ENTP Productivity
I have a few descriptors that have been useful over the years to describe my neurotype and approaches to life.
Whether we call it ENTP, Hyperlinker or Plant, I have worked a lot on how best to structure my days and work to go with the grain of the underlying neurotype at play here (rather than constantly fight it).
Problems we encounter
The main problem is being good at understanding things quickly and starting things -- including finding new ways to come at things -- seems to be anathema to being able to finish and follow through.
Possible causes
In How to be Organized as ENTP it is hypothesised the issue is a natural outcome of that strength to see new ideas and possibilites. That is, it is hard to stop seeing them even when trying to following through on an existing plan.
This attention problem arguably puts these traits on the spectrum for ADHD. Whether ADHD is actually diagnosable or not, the methods for coping with it have a strange habit of being applicable for those identifying with decriptors like ENTP or Hyperlinker.
The article above goes on to present a tension between being good at coming up with systems, but then a spiral emerges where intution keeps trying to pull you away from a prescribed plan.
Solutions to try
Again, from How to be Organized as ENTP, the solutions suggested are generally to keep things minimalist and simple.
Daily Tasks
Use Bullet Journalling. Or at least some way to distill down a summary 2-10 things that need done today and defer the rest.
I have gone back and forth on that approach and the biggest benefit I found was the chore of having to re-write a carried-over tasks would eventually frustrate me to the point of doing the task right now or perhaps just dropping it as it's clearly not valuable to me.
People
There can be a lot of risk of being too busy to keep in touch with people. Also, we can end up with large lists of acquaintances without keeping in touch with actual friends.
The minimalist consideration here is to focus on a small list of people that make you happy.
Projects
I have found that projects are hard to manage in a Bullet Journal system. The "Getting Things Done" approach just has a big list of projects and -- at least for me -- this can be quite a large list.
One solution here is to manage it more like a software product backlog, notably:
- Be clear on what is not being worked on right now
- A clear project will have an end in mind
- A minimalist approach is to define an MVP for each project
- Therefore when you add tasks to a project, you can drop or at least park activities that don't directly feed into that MVP
Things
I have found I can have a clearer focus in more minimalist surroundings like hotel rooms. I have read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying which inspired me to declutter quite a lot of things.
Browsers tabs and bookmarks
I keep a lot of browser tabs open for things I plan to "come back to". One thing that helped me here is the Todoist browser extension where I can quick-add any web page to my Inbox or any project and then I can close the tab.
Another technique is writing this right now. Any links I want to keep for "reference" are now instead transferred into my Digital Garden as either a short note or a longer article as I grow my own thoughts around it and connect it to related articles.
Writing this allowed me to close the tab for How To be Organized as ENTP at the very least.
References
Articles that have fed into this: