Tiago Forte's Blog, page 45

One Taste of Orgasmic Meditation

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Forte Labs Coaching Program, Version 2.0

In January 2018, we launched the Forte Labs coaching program. Our goal was to inspire deep behavior change in our clients, by helping them remove the noise and simplify their approach to productivity so they could apply what they already know.

As we roll out the new-and-improved version 2.0 of our coaching program, we’d like to share what we learned from the first cohort, and what we’re changing:

You don’t need one linear progression

The original design of our coaching program was based on a deliberate practice model centered on our curriculum of online courses: Get Stuff Done Like a Boss, Design Your Habits, and Building a Second Brain.

We found that although drawing on this content helped, the step-by-step progression created a bottleneck. If one part of the progression wasn’t completed in full, the next session would be compromised with catch-up.

Tiago and I created a new coaching model to address this: the Digital Productivity Pyramid. The Pyramid is non-linear, in that you can navigate in any order, in any direction, and opportunistically based on your needs at any given time. Skip parts you’re stuck on, and jump right to the parts you need now.

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We can streamline, customize, and personalize our program to YOU

8 weeks was a big commitment for both parties. Although we delivered on that promise, we’ve decided that a month-to-month commitment works better for three reasons:

Two months proved to be too long of a commitment for a large number of our clients
Some clients achieved their goals in less than eight sessions. A month-to-month commitment forces us to focus on concrete, short-term goals that are more in line with our principles
A monthly recommitment creates a regular milestone for both of us to decide whether to continue working together. This forces us to reconsider our goals, make improvements, and surface feedback

We’ve also decided to use the first session to co-design each client’s coaching syllabus (thank you to Chris Sparks for this idea). This lets us deliver one of the most customized productivity coaching programs on the planet.

The most common issue for our clients was Clarification

If you look at the pyramid, one of the steps in Level 2 is Clarify. Clarification is the process of figuring out why you want to complete a given task, and the “next physical action” required. After you capture everything, you need to figure out what to do next.

Most people in our coaching program started with projects that were only partially completed, or weekly reviews without the proper actions. Most of the time, we didn’t see comprehensive project lists. We’ve developed a series of exercises and tools mapped to each “block” in the Pyramid, so that we can quickly recommend proven techniques to address these issues.

Over time we will develop a toolkit and manual explaining how to use it, perhaps eventually licensing this material to other coaches and companies.

Don’t come into the program trying to fix yourself – do come in with a project

Everyone wants to be faster and more productive, but that’s not the value of the program. Our courses can help with that, but the bigger, more powerful goal is to apply your new skills to achieve results. You’ll master these skills more completely when you apply them to a real project, and remain motivated to continue learning when you see the results.

Use our program to complete that side project you’ve had on the backburner forever, launch that blog or YouTube channel you’ve always thought about, or overcome an obstacle you’ve always encountered in the past. Instead of improving your productivity for its own sake, we’ll focus both our energies on an outcome.

New Focus: Project-based consulting  

We discovered our ideal client is someone who wants to build something, whether it’s creating content to build an audience, get a passion project off the ground, or build an online business to generate passive income. This isn’t a question of traditional 9-5 employees versus freelancers and entrepreneurs. We all have the ability to build new things to advance our interests and careers.

For version 2.0, we’ll focus on the common thread of creation. We will of course work on all aspects of productivity, but with the objective of setting you up for success in your project.

Introducing Version 2.0

Here the components we are adding to the new-and-improved coaching program:  

 

Weekly Review Co-Design: We will work with you to condense, speed up, and automate your digital life into a weekly habit. This critical weekly ritual saves you time doing administrative work, sets you up each week with a clear focus, and provides a context for checking in with your values, goals, and purpose on a regular basis.

 

Project Co-Design: Whether you’ve never designed a project before, or you’ve just gotten stuck, we help you break it down step-by-step so that you can live your life, instead of spending it project planning.

Streamlined Onboarding: This will help us design your productivity habits. We will perform a personality profile and look at how you currently spend your time before your first formal session, so we can get a running start. Our intention is to make the live sessions more about taking action, and less about information gathering.

