The IEI Productivity and Organization Post

I am an IEI (MBTI: INFj). This is Organization By An IEI, For IEIs (or INFJs). Enjoy, my fellow scatterbrains.

In Socionics, IEIs have Te as their vulnerable function, where Te governs effectiveness; productivity; functionality; knowing facts and concrete, factual information; and handling concrete work processes--so, I struggle with precision, effectiveness, and knowing things exactly. In addition to that, IEIs have Ti as their mobilizing function, where Ti governs conceptual structures and systematization: I get excited and motivated by structures and thinking about systems. I am also strongly motivated to avoid shame, and my upbringing placed heavy shame judgments upon expression of weak Te. And, I am afraid that my world and my environment will turn into chaos if I don't tightly manage and control things, and actively bring processes to their intended conclusions.

So...I'm organized. 

What does being organized mean to me? Well, right now I am between jobs, so being organized means that I:

My closet is neater than your closet.

+ Plan out and track daily activities

+ Keep a very clean, organized, tidy home for my boyfriend Thomas and me

+ Cook regularly

+ Care for 2 beautiful dogs

+ Have no physical or virtual clutter 

+Track and manage my finances and debts

+ Am currently writing a paper on sleep and another on consciousness, which require extensive research

+ Write posts for this blog and organize Socionics meetups in NYC

+ Am in the middle of learning Python, a coding language

+ Am taking two courses on Coursera

+ Am reading constantly

+ See my family weekly

...in short, i'm making the most of my time. Here's how I do it.

Guiding Principles 

I have a certain lifestyle I want to lead. I have projects which when finished will improve my quality of life. I have things I want to accomplish, small wants and big dreams alike. So the first principle I work off of is,

Break the big down into small and implement the pieces. 

Here's one project of mine that follows this principle. The goal is that I want to improve my productivity and become more disciplined. This goal is really important to me and it is at the bedrock of what I am doing, so it gets its own principle:

Decide, do, and follow through. 

So I decided that that project means scheduling projects by giving them 'death dates' (the date the project dies whether or not I finish it) and breaking projects down into actions which I then schedule. It also means that I realized I needed to schedule every day in order to get the most out of my day and not waste time. This is because NOT scheduling actions means you never concretize your plans, which means that all you're tracking is a vague feeling of unease about an approaching deadline. This can be rephrased to

You can only be accountable if you think of your time as valuable, stay aware of its passing, and dedicate it to concrete actions. 

Which is really a very Ni way of thinking about time. And that's just fine for me.
This guiding principle is also very Ni:

Minimalise to allow the essential to thrive. 

That one is so important, it's at the top of the list of my personal commandments. This one is huge. It's about accepting that there are a LOT of things I could be doing, but I am CHOOSING not to because the more stuff I am generally committed to, the less I am actually committed to any one of those things/goals/processes. This principle is about saying NO to things because you want to say YES much louder to what really matters, and to see those YES things through to their ends.
To support these efforts, here's a guiding principle that comes straight out of my suggestive Se:

Just start. 

Because that is really helpful for busting through the initial resistance I ALWAYS feel before I start taking actions.
Last one, and this one has become so ingrained to me that I don't know how I could ever have functioned without it:

Write everything down.

You need to get groceries, write a paper, pet your dog, vacuum, remind your boyfriend of something, get tickets to a play, do dishes. What do all these things have in common? They are all going to be done at another time than the moment you think of them: which means that they will ALL be written down on a list somewhere. Don't try to keep things in your head, IEIs. If your brain is as vague and imagination-heavy and unconcerned with factual knowledge as mine is--see utter Te deficiency above--then you need to do this too. Just write it down, everything in one spot is best, and schedule yourself to review it...then trust yourself to look at it at that point in the future, and either decide to do it, or not do it. But you'll be making that choice consciously--it won't be because something fell off your radar. Trust me--my radar is the fuzziest I've ever known, but nothing that I ever write down falls off of it anymore.

Tools
I use a variety of tools to help me stay productive. Here's what I use:

