Developing a Personal Productivity System

I never thought something this simple would make such a difference in how I work and manage my time. This 15-minute weekly habit changed everything for me: The weekly review. This is one of the most simple yet powerful practices I've built over the years. It helps me reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and what needs adjusting. The concept, introduced by David Allen in “Getting Things Done”, emphasises the importance of closing open loops and staying on top of commitments before they pile up. Over time, it’s become a cornerstone of my productivity system. Here’s what my weekly review looks like: - Review the past week – I list the dates from the past week and, using my calendar and notes, jot down key events and tasks. - Reflect on achievements and challenges – Take a moment to celebrate what went well and spot areas for improvement. - Plan for the upcoming week – Adjust goals and priorities to make sure I’m focusing on what really matters. It’s a small investment of time, but the impact is huge. Every week, those 15 minutes give me clarity, keeps me on track, and make decision-making easier. Instead of constantly chasing the next thing, it gives me a chance to pause, take stock, and plan with intention. Do you have a system for reflecting on your week, or is this something you’d want to try?

After two decades of leading teams, I discovered that traditional to-do lists were holding back my productivity. Here's what I have found working well for me in 2025 - 'interstitial journaling'. Outlined by Tony Stubblebine, this approach is a unified workflow that combines note-taking, task management, and time tracking in one seamless system. Rather than saving all your journaling for the beginning or end of the day, interstitial journaling happens in the interstices (the spaces between tasks). After completing a task, take brief pauses to document three things ... 👉 the current time 👉 thoughts about what you just completed 👉 your next focused action I found this approach particularly valuable because it addresses a fundamental challenge in modern work - the constant context-switching that fragments our attention, particularly mine! And it also helps me course correct, cut back on 'guilt', and send myself positive reinforcement. Here's what I discovered works particularly well ... ➞ I record timestamps to track patterns in my peak performance hours ➞ I catch distractions and build greater self-awareness ➞ It makes breaks more mindful and purposeful ➞ It increases awareness of procrastination patterns and helps reduce them ➞ It creates a natural system for tracking well-being and focus throughout the day With January 10th this year, known as ‘Quitter's Day,’ when many people abandon their New Year's resolutions - this could be the simple yet powerful system you need to stay on track with your goals for 2025. I'm curious - what methods have you found effective for managing transitions between complex tasks? #Productivity #SelfAwareness #Journaling

The most underrated productivity hack? Taking breaks. But not just any break. Science says there’s a right way to do it. Here’s how to restore your energy (and do better work) in 5 proven steps: Rule 1: Something > nothing Even short breaks matter. Try the 20-20-20 rule: → Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. You’ll reduce fatigue and give your brain a much-needed pause. Micro-breaks add up. Rule 2: Moving > stationary A walk beats a sit. Movement restores energy and improves mood. Just getting up and walking a few minutes can refresh your mind for your next task. Rule 3: Social > solo Breaks with people restore us more than breaks alone even if you’re introverted. Chat with a colleague. Call a friend. Grab coffee with someone you like. Connection is a powerful recharge. Rule 4: Outside > inside Nature boosts energy and creativity. You don’t need to hike a mountain just walk down a street with trees. Studies show even light exposure to green space can reduce stress and elevate performance. Rule 5: Detached > distracted A break isn’t scrolling Instagram. Leave your phone behind. Log off. Step away. Real breaks require real detachment. Let your brain breathe. Try this break formula: Every afternoon, take a 15-minute walk outside With someone you like Talking about anything except work Without your phone Do it daily. Schedule it like a meeting.

