The Total Recall Productivity Method

Efficiency and effectiveness are becoming more and more important to succeed in today‘s challenging corporate world.

In my quest to supercharge my personal productivity, I’ve embarked on a journey filled with page-turning books, self-experimentation, and the pursuit of game-changing insights. There exist many strategies for enhancing your personal productivity, spanning from crafting daily routines, emulating the habits of high achievers, to investing in different software tools.

However, in my case, the existing solutions didn’t quite cut it, leading me to craft a customized productivity setup by blending elements from various approaches to perfectly match my needs.

In this article I want to show you my current productivity system: The Total Recall Productivity Method (TORP).

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Overview: Essential Parts of TORP

In a corporate job a productivity system has to fulfill the following needs: communication, task & time management as well as notetaking and knowledge management.

For TORP, I blended Luhmann’s “Zettelkasten” with the PARA-Method, David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and added a bit of my own twist to it.

How did I set it up?

In my job as an IT & Digitalization manager I use OneNote and for my personal projects I use Notion. For both applications I set-up the same system and I am sure the system also works for other software out there such as Obsidian, Evernote etc.

TORP in OneNote starts with a Notebook consisting of a handful of sections and section-groups.

_{Overview of all pages for TORP in OneNote}

• Inbox: This is where all notes written throughout the day go initially (before they are processed).
• Tasklist: This is where to-do lists live.
• 2022, 2023, …: This is where notes are stored permanently once they are processed. It has subsections: 1 section per month.
• PARA: This is the knowledge management system - you can also call it “second brain”.

The core of TORP: PARA Onepager

In a corporate setting the amount of different tasks you have to deal with on a daily basis can quickly become overwhelming. Switching from one topic to another, the human brain cannot keep up and has to drop important information from the working memory.

The human brain is very good at having ideas, but terrible at keeping them.

This can easily result in important information slipping your mind. I, for one, experienced this firsthand. This is why, in my humble opinion, a knowledge management system must be the core of a good productity system - TORP does that. The core of TORP in OneNote is a section called “PARA Onepager”. It is one page with a bunch of links to all your Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives relevant to you.

Why is it a Onepager?

It is the most summarized form of all information stored within the system and it enables you to eyeball it very quickly.

When initiating your PARA Onepager, simply input the projects and areas that are currently on your plate or immediately come to mind. You can always make modifications later. Additional categories will naturally emerge when you can’t locate a suitable one while processing a note.

PARA Onepager

In the “Projects” section, you’ll find a bulleted list of all your ongoing projects, just like in the “Areas” section. You can also include additional meta-information on the Onepager. Nonetheless, maintaining tidiness and avoiding excessively long lists is crucial, ensuring that you present the full picture at a single glance.

Getting a more detailed picture of one of the topics is just one click away.

When you click on a project link, it will take you to another one-page summary dedicated to that specific project. To enhance the page’s organization, it is subdivided into sections. The number of entries on this page can vary significantly. Smaller projects or categories may contain just a handful of links, while larger projects could span multiple pages brimming with links.

Another notable aspect of the project page is the ability to incorporate additional meta-information that might not be directly linked within a note or emerge from the content of multiple notes together.

Project Onepager

A note itself should be atomic and it is also handy to follow a certain naming convention as e.g. starting with the date and following it up with a short and descriptive title.

Note example

That’s basically the knowledge-management part of TRP: Atomic notes > summary pages > PARA Onepager.

Inbox & permanent storage of notes

Your Inbox is where you kickstart the note-taking process. The type of notes you generate depends on your personal notetaking style. In my case, I craft a fresh note for every meeting I attend and for significant decisions I make and communicate. Additionally, I incorporate concise summaries of phone calls and one-on-one meetings.

So the inbox will fill up rather quickly.

To maintain note organization and prevent overwhelming yourself, it’s crucial to allocate time for processing your notes. I set aside two to three brief sessions daily for this task, with each session lasting around 5 minutes, allowing me to efficiently process multiple notes.

In OneNote it is a 5-step process:

1. Right-Mouse-Click onto the title of the note and click “Copy Link to Paragraph”.
2. Go to the PARA Onepager and check all entries where the note might be relevant. This might be difficult initially, but trust me, you will soon learn your categories and be very quick.
3. Go to every relevant link (most of the time these are 1 or 2).
4. Add a link to the note at the relevant page.
5. Go back to your inbox and move the note to the permanent storage.