New coaches: We’ve onboarded Clay Nichols and Chinh Pham to our coaches roster. They bring to the table extensive experience with coaching, self-improvement, productivity, and knowledge management, and will help us continue to expand the impact and range of the program.

New Price – $689 for four weekly coaching sessions: The new pricing reflects our commitment to produce tangible outcomes on an accelerated timeline. It includes four coaching sessions spread out over 4 weeks, with the option to renew at any point.

Visit the coaching page for more information and to apply, or our original announcement for more on our approach and philosophy. Send any questions to coaching@fortelabs.co.

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The Digital Productivity Pyramid

Imagine if we had a learning curriculum for modern knowledge work.

This curriculum would reliably produce elite performers, training them in the fundamental skills required to thrive in the digital age. It would impart concrete skills that could be generalized to any kind of knowledge work, not just one discipline or career path.

In our work at Forte Labs, we’ve worked with thousands of people from all over the world on improving their productivity using digital tools. We’ve noticed that people often adopt new tools to address challenges they’re facing at work. The shiny new thing introduces novelty that seems to help for a short time. But it soon becomes just another layer of complexity, exacerbating the original problem.

We’ve taken our learnings from the past few years, and especially what we’ve learned in our coaching program, to create the Digital Productivity Pyramid. It provides a framework for any stage of a knowledge worker’s learning journey, showing them where to focus next.

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The Pyramid shows how higher-order productivity skills build upon and extend lower-order skills. It shows how each skill can be leveraged using a particular kind of digital technology, which is our focus.

Our hope is that this framework will guide not only our community, but anyone seeking to piece together the vast number of learning resources now available on new ways of working. It represents a learning curriculum based not on standardized testing or graduation requirements, but on the real demands of the 21st century economy.

Core Principles
1. Non-linear

The key breakthrough we needed to develop this model was that digital productivity is not a linear learning process. You don’t learn one skill at a time, in strict order, mastering one completely before moving on to the next.

It’s more like a spiral staircase, ascending through increasingly advanced versions of the same core skills. I would estimate that 90% of full-time knowledge workers are proficient in level 1, while less than 1% are proficient at level 5.

2. Skills + technologies

Each level of the Pyramid is a combination of human skills augmented or extended by some form of digital technology: hardware, software, or online platforms.

These skills range from very meta (noticing what you notice), to very actionable (using a text expander). Pairing each of them with a digital tool gives them scale and leverage.

3. Emergence

Each level emerges from the one below it, either extending or abstracting the same core principles. Each level also makes use of the time and attention freed up by the level below.

Building up each level involves an initial design/setup stage, during which key systems and habits are put in place, followed by a longer optimization/customization stage.

4. Information flows

The blocks within each level are ordered from left to right, not in chronological order, but in terms of which direction information flows. The actual behaviors involved with each skill may take place in any order, but are generally organized to process information from one state to another.

Let me briefly explain what each level means.

Level 1: Digital Fluency

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Includes:

Basic computer usage
Web browsing
Basic email usage
Keyboard shortcuts
Digital calendars
Scheduling apps
Read Later apps
Inbox Zero
Password management
Speed reading
Time tracking
Text Expanders

Digital literacy refers to the most basic familiarity with computers, such as how to visit a webpage or create a text document. Level 1 of the Digital Productivity Pyramid extends this concept to digital fluency.

Mastering computer skills is a learning process that never ends. Even the most advanced users continue to learn new keyboard shortcuts, discover new features of their devices, and optimize their settings.

We’ve placed these core capabilities at the bottom of the Pyramid because everything else depends on them

Focusing on your actionable tasks (Level 2) will involve a lot of friction if you don’t have a dedicated place for reading online articles (Level 1)
Building routines (Level 3) will be very challenging without a reliable digital calendar (Level 1)
You’ll have trouble finding the time to organize your files (Level 4) if your email inbox is out of control (Level 1)

Gaps in high-level performance can often be traced back to weaknesses in these core capabilities. Small bits of friction at lower levels can add up to major frustrations when trying to excel at higher levels.

Focusing on Level 1 skills will strengthen all the levels above it, which is why our coaching program starts here. This might include building a solid morning routine (Level 3), redesigning your Weekly Review (Level 2), or setting up a text expander or password manager (Level 1).

