My first day of using my new daily work routine. I'm very inspired by Cal Newport. I read his stuff since ~2010 and I like his scientific approach. Deep work was actually never a problem for me.
My new setup looks like this:
- Life: Vision: Why do I do this? Tool: Joplin
- Quarter: Project: What leads to my life goals? Tool: Joplin
- Month: Sub-Project: What leads to my quarterly goals? Tool: Nextcloud Deck
- Week: Habits/Actions: What leads to my monthly goals? Tool: Nextcloud Deck + NextCloud Calendar
- Day: Timeboxing Actions: What do I have to do today? Tool: Nextcloud Deck + Nextcloud Calendar + Paper
Every morning I have a look into my schedule - if there are any appointments. I try to minimize the amount of appointments. Now I know the timeboxes for my deep work, e.g. from 9-12 and 13-16 o'clock. Then I just go into my Nextcloud Deck, take the most important tasks and put them into the timeboxes. After my first timebox, right in front of my siesta, I revise the schedule, sometimes I have to adjust some tasks. I do this daily planning on paper to always have the daily plan in front of me (closing the calendar browser tab is to easy). After I finished a task I put the Nextcloud Deck Card into Done and add an entry in my Nextcloud Calendar for the sake of reviewing it later (and to write these blog posts).
So this seems to be a lot of planning and tools. But: In the past, I often lost either the macro goals (Why do I do this?) or the micro goals (What do I have to do today?). When I worked in a normal work environment, I mostly felt overwhelmed by all the "urgent" stuff, living in the inbox and the messengers. At the end of the day I was always very tired and frustrated, because I actually was just plumbing broken pipes.