What is worth doing is worth doing well

The director uses this proverb to tell students to take school seriously and put real effort into their education, since it will yield results in the long run. This is good advice for people who are simply not taking things seriously when they should, like students who are forced to attend classes and do the bare minimum.

For me, though, this advice falls short.

Whenever I think about things that are worth doing in life, I end up overthinking them. Instead of motivating me, the idea of “doing it well” creates paralysis. I start planning every step, worrying about details, estimating how long everything will take, questioning how good the result needs to be, and imagining the consequences if I mess it up.

That spiral causes a lot of anxiety. My brain shuts down, and starting feels impossible. To avoid that feeling, I usually end up reading some manga or playing a game instead.

Logically, I know these worries are not a big deal. I will not be put in jail, fired, or suffer a huge financial loss if I make a mistake. Still, keeping the mindset of “doing something well from the start” creates a tremendous amount of friction for me.

The other side of the coin

Because of this, another piece of advice is often recommended online: do things poorly.

The idea is simple. If you need to do something, you do not need to care about doing it well from the start. You just need to do it. Even if what you produce is bad and needs to be redone later, at least it exists.

This approach also works well for establishing new habits. If you want to get fit, you do not need to start with two-hour gym sessions. You can just go to the gym, do three exercises, and leave. Lowering the energy required to start makes action much more likely.

There is even a productivity method built around this concept, called the “Minimum Viable Day” method, or MVD. Inspired by the idea of a Minimum Viable Product, it focuses on selecting only three essential tasks to complete in a day. Once those tasks are done, the day is already considered a success, and anything else is optional.

This mindset is great for getting started. However, it has a weakness. If applied blindly, it can lead to low-quality results, rework, or frustration when the situation actually demands care and polish.

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Then what should I do?

The answer I arrived at was not choosing one side over the other, but separating them.

I still want to do things well. I just should not demand that level of quality before something even exists.

Practically nothing starts out great the first time. Writing, coding, designing, studying, or learning a new skill all require iteration. Improvement happens through repetition.

Instead of pushing a high standard onto something that has not even been created yet, I try to define two phases. First, make it exist, even if it is rough, naive, or incomplete. Then, once it is real, improve it deliberately.

This reframing reduces anxiety because it removes pressure from the starting point. The task stops being an abstract, overwhelming monster and becomes something concrete that I can respond to.

This approach works especially well in my line of digital work. Most things are cheap to redo, refine, or refactor. Mistakes are rarely catastrophic. I can improve things over time without worrying that one bad decision will cause the next apocalypse.

And you? How do you approach this tension? Do you aim to do things right the first time, or do you start messy and refine as you go?

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It’s been a while since I last sent a post here on Substack. I apologize for that, as I pretty much failed at keeping my promise of posting once per month.

Now, I could go on and explain why this failed, with a detailed summary with untrue stories of how my life got way too hard to keep up, the lessons that these hardships gave me and how I plan to improve for the next year with over-engineered goals.

But I won’t, since the reason I didn’t post was only because I procrastinated.

That’s it, I just couldn’t resist the desire procrastinate and decided to push Substack posts to “tomorrow”, but tomorrow never came. It’s kinda funny how I procrastinated on a blog that I made to procrastinate on my real tasks.

Ok then, what’s your plan?

Honestly? I got no idea. I could go back to posting monthly about things that I think are interesting, or post about the things that I learn about, or even make a weekly curation about the things that I consume during the week.

But the decisions are weighing down on me. I can’t figure out what is the best course of action. I wanted to make this blog a kind of goal to achieve in 2026, but I feel that it would put unwanted pressure to keep going, and ultimately make me quit it again. Maybe it would also end up affecting my other projects and goals for the next year.

So I’m looking for a compromise: I’ll aim to post in here every two weeks, just that. No setup target audience, no pressure, no need to post extremely long posts. If I can only write 300 words every two weeks, so be it. If I can’t even complete that, I’ll add a curation of the things that I consumed that week. Once I get into a groove and make this thing a habit, then I’ll think about structuring it.

What this means for you as a reader

You can expect me to become a bit more active on your inbox. However, things will be a bit more chaotic, as I’ll just be posting about my ideas that I get through the year, the things that I learn from books, articles and podcasts, and random stories that I come up with.

Heck, I might even post my narrations of RPG / Survival game characters that I make if people enjoy that. So things will be much broader than before.

Hopefully, you’ll still be with me and won’t hit unsubscribe before I even send out my first post of 2026. If there’s any specific topics you’d like to see me discuss here, feel free to answer this and future emails / posts for what you’d like to read.

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I wish you a happy new year and a great procrastination session.

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Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Social media is most people's productivity arch nemesis. They are a time sink, making you believe that you're doing something nice, while in reality you're doing nothing more than giving the tech oligarchs more money, power, and prestige.

I've recently had to watch "The Social Dilemma" for a class and write a summary about it, but while watching that documentary, I had the idea of creating this article. The Social Dilemma is a dramatized documentary about how social media works behind the scenes, the strategies they use to capture your attention for as much time as possible, how they can extract as much data and profit as much as they can from it.

You are the product

There's a famous quote that summarizes my intent with this article:

You're not the customer; you're the product

- Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, 1973

Yes, the quote is from 1973, way before I was even born. This quote is related to how TV channels at the time were filling up the broadcasting with advertisements, it was a broadcast of a short video titled "Television Delivers People". At the time, most media consumption was done through TV. Even then, your attention was already being sold to advertisers, on paid channels. Viewers were not the consumer of television, they were the end product for advertisers, and they paid for the privilege of being consumed. You did not have a say on what was broadcasted on the TV, you only had a say on when to turn on your TV and which channel you'd watch. Other than that? No choice, only consume.