Relevant Praxis articles:

The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps
Case Study: Alex Hardy’s Successful Quest to Conquer Inbox Zero

Level 2: Task Management and Workflow

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Includes:

Capture: collect what has your attention
Clarify: decide what it means
Organize: put it where it belongs
Reflect: review what you’ve collected
Engage: take action

Task management is essentially “advanced to-do lists.” Popular digital task managers include Omnifocus, Things, Wunderlist, Todoist, 2Do, and Toodledo.

A workflow is simply the sequence of steps information moves through, from first being identified as actionable, to completion of a task.

Although there are many ways to create a task management workflow, there is one that stands above the rest: David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method. The five stages of GTD are so fundamental to how actionable information is captured and managed to completion that we’ve used them to label this level:

Incomplete capturing (i.e. writing down) of your tasks will absolutely become a bottleneck to any ambitious project you want to take on, as decisions and commitments get lost
Trying to complete tasks that haven’t been properly clarified (i.e. formulated in a way that makes them actionable and outcome-oriented) is difficult and frustrating, since it won’t be clear why you’re doing them
The most comprehensive collection of potential tasks is useless if not organized in a way that they can be quickly identified and acted on
Strategic decision making depends on dedicated reflection time, to make sense of all the information being collected
And of course, all of these tasks amount to excessive record-keeping if not actually engaged with and acted on

We address task management and workflow Get Stuff Done Like a Boss, our video-based course that guides people through the process of building a GTD-based workflow.

Relevant Praxis articles:

The Annual Review is a Rearchitecture
The Monthly Review is a Systems Check
The Weekly Review is an Operating System
One-Touch to Inbox Zero
A Conversation with David Allen on Quantifying Productivity

Level 3: Habit Formation and Behavior Change

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After an initial setup period, each one of the five principles from Level 2 must be put on autopilot to have their full impact. The key is to adopt a critical, automatic habit for each one:

Capture => Collection Habit
Clarify => Next Physical Action
Organize => Project List
Reflect => Weekly Review
Engage => Contexts/priorities

These habits allow the principles of task management to recede into the background, taking up less and less attention over time. By understanding the basic principles, we can find original, creative ways of customizing them to suit our individuals needs and preferences.

Level 3 includes not just forming new habits, but extinguishing or adjusting existing habits. This requires examining underlying personal narratives, incentives, and patterns thats drive our behavior, using psychological and design techniques to reimagine them. We lead people through this process in our course Design Your Habits.

Relevant Praxis articles:

The Topology of Attention
The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Desire, and Working Free
The World Beyond Your Head: How Distraction Shapes Who We Are
A Theory of Unlearning: Ecstasis, Anamnesis, Kenosis
Experimental Habit Formation
Meta-Skills, Macro-Laws, and the Power of Constraints

Level 4: Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

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Includes:

Progressive summarization
P.A.R.A.
Workflow Strategies

Whereas Level 2 is about taming the flow of information related to actions, Level 4 is about the flow of knowledge.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a set of skills and tools for an individual to capture, organize, and deploy the knowledge they accumulate while completing their work. It draws from diverse fields such as digital archiving, process management, and project management, and includes software programs for e-reading, digital note-taking, word processing, cloud storage, and others.

Personal knowledge management is the topic of Building a Second Brain, which helps people unlock their creative potential using digital note-taking software.

Relevant Praxis articles:

Series on Progressive Summarization
Series on the P.A.R.A. Method
Masters of Creative Note-Taking: Luhmann and Da Vinci
From Multitasking to Multiplexing: 5 Steps to Building a Personal Productivity Network
Getting Things Done + Personal Knowledge Management
How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow
Tagging is Broken

Case studies:

Second Brain Case Study: Teaching Progressive Summarization in an Undergraduate Classroom
Building a Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode

Level 5: Just-in-Time Project Management

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As working professionals, we don’t have time to consume a body of knowledge upfront and then regurgitate it for a test, as in school. Professional education has to take place right alongside daily work. We have to build the plane (and learn to fly it) as it’s taking off.

For PKM to be sustainable, it needs to directly enable the execution of real projects. That’s why Just-in-Time Project Management is the capstone of the Pyramid. The knowledge we are collecting and managing needs to have an immediate return to be justified, instead of only far in the future.

