It focuses on single-tasking rather than multi-tasking and doing the most important task of the day first. It also uses The Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique is working on a task for 25 minutes without distraction or procrastination and then taking a 5 minute break.
Like any productivity journal the Productivity Planner has Pros and Cons. Here they are:
Pros
Cons
Its design is smart and business-like.
It’s compact and light to carry.
It’s dateless, meaning you can start using it at any time.
It prioritises tasks into: Most Important, Secondary and Additional.
It has Weekly Planning/Review sections.
It has a place for Notes on each day and a full Weekly Notes page.
Every daily page has an Inspirational Quote and a Productivity Score (1-10).
It has circles next to tasks to measure time. You set a Target and then record the Actual, helping you to allocate a more realistic amount of time for tasks.
It has a bookmark ribbon and an elasticated closure.
It is really designed for business use. It only has a 5 day week.
There’s no Done boxes to tick tasks off on the daily pages.
The planner only has 6 months worth of pages in it. Meaning you would need to buy two for 1 year.
It is expensive for a journal, being priced at £20+.
There’s no short term, medium term or long term goal setting pages.
There’s no monthly or yearly view pages.
It is black and white throughout.
There isn’t anywhere to record rewards for completing tasks. I find rewards really motivating.
There’s no way to organise tasks into groups, e.g. Personal, Business, Health, Family/Friends, etc.
This is the sixth and final in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post gives fascinating facts on a particular topic. In part 1 the topic was science. In part 2 the topic was history. In part 3 the topic was geography. In part 4 the topics were art & music. In part 5 the topic was animals.
Today, I give you ten facts about Technology:
1. The first mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper in 1973.
2. The first iPhone was released in the UK in 2007. Today there are more than 682m iPhones in the world.
3. Alan Turing is most well-known for being an excellent code-breaker in World War 2. He happened to be gay and was castrated by the UK state for his sexuality. But he also proposed founding theories about how to make computers work and computer science.
4. The World Wide Web (WWW) was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Today £1.7trillion is spent online in a year, 3m emails are sent every second (mostly SPAM) and there is countless amounts of data on the internet.
5. The X-ray was invented by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895. The idea for the CT (Computed Tomography) scanner was first imagined by Godfrey Hounsfield in 1969. Hounsfield presented his idea to Dr. James Ambrose and they worked together to make his idea a reality. The MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner was developed by a number of people. The X-ray, CT scanner and MRI scanner have all revolutionised medicine, by allowing doctors insight to what it going on in a patient’s body, without the need for invasive surgery.
7. Someone using a computer will blink 7 times a minute, rather than the normal 20 times a minute. This is because they are concentrating more on the screen.
8. Technology of Sci-Fi TV shows and films is now becoming a reality. For example, in Star Trek computers respond to verbal commands and its responses were relatively intelligent. Today we have Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Contina (Windows) and Android Voice Commands (Google/Android).
9. The operating system Linux is huge across servers, computers, tablets and smartphones. The chances are you use it without even realising. Linux is on every Android device, along with being on most serves (computers that host websites) in the world. Facebook, Google and Pinterest all run on Linux servers.
10. The people at Wired.com were the first to come up with banner advertisements, which are now used on most commercial websites.
This is the fifth in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post will gives fascinating facts on a particular topic. In part 1 the topic was science. In part 2 the topic was history. In part 3 the topic was geography. In part 4 the topics were art & music.
Today, I give you ten facts about Animals:
1. Cats domesticated themselves around 10,000 years ago. Dogs are thought to be the first animal domesticated by humans also around 10,000 years ago.
2. Elephants have the longest gestation period among mammals lasting nearly 2 years. However the spiny dogfish shark gestation period tops the elephant at 3.5 years, as does the black alpine salamander with a gestation period of 2-3 years.
3. Animals with the shortest gestation period include: koala (34-36 days), squirrel (about 40 days) and a number of animals that have a 60-62 day gestation period.
4. The largest bat colony is believed to have 20m bats and is in Bracken Cave, Texas, USA.
5. Bees taste with their feet.
6. Octopi each have 9 brains, 3 hearts, blue blood and are about 90% muscle.
7. Dolphins can sleep half a brain at a time, meaning they can be active for 15 or more days.
8. Seahorse males carry fertilised eggs and give birth to hundreds of baby seahorses per time.
9. Ants never sleep and don’t have lungs. There are 1 million ants for every 1 human in the world.
10. Flamingos can only eat when their head is upside down.
This is the fourth in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post will gives fascinating facts on a particular topic. In part 1 the topic was science. In part 2 the topic was history. In part 3 the topic was geography.
Today, I give you ten facts about Music & Art:
1. Vincent van Gogh produced his masterpiece Starry Night while admitted in a mental hospital.
2. Leonardo da Vinci completed the world’s most famous painting Mona Lisa from 1503 or 1504 to 1519. It is thought that Leonardo da Vinci could have been gay. He was 24 years old when he, along with several other men, were charged with sodomy. But the charges were dropped when no witnesses came forward.
3. Michelangelo is most famous for The Sistine Chapel ceiling, which it took him around 4 years to complete. But he was also a wordsmith. He created several hundred sonnets and madrigals in his lifetime.
4. Picasso was perhaps the most prolific creator of all time. During his 91 years of life he created: 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures/ceramics.
5. The top three best selling singles of all time are White Christmas by Bing Crosby, Candle in the Wind by Sir Elton John and Silent night, holy night by Bing Crosby.
6. Mozart was a musical genius. He wrote half of his total symphonies between 8 years old and 19 years old. Mozart could listen to a piece of music once and write it down from memory without any mistakes. He died aged 36, successful in the creation of music, but without any money.
7. Beethoven performed for Mozart when he was 17 years old in Vienna. Mozart was notoriously unimpressed by other musicians, but apparently was impressed with Beethoven. No one really knows what happened at that meeting, but the myth says that Mozart left the room stating: “Keep your eyes on him—someday he’ll give the world something to talk about.”
8. Around 26 years old Beethoven began losing his hearing. He tried to keep the fact that he was loosing his hearing a secret. He was totally deaf by 44 years old. Beethoven used his memory of sound and imagination of how music could sound to continue producing music after becoming totally deaf.
9. Classical music helps plants grow faster, according to a 2007 study.
10. Art and music, along with eating and sex all increase serotonin (the happiness chemical) and dopamine (the motivation chemical) in the brain.
