Naiman Labs Newsletter #50. Productivity sprints

How often do you feel overwhelmed? Are you overwhelmed with the tasks, projects, ideas, and general information you need to deal with?

I feel it quite often. I even think that information overload is probably one of the most pressing problems in our society today. It might even be somewhere close to problems like old greedy politicians and global warming.

😩 When you feel stuck - take a pause or make changes

At work, there were some points in time when I had several projects boiling at the same time. I also had many ideas for potential projects to launch. At a certain point, I calculated that I had around 8 projects simultaneously and about 10 more in the pipeline.

At that moment, I realized that I was not inspired; I didn't have any feeling of accomplishment because I couldn't allocate enough time to push projects forward, and in general, I felt stuck and completely unsatisfied with my work. And there's more. I also worked on Naiman Labs, ensuring my subscribers could get high-quality content regularly. I also had many ideas I wanted to implement in Naiman Labs - new texts, new products and templates, overall concept, style, and so on.

Moments like this usually require two things: pausing and implementing changes.

I firmly believe that no matter how disciplined and motivated you are, if you don't like doing what you are doing for a long time, you won't be able to go on with it. For me personally, it is essential to get the feeling of "delivery" - the feeling that I have delivered something, showed my work to someone, and actually completed something. There's nothing worse for my motivation than seeing a constant, never-ending, mundane process.

🎯 My Approach:

To fight this situation of feeling lost and stuck, I took a pause. I canceled all my plans, switched off the phone, took my Moleskine notebook, and wrote down 3 big areas of my life:

💼 Work

🏗️ Naiman Labs

☀️ Personal life

Then, I listed all the projects and ideas I have for these areas. It looked like this:

After I wrote it all down and saw it in front of me, I thought that if I ever wanted to go forward with any of these projects and ideas, I desperately needed some focus. I am sure you can see this yourself as well. Then I remembered a podcast I listened to 3 years ago about productivity sprints, and I implemented this practice as a part of my productivity system.

Productivity sprints work pretty simply: you identify your sprint's duration, then set a goal for a sprint, and focus on this specific goal. I found that the best way to support this practice and to ensure you get it done is to make a scheduled time when you work towards this goal.

I did the following:

• I decided to have 3-week productivity sprints and identify 1 goal for every area of my life: 1 goal for my work, 1 for my personal life, and 1 for the Naiman Labs side project.

• I also identified a "topic" or a "theme" for my sprint to get some inspiration.

• I made "my productivity sprints 🚀" folder to store the sprints in a single space to review them checking the progress.

ProTip: I decided to have 3-week productivity sprints because it feels like I focus for 3 weeks and let myself take a 1-week break every month.

Since I started following this practice, I have been feeling much more productive, knowing that I am focused on the most essential activities in all my areas of life. I must say that productive sprints have become the second most helpful productivity hack after the daily highlight method I told earlier, and I am sure you have heard a lot about by now ;)

That is it for today. Have a great, productive week!

Things I love this week

I found an excellent management concept from the 1980s, and I am amazed and fascinated by its simplicity and applicability.

This week, I read about the “Theory of constraints” formulated by Israeli scholar Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. I am a little ashamed that I have never heard about this Theory before because I believe it is widely applicable to most of our processes, similar to the famous 80/20 rule.

Simply put, the Theory of constraints suggests that every system has a single bottleneck limiting this entire system. Therefore, when you identify this bottleneck correctly and improve this bottleneck consequently, you improve the whole process and the entire system. You probably have heard the phrase “the chain is as strong as its weakest link” - this illustrates the “Theory of Constraints.”

Why I loved it - I believe that we can view everything in our life as a system; therefore, we can think about the bottlenecks in those systems and improve them.

More content from me

👔 My LinkedIn - more insights from my professional life, news and research

📱My Instagram - videos and posts on career and productivity

✍️ My Medium - deep dive long-reads about career, work, and productivity

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