Earlier this week a friend asked if I knew any 5-10 person start-ups that were doing interesting work in the productivity space. I knew a couple, but the always-full-of-opinion Twitter seemed like a good place to learn more, so I asked. The following is a selection of the surprisingly large number of start-ups that responded.… more
It’s a definitive characteristic of the people I work with that they sign up for too much. They’re optimists. They believe they can do anything. They’re eternally growing. That’s the poetry, here’s the reality. There are two paths for these eager optimists. The first path is the individual who is capable of both signing up… more
From Quartz:
The tyranny of the urgent refers to the tendency of little things that have to be done right now to get in the way of what really matters. This creates a huge problem as urgent actions often have little impact.
I take issue with the deliberately inflammatory headline that Google is to blame for destroying the workplace since open office style workplaces were around long before Google, but the topic is worth debating. I have a variety of issues regarding the open office trend. Let’s start with the fact that the folks often making the… more
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside the well-defined process we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not following these rules. Everyone knows… more
Josh Olson asks, “How do you stay the course with task management?”
As part of the new gig, I’m continuing with Workflowy as my personal to-do system. It’s a bookmark called “Brain” and it’s roughly a page-long outline, but it’s still early in the gig. I’m bracing for the inevitable flood of tasks when I leave the honeymoon phase.
When this flood does occur, I’ll likely do what I’ve done in the past. When the work associated with task management become onerous, when it’s 1am and I’m dragging and dropping tasks hither and fro, I’ll think, There has got to be a better way.
There is. And it has nothing to do with well-designed productivity software.
I eagerly evaluate every single shiny new productivity system because my sincere hope is that they’ve solved for… me. They need to solve for the fact that I excite easily, but I have a short attention span. They need to solve for the fact that I eagerly embrace the disruptive new, I’m not beholden to the past, and will adapt to whatever new craziness they’ve designed. But they also need to account for the fact that new craziness has an incredibly short half-life.
It’s an impossible design specification and my advice for productivity software vendors is to ignore it.
We spend a lot of time asking too much of our tools when, in fact, what we really need is just good practices. I’m certain I could keep track of my individual tasks on a torn coffee-stained napkin reliably as long as the practice around the maintenance of that napkin list was reasonable and, more importantly, maintained consistently.
I eagerly evaluate every new productivity solution that shows up because I truly want them to be “the one,” but after doing this for over a decade, I’m certain the tool isn’t the problem. I am. Where the innovation needs to occur is not within Asana, Things, or Workflowy, it’s with how I choose to spend my time. It’s developing a well defined protocol for myself regarding maintaining my to-do list, and then religiously following this protocol and consistently investing my time.
Fact: to-do list management is boring. It’s like writing unit tests for your life. It’s maintenance work and we engineers both understand the value of maintenance work and excel at finding brilliant excuses to not do it. A simply delicious way of avoiding this boredom is to keep it interesting by changing the rules, finding a new application, and talking about your productivity workflow rather than maintaining that workflow.
Which is what I’m doing right now. See, I’m the problem.
There’s a seductive dark side to The Builder’s High. The high afforded us by our brain when we are productive is delicious. For me, it’s comparable to the endorphin rush after a good workout. A foul mood vanishes, the weight of stress is lightened, and what was complex and difficult to fathom appears knowable. Of… more
You arrive at work. You sit down at your desk and you scan your inbox for potential disasters. Two mails pique your interest. You write brief responses to nudge the engineers in the right direction. Nothing else is urgent so you walk to the kitchen to get breakfast. You sit down with three fellow engineers… more
At some point in the last year there was too much email. I’ve considered myself a competent manager of email and to-dos for much of my career, but the quantity of email that needed my attention exceeded a heretofore unknown ceiling and I began to understand how the smallest parts of my inbox policy could… more
Brief productivity update. As I noted at the end the year, I moved from Things to Asana. After the initial excitement and eager eager that accompanies any new bright and shiny product, my Asana usage tanked. The issue? First, I was using it like I used Things and, second, I didn’t know Asana.
As I’ve written about before, my personal workflows are bereft of complexity because each sliver of complexity creates mental friction and aggregate excess mental friction is why I abandon tools. My initial Asana workflow was an exact mirror of Things – the reason, I didn’t want to reinvent my flow. After a week, it was clear from increasing that with Asana that I was forcing my square-peg workflow into a round product.
After several weeks of watching Asana slowly gather digital dust, I rebooted. First, I watched every single Asana video available. Oh, it all revolves around the inbox. Ok. Second, I became the master of all Asana keyboard shortcuts. This might well be a nerd thing, but part of the reason I knew Asana is built for me is they’re big on keyboard shortcuts and, for the nerd, the single biggest killer of mental friction is memorized keyboard shortcuts. Lastly, and as you’ll read in an accompanying forthcoming article, I reinvented and rebuilt my workflow in both my email client and Asana. Accompanied with a better understand of Asana’s features, this blank slate approach allowed me to build around Asana’s feature set. Two weeks later and this revamped workflow feels familiar and productive.
My workflow is a work in progress. I’m still experimenting, but, then again, so is Asana. This week they released a Calendar feature. I haven’t extensively used the feature, but I sleep better at night knowing my tools are actively thinking about how to grow and evolve with me.
