657th Friday Blog Roundup

I really love posts about productivity, even though I rarely put any ideas into actions. My bullet journal works for me, so I’m sticking to it. But I recently read a paragraph that defined everything for me:

Productivity is about understanding what you really want to do, then building systems to make it work for you. The goal isn’t Inbox Zero. (Who gives a shit?) Your goal is to enable yourself to perform at your very best, every day, and over the course of weeks and months and years.

Forget the fact that I give a shit about Inbox Zero, that is the best summary of productivity I’ve ever heard.  And it’s black-and-white.  Do you have a system that works?  Then you have the potential to be productive.  If you can’t explain your system or it’s too convoluted to use consistently or you don’t have one at all or you can’t even define what needs to get done?  Then you have a lot working against you in the productivity department.

Like the author of that blog post, I have systems to cover the fundamentals.  Okay, I’m a little hazy on the psychology section.  I have a terrible time saying no, I’m not positive, and I would never describe myself as resilient.  I’m sort of like a walking Russian novel.  But wait!  I’ve got the detail triangle all sewn up with my bullet journal.  So I have that going for me.

If you’re not feeling productive, maybe that post will trigger a new system for you.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about being in one of those limbo spaces; needing to make decisions but not really having information to go on.  Thus is the life with unexplained infertility.  She writes, “I thought I was getting good with just not knowing. But then maybe I’m kidding myself to say that, because honestly, this whole infertility thing has got me feeling far less tolerant of uncertainty.”  Go over and read the whole post.

The Empress and the Fool is emerging from the newborn fog, seeing patterns begin to come back into her life.  She explains, “The girls napped at the same time today, and that precious window gave me a little time to write, to reclaim something of my own from my old life so I can better savor the blessings of my new one.”  I love that mental image of two sections of your life bridged by a common action.  Maybe I especially like that the action, in this case, is writing.

Anabegins has a post about tracking… everything.  This post resonated with me because I get very anxious when I track.  I need to write down everything (and it needs to follow capitalization and punctuation rules), and then it becomes one. more. thing. to. do. instead of a tool to help me live better.  I want to get started with My Fitness Pal again, but I don’t know how to track in a way that doesn’t drive me mad.  Posts like this give me hope, or at least let me know that I’m not alone.

Lastly, Empty Arms and Broken Heart has a post that may make you think the next time you see a kid melting down in a public space.  Instead of feeling irritated, it drives home the point that we all have hidden stories; things that inform our behaviour.

The roundup to the Roundup: How to be productive.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 28th and August 4th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.