While you don’t need to build levels 1-4 before starting to work on real projects, the scale and ambition of the projects you can successfully execute is constrained by the structural integrity of your Pyramid. The taller the building you want to erect, the deeper and stronger your foundation must be.

Relevant Praxis articles:

Series on Just-in-TIme Project Management
Mood as Extrapolation Engine: Using Emotions to Generate Momentum
Bending the Curves of Productivity

Case studies:

How I Write Long-Form Blog Posts
Riding the Writing Wave: How to Improve Your Writing, Get Rid of Writer’s Block, and Accelerate Your Output
Personal Sprints: Applying Design Thinking to Your Life
Second Brain Case Study: Researching and writing a 10,000-word academic article

The Next Frontier

We are hard at work on the next frontier – making Just-in-Time Project Management as coherent and teachable as the other levels. Read our ongoing series on Just-In-Time Project Management for the latest developments.

In the meantime, we could really use your feedback and suggestions as we continue to refine and expand the Digital Productivity Pyramid framework. Comment below, in the Forte Labs Slack, or via email at tiago@fortelabs.co.

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Just-In-Time PM #20: Speed as a Capability

In Part 19, I argued that continuously finding new sources of motivation was the most important challenge for knowledge workers, and that the best way to get started was to generate momentum through a series of small wins.

Although Progressive Summarization can bootstrap you to a minimum level of motivation, at some point you do need to go from faking it to making it. The mind can be tricked, but not fooled for long.

Our challenge goes from motivation to speed: how do you keep the wins coming fast and hard?

Throughout this series, I’ve emphasized again and again the critical importance of speed. Intermediate packets, downscoping, convergence, placeholding, small batches, and other techniques are all designed to help us maintain momentum.

Why is moving quickly so deeply important?

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Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

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Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

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Just-In-Time PM #19: Explosive Inspiration

In Part 18, I introduced the idea that our states of mind come and go in “motivational waves,” and that we should try to surf them instead of forcing them to conform to our will.

Now let’s go deeper into what these motivational states entail, and how we can use them to our advantage.

A “motivational state” is more colloquially known as a “mood.” Moods usually have a negative connotation when it comes to productivity. Feeling “moody” is generally not considered a desirable thing while working. Often we don’t feel “in the mood” to do something we know we have to do.

But what is the function of moods in humans? What role do they play in helping us adapt and survive?

An intriguing answer is suggested by this paper: that the function of moods is to create momentum in the mind.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

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Just-In-Time PM #18: Motivational Waves

In Part 17, I argued that unique states of mind are the most powerful resource available to knowledge workers. But these states are difficult to reproduce on demand, and come and go unpredictably.

Our challenge becomes clear: how do we capture the value from a series of valuable, yet fleeting mental states?

Let’s take the following states of mind for example:

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

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Impact Cycles: Finding the Why Beyond the How

You’re a fast runner. You’ve trained for years, worked with great coaches, studied the best techniques and workouts, and you’ve got all the best equipment. You’ve mastered your skill.

The field you’re currently running through, however, is extremely foggy. You can barely see more than a few steps ahead of you, and because of that it’s hard to tell where you’re going. You can avoid rocks and potholes with impressive agility, but your overall progress is unclear. You’re tracking all sorts of metrics – your speed, your technique, the number of steps taken – but you still don’t seem to be making any real progress.

Here’s the problem: it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re running in circles. You need not just a path, but a destination. Not just a How, but a Why.

The World of How

We live in a world of How. How to make more, do more, be more. How to “win.”

But in a world of How, we rarely stop to ask “Why?”

Why are we doing all this? Why should we care about the results? What are we winning and why is it important to win it? The Why gives us our direction, our context, our purpose.

We are, both as individuals and as a society, more empowered to create impact than at any previous point in human history. But just like our metaphorical runner moving extremely fast through blind circles, there is a world of difference between Uninformed Impact – powerful but directionless moves without consideration of the surrounding systems and environments – and what we at the Global Kindness Initiative (GKI) call Informed Impact – moving in line with our own values, capabilities, and surroundings.

In order to have truly sustainable impact, we need something else. We need to understand not just the mechanics of how to create change, but how our work connects to the larger world, the direction it’s going, and the interrelation between the two.

