What Does a Minimalist Productivity Workflow Include?

What does it mean to be a minimalist when it comes to personal productivity? Being minimalist isn’t about having less to do. It’s about having less stuff in a way so you can do more of those things better.

The author of Productivityist.com shares the core ingredients of a minimalist productivity workflow. His minimalist productivity workflow consists of 3 components:

• Align
• Bridge
• Choose

Here’re the extracts from his article:

Every component includes strategies that you can integrate into your approach, no matter how many you choose to adopt.

Align

Aligning the tasks to time slots is one of the simplest ways to keep a minimal setup for productivity.

There are different forms of time theming that you can use to align your tasks. Daily Themes allow you to align your tasks to a specific day (or set of days). Horizontal Themes align specific times of day across multiple days–either consecutively or interspersed. Weekly Sprints allow you to focus your tasks on a project or goal over the course of a week rather than a month.

Bridge

The concept of capturing via The MAPS Mentality helps because the action (A) can be worked on based on mode (M), project(P), or schedule (S). That’s why when capturing tasks on paper or digital it’s worth to keep that mentality in mind.

When you are able to bridge tasks across multiple ways of working on them, then you lower your chances of getting stuck and remove friction and decision fatigue. If you can’t work by schedule, then work by mode or project. Can’t work by a project? Work by mode or schedule. Not feeling mode-based work today? Work by project or schedule.

This minimalist productivity workflow creates constraints as opposed to restraints. There’s always a way out or through. That’s because there’s always a bridge for you to take.

Choose

If you focus on creating alignment and ways to bridge then you make it easier to choose not only when things should be done but also whether or not they should be done at all.

Setting up this kind of workflow isn’t something that takes hold overnight. You need to foster it and stick with it while it becomes second nature. It can be too easy to drag tasks to the next calendar day – which can misalign them – rather than slow down and be mindful of what the best day for them should be. Instead of figuring out the different ways we can approach our to-do list, we can get tunnel vision and limit how much we can accomplish as a result. When we don’t create “focus filters” we can wind up creating paradoxes of choice, which slows down what we can do in a given day, week, month, or more.

Being productive is about doing the right things more often.

One of the simplest ways you can accomplish this is by creating a framework that only puts in front of you what you must work on in the desired timeframe. So even though you may have a lot to do over an extended period of time, you can set things up so you view what you need and want to do over an intended period of time.