You Need to Do a Reset (Ep. 87)

I absolutely love using shaky, barely-justifiable metaphors in my writing.

I also love pilfering terms from one field and slapping them onto another. It’s fun, and the parallels don’t have to work perfectly as long as the general idea gets across.

One such term I constantly subject to this literary abuse is entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is (in simple terms) a measure of disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states (again, in simplified terms) that in any real process, entropy increases. That is, disorder increases.

I find this to be the same when it comes to the various productivity-boosting systems I use in my life. I always try to keep them perfectly oiled, tuned-up, and ticking away smoothly – but inevitably, life slowly pours a sludge of urgent events, changes, stress, and other bits and bobs down into the workings.

The past couple of months have been particularly bad. In fact, things had gotten so bad that I no longer trusted Todoist – my to-do list app – to hold my tasks; it was so disorganized that I wasn’t checking like I should have been.

Instead, I was shoving tasks into Google Calendar, making it one last bastion of hope… and, in the process, a bottleneck.

So I decided to hit the reset button.

The stress this disorganization was causing was really wearing me out, and I found that my energy levels at the end of each day were really low. So I booked a weeklong trip to San Diego to clear my head. When I got back, I also took the necessary time to completely clean out Todoist and set it back up for optimal use. I did the same with Habitica, and also got all the tasks out of Google Calendar.

This episode is about that process, and also about why you might need to do a reset of your own systems (or even your brain) as well.

Things mentioned in this episode:

• Entropy
• 10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades – my free book
• Todoist
• Habitica
• The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Productivity with Chris Bailey
• A Life of Productivity
• Environmental impact of various meats and other foods
• Clearing to neutral
• Casey Neistat’s daily schedule
• Rhode Island hospital
• “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.

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