We need both the How and the Why.

The Evolution of Maslow’s Hierarchy 

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is one of the most universal and influential models of human development ever developed. But the traditional presentation of a hierarchical pyramid has over time given way to a more nuanced model, like the one below.

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Just because we are pursuing higher goals, that doesn’t mean our core needs can be ignored. On the other hand, focusing on our basic needs doesn’t exclude seeking a higher purpose.

Maslow based his theory on a simple premise: it’s difficult to advance to the next stage of personal awareness and development until the needs of the current one are met.

As more of our basic needs are met, we have more capacity to devote mental energy towards our higher needs: identifying purpose, meaning, and impact.

This internal process is mirrored externally as we seek to create effective, powerful, and wide-reaching impact on the world around us.

What is Impact?

Impact is the effect you have on the space around you – be that physical, intellectual, or emotional. You can have impact within a broader system like a career or a relationship, or you can have impact with the application of a tool or technique in a very specific environment.

The amount of impact you have is limited by your ability to be aware of, navigate, and influence that space. At GKI we use a five-stage model which describes the process of maximizing impact within a system, which we call the Impact Cycle:

Exploration
Competence
Mastery
Identifying Purpose
Informed Impact

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The Impact Cycle follows the progression needed to create lasting and effective change within a given environment, be it internally or externally:

Exploration

When we first enter a new space, we know very little about the landscape. We need to try new things, with the understanding that they may not always go as planned. The Exploration Stage should be inquisitive and open; a beginner’s mind. Your first steps are a long way from your first marathon, but every bit as necessary.

Competence

As we begin to familiarize ourselves with the rough outline of the new environment, we start to learn how it works. But we are still finding our way, and we might still make a lot of mistakes. There may be larger interactions, shortcuts, and networks that we don’t yet see. Our ability to create impact is just starting to develop, although it may often manifest as Uninformed Impact.

Mastery

After enough iterations of Competence, we achieve Mastery. We have performed the needed tasks enough times that they have become routine. We no longer think simply about how to do the tasks and subroutines of the job, but how to do them well, with skill and efficiency.

So now what? So far, we have only mastered the How.

Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy, there is a a natural shift towards higher-order questions about the broader context we are acting within.

Now that we have developed this powerful engine, we must decide where to send it. Regardless of how great our mastery of a skill, without informed direction we cannot have real impact.

The missing piece is identifying our Purpose.

How is what you’re currently doing connected to your larger values? What larger trends are you contributing toward, and how do they interrelate with the thousands of micro actions you take in your daily life? How is what you’re doing now ultimately connected to who you are and who you want to be?

It is only with these two things, Mastery of a skill and Purpose in applying it, that you can have true Impact.

Our work at the Global Kindness Initiative focuses on helping organizations and individuals successfully navigate these transitions and maximize their ability to positively and sustainably impact the systems and environments around them.

We offer a variety of workshops as well as consulting and coaching packages around Diversity & Inclusion, Restorative Conflict Resolution, Mediation, Impact Coaching, and Strategic Communication for both individuals and teams. We deeply believe in the transformative power of aligning one’s skills and resources with their values and direction, and in the absolutely critical need for it at this time in our nation’s history.

With powerful organizational tools like P.A.R.A. and Just-In-Time Project Management to supercharge your implementation, along with powerful framing tools like Impact Coaching and Strategic Communication, we can create a vision for a new generation of skilled, connected, motivated, and empowered leaders ready to change the world in profound and beautiful ways.

Register for a live discussion with Ryan and Tiago on Wednesday, June 13 at 9am Pacific. I’ll interview Ryan about his work at GKI, and we’ll discuss the connections between productivity, knowledge management, social transformation, and a healthy, functioning democracy.

Riding the Writing Wave: How to Improve Your Writing, Get Rid of Writer’s Block, and Accelerate Your Output

Writing is its own reward. – Henry Miller
The Writing Habit

Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is.

The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. As a wise man once said: “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.”

When you sit down to write, your mind will rebel. Expect this to happen. That way, it won’t bother you when it does. Keep going. Fight through the resistance. Once you get in the groove, don’t try to sound smart or impressive. Pursue truth and let that speak for itself.