With the rise of the internet and mobile devices, the focus of advertisers shifted from TV to web advertising, but with a bigger shift: now marketers could get tailored data out of users, with their buying habits and interests.

That’s why you will get ads for items that you searched for a few days ago. No, it’s not magic, it’s the result of your data being sold to a marketing company that is now using that data to show you an ad about something you will potentially like. Sounds scary, right? But don’t worry, it only gets worse from here.

Social media is a data minefield

With the rise of social media, these corporations have even more ways to extract data out of you, while making you give it to them out of free will. With social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like, these companies can know:

• Your buying habits

• The places you visit

• Who you know

• What the people you know consume

• Your hobbies

• Your work

• Your relationship

• Your family

• Your insecurities and fears

• Your buying power

• The websites you visit

• Your favorite brands

And many more. Social media markets themselves as ways to become more present with your family and friends, and meet new people through them. However, they’re nothing more than a minefield of data they gather from you, while making you think that you’re sharing about yourself without consequences.

After collecting all of this data, they sell this data to advertisers that follow you not only inside a specific social media, but on other platforms and websites as well. These marketing agencies and tools associate your data through your digital footprint across many apps, so they can make the most accurate profile of you, show you even more targeted ads, and make you buy the item on the advert.

These tools are also free for the user, so the users don’t care about the data, since they don’t need to pay for that tool. In exchange, the corporations capture your attention for as long as possible, while capturing as much data as they can. And that is why the original quote from Richard and Carlotta changed to:

If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

How social media captures your attention

Social media apps increase their profits by making you stay even longer on the platform. To achieve that goal, they apply various techniques and technologies that mess up with the chemicals of your brain. These techniques focus specifically on stimulating your brain through dopamine, which is a chemical related to pleasure. The more pleasure you get from an activity, the more dopamine you get from it, and the more your brain seeks that activity.

Here are some of the methods used to lock your attention to the screen:

Notifications

Every social media will send you notifications about something to make you return to the app. A new post from someone you follow, a like on a post or comment that you made, someone started following you, and anything else that might get your attention.

These notifications tempt you to look at the app, causing the effect of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They make it seem like there might be information that you’re missing out on, that you’ll be out of the loop and excluded from the newest breakthrough, and that makes you open the app out of fear of being excluded.

Being notified about some changes on your social media (like getting likes on a post or someone commenting on your video) also causes your brain to feel pleasured, feel accepted by others, and give you the impression of socialization.

Likes, comments, and follows

Getting a like or comment on your post feels reassuring, like your opinion is being heard by someone else. It gives you a sense of belonging, of being part of a community that understands you.

Commenting on people’s posts or answering people's posts allows you to spend more time on the platform, sharing either pieces of knowledge or opinion about something, giving social media even more data to use in their favor. Long discussions also make you more engaged in the platform, spending more time on it and giving even more data.

Infinite scrolling

Infinite scrolling is a technique that makes your feed look infinite. No matter how much you scroll, new content will be loaded and ready for you to consume. You will never run out of content, and it will make you wonder about what will come next. Will the next reel be a hella funny one, or will I see someone practicing self harm and have it ruin my day?

This is what causes you to lose way more time than you would like to. Your brain hates leaving tasks undone, and social media can never be fully consumed.

Attacks to your feelings and morals

Social media algorithms tailor the content you see based on data collected from your behavior. This means they don’t just show you what you like and engage with; they also surface content that provokes strong reactions, including posts you may disagree with or find harmful, because it keeps you scrolling.

Harmful content will prompt you to comment on it, and spend more time seeing it. You will train the algorithm to showcase more of those posts, and spend more time on the app, getting more opportunities for ads to appear on your screen.

Viral hits

A post of yours becoming “viral” makes other people see more of your posts, get more likes and comments, highly stimulating you and motivating you to continue using the app. It also makes the FOMO effect even more apparent if you don’t know about the viral hit. You’ll feel left out and estranged from your friends as they speak about it.

The side effects of social media usage

Using social media for long periods of time will cause extremely harmful effects on the medium and long term. The average person spends a little over 2 hours on social media every day. Some effects of exaggerated social media usage are:

Brain Rot

Brain rot is a term used to describe low-effort and short content and to refer to the effects of viewing excessive digital media, especially the ones similar to short-form content. Short-form content gives a smaller but much more frequent dopamine hits, causing you to stick to viewing this type of content for longer periods of time, enhancing the feeling of brain rot.

Higher possibility of mental illnesses

Since social media targets your mental state to keep you glued to your screen as much as possible, users can develop mental disorders about their appearance, body, feelings, or career success.

Social media often makes others appear better off, leading you to compare yourself and feel inadequate, less attractive, less successful, less disciplined. These comparisons can fuel anxiety, depression, and even eating disorders.

Procrastination

As you spend more time on social media, you will eventually run out of time to do the things you enjoy doing, such as hobbies and external activities. This might even cause you to procrastinate on hard tasks at your job and make you lose deadlines.

Procrastination will also lead to the feeling of anxiety for what you should be doing with your time, which ironically causes you to procrastinate even more on what you should be doing and dive even deeper into social media consumption.

Corporates don’t care about you

With all the side effects, you might think that corporations would be doing something to solve these problems, but in reality, they’ll lean even more into it. They will apply even more predatory data collection methods and make them look innocent enough for the general user to use, until it eventually becomes normalized and not using that tool makes you stand out as the “weird” person.

Collecting your data makes them more money. They don’t care if they will damage your health in the process, or if they will cause issues to entire small cities due to their data centers consuming a lot of water and emitting bright lights at all times of the day.

