I’ve wasted far too much time learning to be productive.
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Now I’m going to spend too much time explaining what I’ve learned, and the “productivity system” (heavy scare quotes) that I’ve developed to put it all into more or less successful practice.
This post will begin a bit like an annotated table of contents—just a list of things, with the briefest of explanations, that I plan to address in future posts. But I’ll update it with links to those posts as I complete them.
Influences
David Allen’s Getting Things Done—or “GTD,” as the cool kids say. As with all systems I’ve encountered, I find his far too cumbersome to master, so I work with a fairly selective and watered down version. Many swear by GTD, though, so if you’re looking for a comprehensive system, it would be worth reading his book.
Tony Robbins’s Time of Your Life. I’m not a huge Robbins fan, though some people whom I admire are—for example, Tim Ferriss and Brian Koppelman. But TOYL (now called “Rapid Planning Method”) helped clarify several things for me—most importantly, the need to shift from the task-oriented system of to-do lists to an outcome-oriented system—what he calls “OPA Blocks.” As with GTD, TOYL was just too cumbersome for me to use, but I’ve transplanted some of his principles into my system.
Michael Hyatt. I lost my taste for Hyatt awhile ago. Much of that is just a result of over-exposure: I read his book Platform and subscribed to his “Platform University“; I listened to his podcast and read his blog through multiple iterations. At some point, he started repeating himself too much (repetition is important for learning, for sure, but there are limits…), and I became more and more aware of his manipulative sales strategies. (To be fair, I became aware of them because he lays them bare; that’s what he’s selling, and he uses his own company as a model to demonstrate what he teaches.) But I learned a lot from him, even as late as last week (damn him!). So it would be silly to leave him off this list.
Tim Ferriss. Ferriss’s first book, The Four-Hour Workweek, is a very tactical look at ways to hyper-streamline your productivity, with the goal of freeing up time for what you really want to do (in other words, the book isn’t really about working four hours per week; it’s about “10x-ing your output”). Me? I’m too chicken to take it as seriously as it deserves to be taken. But over years of listening to his podcast, and dipping into his two compendia of advice from high performers (Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors), I’ve gleaned a lot of helpful ideas—many of which, it turns out, are back in that first book.
Cal Newport’s Deep Work. This book emphasizes the importance of devoting blocks of time to cognitively demanding work. The first time I read the book, I wasn’t very impressed. But—I don’t even remember why—I decided I needed to reread it, and that second read turned out to be very helpful.
Greg McKeown’s Essentialism and Gary Keller & Jay Papasan’s The ONE Thing (I hate that “ONE” is in all caps…) are two shades of the same idea. Neither idea needs its own book, in my view. This is especially true of McKeown; he was out hocking his wares just about everywhere, so almost every interesting idea in the book appears in some interview or other. And the truth is that I encountered the main insight in The ONE Thing in Tim Ferriss’s work. Still, credit where credit is due….
Tools
Todoist is, as its name suggests, a to-do list app. You might think that this would clash with the insight I learned from Robbins, that task-oriented systems are less desirable than outcome-oriented systems. And you’d be right; it’s a constant battle. Still, it’s at the heart of my system, such as it is.
Evernote: I don’t use Evernote as much as I used to, but it is still critical to my system. I’ve been with them—as a paid member and all—since fairly early on. But it’s not just loyalty; it still seems to be the best at what it does—at least, the way that I use it.
Google Calendar is, to state the obvious, a calendar app. It integrates well with GMail. But it has a lot of other useful functions—most notably, the ability to show (or hide) several different calendars in one. I use that a lot.
GMail: I suspect there isn’t a lot of difference among email apps any more, especially now that they’re all pretty much cloud-based apps. But GMail integrates with both Todoist and Google Calendar. And the distinctions they made—years ago—between (a) “folders” and “labels,” and (b) “archiving” and “deleting,” have had a big influence on me.
Trello is a project manager, which I use when things get just a bit too complex for Todoist. It’s not that ToDoist can’t handle it, but when I try to cram to much into Todoist, I end up overwhelmed. Trello eases that.
Google Keep is a hyper-simple note-taking app. It doesn’t do many things, but the few things it does, it does well. I use it primarily for recurring checklists (grocery lists, routines). Todoist or Evernote could handle this, but not as quickly and easily.
The Journal is where I work through a wide range of issues, many of them dealing with productivity (or the appalling lack thereof). I wrote about this in an earlier post, The examined life.
LastPass is a password manager that lets me have complex, distinct passwords for all these other tools. One of David Allen’s central concepts involves “trusted buckets”—and security is an important part of trust.
Pocket is a “read it later” app. When I see something I want to read—on the anti-productivity apps Twitter or Facebook, for example—I save it in Pocket for later.
That’s it! I mean, there are other tools I use, but these are the ones that keep me moving forward—or, at least, save me from disaster. I’ll write posts on each, probably in no particular order, and update with a link to those posts.
[Updated 1/2/20: This post originally had no affiliate links — and bragged about it. I changed my mind on that, so here’s my affiliate disclosure and, if you are interested, why I made the change.]