Happy Sunday Friends!

Welcome back to another Sunday Friends! I’m glad you’re here. Here is your Sunday Musings, dedicated to exploring and sharing thoughts and insights on productivity, technology, and life. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends!

This Week in Productivity

Time Blocking - The Secret to Staying Focused

What is it?

Time blocking or Timeboxing is scheduling your day by blocking out specific chunks of time for specific tasks, rather than just making a to-do list. It lets you focus on one task at a time and avoid “multitasking”, which should be read as “doing everything slower”. You end up with blocks of time in your calendar, leaving no room for wondering what to do or for how long you should work on any given task.

How I use it

I generally plan out my schedule ahead of time. Either the night before, or on Sunday and loosely prep for the week, penning in my operational rhythm events that reoccur first, then my known tasks. I organize these by what I consider most important first, allocating the morning time blocks for those. Then fill in the rest, including blocks for food, travel time, etc.

Note: While I block them in, it’s important to keep in mind the importance of being flexible and able to adjust as needed as new emergencies arise and/or you get ahead or behind. That's where other productivity methods, such as Eisenhower's Matrix, can come in handy.

If you're interested in learning more about time blocking, I recommend checking out Cal's blog post on the subject. You can also dive deeper into the concept of "Deep Work" by reading his book. And if you're looking for ways to integrate Kindle into your note-taking system, be sure to check out the next section.

Technology I’m Loving

Kindle Highlighting Integration - Export your Highlights using Readwise

I love books. I love the smell, I love the feeling, I love having a bookcase overstuffed with books in my library. My problem is that I’m lazy and dumb. I highlight and annotate my books. I dog ear pages, I put sticky-tabs in them. When I’m done with the book, it’s beautifully ugly with great marks to outline important things in it.

Then I put it on the shelf. I’m at the office, or chatting with a friend, or up in my home office and I remember there was this great line from one of the books I read last whenever ago… It had something to do with life retrospectives, or productivity.

Great, that’s 70% of my books, and probably 100% of the tabs in those books.

Enter Readwise, it’s a great little integrator (with a fee after a trial) that lets me bring in all my annotations from across my reading adventures, kindle, websites, articles, all of it. I bring them all into my Notion database and now it’s all searchable from wherever I am.

Laziness retained, productivity retained, sanity assured (mostly). I’m not an affiliate or anything with Readwise or Notion… but if either of you read this.. Hey, let’s chat!

Alternatives to paying for Readwise: (Hey, I don’t make any money from a referral, and you shouldn’t have to pay if you don’t want to.)

API Integration:

A guy made an API that he put on GitHub for free if you want to use it. It works and it’s not difficult to setup. Here’s his Medium Article for your perusal.

Kindle Export:

Kindle comes built in with an export function in its highlights. You can export them for email and it will give you the option to export as html. Most of your note taking apps will be able to take in mark-up language. Just export and paste in. It’s not automated, but it’s just as functional and importable; just trading time usage for money usage.

The Thin Slice

This is productivity over aesthetics. There are other, cheaper, manual ways to do this, but I like the immediacy and simplicity.

My Opinion

While digital reading isn’t as pleasing to me as physical, it’s way more effective. So I migrated. I have my systems set up around my being able to access the information important to me from any of my devices, regardless of clime, place, operating system, or platform.

I still buy many physical books because of the work I do and I can’t always bring digital media with me. And it’s so,so,so satisfying to read a physical book in a nice coffee shop.

Quote I’m Musing

“Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation.”

- Marcus Aurelius

“Don’t sacrifice the present for what may come in the future” is my modern interpretation. As leaders, as professionals, we feel compelled to do more. We have to make things happen, we have to produce more results. There’s the incessant concern that we’re missing something; that there’s something else, somewhere else or somewhere better that we could and should be doing or at.

For me, and many of those I am lucky enough to get to chat with, this thought manifests anxiety, guilt, fear, and insecurity. Crisis. This means that not only are we unable to focus, we aren’t content. We aren’t present.

Marcus Aurelius understood this and refers many times in Meditations to being present or present at the moment. He’s reminding himself to stay present, be focused on what he must accomplish and be excellent at it. The time for that somewhere and someplace else will come. Don’t undermine your present self, don’t suffer needlessly.

This reminder is one we need more than ever. In today's world, we are bombarded with information, making it harder to be present and attentive. This incessant forced ingestion of information is depriving us of the moment. We give only a fraction of our attention to what is at hand, as the rest is taken by our phones, TVs, and computers. But this leaves us feeling unfulfilled, with a sense that we haven't accomplished enough.

Time flies by, we’ve doom scrolled 20 minutes here, watched cat videos and memes for 30 minutes there. Then we have to return to our present and wonder why we have so many mistakes or why we aren’t feeling like we’ve done enough.

Stop, breathe, be present in the moment. Accomplish your task and move to the next. Whether you’re doing the laundry, writing your thesis, or completing a sync matrix for your risk management framework. Be present. Whether you’re in a career transition, with your kids, or just in a meeting that could have been an email, you’re where you’re supposed to be. In the now, focus and give it your attention.

I would love your feedback!

Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
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Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
​-e