Information is a commodity in today’s society, and those who possess information hold power. It allows them to manipulate what the masses consume, and eventually change their views and opinions to match theirs, to gain even more power.

How to mitigate the damage to social media

Avoiding social media is a hard task, since it’s especially made to be addictive and hard to leave, but you can highly lower your consumption by applying specific habits:

Disable notifications

Notifications are one of the main strategies for apps to drive you to use them. If the app is not important, disable its notifications and only look at the app when you decide to, not when the app thinks you should.

Add time limits

Android phones have an app preinstalled called “Digital Wellbeing”. Through it, you can monitor which apps you’re using way more than expected, and set schedules to block specific apps from being opened.

There are some useful apps that you can install as well, such as One Sec, which prompts you to take a moment to process if you’re really opening a specific app because you want to, or because you’re simply bored.

Use blocking apps

If you’re like me, who spends a hella lot of time on social media even through the set limits, you can use blocking apps, as they will either completely block specific apps and websites from your notes, or highly limit the app to make it harder to compulsively consume content.

What I’m currently using is Unhook, which is a browser extension for YouTube that blocks specific items from appearing, such as shorts and recommended videos. This allows me to be more intentional with what I consume on YouTube.

Conclusion

Social media is a great way to stay in touch with other people, but you should use it wisely and know its risks before you spend way more time than you should in it. I still have quite a few issues with it myself, but I’m slowly working on improving it.

But a question for you: open your app tracking usage, and let me know in the comments what’s the app that you use the most.

If you enjoyed this post, it would be extremely appreciated if you restacked it or shared it with a friend.

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I hate to break it to you, but the original use of contexts is basically outdated.

The world has changed. The original method in the GTD book, published in 2001, had a very different context (pun intended) than what we have now. Email was tied to your desktop, work was only done from an office, and getting groceries required going outside. Laptops were rare and bulky, and smartphones didn’t exist yet.

Fast forward to today, many of us work from home (myself included), become entrepreneurs, and check email from phones while waiting for our groceries to be delivered. Our tools and environments have blurred together, making the rigid contexts of “@Computer” or “@Office” feel… Well, irrelevant and useless.

From my experience with the original contexts, it felt like rubbing salt into a wound to make it heal faster. Except that there was no healing – just friction. I didn’t feel more organized, I just felt lost. It didn’t make sense.

But it made me think: how can I adapt GTD to fit into modern life?

Revisit the concept

The main use of a context is to limit a task to a specific resource, so it becomes easier to filter a task out if it doesn’t fit your current context. When you add a context of “computer” to a task, you’re saying that the task requires a computer to be done.

But here’s the issue: your computer is almost always near you. And in many cases, the task doesn’t even need a computer – it can be done on your phone instead.

Other than location or tool-based contexts, GTD also encourages you to focus on other criteria: time available, energy level, and priority – in that order..

These contexts help you filter out what you can do right now. Yet, they can still not be specific enough. Say you got an hour before your next meeting and medium energy left, your filter could still have 12 high priority items, all due in a week. Which one do you pick?

The solution: categorize the type of tasks

While searching for a solution for this issue, I found one that was quite simple: create a context for the type of work that the task is related to.

This separation allows me to select when I feel like working on a type of task for the day, like writing. I can filter tasks for the “writing” context and select the highest priority from that list. This way, I have the freedom to select what I’ll work on without feeling lost about the tooling needed for it.

One person who heavily influenced my choice for choosing this type of context for my tasks was Carl Pullein. He uses this method coupled with time blocking, so he can lower the amount of decisions he makes at a time. You can watch his video about it on YouTube.

I personally didn’t have much luck with time blocking (blog post about it coming out in the future! Wait patiently for a rant about me being unable to use a simple productivity method and getting into a hella lot of issues because of it), so I decided to use a more GTD-focused approach: I’ll filter tasks by the time that I have available, filter for them on my task manager along with the type of task that I want to do, and choose the highest priority that matches my current energy level.

It sounds complicated, but it mostly looks like this filter in my tool of choice (Amplenote):

Conclusion

Original GTD contexts are still useful if you do a lot of manual work and still need to move to various places many times throughout the month, so you can (and should!) continue using them if they provide value to your work. However, most knowledge workers won’t be as benefited from them in the current times.

I want to know about you, though: do you use contexts like mentioned in the original GTD book? If not, how do you choose what you’ll work on at any point in time?

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Latest post:

Stop being delusional thinking that getting more tasks done is the same as being more productive. It's not.

Think about it: when you complete a lot of tasks, are you really completing what moves the needle forward, or are you focusing on the wrong things?

Do what really matters

You probably believe that doing more tasks equals to being more productive, but it means nothing if you're not producing value from those tasks.

You have to understand that your to-do list will never be fully completed. There will always be 300 things that you could be doing at any given time that could be considered productive. If you're like me, you even have those 300 tasks saved in your task manager somewhere.

To choose what to do each day, you first need to decide which tasks are truly valuable to you.

Tasks that are valuable are those who align with your goals and will move your current projects forward. If you have the goal of being a writer, writing a draft for a blog or story would be a pretty important task in your list. However, spending 3 hours optimizing your task management workflow in Notion might not be the best use of your time.

If you need some more metrics to figure out what is important to you outside of "gut feeling", here are some measures you can use:

• Do you need to deliver it soon? (especially helpful for college assignments and time-sensitive projects)

• Does it increase revenue for your business?

• Does it improve any of your areas of focus (health, finances, productivity, knowledge, etc)?

• Is it enjoyable?

How to choose what to do next

After prioritizing the tasks that really matter to you, it's time to select which ones you'll work on now.

