Tiago Forte's Blog, page 46

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.

[image error]
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

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

 

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.

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

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.

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Just-In-Time PM #15: Multithreading

In Part 14, we looked at the potential for massively increasing our bandwidth by creating “personal productivity networks.” These networks are made up of packets of work that move between “nodes” where some kind of intelligence is applied, whether human or software-based.

But what does it look like to operate such a network in our day to day work?

Through multithreading, a term borrowed from modern computing. While multitasking is switching rapidly between tasks, and is absolutely not a good idea, multithreading is switching rapidly between projects, and is essential. They may seem similar, but in fact require completely different approaches.

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Personal Sprints: Applying Design Thinking to Your Life

There are many practices that have emerged in recent years to accelerate progress at work: daily stand-ups, weekly review meetings, and my favorite – sprints. In this context, a sprint is a set period of time that is dedicated to achieving a goal. Many tech companies have adopted this method in some form based on years of trial-and-error experimentation.

After seeing how sprints helped accelerate ideas at Degreed, an idea popped into my mind: “What if I applied this exact same concept to my personal life, using the same techniques of iterative innovation and rapid feedback loops?”

And so the journey began.

Drawing inspiration from sprints, I wanted to see what would happen if I did a personal reflection every month instead of waiting for a whole year to pass before checking in with my resolutions. I wanted to see how my life would change if I had a clear focus and achieved a goal each month, instead of setting and forgetting my goals each year.

2016 was the year of experimentation, when I started and finished 12 projects in 12 months. These projects ranged from hosting Sunday dinners in a new city to exercising every week. Because of these projects, I was able to explore my interests, build up skills, and become a more effective learner over time. Having that foundation set me up for things I couldn’t have imagined beforehand. For example, starting One Month Projects, an online project accelerator program for those who want to make their life more effective via personal sprints.

The Foundation of Personal Sprints

A personal sprint is similar to a work sprint, except we focus on goals in our personal life. I’ve found it helpful to think about personal sprints using Google’s design sprint framework:

Google’s sprint framework:

[image error]

Modeled after IDEO’s design thinking concepts, Google has greatly benefited from these sprints, which have led to products like Gmail. Other companies such as Uber, Slack and Blue Bottle Coffee have seen significant results as well.

The process consists of generating an idea, building it, launching it and learning from it to improve the idea later. As shown by the grey circle above, the sprint is a process of understanding and testing a problem to be solved, before fully launching into solution development. We can apply this same concept to ourselves, except what we are developing is not a product, but our life paths.

Why do a personal sprint?

A personal sprint is based on the process-first approach of productivity, where the main focus is creating a system that can be seamlessly used over and over again. After all, no one is equipped with perfect knowledge – rather, we pick up what we need to learn, mostly through trial and error. This iterative learning serves us well, especially with today’s ever-changing technology and the fact that the most in-demand careers today did not even exist ten years ago. Personal sprints give you a process to keep up and evolve with the changing landscape.

My personal sprints are done in 30 day iterations, consisting of monthly reviews (in which I document the progress on my goals) and monthly projects (in which I experiment with and live the month through those lenses). These personal sprints have empowered me to acquire skills in the areas of being a full-stack freelancer, building educational chatbots, and creating my own focused MBA program, etc.

Benefits of a personal sprint

While everyone’s goals are different, and will lead to different creations and experiences, here are some common foundational benefits to personal sprints:

Shortcut time: The difference between a yearly review versus a monthly review is vast. Think about the compounding effects you get to reap when you iterate every month (twelve times a year) versus yearly (once a year). When I used to only do yearly reviews, I’ve found that usually I would either forget the goal I had at the beginning of the year (which often became less relevant as time passed); or, I was just floundering in different directions without a goal. More frequent reviews give you more data points, and as a result a clearer direction.

10x your productivity: Productivity matters the most when you are both effective (working on the right things) and efficient (getting things done). For example, with personal sprints, I was able to experiment with a variety of side businesses to test out potential careers. As a result of testing five side businesses in five months, I quickly learned that I liked some ideas more than I actually liked doing them. For example, I thought I wanted to be a dance teacher, but after experimenting for a month, I realized that I preferred not to teach dance moves repeatedly. This is similar to an intensive internship: you can test out which direction you’d like to go towards and get clarity on your preferences.

Prototype life: Instead of waiting forever to “launch” when all the conditions are right, or delaying on trying out something until it’s perfect, you can get an experience of what it would be like with a miniature version. Personal sprints are all part of your life MVP: it’s better to know what doesn’t work now rather than wonder whether it would work for an undefined amount of time. Frequently, we wait for someday, but often that someday never comes and we end up regretting the things we missed out on by not trying. The first step is the hardest – and also the most impactful. Many aspects of my current life, such as my work, hobbies and lifestyle, were shaped and jump-started by the 12 projects in 12 months that I did in 2016 (this is also an example of small batch projects for focus, creativity and perspective).

How you can get started

Ready to try out personal sprints? Here’s how you can apply each step of Google’s sprint framework to create your own personal sprint:

The Google Sprint:

[image error]

The Google sprint is a five day sprint. On Monday, you brainstorm the problem and choose an area to focus on. On Tuesday, you sketch out potential solutions, and on Wednesday, you make a hypothesis to test. You then spend Thursday creating a prototype and test it with users on Friday.

Since you know yourself the best, you can easily tailor the process to your personal sprints, whether it is five days, a month, or longer. For the monthly sprints that I do, I tend to create an action plan at the start of each month based on a hypothesis I want to test, spend the rest of the month implementing the idea, and do a review at the end.

