I never cared about efficiency before, because every self-help article I read about it didn't work for me. The way I work is to go with the flow and do what I'm passionate about at the moment. (That results in some disasters but also unexpected discoveries.) That open-attitude destroys any type of schedule management I came across.
My thinking changed: I shouldn't look for other people's answers to "How to become productive?" All of them created their methods because the methods existing before weren't suitable for them in the first place.
"What I should do is to improve my own schedule-less lifestyle?" I started with that. The goal is to produce more content/engagement/learning with the least amount of work/time. I need to change something without feeling that anything changed.
I started looking at it like this: Most of the time management services strive to improve Order. Instead, I should look for ways to make the most of the Chaos. That's how I started thinking after watching a bunch of videos about productivity the other day.
I started using Trello to organize stuff. My own way of mind-mapping: Every one of my small projects will have a tab dedicated to it. Once I stumble on related information, I add it there!
That way I know I'm doing something even when I'm reading a random article or watching a video online. Quote stuff, put them in Trello. I could write snippets for my Reviews as I am playing the games.
A Screenshot Using Trello
I could do it with Note-taking software. I used to do that but I needed a cross-platform one. It needs to offline and sync as soon as I connect to the internet, EverNote has the best features but the free version doesn't support offline note-taking.
I started using ToDoist, not as a time scheduler but as a reminder. It helps that it has integration with Trello. I found that the links in the task's text are very useful and time-saving!
If you're like me, dismissed the productivity tools because a lot of them don't work for you. I advise you to think of a way to use them that works for you! Or maybe you haven't stumbled upon the best one for you yet.
I'll continue researching ways that work for me. If you have any ideas or productivity tools you're using right now, put them in the comments. *Don't have any? You could invest 5-minutes of your time to look up something and tell us what you learned below~