I personally prefer to plan out 20 tasks that I'll work on each month - 10 personal tasks and 10 work tasks. You might be thinking that I'm really inefficient to only do 20 tasks per month, but this number is low for a reason: it allows me to have quick wins.

My monthly task list is intentionally small. It allows me to finish it in one to two weeks, reducing decision fatigue and making it easier to focus on what truly matters. This not only helps me feel productive and motivated but also ensures that I make steady progress without getting overwhelmed by an endless backlog. Once all the tasks are done, I pick 20 more and complete them.

However, I don't look at all of those 20 tasks at once, or I'll feel like a snail wandering in circles, being slow and never going anywhere. Instead, I prefer to use the Ivy Lee method for daily planning: I select 6 tasks that I want to work on, prioritize them in the order of what's most important to be done at the moment, and do them from top to bottom. If you complete every task, pick more 6 tasks with the same priority criteria and work on them. If I don't complete everything, I push them to the top of the list for tomorrow and fill it with tasks until I have 6 tasks again.

I also prefer to do a split of 2 tasks for work and 4 tasks for uni/personal responsibilities, since I spend more time doing uni stuff than doing work stuff. You should change it to your needs, though.

You can do a split of 4 tasks for work and 2 tasks for your personal issues, or even 4 tasks for work, 1 task for personal responsibilities, and 1 task for your side projects/business.

With a small task list, It becomes much easier to focus on what can be done next and not feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that I should be doing at any given time.

Conclusion

Knowing what to do next is an important step to getting your most important work done first. This will grant you more results while allowing you to work less overall. Do you already plan what you'll do each day? Let me know in the comments what's your usual strategy for it, and how it's working out for you!

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I can easily plan my whole week ahead of time, but when it’s time to actually follow it — I freeze, unsure of what to do even with the plan right in front of me. I start to think “Why should I tie myself to something I made in the past when I can just do whatever the heck I want?”

Then, I end up ignoring the calendar altogether and regret it after I barely did 20% of what I planned for the day.

Your calendar is a guide, not a dictator

However, a lot of people (myself included) still struggle to follow their calendars, even if planning inside it is easy and visual.

There’s a lingering feeling of anxiety and fear with following a schedule. It’s like you’re being ordered around by your older self who made that plan, who had the expectation of completing everything in it, ignoring what possible situations could arrive in the future. It’s like you don’t have a voice, and that your older self is a dictator, ordering you to finish things.

I imagine my older self, sitting on a pile of older tasks, staring down at me with a gaze filled with disdain, saying “Are you going to offer more undone tasks for me, or are you finally going to do them like I planned to?”

This makes me not want to follow the schedule, due to fear of not completing everything on it.

But, what if, instead of a dictator, my past self was a guide?

Instead of seeing my past self as a critic waiting for me to fail, I can choose to view them as an ally who wants me to succeed and guide me through my journey. Adopting this mindset would make it easier to follow my calendar and stay on track.

Without that judgmental dictator, what’s there to be afraid of?

Your calendar is your last line of defense

It also makes no sense to think of your calendar as a dictator, who only orders you around and forces you to defend them when the enemy approaches.They’re your last line of defense, they’re what should prevent you from succumbing to procrastination, not induce it.

The calendar is supposed to help you visually plan your time, like a medic in a battlefield, assisting you in your time of need. It’s not above or underneath you, it’s your comrade.

Then, why do you think of your calendar so badly? Why are you fearing it?

Most likely, it’s because you’re projecting your own insecurities onto it, or you’re making a hella heavy schedule back there.

A guide will not place too many places for you to visit in your schedule, and will instead do their best to have wiggle time for breaks and emergencies. If nothing bad happens and things finish ahead of time, they can always add something new at the end.

You should do the same: don’t overfill your day, keep some wiggle time for emergencies on your schedule, and if everything goes smoothly, you can end your day earlier or put other things in the free pockets of time.

Remember: your calendar should help you, not overwhelm you.

Making the transition

Before I made the transition to seeing my calendar as a guide, I used to see my calendar like this:

This might look okay at first glance, but it was actually hard to follow. I had to follow the calendar religiously, as anything other than perfection would derail one task, that would derail another task, and eventually my whole schedule would fall apart. For example, if I overspend my time on a draft, I’ll have less time to work on my research before the meeting.

After making the change to see my calendar as a guide, I found my calendar to become much more bearable and easier to look at.

I added 15 minutes buffer timers between each task, in the case that anything unplanned for creeps into my schedule. Yes, this means that I can’t fit in as many tasks as before in the calendar, but ensures that the quality of what I do increases, since I won’t be stressed about rushing my current task to instantly start another.

And at the end of the day, if I don’t need the 15 minutes, they will accumulate, and I’ll have 30 min to work on a new task after each time block — or just to relax if I’m feeling lazy.

To make things easier, I also prefer to keep my schedule even tidier by batching tasks together: this means that, whenever I want to work on some project, I’ll just create one big time block called “Work on project X” to my calendar, and kick off the tasks on my task manager until the time ends.

This way, my calendar is guiding me to work on the project, not finishing a large amount of tasks. It also makes it a bit easier to look at, since I don’t have to modify it too much, nor get overwhelmed by the amount of things it wants me to do.

Let me hear your thoughts

What’s your current relationship with your calendar? Are you treating it as a dictator or a guide? If you’re treating it as a dictator, what makes you fear them?

Thanks for reading this post. Feel free to like it so more people on Substack can discover it! Let me know your opinions on this topic in the comments section!

An annual review will help me learn of what I did well and what I could improve on for the year ahead. I warn you that this might be a bit worrisome for you as a reader, since this is a very personal piece of writing that might not be interesting to everyone.

