Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.
Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.
Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.
So great. The ultimate paradox of human productivity. For some reason when we’ve done nothing...
Here’s Jason Fried with a good reminder: often times when we say we “don’t have time”, it’s more appropriate to think in terms of applying attention. There’s lots of time; we just choose to prioritize different things:
A few years ago I realized that if I’m too busy to take something on, I shouldn’t say “I don’t have the time”. In fact, I often do have the time. It’s not that hard to squeeze in some extra time for someone.
What I don’t have – and what I can’t squeeze in – is more attention. Attention is a far...
I have a bone to pick with recurring meetings. They’ve become a scourge that’s been amplified with fully distributed teams. What may start with clear intent as a space for a team to coordinate continuous work eventually devolves into a purely ceremonial affair. And they’ve gotten 10x worse since the pandemic turned every meeting into a remote one. This effect was visible long before COVID, but I think remoteness has magnified the negatives without adding any positives.
Since no one has to book a conference room, the bar to generating tons of ceremony...
The latest episode of Notion’s Tools & Craft podcast features the excellent Andy Matuschak, talking about his research, productivity practices, and more.
App launchers have been around a long time. Way back when it was Quicksilver, then it was Launchbar. A quick keystroke would pull up a search box, and a few letters of typing would open what you wanted.
For many years the go-to has been Alfred, which added a whole category of other automations, customized searches, and an entire workflow engine for building your own. I still use it now for certain things, but lately I’ve been kicking the tires on a new entrant in the category called Raycast.
I ran across this little Mac utility recently. My left thumb and ring finger are always tethered to the alt-tab keys, muscle memory programmed to toggle between apps routinely on my machine. I must flip through the alt-tab menu hundreds of times in a typical day to switch between apps. If you combine this behavior with having lots of apps open all the time, I’m constantly switching to the wrong things accidentally.
Charmstone is a clever alternative to alt-tabbing. It uses a combination of key press and mouse movement to pop up a programmable switcher menu from anywhere...
When I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work a few years ago, one of my favorite ideas in the book that I keep coming back to in conversations is the idea of “busyness as a proxy for productivity”. Here’s how he puts it:
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner
We’ve all worked with violators of this. People that always have fully-booked calendars, can never...
He differentiates what the “waking” mind and “background” mind are good at, which I’d interchangeably refer to as the “at the desk” mind and the “away from the computer” mind:
For years Todoist was my tool of choice for task management. When Roam came on the scene for me earlier this year, I’d seen pretty compelling methods from the #roamcult for how to manage todos inside of Roam with its TODO feature. It was an intriguing idea: such a fast and simple way to capture things without leaving the current frame.
But it took me a while to go all-in on Roam for tasks. Todoist was so embedded in my muscle memory, especially with its accessible web and cross-platform...
Earlier this month I passed the 2-year mark of writing on this site every day. If on that first day, deciding to embark on this streak, you’d told me that in October 2020 I’d still be going, 2018 me would’ve laughed it off. Doing it even for a few months sounded impossible.
What helped make it reality was converting writing into a continuous background activity, an ever-present filter for thoughts, ideas, and readings to pass through. Every time I read an article or have an idea, I filter it through the writing lens — Would this make a good article? Do...
In his piece “Why Books Don’t Work,” Andy Matuschak made a strong case that books are a poor medium for knowledge transfer. Even with the most advanced book experiences today (like digital ebook downloads to a Kindle), if you took away the digital e-ink screen, a reader from the 16th century would still recognize books as no different than what they had. We’ve added digital on-demand access, dictionary lookups, and the ability to have a library in your pocket1, but the fundamental model for conveying...
Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment:
“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged...
Lately I’ve been pouring time into Roam, finding ways to improve my long-term memory, and reading about taking notes, all in service of getting better at synthesizing new ideas.
Central to all of these is the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, a fancy-sounding German word for “note box.”
In addition to Sönke Ahrens’s excellent book on the topic, this post offers a deeper look into the mechanics of the system.
With the lockdown, the kids always at home, and no transitions between personal life and work, I’ve been thinking about how to harness the morning time for thinking more effectively.
My most productive hours are early. I usually get the most bang for my buck first thing when I get started, even if it’s just thinking and not building or writing. In a normal day, I even get a lot out of the commute time, the door-to-door 30 minutes or so between home and work — the transition space lets me clear my head before I dig in. With no...
A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.
Marty Cagan’s SVPG has a good series on team objectives covering a broad range of topics related to product team goal-setting and execution.
As we work on implementing an OKR model internally, I’ve been thinking about how to understand the literature you read out there about various companies and their successes or failures with the framework. In my reading, I like the concept of OKRs for two primary reasons:
Clarity & transparency across the entire team, with intertwined, connected goals and targets
Using them as a forcing function to think about the road ahead to, most importantly, explicitly define...