Copy link to note

Paste link to note

Add note to storage

Once you gain some experience, you’ll find yourself capable of handling 15 notes in just 5 minutes. This makes the task of keeping TORP well-organized and emptying your inbox a breeze.

In my workplace, email is a primary mode of communication, and this holds true for many corporations (as far as I know). To seamlessly integrate emails into TORP, I leverage the “Send to OneNote” function in MS Outlook. This feature generates a new page containing the email text and any attached documents in your OneNote notebook. To manage these email notes, simply follow the same process as you would for all other notes. But don’t do this for all your email - just do it for the most important ones.

By integrating your emails within TORP, you keep the system even more complete and are one step closer to achieving “stress-free-productivity”.

Tasklists

To-do lists are a common part of every productivity system and there exists a ton of dedicated and integrated solution.

I tried out many of them, but most of the time I found my to-dos scattered across different applications, leading to some effort reviewing them regularly and keeping them up-to-date. This initial barrier requires you to invest at least some energy to get started. On a stressful day, this can mean that you don’t make good use of your time (e.g. the 15 minutes between meetings) and procrastinate instead of crossing off things from your to-do lists - productivity suffers.

To me, this changed once I read “Getting Things Done” (GTD). I discovered a method to integrate all my to-do lists in one place - exactly where all my notes are.

In GTD task-management is divided into three categories:

• Next action list: This is a to-do list designed with each entry structured as a clear, actionable task, eliminating the need to recall the original intention when jotting down the item.
• Waiting for list: All things you delegated or responses you are waiting for are stored in this list. It should contain the three columns: (i) the delegated task, (ii) the person delegated to and (iii) a date.
• Someday maybe list: All to-dos that are important, but do not need your immediate (next few weeks) attention are put into this list.

By curating your to-dos into this three different list types you get a good overview. It even comes in handy if you create different “next action” lists - each one dedicated to a specific type of task (e.g. administrative, creative, quick wins, …). To integrate these to-dos well into TORP, adding links to the tasks supercharges productivity.

This facilitates a quicker start to your tasks by eliminating the need to search for relevant reference materials or a more detailed description of the task at hand.

The human mind tends to be averse to extensive upfront effort, and a task can appear more intimidating when a lot of preparation is required. Conversely, when all the necessary resources are just a click away, the initial barrier is greatly reduced, and you require less energy getting started.

How did I implement this task management setup in OneNote?

I created a section called „tasklist“. Within this section, I created dedicated pages for each to-do list: in particular 5 different “next action” lists. Due to the categorization of the next actions it is easier to pick up to-dos that suit my current energy level and time constraints. If I have little time to get things done, I can jump to the “quick wins” and use the e.g. 7 minutes, before a meeting starts, productively.

Next action list (Quick Wins)

The “waiting for” list is organized much like a “next action” list, but it includes an additional column for tracking the individuals to whom tasks have been delegated or from whom you are awaiting a response.

To store completed tasks, I’ve implemented a “done” page. This helps maintain clean and uncluttered to-do lists while ensuring that older to-dos remain accessible if needed in the future. There may be instances where a task is no longer necessary to complete, and in TORP, we differentiate this by using an “x” to mark a task as done and an “o” to mark a task as closed (though not necessarily completed).

Done list

If you have tasks that have lingered on your “next action” lists for an extended period or new tasks with lower priority, consider moving them to the “someday maybe list.” This also applies to delegated tasks for which you no longer wish to push for immediate action but are still awaiting results.

In short: the “someday maybe“ list is for to-dos you do not want to close, but shouldn’t clutter your main to-do lists.

Someday maybe list

Conclusion

Let’s do a brief recap: If you want to set-up TORP yourself, all you need to do is:

• Select a notetaking application (the method works for most of them, so choose whatever tool you like most).
• Set-up your TORP structure with the PARA Onepager at its heart
• Create tasklists: ”next action” , “waiting for” and “someday maybe”

To me, TORP supports my daily workflow where I need it to. It took me a while to find and combine the solutions which bring the most value and for now I am happy with it. However, I am still curious on what tools and methods I will stumble across in the future - they might find their way into TORP as well!

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If you are interested in personal productivity, management & leadership or the TORP method in particular, stay tuned!

If you want to dive straight into TORP, you can use my OneNote template.

Thank you for reading and have a good one!