Fail better

Zeno’s scheduler organises your day by making you do your longer tasks first when you have the most focus. Get the longer deep work tasks done at the start of the day and work on shorter tasks towards the end as your attention span lapses.

Designed for people who like to organise their day by length of task, we named this one after Zeno’s paradox. 

We created Run Agenda for people who have full-on days who need to be reminded to take a

break. Schedule your hourly appointments, then schedule what breaks you'll take in between.

Perfect for those new to work-from-home who forget to take coffee breaks without co-workers

around.

Identify three things you like doing and work out how to do them more. Then identify three things you don’t like doing and work out how to do them less. Sometimes small changes make big differences. We’ve redesigned this one into a notepad rather than a set of cards.

Score your life in ten different categories to work out why you’re feeling rubbish, and then pinpoint which area needs improvement. Maybe you need to go the gym more, go to evening classes, or just grab some beers with friends and have a massive Cards against humanity session.

You want to set yourself goals. Great. Have you checked that these goals are the best designed they could be? Use the SMARTER method to break down these goals and interrogate them to make sure you’re not setting yourself up to fail.

Goal compass is a notepad designed for people in a bit of a rut, or feeling a bit distracted and unsure what to focus on. Most of the time you won’t need it, but it’s particularly useful if you’ve just had a major setback, need to reorientate, or are feeling a bit lost.

Plan your meetings ahead of schedule to keep them on track. Note down specific questions consider possible solution in advance. Collect items from the whole team to build the meeting around the group.

Habits take time to bed in. Some people say 40 days, some people say ten weeks. Focus on the minimum effort version first. You’re more likely to lace up your trainers for a run if you only have to do 10 minutes rather than 10k. (Although if you do 10k - that’s awesome)

Hold yourself accountable to the changes you decide to make. If you decide you’re going to focus on healthy eating this week, write down what you plan to do each day to work towards that goal.

We all have memories of failure, some more epic that others. A failure is not a waste provided you learn something. You just need to get over the initial cringe in order to address it.

Don’t let your big goals overwhelm you. Focus on what the big goals are and break them down again and again until you’re left with a little goal that you can get started on right away to get the ball rolling. Worry about the rest later, the most important thing is to get started.

Get an overview of your week and plan ahead. This notepad organises your days into named parts of the day, morning, early, late, afternoon .etc. Different people divide up the day at different times so this makes it easier to jot down events that are still a bit up in the air.

The walk planner lets you schedule your time in two hour blocks, colour coded to help you work out when you have the most energy in the day. If you’re a morning person, don’t try to do much after 9pm.

Paperthink’s design is based on the idea that the space a task takes up on a page should be proportional to the importance of a task. One of the downfalls of to-do lists is that all the tasks are the same size, which encourages people to look for quick wins (crossing off the easy and simple tasks) rather than working on the most important ones.

Big projects are hard to make a start on. Keep breaking down goals until they're arranged into manageable subtasks using this dinky little notepad. Ideally all tasks you undertake should be less than an hour, but we know that some of them will need a much larger chunk of time set aside to make progress

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain

Frogs are tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long time which somehow never get around to. “I must do that tomorrow” you think. Just as you thought yesterday, and the day before that.Keep track of your frogs and how old they’re getting. 

Sprint is our approach to the Pomodoro technique. It’s designed to help you blaze through shorter tasks (usually under 30 minutes) by committing to spending a certain amount of time on them, and rewarding yourself with a pre-planned break.

Task bucket is a modified version of the Eisenhower matrix method. The issue we had with the matrix method is that you always need a second piece of paper to list all of your tasks before you start categorising them. This design allows you to make the list first. The second issue that we had with the original matrix was that you often have to decide on urgency and important simultaneously, which can make distinguishing between the two a challenge. Here the two are physically on opposite sides of the list, so you score each one separately.

Struggling to work out what to focus on next? Plot all your to do tasks on our Task matrix based on urgency and importance, then follow the instructions based on which box they ended up in.

Struggling to work out what to focus on next? Plot all your to do tasks on our Task matrix based on urgency and importance, then follow the instructions based on which box they ended up in.

Right place. Right time. Right task.

Some tasks require you to be in certain places or with certain people. These conditions can act as a roadblock as setting them up takes time and effort. 

Batch encourages you to organise tasks with similar conditions onto the same list. Collect tasks over the course of a week and then breeze through them in one go.

Write down all the things you have to do, then pick the five you are ACTUALLY going to do. The rest of the list becomes the ‘avoid at all costs’ list until you have finished the five most important things.

The key to having good ideas is to have many ideas. Want to come up with better ideas? Decide on a number of ideas to come up with and don’t discount any until you've hit your target number. Brainstorm notepad has a set number of slots that you HAVE to fill before you're allowed to pass judgement. Picking an endurance challenge? Let's see ‘ultimate camel riding’ alongside 'marathon' and 'cycling'.

You have 168 hours in the week. Just like everyone else. Work out where you spend your time over the course of a week. Be honest. If you spend three hours getting distracted on social media, at least it's on record and you're in a position to do something about it.

Don’t look at your to do list first thing in the morning. You’ll spend half an hour trying to work out what to do next and end up with decision fatigue before your coffee has cooled. Write yourself a daily priority list every night before you go to sleep so that you know what you need to do the next day.

Struggling to work out what to focus on next? Plot all your to do tasks on our Task matrix based on urgency and importance, then follow the instructions based on which box they ended up in.