Productivity and time management

I’ve been asked this a couple times now, so I’m putting my response here for future Lindsay to quickly reference.

For personal productivity, I follow the Inbox Zero + Getting Things Done methods. My tool of choice for this is Todoist. I have the Chrome plug-in and the phone app, and I use it with the Gmail, Google calendar, and Slack integrations so I can add tasks immediately when I see them (per Getting Things Done).

I've been using the same productivity/time management software for a while now. I was surprised to see the quantitative shift from academic trainee to startup/PI! pic.twitter.com/ODMyYVHslD

— Lindsay K Pino – @lkpino@genomic.social (@lkpino) March 12, 2022

I like to check-in with myself every few months to see if my time is being spent on the things I think it should be spent on. Doing these time audits has been easy with Todoist because, if I categorize my tasks into the general themes I want to track, then I can use that data to plot how I spent my time. There used to be some nice apps to do this, but they’ve shut down. In the mean time, I’ve been looking into some of these alternatives.

[UPDATE 11/6/2023: Twitter/X issues with the embedded tweet. Here’s a screenshot (below).]