For this review, I’ll use the set of questions from James Clear’s annual reviews, which are:

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn’t go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

4. What do I plan to improve on next?

Now let’s get started with the good stuff!

What went well this year?

Productive Procrastination (blog)

This year I finally started my blog. Okay, it was kinda late (~October I believe?) and I haven't been as active as I wished to, but I still consider it a win to have created it, nonetheless!

I only have 2 posts for 2024 (3 if I somehow manage to publish this before December 31), but 'm still happy with it. I don't want to be the best writer around or the most famous one (my online presence is smaller than an ant at this point, and the frequency that I post online is smaller than a microbe, don't think you can get much smaller than that), I just want to write about this productivity hobby that I spent way too much time on and share my knowledge with others, while improving my own writing ability.

To help me achieve that goal, I joined Write of Passage - a writing bootcamp with an incredible community on writing in ways that are enjoyable to you and aren't dull for the reader. Unfortunately, their stay was also a passage and the course is gone for good now. I'll do my best to use David Perell's teachings for my personal growth.

I confess that I still haven't done a lot of changes to that Substack's view and “About” section, and I should probably do that soon. That's probably gonna be a priority for 2025.

Regarding this blog's growth so far:

• I got 12 free subs, and my most liked post got 8 likes. It ain't much, but it's honest work.

• 2 Posts this year, one with 67 views, and another with 53 views

University

My university went on strike at the start of the year, to the surprise of 0 students from it. It lasted about a month and a half, so my graduation should be postponed by a semester now. Fortunately, I was able to pass all of my classes with good grades in my last semester (that ended in August), and I hope to do the same this semester (that will end in April, hopefully).

For this semester, I took quite a few hard subjects: one where I have to write the research project for my end-of-graduation thesis, one about basic internet (known as the hardest subject in the course) and one for developing mobile applications. I also have other two classes, but they're more miscellaneous and won't have as much focus as the other three, since they are relatively easy (namely one to create a business idea and another for building something with a physical board).

If I can stay safe on the hard subjects, I should probably have a good time on the less demanding classes too.

Some metrics from my last semester:

• Completed ~90% of my assignments on time

• Got over 80% results in all classes

• Highest grade: 92% on Assistive Technologies

• Lowest grade: 81% on Web Development

• General GPA: 80.12%

These grades are good, but there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. If I was able to finish all of my assignments on time and study a bit more, I'd probably be able to get more than 90% results.

Investment portfolio skyrocketing

This year, I decided to follow the Bogleheads investment method for my investment portfolio. It basically focuses on buying index funds for the long run, instead of analyzing and picking specific stocks to invest. I think I'm riding a high wave right now, as the companies from the index fund are growing in value and USD is getting more valuable (compared to BRL).

The issue is: will I hold on when this wave crashes? I hope that I will.

For some metrics:

• Portfolio overall grew 15% in 12 months

• I was able to invest over 60% of my paychecks each month

I also know that one year is way too little time to get any kind of conclusions, but I want to be grateful for choosing this type of strategy instead of just being careless with my money. I guess I can also use this meme now.

What didn't go so well?

Health not healthing

At the start of the year, I was very inconsistent with my workouts. I was trying to go to a boxing and a weightlifting gym at the same time, and I did both pretty badly. This was sucking onto my confidence in my ability to get things done, and with university wanting every fiber of my already scattered attention, this was being even harder than I expected.

Then, somewhere around April, I dislocated my shoulder in a boxing training session. It didn't hurt a lot (only at the time, a few days later and the pain was eating me alive), but my doctor prohibited me from doing martial arts since it could cause the shoulder to dislocate again - and the more it dislocates, the worse it gets.

And since I lost my main mode of cardio, my relentless eating caught up to me and I gained over 7kgs (15lbs) of weight. I'm trying to come up with my own cardio plan that isn't too impact heavy (so I won't cry like a kid over a hurting shoulder) and that isn't monotonous (so I'll continue doing it regularly and not grow tired of it).

I also went to a nutritionist in November, and my exam results were bad to say the least. I'll need to get a lot of supplements to unfuck myself. I'll take a total of 3 supplements, alongside my normal creatine and whey protein. Rip my wallet.

What is tracking?

Since this is my first proper annual review, I didn't set out proper tracking for most of the items that I think would be nice to track.

• How many workouts did I do each month? I Have no idea.

• How much water do I drink every day? Maybe enough to not die?

• How many tasks do I complete each day? Enough to make progress

• Yearly Goals? None were set

• How much time did I spend studying for university? Probably the bare minimum

It's honestly kinda embarrassing to share a review with so little tracking prep made. I'll try to up my tracking game for next year, since I believe these insights will be valuable for making proper improvements and getting a slap on the face for them - or a straight up drop kick if the results are bad enough.

Ignoring my own plans

Yes, I make plans for what I'll do on a day/week/month and I still won't follow them through. I've constantly gone against my own plans for God-knows-why way more times than I could count. Kind of ironic to hear this coming from someone who wants to maintain a blog about productivity.

Even while writing this review, I got distracted and burned so many plans for finishing it that I've already lost count - I took almost 1 week just choosing which kind of template to use for it.

I guess I'll need a bit more discipline and burn some willpower to follow plans from now on.

Inconsistency at the gym

Even though I now only go to the gym, I'm still very inconsistent with it. I don't have enough data (again) to know how many times, but I can say that there were a lot of times that I only went to the gym once a week.

Sometimes I'd blame having too much homework to work out, and other times I'd blame a lack of energy. There was just no way for me to succeed with this kind of plan.

