The three productivity loops we all share
Productivity at work isn't constant - it’s the combined output of a few crucial moments, each of which can determine whether your day stays on track. These are:
Framing: Pulling together and prioritizing all your tasks for the day.
Activating: Jump-starting yourself to get the energy you need to get moving (coffee?).
Triaging: Ongoing re-prioritization as new tasks come in through the day.
Framing, Activating and Triaging are behavioral transitions, and they carry disproportionate weight in our day. Fail at one and your day becomes noisy, reactive, or paralyzed. Get them right, and even a chaotic workload becomes navigable.
Most productivity tools ignore these moments or treat them as incidental. At Toodo we believe they should be the primary design surface. Below is a bit more detail on each, along with some tips on how to maximize your productivity at each step.
1. Framing: How we collect our tasks for the day
Before you can do meaningful work, you need to figure out what the work is.
This means collecting all your open items - the thoughts you woke up with, tasks buried in your inbox, follow-ups from yesterday’s meetings, sticky notes, unread messages. It's a messy constellation of inputs—and unless you convert it into a prioritized plan, you're operating reactively.
What happens here:
Mental unload from memory and notes
Scanning inboxes, tools, calendars, Slack channels
Building a working plan (even if it's loose or incomplete)
Example: Sasha is a Sales Associate at Salesforce. At 8am she opens her laptop and starts her “sweep.” She checks flagged emails, unread DMs, and yesterday’s notes. She pulls all action items into one place and rough-sorts them: high-priority deliverables at the top, everything else below the line. She identifies three “must-move” tasks and two dependencies she needs to unblock. By 9am, she’s clear on what matters today—and what can wait.
Why this moment matters: Without this step, you're outsourcing your agenda to the most recent notification. Framing creates intentionality and focus.
Fun Sasha fact: Sasha is so efficient at drafting her to-do list that she writes it with both hands at once :-)
2. Activating: Plucking up the courage to start the day
The hardest part of work isn’t working - it’s getting started.
Even after you’ve framed the day, there’s a psychological barrier to doing the first real thing. Most people instinctively reach for ritual (ie your fist cup of coffee) and then easy, high-velocity tasks. And there’s nothing wrong with that - items you can knock out quickly help generate forward motion, and give our brains a dopamine kick that makes us feel positive about what we’re doing.
What happens here:
Seeking low-friction wins to build momentum.
Avoiding emotionally heavy or cognitively demanding work.
Reassuring yourself that progress is possible today.
Example: Jared starts his day with two simple tasks: logging expenses from a team offsite and approving a vendor invoice. Then he sends a quick Slack reminder about a deadline. None of it is high impact - but now he’s in motion. By 10am, he’s transitioned into drafting a proposal that he’s been avoiding for a week. It still takes effort, but the warm-up makes it feel less like a wall and more like a ramp.
Why this moment matters: Most systems assume that people just “get to it.” In reality, getting started is its own phase - one that needs to be designed for and supported. At Toodo, our algorithm quickly learns the types of tasks you prefer getting started with, to help ease you into every day.
Fun Jared Fact: Jared’s laptop is the size of a regular desktop computer. This lets him get in some mild strength training while he’s walking between meetings.
3. Triaging: Staying focused on the right stuff in a noisy environment
Even the best-laid plans don’t survive contact with the average workday.
New tasks emerge constantly - in meetings, DMs, inboxes, drive-by conversations. The challenge isn’t just capturing them, but integrating them into your current priorities without derailing your day. Knowing what to sacrifice and compromise is the essential value a knowledge worker provides, and a dynamic, multidimensional calculation we are all performing constantly in our brains.
What happens here:
Real-time capture of new tasks or commitments
On-the-fly prioritization, whether or not we’re conscious of it: “Do now, later, or delegate?”
Continuous recalibration against your original focus for the day.
Example: Anna spends the first half of her day focused on a product roadmap draft. Then a leadership sync throws a wrench into her plans: a bug affecting a key client needs investigation today. She captures that task on the spot, pauses to reprioritize, and moves one of her roadmap items to tomorrow, with the slightest of sighs.
Why this moment matters: Triaging well means you can be flexible to emerging and real business needs, without losing control of your focus or getting mentally fried.
Fun Anna fact: We think the Anna in this image might actually be Lucille Bluth.