“Oof! What did I even do this week?!” ...Meetings?!👇🏼 As engineers we tend to focus on how much code we wrote, and how many Jira tickets we moved to done. But as we move into more senior+, tech lead and management positions, we start writing less and less code. Less coding / tickets leaves us feeling like we didn’t get anything done. 🤪 But are tickets/coding the only value we contribute to our team? I’ve wrestled a lot with the feeling of getting nothing done as I transitioned into a senior+ engineer, and tech lead... Slowly but surely it’s become clear to me. The more senior we become, the more important it is that we multiply our efforts and help others level up. 🚀 If I improve my coding by 10%, the team gets minimally better. 🚀 If I lean into being a force-multiplier and help 3-5 others level up, the whole team just got massively more productive and effective. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 My efforts are compounded. Suddenly all these force-multiplying activities make sense! If I: – Give through, timely and helpful code reviews – Mentor junior engineers in our patterns, and systems – Tackle bugs or pain points that are plaguing the team – Write and review technical specs to ensure good design – Help estimate effort in roadmapping and planning meetings I’m now influencing and moving things forward on a whole different level. My productivity is actually improved – if we measure it by value contributed to the team and the business goals. 🙌🏼 But back to feeling unproductive... A lot of wins are harder to measure and leave us feeling unproductive. One way to help your brain is keeping a daily + weekly summary journal doc. 🧠 Daily: Write 3-5 bullet points of ways you helped the team move forward. Weekly: Roll those up into a short summary of wins/learnings. Monthly: Add bigger wins to your brag doc You can even send that weekly doc to your manager and product partners. It’s a great way to manage up and give visibility into your work. It also helps them point out areas you might think are valuable, but aren’t as much, or areas you should lean into even more. Personally, I’m on a journey to re-think that I’m still contributing huge value even without coding as much. Days where I don’t code are still successful if I’ve been a force-multiplier. 💪🤝 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How about you? How do you think about contributing as a senior IC / manager when you aren’t coding as much? 🙋♀️🙋♂️ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If you liked this post, you’ll probably love my weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e8d5ymr3 👉 Follow along as I share everything I’ve learned about becoming a #fullstackengineer and leveling up into a #senior+ engineer and #techlead at a hyper-growth #startup.

🧵 If you’re doing bioinformatics manually, you’re wasting time and prone to make errors. 1/ Bioinformatics is full of repetitive tasks. The best bioinformaticians don’t just analyze data—they automate. Let’s break it down. 👇 2/ There are 4 levels of bioinformatics skills, from manual work to full automation. The higher you go, the faster and more efficient you become. 3/ Level 1: Manual Execution • Running each command by hand. • Copy-pasting file names, tweaking scripts line by line. • Slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale. 4/ Level 2: Automating with Bash • Using loops and scripts to process multiple files at once. • Combining awk, sed, cut for fast text manipulation. • Example: Run bwa to align multiple samples in a for loop 5/ Level 3: Automating with R/Python • Writing reusable scripts for data processing and visualization. • Using pandas, tidyverse, Bioconductor to automate analysis. • More flexibility than Bash, especially for statistical tasks. 6/ Level 4: Automating with Workflow Languages (Snakemake, Nextflow) • Scalable, reproducible pipelines for large datasets. • Handles dependencies, parallelization, and cloud computing. Example: Processing 100s of RNA-seq samples without modifying a single script. 7/ Why does this matter? • The best documentation is automation—reduce mistakes and save time. • Computers are good at repetitive tasks. Automate once, and never waste time again. 8/ Key Takeaways: • Manual work doesn’t scale. Automate early. • Bash is great for quick scripts, R/Python for analysis, workflow languages for full automation. • The more you automate, the more valuable you become. 9/ Action Items: • Find a repetitive task in your workflow—start automating it. • Learn Snakemake or Nextflow for scalable pipelines. See how I scaled bioinformatics analysis in this real example: 🔗https://lnkd.in/eaPhWxbt I hope you've found this post helpful. Follow me for more. Subscribe to my FREE newsletter https://lnkd.in/erw83Svn

Two years back, I spent 3 hours fixing a report I’ve built 20 times before and i do it even on weekends It hit me: Why am I still doing this manually? That’s when I decided to automate it — and now, what took 3 hours takes less than 3 minutes. Here’s the truth about automation: It’s not always about reaching zero manual effort. It’s about reducing the time, stress, and repetition that eat up your day. And there’s more than one way to automate your work. Let me show you 5 powerful approaches: 1. Excel + Power Query / Macros Example: Pull monthly sales data from multiple CSVs, clean it, and update your dashboard — all with one click. 2. Python Scripting Example: Scrape competitor pricing data daily, clean it, and email a summary to your team automatically. 3. Zapier / Make.com (No-Code Tools) Example: New lead in Google Forms? Instantly add it to your CRM, alert your team on Slack, and send a thank-you email. 4. SQL Scheduled Jobs Example: Run a daily revenue summary at 6 AM and send it to finance before they ask for it. 5. Task Scheduling (Cron Jobs / Task Scheduler) Example: Automatically back up files or trigger Python scripts every night. Start small. Automate one pain point. Even if you save 15 minutes a day — that’s 90 hours a year. I’ll be sharing weekly posts on automation tips using Excel, Python, and no-code tools. Follow if you want to work smarter — not harder.

