312. Productivity 🚜
5 personal productivity templates for boosting your work (remotely or in office)
Hi there 👋
This week, I spent some time refreshing our marketing hiring playbook at Oyster. We continue to hire lots of folks — in particular, if you’re a communications person, an events person, or a lifecycle person, I’d love to meet you! — and we do our best to create an equitable, consistent process for candidates. We also strive to amplify our listings so that people everywhere can see our roles and apply. This is part of our team OKRs for 2022, and we have high aspirations. Here’s a list of the places where we’d like to start advertising some openings. If you know of any other job boards we should look into, I’d love to hear!
Power to Fly (underrepresented groups)
Fairygodboss (women)
Elpha (women)
Pink Jobs (LGBTQ)
We Work Remotely (geographically-distributed)
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
5 Personal Productivity Templates for Boosting Your Work (Remotely or Otherwise)
I used to relish the days when I published a new blog post because it gave me that immediate dopamine hit of productivity. I did a thing! my brain would say. And here’s the proof!
Times change, and now productivity looks and feels different to me.
I imagine productivity looks and feels different to a lot of folks these past couple years. It’s not easy to feel hugely productive when you’re working from home. But at the same time, it’s quite important to feel productive (and to be productive).
I no longer have a “Publish” button to hit every day, but I am definitely not lacking for to-do list items. That’s why I’ve adopted a mix of productivity templates, frameworks, and to-do lists that have helped me at various points of my remote working career.
Here are five of them.
I’d love to hear what productivity templates you use as well!
(For paying subscribers, I’ve added all these to my personal Notion workspace, which you have access to. For anyone who’d like to subscribe, you can do so here.)
1. The 1-3-5 list
by me :)
One of the most valuable productivity frameworks I’ve used over the years has been this simple three-part to-do list.
Do one big thing each day.
Do three medium things.
Do five small things.
What I enjoy most about this system is that it acknowledges that not all tasks are created equal. Typically my to-do lists have a handful of check boxes that are nearly impossible to check because inside of a single task could be three or four sub-tasks lurking beneath the surface. But if I recognize that the task is a big task (1) or a medium task (3), then I can carve out time to be sure I check it off. And it keeps me from having a list full of big tasks (1s) that I’ll never get to.
Here’s a sample day:
1 — Write the Q2 marketing strategy doc
3 — Prep for an interview, proofread copy on a new landing page, and record a Loom update on a recent project
5 — Schedule a kickoff call with PR firm, share our latest blog post on my social media accounts, send a note of encouragement to a teammate, respond to comments in GDocs, and contribute feedback to a campaign retrospective in Miro
I’ll often pair this with another of my favorite productivity systems: the tomorrow list. The tomorrow list is simply a list I make the day before, full of the things I want to accomplish the next day. I’ll fill out my 1-3-5 for tomorrow, saving my brain a lot of remembering in the morning.
2. Personal library
The rainbow progress bar in this library template is quite engaging — and motivating! — so I’ve put this into use for our Oyster marketing team to track progress on many of our targets and KPIs. This template can be quite a useful tracking tool for ongoing work so you can tell at a glance which areas require extra focus and which areas to prioritize. Or, you can use it as intended: tracking the books you’re reading, movies you’re watching, and podcasts you’re listening to.
3. The Happiness Bar Journal
The Happiness Bar is both productivity tracker and mindfulness journal. It’s a useful way to keep track of the progress toward your goals as well as charting gratitude, self-care, and positivity.
4. Goal-Projects-Tasks template
This template makes easy work of the normally convoluted nesting of Goals, Projects, and Tasks. Here, you can track all three and see how Tasks build all the way up to your Goals. In particular with remote work, the treadmill of tasks can obscure the bigger picture, so having a framework like this — and progress trackers built right in — helps a ton with clarity, focus, and prioritization.
5. Your $10k Task Manager
by Khe Hy
No, this template doesn’t cost $10,000. The reference to $10k comes from Khe Hy’s productivity system where you assign all your various tasks into four buckets: $10k, $1k, $100, and $10. The thinking is that the various items on our to-do list have very different value to them, and we should be mindful to ensure we’re prioritizing the most important work.
Misc.
Speaking of cool Notion templates, here’s Netflix’s branding framework.
I finished reading a unique branding book called This Is Not a T-Shirt, which had this great line about the future of branding:
The future of successful branding lies in genuinely bridging the gaps that divide people.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.