Aim to produce a deliverable or finish once you’ve hit a definite milestone. If you stop at a logical stopping point, you’ll have something to think about between work sessions. Other people can give you feedback while you’re not working since it’s easier to edit a draft or a paragraph than a jumbled work-in-progress.

Focus on the process, not the outcome. It’s impossible to play the long game when you’re checking the score every five minutes. If you want to sustain your writing practice over a long time, don’t write for more than three hours per day. It’s best to stop when you still have some juice and know what you’re going to write next. That way, you’ll be excited to write again the next day.

Make writing a daily habit. A day where you don’t write anything is the enemy of productivity. Days when you don’t write anything are the enemy of productivity. The most important thing: write something every day — no matter what.

Why Write?

Never underestimate the power of words.

Writing regularly will change you. When you become a regular writer, you change how you live. Writing forces you to pay attention. More of the world will pop alive. It motivates you to become more curious about the world. It takes you to a higher level of perception and a deeper level of analysis.

Writing has infinite leverage. It creates luck and serendipity, which makes it the most efficient way to network. Conferences and networking events are good for the short term, but writing is the best long-term strategy. Write at a regular cadence and don’t give up. When you have free time, have a bias towards writing.

For knowledge to become wisdom, it must be carefully, tenderly analyzed from many angles, through many means. Many people don’t write because they’d rather consume more information. Consumption is fun, but it can get out of hand.

The problem with consumption is that it feels so good. It gives you a thin, superficial perspective on the world. Even if you get an accurate picture, it’ll only be two-dimensions. But if you don’t write about an idea, you’ll never have a three-dimensional perspective on it. This is why you should expect 80% of the ideas in the essay to happen after you start writing it and 50% of the ideas you start with to be wrong.

If you’re not careful, consuming all day can become another form of procrastination. This is a dangerous trap. When you consume all the time without producing anything, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re more productive than you really are.

Growth is maximized when production and consumption are well balanced. Summarize what you’ve learned and use that knowledge to solidify your own ideas.

The Most Important Thing: Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit

Streamline your message. Focus it. Pare is down to its simplest, clearest, and easiest-to-understand form. Make it fun.

Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy not to read it.

The 10-Step Writing Process:

Step 1: Create a Mega Outline
Step 2: Build an Archipelago of Ideas
Step 3: Outline
Step 4: Write a 2nd Rough Draft
Step 5: Re-Write Every Sentence
Step 6: 10–15 Sentence Article Summary
Step 7: Send to Friends and Ask for Feedback
Step 8: Write a 3rd Rough Draft
Step 9: Turn outline into a full post
Step 10: Publish

The Writing Process: Explained
Mega-Brainstorm

Before you begin, piece together ideas, facts, and stories into a single document. Don’t bother organizing it. Put information in there whenever you read, hear, or experience something that’s relevant to the general idea of the essay. Doing this is trivial because your smartphone is always with you.

Keep adding ideas to your mega-brainstorm until it becomes painful not to write the essay. Goodbye writer’s block!

Archipelago of Ideas

Organize ideas from the mega-brainstorm and build the archipelago of ideas. Think of the ideas in the mega-brainstorm as islands in the ocean. The archipelago of ideas is about building bridges between all the ideas. These bridges give the piece unity and cohesion.

Here’s the template I use.

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Outline

Make the outline as simple as possible. That way, you can focus more on ideas and less on the structure. The outline is the most challenging part of writing an essay, and it’s not optional. The first draft is always terrible, but good writing has to start somewhere.

The outline of an essay is like the skeleton of a body. It provides its fundamental form and structure. If it helps, write a stock intro and a stock conclusion to stay focused.

Stock Intro: what is the purpose of this essay? How is it going to proceed?

Stock Conclusion: How did this essay proceed? What was its purpose?

Keep the post in outline form for as long as possible. Outlines force simplicity. They make it easier to see the ideas and move them around. The vast majority of people should write with shorter sentences; outlines trivialize this pursuit.

The outline should be longer than the final version. Organize your outline with subdivisions, sections, and paragraphs. Each paragraph is a stepping stone to your final destination and every one should focus on a single idea. Write ten to fifteen sentences per outline heading to complete your paragraphs.