I struggle with calendars and how to manage communicating “availability”. Simply publishing your calendar or considering every unbooked space as “open” implies you’re just waiting to have a meeting. In reality those tend to be the most productive times!
Daniel Gross communicates it well in [this post](https://dcgross.com/improvising-for-productivity/ “Improvising for Productivity) on productivity:
Time isn’t the correct index for a schedule. Time doesn’t know when I’ll be in flow. White space in the calendar doesn’t mean I’ll be sitting at my desk, twiddling my thumbs, just waiting for someone to call. It usually means I’ll be working. When I mis-fire...
A great piece from the Atlantic’s George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize.
At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from our literary life sound pretty trivial. But if writers are afraid of the sound of their own voice, then honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. It doesn’t matter if you hold impeccable views, or which side of...
We all have a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. You have one. I have one. And this story is what we use to judge our successes and our failures. But it’s not the only story that could have been written, it’s just the one that was written. If your story has more blessings than hardships, consider lending a hand to someone who wasn’t as fortunate. The power of having a positive delta is being able to uplift those currently experiencing a negative delta.
This is from 2007, but is still a very astute observation in how politicians and activists use rhetoric to signal rather than recommend a real, actionable way forward on issues:
The substance of a democracy is the specific mechanism that resolves policy conflicts. If all groups had the same preferred policies, there would be no need for democracy—we would automatically cooperate. The resolution process can be a direct majority vote, or an elected legislature, or even a voter-sensitive behavior of an artificial intelligence, but it has to be something. What does it...
In this essay, Kevin Kwok attempts to differentiate between productivity and collaboration, with a focus on how Slack has failed as yet to become the nervous system that combines these things.
This take is one of the better summaries of where Slack sits in the stack of business productivity tools:
A new generation of functional apps have risen, with messaging and collaboration built directly into them as first parties. And with them it becomes increasingly clear that Slack isn’t air traffic control for every app, it’s 911 for when they fail.
Andy Grove is widely respected as an authority figure on business management. Best known for his work at Intel during the 1980s, his book High Output Management is regularly cited as one of the best in the genre of business books. After having it on my list for years and finally reading it earlier this year, I’d wholeheartedly agree. It’s the best book out there about business planning, management, and efficiency, still just as pertinent today as it was when it was first published in 1983.
Its relevance more than 30 years later attests to the...
As I’ve written before on this topic, separating goal-setting from habit-forming is important to do if you want to have success at either. Often people set goals without defining the daily behaviors that will enable them to achieve said goals.
I felt the goals I set this year were firmly in the SMART category, but it’s required diligence not to fall off the wagon of the daily habits. I set some big numbers down (importantly, only in a few areas), so I needed to break down those into daily and weekly patterns to pace...
Like many working in product, I’ve been a follower-slash-admirer of how Basecamp works for years.
This model of working in 6-week “cycles” sounds like an attractive option for organizing a team, without falling into the onion-slicing trap of what agile can become — where more time is spent microscoring, tracking, and measuring velocities than on defining what needs to get done and why.
Once a six week cycle is over, we take one or two weeks off of scheduled projects so everyone can roam independently, fix stuff up, pick up some pet projects we’ve wanted to do, and generally...
Basecamp’s Ryan Singer articulates well the struggles with adopting and truly getting value out of an agile workflow. The core problem most teams face isn’t that they’re bad at estimating time to completion, it’s that they don’t even know what exactly they’re trying to complete. Knowing the broad outline of the objective — like “refactor user management interface” or “build dashboarding system” — is one thing, and the team could all largely agree on the target. But it’s another thing entirely to break down each step along the way into a discrete element with...
I’ve written here before about my enjoyment of working on the iPad Pro. Even with the excitement around Apple’s launch of the new Mac Pro this week, my favorite announcement was their “specialization” of iOS in the new iPadOS.
Running down the best features:
Denser screen real estate — Anyone that uses an iPad for work lots of different apps is familiar with this gripe. The giant screen with a sparse scattering of tiny icons looks sort of ridiculous. That plus the addition of the anchorable Today Widget view on the left will both...
This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam’s Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reading material here to study different modes of thinking. Like writer Shane Parrish puts it, this latticework helps you “think better”:
The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see...
Once a year around this time I like to do some “winter cleaning” of my personal security footprint, mostly covering passwords and internet service accounts I have that may be out-of-date, unmaintained, or unneeded.
1Password is a dream for things like this. If you don’t maintain an account, it’s well worth setting one up for the family with their 1Password for Families product tier. Worth every penny1.
Good hygiene with passwords has been a perennial problem in internet-land, and the security risk only goes up with seemingly-daily announcements of the next...
From Zen Habits comes a nice a summary of common hangups to productivity, and a list of quick reminders to help overcome.
