Productivity workflow 2026

One of my resolutions for 2026 is to implement a productivity system that can help me stay on track with my goals. I have been tinkering with what that productivity system will entail for a few months, and I finally feel what I am doing is working well enough for me to write about it.

I am currently using Emacs and Org-mode for everything. Obsidian is a great choice as well since it has much better mobile support. Regardless of the application, I still feel the following areas are a necessity for my productivity:

Todo management

The entry point to my whole system: I have a single todo.org file where quick captures get sent. Basic things like * TODO Write blog are put in there and marked when done.

Time management

I have seen people tracking every minute of their day, which I find too invasive. I only want to track time on things that I care about being “productive” on. Org-mode provides clocking commands to facilitate this and generate nice printouts of where I have been spending my time each day/week/month. I simply clock in when I want to work on a particular subject and clock out when I am done. At the end of each week I do a review of my progress and see what I can improve for the next week. Here is an example of a table that I can generate:

Habit management

I believe habits are the most effective way of building lasting behavior. There are many books that delve into greater detail than I will here. Org-mode once again pulls through with the habits module, where I can declare a recurring habit that will appear wonderfully in my agenda view.

Example:

TODO Morning routine
SCHEDULED: <2026-03-08 Sun .+1d>
:PROPERTIES:
:STYLE:    habit
:LAST_REPEAT: [2026-03-07 Sat 09:52]
:END:

Event managment

The final type of tasks I distinguish are events. Much like habits, these are recurring, but generally attached to some sort of external cue. Some examples of events are holidays, anniversaries, or birthdays. I further break these down into events that involve specific people, and events that don’t.

Reading/reference managment

This is still a bit of an underdeveloped area for me as setting this all up using Emacs is quite a bit more complicated than using Obsidian. A proper reading system contains the following pieces:

• Good source of new inputs (RSS feed, book recommendations, tailored feeds, etc.) It is important to constantly be exploring new ideas and information. If you dwell in the same area for too long, thoughts will get stagnant and you will be limiting your brain’s ability to process new information and make connections you previously were unable to.
• Capturing from these inputs This can be set up with a web clipper, ideally it automatically creates a new note with a link to the source material. After that I take notes as I normally would.
• Finally comes the processing of these reference notes into more bite-sized pieces. I take what I was writing about when consuming the reference, and strip the context, making a note that stands on its own.

If you are curious to learn more about this process, it is essentially what the Zettelkasten system is.

Conclusion

A productivity system is whatever works for an individual. If you like any of my ideas here, feel free to steal them and incorporate them into your own system. I will continue to refine what I talked about here over the coming months and maybe another blog will get written. Until then, I will continue to improve myself and my writing. Thanks for reading!