While creating the outline, keep moving, keep writing, and don’t get bogged down by the details.

The mega-brainstorm, archipelago of ideas, and the outline are elements of production. The purpose of production is to produce. The editing phase comes later. The function of editing is to reduce and rearrange. Produce, then edit. Don’t combine them. Never let production and editing interfere with each other.

Editing

Great writers are great editors. Most great writing starts out as bad writing. Rewriting is the only kind of writing that counts.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. If you’re struggling to do this, step away from the piece for a few days. Edit as if you have no sunk costs. Reject bad ideas, so good ones are all you have left. Delete the parts that readers will skip. Eliminate the extra detail, and concentrate on communicating what’s important.

Poor communicators ramble. Good communicators leave out unnecessary details. Great communicators treat words as the scarcest commodity.¹

Aim to pass the “Thanksgiving Test.” Ask yourself: Could you talk about this at the Thanksgiving table and your family would get what you’re talking about? Keep in mind that you want to write in the same voice you’d use if you and I were in a bar having a chat.

Rewriting Sentences and Organizing Paragraphs

If you aren’t rewriting, you aren’t developing as a writer. The most important part of learning and remembering is the re-creation of what you have written in your own words.

Read each sentence aloud, and listen to how it sounds. Put brackets around unnecessary words. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works. Write another version of each sentence, under the previous sentence. Each sentence should flow logically from the one before it and refer to the topic sentence of the paragraph.

Here’s an example:

Original Sentence: Liberal and conservative thinkers stress efficiency of production, as well as quality, and consider profit the motive for efficiency.

Edited Sentence: Liberal and conservative thinkers alike stress the importance of quality and efficiency, and see them as properly rewarded by profit.

Try not to use transitions. If you do, don’t use the same transition too many times.

Seek flow and precision. Shorter is better. Don’t try to impress people with vocabulary; it will backfire. Eliminate words that aren’t used in normal conversation.

Once you’ve rewritten the sentences, re-order the paragraphs so they are ordered appropriately.

Create a New Outline

Re-read the essay out loud. This works because the cadence of breathing and speaking tends to mimic the frequency of the brain’s ability to process words and sentences.

Put brackets around unnecessary words. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.

Write a new, 10–15 sentence outline. Don’t look back at your essay while you are doing this. The works because you’ll force yourself to reconstruct your argument from memory. This will distill the piece to its essence. By doing so, you will likely improve it. Most of the time, when you summarize something, you end up simplifying it, while retaining most of what is important. By summarizing your ideas, your memory becomes a filter. It helps you remove what is useless and preserve what is vital.

Once the new outline is complete, cut and paste material from the previous essay. Many things from the first draft won’t be necessary. Keep only what is necessary. Delete everything else.

Repeat this last step as necessary.

Note: An essay is not finished until you cannot edit so that your essay improves. You can tell if this has happened when you try to rewrite a sentence (or a paragraph) and you are not sure that the new version is an improvement over the original. Delete banned words and phrases whenever possible.

To take an essay to the next level, repeat the process of sentence re-writing and re-ordering, as well as paragraph re-ordering and re-outlining. Wait a few days to do this so you can look at the piece with fresh eyes. That way, you can see what you have written, instead of seeing what you think you wrote.

Style and Substance

Effort isn’t something readers want. Substance is. The shorter the article, the less bullsh*t.

Treat every word like it costs you something. Good communication is the ability to say the most stuff in the fewest words. The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Create People and Avatars, not Descriptions

Humans love characters. It’s why we love cartoons, novels, and movies. Humans have an incredible ability to empathize with characters and put themselves in their shoes.

Invent characters that are fun to follow and easy to remember. Characters are more memorable than abstract generalizations about a demographic.

Use Short Paragraphs

Most people read on their smartphones. They’re busy and on-the-go. Don’t write 8–10 sentence paragraphs unless you’re making an important point.

Long paragraphs should be the exception, not the norm. Keep your paragraphs to five sentences, or less. Short paragraphs will make your article less intimidating and easier to read. Now, when you write a long paragraph, it’ll stand out and be seen as more important. Use long paragraphs sparingly. Save the length for when you need it.

