DTB: My Own Spin On Personal Productivity Systems

Start of Productivity Obssession

I was always a competitive person ever since I was very young, and I also always tend to get overtly nerdy about things, stuff that led to a heightened interest in productivity systems and efficient management of workloads and whatnot. I was always able to perform well in school whilst also playing a ton of video games and having fun with friends outside. Although through efficient time management, this interest of mine became an obsession, especially in my high school years. I started watching self-help and productivity YouTubers A LOT; names like Thomas Frank, Matt D'Avella, and John Fish are forever carved into my brain.

Personal Struggle

Additionally, although not professionally diagnosed, I do have a strong belief that I have ADHD. All the people who know me closely will confirm this. Combine that with my extreme dedication to my goals and aspirations, and you get a person who's extremely obsessed with achieving their goals in the easiest manner possible.

Creating My Own Path

I've tried many productivity systems, and a lot of them worked well enough for a long time. But after collecting a huge amount of knowledge and different points of view and spins on these systems, I decided to make my own. Initially, I used a simple system where you write tasks and check them off when they're finished, but in many ways, that was just not enough for me. I needed something more indicative of my progress and more detailed. So, I started writing tasks and giving them a percentile to represent the progress on the task, making it more rewarding to complete small chunks each day. If you're a productivity-centered person, nothing sucks more than working a full day only to not check off ANY tasks.

Efficiency First

This served me well, but there were a lot of improvements to be made. Later on, I started merging all these percentiles into a total that gave me a good idea of how well I was doing in that specific period of time. In school, we were always racing against the clock, and there was so much to keep track of that this system eased off a lot of the mental stress of planning and keeping track of what I should do, especially knowing I was studying the hardest high school branch of science in my country.

But again, another improvement would come along. If you think about it, not all tasks have the same priority and not all of them demand the same amount of work. So, inspired by how school grades are calculated, I also started giving tasks a coefficient that decides how much the tasks would contribute to the total progress of the cycle.

Digital Transition

With all this being drawn on a board, I had a system that worked perfectly for the two hardest years of my life. But then, my life started becoming more and more digital, and my interest in programming grew even further. I thought about developing the system as an app that not only I, but even more people can benefit from. Throughout my use of this custom-crafted system, a lot of my friends showed interest in it, mainly because of how passionately I talked about it a lot of the time :p. One person who used it regularly alongside me was my best friend; we always shared our progress to motivate each other.

Like so, the development would start. At first, the app would be packaged as a desktop GUI written in Python Tkinter. The project is not worth even talking about. But to take it to the next level, I needed something flexible in both the look and practicality. A website fulfilled that need perfectly. In order to make my app a reality, I had to learn how to make a website. With a full-fledged idea ready, all I had to spend my energy and time doing was learning the frameworks I decided on using. But the end app would suffer greatly in terms of quality and UX, it was my first web app.

Striving for Perfection

In the last stride of trying to make a maintainable, future-proof app that I could keep iterating on and improving to make my own perfect system, I rewrote the whole app using better technology and with a greatly enhanced set programming skills.

You can find and start using the app at https://dtboard.tech.