How to Stay Sane with a Full-Time Job and Personal Projects

A tiny case study

Since starting a new job, I have struggled to make progress with personal projects outside of work. Fed up with my own laziness, I finally reexamined the way I keep track of tasks, habits, and projects to see what I could improve. What emerged is an updated productivity system that I hope will allow me to take back control.

My obsession with productivity began when I was a freelance translator looking for ways to squeeze more work into my day—since more work meant more money. Admittedly, it wasn't the most healthy motivation but books like Deep Work by Cal Newport and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (plus Youtube) inspired me to optimize everything for success, from chores to relationships to learning new skills.

I started with practicing discipline. To me, discipline is about developing and maintaining attitudes that allow you to focus on what matters to you, in a sustainable way. Fortunately, focus is something I didn't have to learn as I have always been able to sink hours at a time into reading books.

My translation output didn't improve much but I learned something far more valuable: how to consistently achieve goals I had set for myself and how to learn hard but valuable skills.

I am probably not the best person to teach you discipline or comfort with stretching your mind--I was blessed with parents and teachers who always encouraged and enabled me learning whatever I was interested in¹. However, I also enjoy finding and maintaining the best system to help me stay productive and organize my life. Over time, I have cycled through several iterations that helped me better understand what works and what doesn't.

Obligatory disclaimer: All of this is highly personal! Feel free to take what works for you and ignore the rest.

How to Stay Disciplined at Work

To be able to consistently focus on what matters, you have to approach all areas of life with the same discipline. If you are scattered and struggling in your job, you will hardly do better with your personal goals outside of work. This is why I organize my work and personal life in the same way, although I use different apps to do it.

At work, we use Trello so I created a private board to keep track of my day-to-day tasks. I also add meeting and discussion notes but if the Trello card gets so long that I have to scroll, I will move the content into a separate text file on my PC. My Trello board has six columns, inspired by Cal Newport.

Sample board with sample tasks, zoomed out to fit everything on one screen.

1. Today: my daily task list

2. Ongoing: tasks in progress, most of which do not have a deadline

3. To discuss: questions and notes to discuss with other team members (mostly my supervisor)

4. Waiting: tasks I am waiting to hear back on or time-sensitive reminders, like when team members will be on holiday etc.

5. General & templates: only holds two cards so far, a template for repeating daily tasks that I can copy into the today column and a card with a list of things to do when work is slow

6. To remember: short notes I need to refer back to often—this is more convenient than a text file since Trello is always open in my browser

I also use labels so I can see at a glance which tasks are important: Red is for urgent or top priority tasks, orange is for semi-urgent tasks, and yellow is for tasks that are not urgent but still need to get done at some point. Only task cards get labels assigned to them.

The System

In my personal life, the foundation of my system are six categories that all tasks, projects, and notes can be sorted into. There is some overlap but not as much as I feared when I first started using it. Gratitude goes out to Rachael Stephen who invented this system—I adopted her categories, with the exception of Socialis (relationships) which I changed to Dialogi (learning). The app I use to organize my personal life is Todoist so I set up these categories as labels.

• Divitiae (yellow): work and finances

• Dialogi (orange): learning, e.g. Japanese language, tea ceremony, programming etc.

• Corporalis (red): physical health, which encompasses diet and exercise

• Domum (green): household and possessions

• Genero (blue): creative activities and inspiration

• Spiritus (violet): mental and spiritual health, self-care

What to Focus On

With a full-time job, I only have time and energy for one to two personal projects which I also track in Todoist. I came up with a cool-sounding name for each to make it more fun.

1. Glau Labs is writing

2. Silicon Duck is learning programming

3. One-time tasks that do not fit into one of these two go into the inbox but are still categorized by label.

My manuscripts, story notes, research, and all other project notes live in Obsidian, a note-taking app I use to plan and write fiction as well as nonfiction. I prefer Obsidian because it supports bidirectional linking, allowing me to easily connect notes and make associations between ideas. Let me know if you want to know more about my note-taking system!

Habits vs. Projects

The third project in my Todoist is called habits.

I have experimented with planning my days more rigorously but techniques such as calendar blocking or time batching have always felt too constricting. To me, deciding in advance how I'm going to spend each and every minute of my day takes all the fun and creativity out of it. At the same time, I learned that deciding what to do with my evening when I get home from work at 8pm leads to me just watching anime or gaming until it's time for bed. On weekends, I'm often exhausted from sightseeing or meeting friends during the day, which perpetuates the vicious cycle.

Since I want to dedicate some time to both writing and learning programming every day, I created daily habits for both projects:

1. Write for 20 minutes

2. Study for 20 minutes

My thought process for this was as follows:

• Twenty minutes is low-effort enough to realistically complete every single day.

• Both "writing" and "studying" are open-ended enough that I can fill in whatever story or study topic I most feel like tackling or which is most convenient on that particular day.

• If I don't have a strong preference, I will default to my ongoing long-form story (at the moment, Requiem of the Moth) or my ongoing programming course (at the moment, an introduction to cybersecurity).

The only other daily habits are exercise as well as Anki reps².

Top of Mind

As the only device I have with me at all times, my phone serves as a constant reminder of any outstanding daily tasks. How? The Todoist widget on my home screen shows the "Today" view. If I scroll to the left, I get to my running shopping list (the fourth and last project in Todoist) which I obviously also refer to a lot when out and about.

Upcoming view because I had already finished most of my tasks for that day. Why is only “inbox” localized?

---

Your turn: How do you keep track of your tasks and projects? If you use a similar system, is it more or less structured? Are there differences in how you stay organized in your job vs. your personal life? I'd love to exchange approaches and tips in the comments!

If you wish you were more organized or productive but do not know where to start or what to focus on, perhaps the reading list below can provide some inspiration. Keep in mind that it took me years to find out what works for me. Again, take what you like and leave the rest!

• Deep Work by Cal Newport

• So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport

• Deep Questions with Cal Newport (podcast)

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

• Ultralearning by Scott Young

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Grit by Angela Duckworth

• Range by David Epstein

1. As a child, I tried violin, orchestra, tennis, horseback riding, chess, and hip hop dance. Only violin stuck with me but that's not important.

2. I use two decks to keep up with my Japanese: one for kanji, one for example sentences mined from various media, i.e. vocabulary