Topic
productivity
- My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
Jeff Huang writes about his 14 year old productivity system of simply using an ever-growing single text file to house everything. To-dos, meeting notes, ideas. Everything. Good reminder that you can have a high producā¦
- Where You Work Shapes How You Work
Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections ā quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. darkā¦
- Shaping Our Environments
Our environments heavily impact what we do in them. But we have the ability to engineer our environments, and therefore, our habits and behavior. āChoice architectureā means architecting our surroundings to coax the hā¦
- LāappĆ©tit Vient en Mangeant
From Stephan Ango: Thereās a French expression I like: LāappĆ©tit vient en mangeant Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow. Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Someā¦
- The Difference Between Time and Attention
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 thingsā¦
- Against Recurring Meetings
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 eventualā¦
- Tools and Craft with Andy Matuschak
The latest episode of Notion's Tools & Craft podcast features the excellent Andy Matuschak, talking about his research, productivity practices, and more. Also check out Andy's work on smoothly-ratcheting goal trackingā¦
- Raycast
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 yearsā¦
- Charmstone
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 alā¦
- Don't Confuse Motion With Progress
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 thā¦
- Hammock-Driven Creativity
Here's Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) on the benefits of stepping away from the computer, in his talk on "hammock-driven development": He differentiates what the "waking" mind and "background" mind are good at, whicā¦
- How I Plan My Week with Roam
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 itsā¦
- Two Years of Everyday Writing
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 iā¦
- The Idea-to-Reality Production Stack
A great overview of mental models, thinking approaches, and techniques to, as the piece says, go from "idea to reality."
- Readwise, Books, and Spaced Repetition
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)ā¦
- Measuring Productivity
Florent Crivello had a short thread on Twitter contrasting the effectiveness on systems between Goldratt's The Goal and Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself. One of the replies linked to this piece from Scott Yā¦
- Weekend Reading: Dracones, Calendars, and Science 2.0
š Hic Sunt Dracones Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment: āIs this as bad as 1968?ā is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objā¦
- The Zettelkasten Method
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 Zettelkaā¦
- 6am Writing
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 earlyā¦
- Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup
š The Individual, the State, and the Virus I agree with most of Kling's takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis. š©š½āš» Mapping the Future of Work A nice comprehensive list of SaaS proā¦
- Team Objectives
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 aboutā¦
- Improvisational Productivity
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 tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
āš¼ The Enemies of Writing 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 oā¦
- What's Your Delta?
On comparing yourself to others: 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 itās not the only story thatā¦
- Weekend Reading: Signaling, Busyness, and Magic Ink
šš¼ Applause Lights 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 aā¦
- The Arc of Collaboration
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 theā¦
- Managerial Leverage
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 buā¦
- Habits vs. Goals
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 tā¦
- Structuring Work and Teams at Basecamp
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 tā¦
- Running in Circles
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 thatā¦
- iPadOS
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 neā¦
- Weekend Reading: Mental Models, Git History, and Notion
š§ A Latticework of Mental Models This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models ā first principles, Occam's Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reā¦
- The Personal Security Footprint Review
Once a year around this time I like to do some āwinter cleaningā of my personal security footprint, mostly covering passwords and internet service accounts I have that may be out-of-date, unmaintained, or unneeded. 1Pā¦
- The Little Handbook for Getting Stuff Done
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 commonā¦
- A Couple Years with Todoist
For all of the todo list apps out there, Iāve 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 havenāt even tried, bā¦
- Link Queueing with Shortcuts
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 candidatā¦
- Writing Workflow
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 myā¦
- Dialing Down
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 'overwhā¦
- Task Capture with Siri & OmniFocus
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 ofā¦
- Time & Energy Diagram: Contexts in OmniFocus
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 betā¦
- OmniFocus 2 for iPhone
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 upā¦
- Dropbox and Backups
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 feā¦
- Drafts
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 inforā¦
- Rediscovering GTD
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 anyā¦