My four main pillars to multitask seemlesly | by Carlos Z. Bent | Sep, 2022

Some time ago (I couldn’t say exactly when), my medium following base started to pick up a bit of growing pace. At the time, I promised myself (and made sure to add to my tasks app), that I would write a post about myself more as a person and less as a developer and writer. But since then, I haven’t been able to stay up to date with my writing plans, precisely because of the many responsibilities I’ve been handling.

This isn’t a “50 things you didn’t know about me” kind of content, not even near, but it is more personal because I show you my various responsibilities, and then tell you the main productivity pillars that help me to keep it all under control.

For some time, I saw this responsibilities as things getting in the way of each other, given how varied they are and how much time they usually demand, but lately I’ve also started to see that it can all be handled with efficiency and coolheadedness.

So on this blog post I just want to share how I manage to control a college career (totally unrelated to software development), writing code for personal projects and as a freelancer, writing as a hobby and a job, and making time for friends and family too.

It is hard, and I’m not always successful at it, but things tend to be under control most of the time.

There are plenty of personal and professional productivity systems, there are also plenty of books, blog, videos and podcasts covering those systems. I, personally, haven’t found one that fully suits me.

So, if you came here hoping to find the holy grail of productivity systems, I don’t think you will. What you will found is a sincere explanation of how a regular guy manages a lot of coexistent and unrelated stuff by being flexible, calm and practical.

First of all, I’ll quickly put you into context by letting you know the responsibilities I have to juggle daily, then you’ll be ready to understand how I go about my stuff, that’s what I’m excited to share.

This is a part of the blog post that I intend to dwell the least at so I’ll be brief.

Surely some of you have read some of my content before, so this will be surprising, but what I study is not remotely related to tech, it is Law.

So now you are wondering: How did this humanities guy get into programming? Well, I’ve been into tech, software and electronics since I was a child, so when I found out that it was possible for me to learn programming without starting another college career, it was a no brainer. I instantly took to the internet to get some basic courses to start with.

Long story short, I love humanities related careers, and I actually really enjoy my career, researching and the technical part of it, but programming is where I see my future going, no doubt.

As you might figure out, studying a college career consumes a lot of time (even at a late stage as I am at). So I have not been able nor willing to take a full time coding job. Instead I freelance. I have freelanced ang gotten temporary flexible contracts both as a dev and as a writer, all of which have allowed me to gain real world experience and sharpen my skills. Most of the time I write for tech related blogs and develop webpages and Telegram bots. However, my college time is almost up, so I am now actively looking for more stable jobs.

The harder part to balance for a lot of people. Not for me though, I set clear time where study and work must take a back seat in favor of my family and friends.

Truth be told, most times that time spent on my personal life instead of work then has to be replaced with losing a few hours of sleep.

Ever since I started coding, I was looking for a place to fit in. I got in alone (none of my close friends had anything to do with this), with zero experience, and with little resources (poor internet connection, no job to pay for my learning, a crappy PC).

Step by step different worlds were opening to me, and one of those was the one about startups, indie hacking and entrepreneurship. That one got me. I met some friends who were creating awseome stuff and building big communities despite being in my own poor and undeveloped country, and that was a hell of a confidence booster.

At the beggining, I doubted I could even build a website, or if I could build it, I wouldn’t have been able to “publish” it, it all seemed alien and complicated, now it is trivial, but it was a bumpy road.

So, those entrepreneurs friends I met, coupled with my low chances (at the time) of scoring a full-time high paying job, prompted me to go the indie hacking route. I then read Pieter Levels book (Make), and it all seemed too good to be true. This was made for me.

(It’s not that I am an anti-job person, I don’t mind having a boss, nor do I buy into the “all bosses are bad” crap, besides, being part of a good team putting great code out there day in and day out is surely a great experience, but personally, I like to build and innovate.)

I then decided to build products as a way to learn, validate my worth in front of others and myself, and increase the chances of building something successful. I first built plan-todo.com and then fancyxt.xyz. Both are simple products that I hastily abandoned after building them with great excitement. They were good playgrounds for me to learn about launching a product, deploying it, and managing a personal project.

Since then I have been joting down ideas and saving time to build the next thing. I constantly read, listen podcasts and watch videos about marketing, scaling, bussiness, and all the related topics. And I am now building that next project.

So, now that you know all I have on my plate, I’ll tell you how I handle it.

Productivity, the world on everyone’s lips (at least everyone on the tech world). We all want to be productive, and for that we consume productivity content like water. I do it too. It’s not wrong, but it shouldn’t be the main practice to get better at it.

As i said earlier, there are a million systems and content pieces about productivity, but I am yet to find one to end them all. And perhaps, that’s how it should be. After all, we are all very different from each other, and have very different circumstances, and that’s Why its easier to find one’s own system by experimenting with many of them, and improving upon them.

