A lot of what Thomas talked about in his course is pretty similar to what I already do, with some tweaks and some additional tools. Here's what my system looks like. For some context, I graduated college a couple years ago and currently work as a software engineer. In my spare time I like dabbling in music and (lots of) rock climbing, which is why most of my task items here revolve around that.

Todoist

I use the Inbox in Todoist as my dumping ground for immediately externalizing tasks that will be sorted later. When I do sort them, I dump them in one of a few buckets:

Work
Shopping
Things to Google (because often random stuff pops in my head that I want to research later)
Read Later (for articles that I need extra time to read in depth)
For all other tasks, I leave them in the Inbox but make sure to put a due date on them.

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 1 - student project

Evernote

At the moment I use Evernote mainly to keep track of my climbing training schedule and my Impossible List. When I get my personal site up and running I plan on migrating my Impossible List over to that. Here's a neat Evernote trick: I like to organize my notes alphabetically, except for the most important notes, in which case I'll prepend the title with an underscore ("_") so it gets alphabetized at the top!

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 2 - student project

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 3 - student project

Gmail

I try to keep my personal email at Inbox Zero as often as I can. I travel a lot (mainly for climbing trips) so I have a label for all my flights. Also nice to label all my Uber receipts in a Receipts label and have it skip my Inbox. My work email, though, could use a little help. Definitely not showing that here :)

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 4 - student project

Google Calendar

I use my personal calendar to both keep track of events and medium-term personal goals. I color-code them depending on whether it's a personal event (blue) or climbing-related (green). In this case, I wanted to know exactly when each phase of my climbing training begins and ends, so I mark them down on my calendar.

There's also a feature in Todoist to create calendar events for which I find incredibly helpful. It can even store them as a separate Calendar in Google Calendar. I have it set up in my system, although I disabled my Todoist calendar for this screenshot for privacy reasons.

My work calendar (not pictured) is structured similarly, but for work events. I have it as a weekly-view instead of a monthly view since it's a lot easier to view my daily schedule that way.

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 5 - student project

Forest and Brain.fm for Deep Work

Now that my productivity system is set in place, it's time to hunker down and get some Deep Work done! I'm a huge fan of the Pomodoro technique to actually get in the groove of being productive, and my favorite app for facilitating that is Forest. When I'm deep in a coding project, I often like to listen to background music from Brain.fm. These two apps are a deadly productivity combo that can easily get me in the focus zone for hours on end.

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 6 - student project

A system that works for me, a rock-climbing/techy/productivity nerd - image 7 - student project

Melissa Thai

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