1. A Passion Planner and a set of highlighters. This is my daily and weekly planner, and it is a great guiding tool for tracking my time, which I do to stay accountable to my time (one of the guiding principles!) by staying aware of how I use it. It also is spectacular for what it was intended for, which is to help you bring your passions into your life: the big-picture goals and desires you want to implement to be happier. In the morning at 10am I review my open projects and to-dos and plan out my day; then, after every major set of actions, I check in and color-code what I did (just like this article). It is much less work than it sounds, and it helps me stay aware of time passing and what I'm using my time for: since starting to use this 4 weeks ago, I have cut down my wasted time by more than half. I also found that I really love the physicality of it, something I haven't gotten enough of or gotten used to not having even after many years of exclusively digital planners and calendars. 
2. A digital calendar. For things that I know are coming ahead of time, I schedule those various events and recurring reminders like birthdays on my Google Calendar, and set up groups for different kinds of events (my groups are: family events, personal events, to-dos and errands, and socializing) and run that calendar through Sunrise calendar. It is a great app for putting together calendars from multiple platforms into one beautiful view and can be managed via pretty much any device. 
3. Wunderlist. This is an absolutely incredible app that helps you stay on top of your lists. You can schedule any item, have multiple lists and items from different lists show up together under the 'Today' list, set reminders and due dates, add notes, sync with Sunrise, and more. I use it for:
   = scheduling weekly recurring to-dos such as 'Take out trash/recycling on Thursday', 'dishes', '10-min cleanup' etc. This helps me not think about recurring events, just follow instructions, which falls under Decide, do, and follow through: I decided I have to water plans weekly, write the note once to remind me every day at a certain time, and then just do it when I get the reminder.
   = scheduling project deadlines, or 'death dates'
   = keeping a big list of to-dos
   = writing down all the groceries you usually get: check them all off but they don't disappear, so you basically have a database of items; so if you are going to the store and need tomatoes, milk, and cheese, just uncheck those so they pop back up on the active list, then check them off once you have found them in the store, and they slide back down until you need them again. This helped my food shopping tremendously...and my diet, too, since I pre-wrote my list of items I can actually eat without guilt :) 
4. Timer. I don't care how fancy you get with this, but you need a timer. I decide on an action or something I want to focus on--like kitchen cleanup--and set a timer to go off after 1 hour. That way I don't have to worry about anything else but what I'm doing, because I've already thought through my plan and once the timer goes off, I know I will stop what I'm doing and continue on with the other actions in my day. It also really helps to concretize how much time you have locally speaking, because that helps make every action you take feel more 'real'. 
5. Phone alarms. I use my iPhone 24/7 and found that having preset alarms for daily things helps tremendously--as long as I do that thing the moment the alarm goes off, or snooze the alarm until I can do that thing as soon as I turn the alarm off. My daily alarms are my 10am, 12noon, 3pm, and 8pm schedule check-ins; at that time, I open my Passion Planner and review how my day is going. 
6. Gmail folders. I automate my email so that various emails are automatically sorted into folders--anything from friends goes into 'People', work-related things go into 'Business', Amazon or eBay goes to 'Money', and all my feed articles, like Lifehacker, go to 'Current reading' (I use IFTTT to send blog and website posts automatically to my email account...I love waking up to a new xkcd comic, or something new from Raptitude). That way, instead of 10-30 unread emails immediately jumping out at me from my poor overworked inbox, they are all sorted for me and I know automatically which unread emails deserve my attention first.

My desk and workspace at home.

Emotional Support

I use the following to support my emotional wellbeing through all this productivity and organization:

• I make sure to upkeep a decluttered visual atmosphere so I can work without being distracted, and to model success for my conceptual projects. This one is recursive: I upkeep this via projects and actions that I schedule on Wunderlist and my Passion Planner, in order to be able to do other projects and actions. 
• Keep a success board: when I finish a project, it's easy to forget about it soon after because I focus on the difficulties at hand presented by a new or unfinished project. Keeping a success board helps you remind yourself of your own productivity, which in turn can really help you stay productive. 
• Track the books I read via Goodreads Reading Challenge -- one of my projects is to read more, and seeing the books I've read this year helps not only along the success board principle, but also reminds me of the literary places I've been, which helps me cope when there are difficulties in the moment. 
• Taking time to think about and understand why being productive is important to me. Being productive ISN'T important to me, actually: making my dreams come true, having no ambiguity, and making sure I don't feel bad feelings are my actual motivators. Thinking about the big picture purpose helps me determine what activities and plans I can say NO to today--that's one of the guiding principles--because I can determine how today's scheduled tasks might not be relevant to my global goals after all. 
• Making sure I specifically plan activities that will rejuvenate me: if I schedule myself to read, and make myself read even if I don't feel like it, after about 5 minutes I am already feeling better about my life and my day than I was 5 minutes ago. Schedule the things that matter to you, the things you need even if you are not too happy about needing them: walks, ice cream, watching TV. The additional upside is that you can then use your handy-dandy timer to make sure you spend only as much time on those things as you choose to, BEFORE you start. 

Tips and Tricks
Schedule break time to make breaks official.
Don't neglect your need for a break and don't overestimate your ability to work hard and attentively without a break to look forward to. That was always my biggest issue: assuming I can totally chew this gigantic bite I just bit off. But as long as I schedule the breaks in advance, it's easier to concentrate because I know I will get a break soon. And when I do take that break, I take it under ideal conditions: I know I don't need to even think about the things I'm not doing, because I'm handling those separately.

Reflect on your day in the morning and at night to bookend the day with awareness.
Not being aware of my time was one of the biggest hinderances to getting things done. Using my 10am and 8pm phone alarm reminders to help me take time to reflect on my day's schedule has been huge in helping me stay aware of how I'm using my time, and therefore use it more productively.