It’s shocking how many hours we waste every week on the same tiny tasks...and no one really notices it happening. We deal with a lot of routine documents:   • Offer letters   • NOC letters   • Experience certificates   • Joining docs   • Contract updates   • Approval notes   • Invoice   • Payment approval   • Promotion letters   • Salary increment letters, etc. Different documents, but the same painful pattern every time: Open the template → replace details → format → export → upload → share → update the tracker It looks simple. It feels harmless. But when we repeat it dozens of times a month, it quietly drains hours without anyone realizing. So I built a workflow using n8n. All you have to do is fill out a small form. That’s it. Behind the scenes, the workflow: ✅ Picks the correct template ✅ Replaces every placeholder (names, dates, positions, anything) ✅ Formats numbers and dates ✅ Creates a clean folder for the output ✅ Drops all final documents inside ✅ Updates the Google Sheet tracker automatically The whole process finishes in about 5 seconds.   • No back-and-forth.   • No mistakes.   • No repetitive steps. And just like that, hours of manual work every month disappeared. Here’s the real point: This isn’t just about one document. Every team has small repetitive tasks like this - Ops, Finance, Admin, Sales, Projects…anyone. People think automations need 𝗯𝗶𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 to be worth doing. But the biggest gains often come from removing the smallest annoyances. One little workflow. One tiny form. A lot more time saved. So, I am curious: What’s one repetitive task you think should already be automated for your business/team? #n8n #WorkflowAutomation

Here's my 4-step system to make sure nothing slips through the cracks: I know when it comes to keeping track of everything—commitments, tasks, and all the tiny details—it can be easy to get lost. To stay on top of it all, I follow a simple mnemonic: Every Commitment Needs Tracking (ECNT). It stands for the four key areas where I manage my responsibilities: email, calendar, notes, and tasks. Here’s a quick look at my process: 1. Email: I start by reviewing my inbox. I check for anything that needs to go on my calendar, save resources to my notes, and tasks that require action to my to-do list. This first step lets me pull essential information from my emails into my downward systems. 2. Calendar: Next, I review my upcoming week. Any meetings or deadlines I need to prep for get turned into tasks. This way, my calendar and to-do list stay aligned. 3. Notes: Moving down the ladder, I review my note-taking app (Evernote) to catch any ideas or project notes that need action. Anything relevant gets added to my task list, ensuring no loose ideas or insights are overlooked. 4. Tasks: Finally, I pull it all together in my task manager (Things). This is where everything actionable lives. I prioritize my day and week here, choosing what’s urgent and what can wait. By following this routine—usually several times a week and especially during my Weekly Review—I gain clarity on what’s on my plate and prioritize with confidence. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, try this sequence. By processing each source of information in order, you’ll capture everything you need to move forward with clarity and focus.

I stopped writing down action items after meetings. They now just show up on my to-do list automatically. Granola records and transcribes my meetings. Claude reads those transcripts, pulls out my action items, and drops them straight into Todoist. If I said "I'll send that over," it shows up as a task in the relevant project. (You can do this with ChatGPT too.) The setup: 1. Connect Granola to Claude: Settings > Connectors > search Granola > Connect (takes 1 minute). 2. Connect your task app the same way (Todoist, Notion, Asana, ClickUp all work). 3. Open Claude Cowork or Code from the desktop app (no coding required!). Tell it to scan your Granola transcripts for your action items and add them to your task app. 4. Set a schedule for Claude to run this task (I run it every hour during the workday). Less than ten minutes of setup. Now every meeting generates a clean task list waiting for me when I'm ready.