The closest thing I found to that holy grail is the book Getting Things Done, by David Allen. What Mr. Allen presents is a theoretical and practical framework to improve personal and professional productivity, one the encompasses all aspects of life (it even tells you how to go through your house and office setting everything up to be more productive). So it is comprehensive and deep. Sincerely, I read the whole book and loved it, but only took fully to myself a couple of things. The first is the image below:

This, as you can see, provides a way of handling everything that comes to your inbox (be it a literal inbox or a proverbial one), and a way to store it for further processing.

The second thing I took from that book is less graphical: Whenever you must decide what to do next or what to plan to do, you must take into account four criteria: the context, the time you have available, the energy you have available, and the priorities you have set.

So, say you are at home at around 9:00pm, have nothing to do until you go to sleep in about thirty minutes, and you just finished an assignment after five hours of work. You can either get out the trash, mow the lawn or call your partner to update her on the progress you made earlier.

Context is you are at home, late at night, with no current task; the time available is about a half hour; and the energy available is very low (a five hour assignment can be very grueling).

Then you have three possible tasks: mowing the lawn is too exhausting, so that’s off the table; you can either make the call or take out the trash. Which one has the biggest priority? You can maybe see your partner tomorrow at the office, but the trash bin is already overflowing, so it is in your best interest to take it out quickly. Done, great, it isn’t really hard.

You might be thinking that this is all a bit too much just to make a choice. But imagine you had called your partner and fallen asleep mid call because you were calling from your comfortable couch while being so tired, or you had started to mow the lawn and then had to go to sleep three hours late and ended up being all tired and with backache the morning after. Small choices make great differences.

The other biggest impact made on me was made not by a productivity system, but by a book about minimalism.

Now, the goal of this book, called The joy of less, by Francine Jay, was not productivity, but it was something very related and partly intertwined: tranquility of mind.

On the modern days, we are surrounded by consumism, all of us without exception are bombarded with ads telling us that acquiring more material goods will make us happier and more complete. However, we don’t become happier people the more stuff we buy, quite the contrary actually, we become more unhappy because we want even more material things.

This material goods are (generally) diversions, they distract us from what is really valuable, and that’s pretty far from making us happier. So what’s a good practice to be more productive? Be more minimalist, thus removing unnecesary distractions and improving our chances of focusing on the productive tasks.

This doesn’t mean we should all become monks without possessions, it just means we should have, acquire or keep things that are either practically useful, or sentimentally/morally valuable. Everything else should be sold, given or otherwise gotten rid of.

Finally, the other helpers I have on my productivity crusade are less elevated, they are the tools I use, which are all apps and platforms. This include Google Calendar, Notion, Joplin, and others. I have a blog post with the details of how I use them (read it here).

This tools are mere helpers on my daily work, but I don’t think I would be as successful at multitasking as I currently am without them.

This are the pillars of my productivity, they are not the only ones, but they are the biggest, the rest are more intricate details that I think everyone has to come up with individually.

Apart from systems and apps, there is something I think is necessary and I wouldn’t want to skip. That is the correct mindset. If you want to successfully handle various responsibilities, there are traits that you must incorporate to your arsenal. I would collect them all in a couple of words: coolheadedness and flexibility.

Yes, your system might be tight and detailed, and you might have an account on every productivity app in the Milky Way, yet, life happens.

And when it does, your system must also be capable of accepting changes, and you yourself must be capable of handling unexpected things in a cool, composed way. Do that, and things will appear to you in it’s clear form, not as threats to your established comfort, but as possibilities for improvement and growth.

For example, you might have a very nice day planned today. You’ll work on your job assignments on the morning, spend the afternoon writing, and at night you’ll finally design that idea you had last week. Cool!

Then your annoying neighbor comes over to ask your help to fix his bike. You could say no, but how rude is that! So you go down to help and between one thing and the other, when you get back is already 2:00pm.

“Crap, a whole day ruined”, you mumble. It isn’t really ruined, it just didn’t go as planned. You could, in fact, ruining it by doing nothing and postponing everything for tomorrow, or the next available day, effectively pushing back all of your projects.

Or you could complete your job assignments in full fashion, and then, take the time formerly allocated to writing to investigate more about that which you wanted to write about, and take the time allocated to designing to read the documentation for the app you’ll use, so you can save more time tomorrow by using its keyboard shortcuts. Was it all lost? Absolutely not. It certainly didn’t go smoothly, but it moved forward. That’s the key.

A little bit of motion is always better than simply stalling.

Honestly, I hesitated to write this blog posts, maybe people don’t want to read about the tasks of some random dude on Medium. But I finally decided to do it because I think it is a good lesson for those in a similar sutiation to mine, and it is also a good way of recommending two of the best books I have ever read.

I hope you get good tips from this piece and you can be even more productive. Thanks! See you around.