Use highlighters (use tools that make you feel happy to use them). 
I've already mentioned that I chose the Passion Planner for my daily/weekly tracking because I love the way it feels and how using it feels wonderfully real and easier to physically do than the extra steps that digital calendars feel like they put on me. I use highlighters on the Passion Planner because it helps me quickly get a sense of how I'm spending my day, but also because I like the colors and the sense of childish irreverence and fun that I get from them. Use what makes you happy.

My beautiful(ly organized) windowsill display makes me happy to look at it. #Ti+Fe!

Let yourself do recurring, but passive, visual reviews of your projects, activities, and physical environment.
If you're like me, clutter and ambiguity irritate and upset you. Letting yourself just look around will help by giving yourself permission to just be aware of the clutter and ambiguity around you. You can come back to it when you are ready, but staying aware is the most important step to that.

Reunderstand 'stuff'
Everything you own, physical and digital alike, including conceptual projects (and I'm taking about owning a project like 'reorganize kitchen') fall into one of three categories. Each of these categories needs to be strongly differentiated away from the other two. Don't even keep them in the same location.

• [Projects]: the item or news article or what-have-you has actions you need to take on it. E.g., there's 5 books you want to read (next to the 4 books you just own). Put those 5 books in a different place and ask yourself what the next action would be that would get you on the path to reading those books. Or, decide you will not read them and they are JUST things you own. Or, schedule when you will begin to read them. Just don't defer these decisions. 
• [Upkeep]: things that have identical, recurring actions on them. E.g., dirty dishes need to be washed, plants need to be watered, etc. Concretize every single action that all of your upkeep things need, then use a reminder app like Wunderlist to send you weekly or daily reminders, so you don't have to think about whether your plants are getting enough water. David Allen, he of the Getting Things Done program, suggests that whenever there's something you should be doing that you're not doing, part of your brain is thinking about it all the time; it keeps an open tab, and that will ruin your equilibrium and ability to focus properly. Take the pressure off. Write it down and schedule it so you don't ever have to think about recurring actions. 
• [Stuff you own]: just stuff you own; if you only stored it for the rest of its life, that would be good enough. Let everything in this category be firmly in this category and not also in a 'maybe one day' project category. Harsh differentiation really helps with knowing exactly how much work you have, which lets you take control of it and eliminate ambiguity. 

Have a 'home' for everything
Everything you own deserves a home, including you. Including tiny objects and big objects, every piece of clothing, every book, every medication bottle, every cup and pan and even things like cookies in boxes and milk and water bottles--these should all have a dedicated location where they belong. And even things like projects and books you're reading and books you're not reading. Everything should have a 'home', and when it is taken out of its 'home', it should eventually return there. That will take care of 50% of your clutter. (The other 50% you'll throw out. I believe in you.)

Schedule with other people to stay motivated
With Se in our suggestive function, we are often externally motivated by things or people pushing on us to act. Use this to your advantage by making your schedule transparent to people close to you, or enlist others' help in doing things with you (like remote house-cleaning sessions where you and your buddy both check in with each other at the start and the finish!). Check out Gretchen Ruben's 4 Tendencies in regards to how people deal with rules and requirements; her quiz on those 4 Tendencies is here.

Things That Haven't Worked For Me

• Physical monthly calendar. I can't squeeze the things I need to see every day into those tiny boxes. And something that's edited more rarely than 2x a day needs to be digital for me. 
• Planning days in advance: really a terrible, misguided idea on my part, and I tried this for *years*. Don't plan your day in advance, plan your day the day you are living it. Set weekly goals and check in with those goals every morning when you plan your day. Don't set yourself up for breaking your agreements with yourself, and you do that every time you make plans you don't follow through on. 
• Working off to-do lists. Just don't bother trying, it's another thing that people do for years without it working for them. Your to-do list should be short and concrete, and include things like 'schedule grocery shopping for Monday' or 'buy dog food', but even those things should have deadlines attached to them. Don't let yourself grow a to-do list that is divorced from the flow of real time. As soon as a to-do pops up, ask yourself where it fits on your local timeline--is it a today item, tomorrow item, or 3 months from now item? Then schedule it on your calendar or put it into an appropriate list via Wunderlist. 
• Mind-dumps. This is a cool concept that I wish worked for me. Basically you give yourself 5 minutes and you write down literally everything that you can think of that you are tracking in your head, or have to do, or isn't done yet, or isn't scheduled...you get the idea. Then you review the list and those things that you commit to, you put them into the appropriate groups or schedule them or decide on the next actions. This hasn't worked for me because I don't remember to do it, but the reason to do it is because you are overwhelmed by things you are not sure you are getting done or not, and since I've been so good at writing things down (guiding principle!) I don't actually get to the point where I could really benefit from a mind-dump. 
• Trying to motivate myself to stay on track by being upset at myself for not being on track. Just don't do this to yourself. It won't work. Self-flagellation only hurts, it doesn't help. It won't help you get on track. What will help you get on track will be by knowing what the track is, how everything fits into it, and choosing the track to meet the real goals you yourself feel are important. 

That's basically my organizational scheme in a nutshell. I do it because I want to love my life, and I want my life to not suck. And so I can spend guilt-free time with my puppies.