Style

Aim to produce something of worth, beauty, and elegance. Steal stylistically from other writers, as all great readers do.

Write as smooth and naturally as you can and use the same voice you’d use if you and I were in a bar having a chat. Write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do. If it helps, lead with something counterintuitive or provocative. Use footnotes to contain digressions. Vary sentence length.² Occasionally, the reader needs a breather.

A pause.

Note: The paragraphs (Rules and Writing Hacks) below are courtesy of Nat Eliason.

Rules

Avoid Adverbs: This one is simple: delete your adverbs. If you’re not sure what an adverb is, the easiest way to identify them is that they frequently end in “-ly.” This is, again, more about pruning than outright abstinence: you can still use adverbs, but save them for when they mean something.

Avoid Repetition: If you use a less common word too often, your writing starts to sound odd. When writing, and especially when editing, make sure you aren’t using the same word too frequently. Don’t repeat an uncommon word in the same sentence, ideally not in the same paragraph, and possibly not for the rest of the section.

Vary Sentence Length: Most of us speak in longer or shorter sentences, and that will tend to come through in our writing. But if you monitor the length of your sentences, and force yourself to make some of them shorter or longer (depending on which you default to), you’ll make your writing sound more interesting. I like long sentences. But a short one every now and then helps make my paragraphs more readable.

Writing Hacks

Use TK: As you’re writing, put “TK” anywhere you aren’t sure of a detail, or where you need to add more context later. One of the main reasons I stop writing or fall out of flow is getting stuck on some detail giving me trouble, and by dropping in a TK to come back to it later, I can maintain the flow. Why TK? Think of it as “To Come.” That letter combination doesn’t appear in any English word, so when you CMD+F for it after you’re done writing, you’ll only find the instances where you used it as a place marker.

When in Doubt, Delete It: The easiest way to deal with almost anything giving you trouble is to delete it. If a sentence is bugging you, delete it. Awkward paragraph, delete it. Confusing section, delete it. You’ll find you never needed it in the first place.

Context Switch: If you can, try editing in a few different contexts, the more varied, the better. Do one round of edits standing at the desk you work from, then do another at a bar after a glass of wine or two. Looking at a piece in different places in different mental states will help you see it differently and develop a more varied voice throughout the piece. You may find, too, that when you look at it in a different context, you think of other material to include you hadn’t thought of before.

A Fresh Perspective

Writing is a fruitful habit. Expressing ideas will help you form new ones and by sharing them with others, your thinking will gain precision.

Make this process your own and improve it whenever possible.

Read to inspire you to write more, and write to inspire you to read more. Through this delicate balance of production and consumption, I encourage you to cultivate your own writing habit.

Read more about David Perell and his work at perell.com.

¹ A Morgan Housel quote

² Inspired by Eugene Wei

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Just-In-Time PM #17: States of Mind

In Part 16, we refined our understanding of Return on Attention by taking into account our biggest constraint as knowledge workers – not just our attention but our deeply focused attention in particular.

But human attention is not a simple commodity like oil or gold. It can’t be stored in barrels or vaults or measured in liters or grams. Attention emerges from deep within the human psyche, which means that all aspects of human psychology come into play.

Luckily, we don’t need to understand the full complexity of our minds to become more effective at shaping and deploying our attention. We just need to learn how to manage our states of mind, each one representing a certain kind of attention applied in a certain context.

I believe that our states of mind have become our most important assets as knowledge workers. In an economy based on creativity, it is the state of mind that we enter through our creative process that is even more rare and valuable than any product or deliverable we produce while in it. Our ultimate competitive advantage is a way of thinking.

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Just-In-Time PM #16: Effective ROA

In Part 15, I advocated for multithreading, or weaving together multiple projects to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and synergies.

To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM). Traditionally found only in large companies with hundreds of simultaneous projects, digital technology has made it possible and necessary for each of us to manage a portfolio.

The two most important skills you’ll need as a PPM are:

Choosing the right projects to start (good inputs)
Maximizing project completions (good outputs)

To accomplish these, we’ll need to refine our understanding of Return on Attention (ROA), first introduced in Part 1.

When determining the return on our attention, our natural inclination is to focus on throughput, which is how many projects actually get completed.

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