I started a plan to counter the effects of the lack of consistent workouts: I'll do full body workouts. This way, I can at least maintain my progress for the week and still grow when I want to frequent the gym more often. I applied this strategy around September 2023, and I managed to double the amount that I lift on each exercise since then.

My best lifts for this year were:

• Leg Press - 80kg (176lbs) for 10 reps

• Dumbbell bench press - 11kgs (24lbs) each for 10 reps

• Standing calf raises - 50kg (110lbs) for 10 reps

I could probably up these numbers by 20% if I was focused on beating PRs, but I want to workout for health, so as long as the weight naturally goes up and I'm feeling stronger, having small numbers in my record is good enough for me.

Not following routines

This is a chronic problem of mine. I can't follow a routine even if you tell me to watch Dragon Ball Evolution two times in a row. This ties with the "not following plans" issue, and gets even worse when I have to take medicine in a regular interval (and not a set time). I have a lot of little habits that fall flat from me if I don't consciously remember them, even if I've been doing them for years.

I still need a digital reminder to myself to brush my teeth...

This is something that I want to slowly change in 2025, but this issue might be harder to tackle than all of the others combined - and might be what makes or breaks them as well.

What did I learn?

Some of the best things that I've learned this year were:

The problem really is that damn phone

My parents have been saying this since I was 15, and I just realized now that there's a lot of damage done. My concentration skills have been free falling like skydivers after driving 5 Red Bulls, 4 Monsters and 12 Espresso shots - at a steady pace, but crazy enough to have a diarrhea mid dive.

I'm now keeping my phone in another room when I'm trying to be productive, and I can say that it's helping me a lot. I still keep it near enough to hear it ring in emergencies, but I'm also being a bit more considerate to my own productivity.

For the record: this year, it was very frequent to have 6-10 hours of screen time. I'm slowly lowering this number, so I should see some real results around mid 2025 if I maintain my stance on phone usage.

Repeat past learnings

One quote that I came across this year from Naomi, on one of the Todoist's email newsletters was:

“The best lessons are often those we have to relearn.”

And I've been getting the same lessons over and over and over again. Some I refused to believe in like a kid throwing a fit for not wanting to eat their veggies, while others I gave voice to and applied them in my life - and whenever I start being inconsistent with them, I get a reminder of those learnings and remember why they're important.

Writing is social

After getting into the Write of Passage course, I learned a valuable lesson about writing: writing is social. It doesn't matter if I write 1000 articles if I don't have anyone to read and give me feedback on what I write, and the quality of my writing will be much higher after sharing it with someone else.

What are the things that I plan to improve next year?

A shortlist of what I plan to improve for 2025 is:

• Get more tracking methods for easily knowing if I did something

• Work out at least 2x per week (excluding exceptional circumstances)

• Lower my phone usage to less than 6 hours daily

• Consistently focus for 2 hours each day

• Write a blog post once a month

Thanks for reading my work. Happy New Years!

I’ll smell ya later!

I've been a forgetful person since childhood. I never remember what I need to do next, what happened minutes ago, or names of people I don’t see on a literal daily basis. Studying for exams was always a pain. I always forget what I studied. I’m not gonna lie, I had more success just winging the tests and trying to reason my way through.

However, things got harder in high school. Winging exams stopped yielding 80-90% results, and I had far too many things to remember than I could reason with.

Around that time, I started testing out a lot of different tools and methods for task and knowledge management and became a PAC: Productivity App Connoisseur, knowing the limits and weird quirks of many notes, calendar and task management apps. (At least to the ones that offered a free version. I was a broke ass teen, don’t judge me).

Throughout that journey, two specific methods struck me the most - Getting Things Done by David Allen and Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Both have a few commonalities: capture and keep your mind clean, organize the information, then act and review the actions.

My whole productivity setup changed because of these two methods. I went from a lost teenager who didn’t know which app he even saved a screenshot about a topic to study for, to someone who can find his stuff and take proper action on his most important work.

On this blog, I want to dive deeper into how I use Building a Second Brain inside my productivity app of choice - Amplenote.

Why do I use Amplenote to manage my notes and tasks?

One of the reasons that I use Amplenote – outside of the fact that I work for them, but it wouldn’t matter, since my love for the app was why I got hired in the first place – is that I can keep all my notes, tasks, and calendar inside the same productivity app. For someone who always loses his socks and ends up using mixed pairs, this is the best invention ever.

No more forgetting where I put stuff, forgetting to check my calendar, or forgetting tasks!

Since Amplenote mixes tasks, notes, and a calendar, it has an advantage over specialized apps, like Microsoft To-Do: increased context. For example, I can keep my tasks in the same note that explains not only what a project is but why it is important. Now I see my tasks in the app without forgetting what the task is about. In other apps, I’d need to either keep a reference to the documentation inside another notes app or duplicate and manually update that specific knowledge inside the task manager.

Managing tasks inside notes

After this thorough explanation for why I use Amplenote, you might be wondering: “then why do people keep their notes, tasks, and calendars in separate apps even if it increases complexity and cost?”

They’re what I call “Magicians of Organization”: those who know exactly where they put something, that keep all of their productivity apps neatly organized with extra meta-work, and don’t mind spending money and many apps, as long as they all do the things they’re supposed to do. If this sounds nothing like you, welcome to the club, my friend.

I want technology to help me remember, not give me more meta-work to handle and keep me up at night.

Keeping your productivity software segregated into different worlds is like putting stuff into different boxes and different rooms, then hoping to remember what is where when you need it. For heavily distractible people like me, I call this the “highway to hell” move, not only because it makes it hard to remember where each item lives, but because it adds complexity, unreliability, and duplication.

By using a single app, I avoid making complex systems and relying on 300 shitty integrations that may or may not lose information between apps for my system to work. A single app is all I need, and in my opinion, for most people as well.