Two of them stand out as common for me.
On starting:
Procrastination is one of the most common obstacles to Getting Stuff Done… so if we get good at starting, we’ll have conquered a huge obstacle. Starting is best done by focusing on the smallest first step, and practicing just launching into that. When I wanted to form the habit of running, I focused on just getting my shoes on and getting out the door. An art...
For all of the todo list apps out there, I’ve only seriously tried a couple of them. After using OmniFocus since its first version, I switched over to Todoist a couple years ago. There are many I haven’t even tried, but I’ve always tried to stay focused on doing the tasks rather than fiddling with my system. It’s especially ironic with productivity apps to be constantly messing with the workflow in search of some kind of optimization. As Tom eloquently put it a few years ago: “todo lists don’t make...
Most reading on my iPad happens in Reeder, Instapaper, or a browser. I wanted to come up with a way to save URLs in a text file for easy access for new link posts and archive purposes. This seems like a great candidate use case for trying out Workflow again which Apple has renamed Shortcuts.
I use Ulysses for most note-taking and writing purposes on the iPad. It syncs with iCloud between desktop and mobile, has good organization support, and is a good Markdown editor. it also is integrated with Shortcuts.
I write a ton on the computer, whether it’s for our product blog, internal documents, product help guides, this blog (rarely), or many other things, I tend to stick to the same set of tools for different pieces of my writing workflow.
Everything I write, even things like meeting notes only for myself, I write in Markdown. It’s essentially muscle memory at this point. I write for Jekyll-based websites quite a bit, I write issues and wiki pages on GitHub, I keep my personal journal in Day One, and several other places. All of them...
CGP Grey has a good post on dialing down the volume of self-invited Internet noise for a month. On letting in too many little inputs over time:
Arguments about the quality of news aside, he came to realize the ‘overwhelmed’ problem wasn’t about the number of things to do, but was about the number of things he let into his brain. The news is a rather effective vehicle for delivering a large number of small things: each story a single guest arriving to a party.
Individually the guests don’t make a lot of noise, but adding one by one...
I’ve talked before about the concept of “ubiquitous capture” and how achieving a system where you never lose an item is an ideal for a seamless GTD setup. No matter what task management tool you use of the hundreds of options, both automatic or analog, there are still moments when a fleeting piece of info we want to remember — either something new to do or an idea or breakthrough on an existing project task — slips through the cracks. The best system for managing all of your collective “stuff” is any that you trust to be the go-to...
Nathan Lucy diagrammed Sven Fechner’s great guide on rethinking GTD contexts: remapping items on a to-do list with a framework of time vs. energy instead of physical limitations. There are few hard borders anymore between physical contexts. Most of my tasks I can do anywhere.
I know this has helped me make better use of OmniFocus contexts, a feature I’ve essentially never used because of this problem. There’s also a video of Sven’s talk included, in which he explains the approach.
I’m an OmniFocus-flavored GTD adherent, or try to be. The iOS apps for OmniFocus were huge contributors to my mental adoption of my own GTD system. When OmniFocus 2 dropped a few weeks back for iPhone, I picked it up right away.
The new design lines up with the iOS 7 look. I really dig the flat UI style in utility apps like OmniFocus, or any app where function truly overrides form in importance—typically anything I open dozens of times of day as part of my routine. The new layout gives...
I use Dropbox as the nerve center for all of my digital goods, keeping data, configurations, histories, log files, and anything else I need access to centralized and available from my Mac or iOS devices.
Here are a few of my daily tools or information trails I want to keep synced up, so anything here can be a few clicks or a search away:
Instant message chat history
iTunes library
Histories + log files
OmniFocus backups
Chat Archiving
I use Messages on the desktop for all chat conversations with my Jabber and Google accounts. I...
Through a number of recommendations around the web, I’ve started using Drafts, an iOS app with an interesting workflow model that’s helping me replace a number of input channels for capturing different pieces of information while on-the-go.
It’s positioned primarily as a text editor or note-taking app for iOS, but it introduces a fundamentally different approach to the capture → process flow than most other solutions I’ve tried, even ones that I like. Like most heavy mobile users, I have a suite of apps I use constantly to capture different inputs:...
For the last month or so, I’ve been readopting the GTD methodology for organizing my work, personal and business. I read David Allen’s book back in 2007, and attempted to adopt the workflow. This was before having any sort of smart device, so workflow systems were much different back then. My system when I initially jumped in involved pens and pads, inboxes, folders — most of the recommended elements from the book. I didn’t last long, and since then I’ve only dabbled around really getting back into it. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin’s recent podcast series on...
The new design lines up with the iOS 7 look. I really dig the flat UI style in utility apps like OmniFocus, or any app where function truly overrides form in importance—typically anything I open dozens of times of day as part of my routine. The new layout gives...
