The 1-tab/app productivity rule
Tags: productivity, programming
Published: 2020-11-12 11:54:38

There are thousands if not millions of productivity "techniques" or “hacks” in the world from which the most common is the Pomodoro technique. I know I have tried a lot of these techniques and almost none of them have worked for me. Some worked for a couple of days and then it’s back to the same old habits.

From what I came to understand about productivity, it’s not based on the technique you’re using but based on you as an individual. After thinking about it several times in my life, I came to realize that there’s nothing known as the ultimate productivity hack or technique, you just have to figure out what works for you(which I am also trying to figure out myself).

This is why I want to talk about this one technique I started testing out not long ago. For the first couple of days, it’s working but I’ll have to try it longer to see if it boosts my productivity or not. I just thought of it while I was thinking and frustrated about how unproductive I was in that particular week. It is what I call the 1-tab/app rule or technique(whichever you prefer calling it. The way it works is you’ll only open 1 tab or app per project(or whatever you’re doing), you’re only allowed to open that particular tab or app you’re working on and you cannot open any other tab or app until you’re done with that project except if it is heavily related to that project you’re working on, for example, a link to a page that explains what you’re reading in more details than the current page.

This is a way to remove all distractions from sight and lets you focus solely on what you’re doing. This is coming from a person who is so into distractions that I pinned a youtube tab in my browser so that I won’t even think of closing it, before I discovered this technique I’ll binge watch youtube for like 1 hour and work for about 20 minutes then go back to youtube or open another social media tab or any other distracting tab or websites. Sometimes I even ditch what I’m through the middle to go check if I’ve gotten more views in the last 60 minutes and I’ll be like “I’ll only check if my views are up” and the moment I refresh the page BOOM fresh content and like it read my mind, it’s from one of the channels I like watching. That’s why I came up with this particular technique of only 1 tab per session.

Multi-tasking, Multi-tasking is a productivity killer, honestly, I don’t know for you guys out there but multi-tasking has made me lose focus more times than I can imagine. Multi-tasking is very dangerous, except if you’re a superhero which I’m certainly not because I consider people who can effectively multitask as superheroes. What about TO-DO lists? TO-DO lists are still part of our daily productive life but something I learned from Matt D’Avella is the use of a checklist instead of a long list of daily TO-DO lists which brings me to my second technique which is prioritizing. I just discovered this new task manager Llama which I’m still trying out, but what I do is I write down all the things I need to for the day or the following day, then I pick 3 or 4 and them to the task manager. I give each of the time expected to finish and then I cross them out as I finish. I think being productive doesn’t have to mean you finishing 10 tasks in a day, it means how you effectively handled/managed your time throughout the day and that comes down to you as an individual.

In my next post, I'll be breaking down some of the best free to-do list apps you can use to help you boost your productivity.