How I organize my notes using PARA

I organize my notes with Tiago Forte’s PARA: Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives. Each letter of PARA is a tag in Amplenote, but you can think of them as very flexible folders.

P - Projects

Projects are short-lived objectives that I want to achieve. Their main characteristics are:

• Have a specific due date or time frame.

• Have an end result that needs to be produced at the end of the project

• Examples: Redesign website homepage, Write thesis for running code tests inside Google Classroom assignments

Projects are where my most important work lives, and since it’s the most actionable set of notes, I reference them much more often than the notes in the other categories. To separate projects from one another, I create a subtag for each of the projects. Each project mostly consists of instructions to properly execute the project, task lists and supporting material for it.

As an example, I have this project to “Complete a game for a game jam”, which is due on November 4, 2024. I keep a tag with its name, and add any notes that might relate to it.

A - Areas of focus

Areas are recurring responsibilities that I have in life. Their main characteristics are:

• Are recurrent and never-ending

• Have a standard to be maintained over time and no clear outcomes

• Are needed for me to have a source of income or well being

• Examples: work, personal, blog, health, finances

Areas are the second in the actionability hierarchy, so they are also looked at often, but not on the same frequency as projects. The subtags in the Areas tag normally contain recurring and one-time tasks, along with important information about those areas.

I think of the areas tag as the place for my mid and long term goals, that will be broken down into smaller and more achievable projects.

R - Resources

Resources are topics that I find interesting and want to keep for future reference. Their main characteristics are:

• Hold notes of my current interests

• Don’t have actions (tasks) tied to them

• Examples:book notes of Atomic Habits by James Clear, notes about my watch lists, spanish learning

Resources don’t have tasks in them, as they are meant to just be information about a specific topic.

A - Archives

Archives are anything that is currently inactive, either due to not being useful at the moment or by me losing interest in it. Their main characteristics are:

• Hold anything from the other tags

• Don’t have tasks inside them

If something goes to the archive, it’s either something that has become irrelevant or doesn’t have any use for me at the moment. I mostly add completed projects and topics I lost interest in. I also keep a subtag per year, so I can have an easier time filtering my notes whenever I want to reference something from the archive.

How I break the rules

A rule my coach would always tell me during training:

“First you need to learn the rules, then you can break them to your liking”

So I applied the same logic to almost everything in my life, including the PARA method. After I learned the basics of the method, I started tweaking the rules - or breaking them - to my liking. I did this to mold the methodology according to my own values.

I changed the core concepts of the PARA method, so if Tiago ends up reading this, he’ll look like Mike Tyson if someone stole his sweetroll.

Notes with more than one tag

Originally, Tiago Forte coined PARA by using Evernote (RIP), so his method was based on folders - a note could only live in one folder at a time, so you’d need to choose if it would be related to a project, area or resource beforehand. If you changed your mind, you would need to move the note to another folder. In my humble opinion, I think this is BS.

A note might be useful to an area and a project at the same time, or to two projects with a similar goal. In a traditional folder structure, how would you make this work? Duplicate the notes? Link them? Keep the notes in a specific tag and “”try”” to remind yourself where you put it?

With a tag-based structure, I have the freedom of adding many tags to a note, not needing to face the problem of “choosing where it should live”, since it can live in both places.

An example would be the notes for this very article. I keep those notes with a tag 1-projects/write-of-passage, 2-areas/work and 3-resources/productivity. This allows me to search for notes that relate to any of those topics, find older notes that might be useful to the article, or “get outside the dog’s house” (brazilian expression for “thinking outside the box”. It’s mostly used to say that someone’s acting crazy, though).

That only broke a major rule of PARA to get this result. But oh well, Tiago won’t be mad, right?

Managing tasks inside notes

This rule isn’t outright enforced by Tiago, but I’ve seen it shared in quite a few productivity tips regarding tasks and to-do lists, so I’ll address it here. Many tool how-tos and influencers insist on keeping your tasks and notes separate, so that you can dive deeper into work mode.

This might work for some, but I fundamentally believe the opposite to be true.

It’s much easier to get into a specific work mode when you have everything you need to complete your work - your tasks and your notes. It helps me understand the reason behind a task, how I can complete it, and review supporting material without leaving my current screen. This keeps me in work mode by getting into the specifics more easily, compared to separate apps.

With the inferior workflow: I open the separate tasks and notes app, see which task to do next on the tasks app, then look up the definition and support material on the notes app.

It’s much easier to keep a single app for tasks and notes. Just check a note, find the tasks and everything else you need in the same space. It takes less time to figure stuff out, less things to remember, and less apps you need to pay for.

My wallet thanks me for this.

Conclusion

Maintaining a Second Brain has allowed me to focus on what truly matters to me, letting me learn more information while keeping my head clean off clouding thoughts

With Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain approach, I was able to achieve much more than I thought possible.

I hope you learned something from this blog post.

I’ll smell ya later!

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We're constantly nagged to do more, whether it's by our clients, our bosses, or ourselves. Who hasn't had the nagging feeling that they're not doing enough, or that they haven't accomplished anything substantial all day? I'm certainly guilty.

I believed that my procrastination was killing my personal, professional, and academic life, and this led me to pile more tasks on my plate to force myself to do the work I was constantly dreading and avoiding.

The result? Now I have my day job at Amplenote. I'm enrolled in the Write of Passage cohort, have 6 classes of college that come with their own assignments, projects, and exams, in addition to the extracurricular activities and classes I need to graduate.

It has gotten to the point where I have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to do all of these things.

I'm not proud of it, because even though I'm doing all these things, I still feel like I'm failing in my professional and academic life, like everything I'm doing is of poor quality and I'm not putting in enough work.

"Why can't I do better? Why can't I just do everything on my to-do list on time? What's wrong with me?"

These questions would play over and over in my head, and I would constantly beat myself up for not being able to do all the things I wanted to do. But now I've realized that these thoughts were just stopping me from managing myself better, and I've become a bit better at it - although I'm still a procrastinator with over 300 tasks in my task manager. At least now I can be at peace with that number and work in a more sustainable way.

The illusion of infinite productivity

There are so many success stories out there. People who have created unicorn startups, people who have created new and innovative technologies, people who have discovered new diseases and cures for new and old diseases, and people who have even created and proven their own theories that could change the world! It's amazing what humanity is capable of now. This makes me feel like I have to do more to be as successful as these people, even if I have to make some sacrifices, like taking care of my health.

If I spend more time doing productive things, I'll be more successful and get more out of my time, right?

Right?!

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Humans weren't designed to be productive all the time. We need sleep, food, and exercise to function properly. If anything is missing, our ability to work is compromised, and we end up being less productive overall.

But we're led to believe that we can be productivity machines and push ourselves to exhaustion, working all day while being constantly bombarded with information. It doesn't help that a lot of productivity content is all about "tips to be more efficient" or "how to become an unstoppable worker" and "how to make the most out of your 24 hours".

And with that comes all the unhealthy practices we do when we're overwhelmed: multitasking, working overtime, sacrificing exercise and sleep, or not even getting started!

In an attempt to meet society's demands to do more while trying not to worsen our health and sanity, we put more tasks on our plate than we can handle and end up feeling overwhelmed with all the things we need to do. To counteract these feelings, we spend money on books, courses, and software about productivity tips and methods that promise to "keep us organized and give us more time to work.

But these are nothing more than Band-Aids for the overwork culture that's been pushed on us.

Tasks don’t matter, results matter

The main issue with most people's to-do lists is that they are so overwhelming that it is hard to know where to start. The tasks are numerous, their clarity is abysmal, and of course time is short. We start overthinking each task, wondering if it's really the right thing to do or if we should be doing something else with our time - and suddenly the Xbox controller is in your hands and you're playing that game from your Steam library that you've been dying to play for days.

While playing games is fun, we want to get on with our work and create something meaningful.

To avoid situations like this, we should shift our focus from the tasks themselves to the results they produce. It does not matter if you completed 30 tasks or 3 in a day, what matters is that you accomplished something of value and made progress toward your goals.

There's a quote from Tiago Forte, author of "Building a Second Brain," that I really like about task lists:

“You have to remember that tasks don’t inherently matter – only the results they produce do. If you could get exactly the same results by doing half as many tasks, wouldn't you? [By that measure, you've become twice as productive by doing half as much work!”

This means that we should focus more on what drives results, rather than just aimlessly doing more and more tasks just for the sake of it. But now the real question is: how do I find the tasks that produce the best results?

You should look at your task list and identify some categories that will help you determine which tasks deserve your attention. Some possible criteria are

• Important and urgent tasks.

• Tasks that are close to their deadline.

• Tasks that are important and will give you a lot of personal satisfaction and prestige.

Don’t do more, do less

Doing more doesn't necessarily mean being more productive. Many of the strategies people use will just make you more tired and sometimes even less productive than if you hadn't used them.

Some of my tips that sound counterintuitive, but have worked for me to make sure I'm staying sane with everything I need to do, are

• Avoid multitasking: Multitasking is a myth. When you multitask, you're just switching your focus quickly between tasks, which makes you make more mistakes and reduces your overall focus on a task. By focusing on one task at a time, you give it your full attention and spend less energy switching between tasks.

• Take frequent breaks: Taking breaks allows you to maintain your energy and focus for longer periods of time, avoiding the sudden fatigue that comes from working too hard.

• Work less hours: Working more hours doesn't actively lead to getting more done. Productivity comes from doing more in the same amount of time, so working more hours is counterproductive and will only lead to burnout and error.

• Say “no” more often: How often have you been pulled into projects and tasks that drain your energy and don't have anything to do with you? When you have the ability to say no to these tasks, you can focus on the tasks that are most important to you.

How do I manage (or survive?) my schedule

As I said in the introduction, I still face the problem of having way too many things to do, mostly because of my past choices. However, I stopped feeling bad about having way too many things to do after I analyzed my to-do list and came up with a few takeaways.

Keep in mind that these takeaways are from my experience, so you may have a different experience or come to different conclusions than I did.

The first is that I tend to break my tasks into smaller actions, so most of the tasks on my list are subtasks. I don't have an exact number, but at least 50% of them are subtasks. This makes me feel better because I know that my workload hasn't really increased, I've just made it clearer.

Second, most of my tasks are nice to do and not really necessary for me to do. I can put them off as much as I want and the consequences will be minimal. I estimate that about 20% of my (main) tasks are nice-to-do.

Third, most of the tasks that I need to do don't have a set time for completion. I can just do them whenever I find the time.

Fourth, the tasks that are urgent and important will naturally come to my attention several times a week, if not a day. I'll either be constantly reminded by the people who need the task done, or by my task manager app if they're too important or urgent to ignore. This makes up the bulk of the urgent and important tasks that should get my immediate attention.

Conclusion

Fighting that little voice in the back of your head that says you're not doing enough is hard, but not impossible. Take it one step at a time and focus on what really matters to you, not someone else.

When tasks pile up, ask yourself if you're overdoing what you can do in a day, and if you really want to do all these things. Maybe they're just ideals imposed on you by others and may not be the best use of your time.

I hope this was informative and you learned something new.

Smell ya later!

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