Below is the process you can use to start your personal sprint!

The 4 step process for personal sprints:

Idea

Choosing your goal idea is a two step process.

First, I usually have a bucket list of goals or things I want to concentrate on or get better at. Perhaps you already have some from your Project List Mindsweep, where you already filter the ones that are projects. If you’re having trouble, you can also refer to the Wheel of Life, as it covers 8 areas of life that you could generate a project in. The goal of the first step is to write down 3-5 goals.

Second, similar to work sprints, choose one that is the most relevant and has the highest ROI to your personal roadmap right now. A question you can ask yourself is: Where do I want to be in one month?

Build

Now it’s time to build an action plan. Viewing them through the lens of SMART goals (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound), what are the weekly deliverables you need to finish to hit your month-end goal?

The action plan acts as a blueprint of the steps needed to achieve the goal, for example, your current resources, your success metrics, your working sessions, etc. to make a sprint successful.

Launch

These is also some frontloading you can do to make launching your personal sprint as easy as possible. Think of how a product launch would have a lot of work to be done ahead of time like contacting the press, as well as debugging the program and perhaps even having a backup or emergency plan.

When personal sprints revolve around creating habits, sometimes I even start half a month before the actual month to acclimate. For example, for meditation, I tried to start practicing the month before so I could get used to it for when I had planned to do it every day the month after. By making these preparations, I could consistently set myself up for success for the start of each month.

Learn

The blue line that connects “learn” and “idea” on the the sprint cycle indicates where reflecting on your learnings would inform and strengthen your ideas over time, whether it’s making future ideas more feasible or relevant.

To track progress, you can ask yourself questions for weekly reviews such as: What went well? What didn’t? How can I improve for next week? To reflect more holistically, at the end of each month, you can write monthly progress reports for your goals. I’ve found it really helpful to see  how the chosen personal sprint fits into my bigger life vision as well as to consider any major changes I need to do for next time. (See monthly review is a systems check + weekly review is an operating system).

Results + impact of personal sprints

As a result of doing monthly projects for the last two years, I’ve been able to experience the following results:

Workplace productivity: Before, my afternoons at work would miraculously disappear (but be really spent on the endless tunnel of news). Now that I’ve started to create projects for myself, I’m able to hone in on the internal management of my digital and mental workspace, as well as more self-awareness around my energy levels so I can optimize tasks accordingly.

With the use of these “meta-organization skills,” I was able to pick up a variety of skills in Excel, design, and front-end development during my previous daytime job.

Business growth: Due to the last two years of trial and error with learning, when I decided to quit my job, I was able to create a learning bootcamp for myself around writing and instructional design complete with monthly goals and action plans.

As a result, I was able to launch two businesses at the beginning of this year around  those two areas: a content consultancy agency for EdTech companies and an online coaching + course called One Month Projects.

Life well-being: Right now, I’m as mentally and physically healthy as I’ve ever been.  Before, I would dabble in creative pursuits, and exercise here and there. Now, I have solid habits around meditation, writing and videography as well as the ability to do twenty push-ups (which I’m still super proud of given the fact that I couldn’t even lift up my own mattress before!). Keystone habits like eating healthy and sleeping regularly also naturally became a priority.

In addition, with personal sprints, I was also able to align my life and career. My designed career allows me to have the flexibility to spend time with those closest to me (friends and family) and spend time on things I truly care about (education and self-expression).

Conclusion

When I first started the year-long project in 2016, I was wandering amidst the fog of confusion. With each iteration, it became more clear which direction I wanted to go in and how to get there. The future of work is experimentation, and personal sprints are ongoing experiments to create the life you want.

Your Turn

Now the next step is: what will you choose to be your first personal sprint?

Whether you have a concrete idea or some rough sketches, check out this personal sprint project checklist to get started. Or take my course One Month Projects and I will take you through the process myself!

I’ll also be available at yunzhe@yunzhezhou.com if you have any thoughts or questions.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Just-In-Time PM #14: Personal Productivity Networks

In Part 13, we looked at the benefits of Component Thinking, which involves thinking of any product we are working on as made up of subcomponents, which can be evolved or swapped out over time.

Now I’d like to take a step back and consider the big picture of what it means to work in small packets.

The implicit model of human productivity that most people hold is a pipe with a fixed diameter. You can only push so many units of work through the pipe at any one time, so it’s better to dedicate your full bandwidth to one thing before moving on to something else. This is apparent when you hear people turn down new projects or commitments with the phrase “I don’t have the bandwidth.”

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Just-In-Time PM #13: Component Thinking

In Part 12, I described the shift from a just-in-case to a just-in-time philosophy of work, using late starts as an example of the benefits it offers.

But if nearly everything can be done later, and there are major benefits to doing so, one question comes to the forefront: what in the world should I do now?

As the constraints on how we work continue to fall away, and you can potentially do any kind of work from anywhere, at any time, the spectre of choice overload looms large. Every minute, you are faced with seemingly infinite options for what to pursue. Instead of being liberating, this possibility is often overwhelming.

Thankfully, there is a good answer for what to do at any given time, which is Principle #5: “Create subcomponents as early as possible.” I define a subcomponent as “an inherently valuable piece of a potential future project.”

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Just-In-Time PM #12: Just-In-Case to Just-In-Time

In Part XI, I introduced the concept of a “critical path” of tasks in a project, and the rationale for pushing tasks as late as possible on the timeline.

The late starts approach inspires a tremendous amount of resistance, especially from creative knowledge workers. It sounds an awful lot like taking control from individual employees, centralizing it in a central decision maker, and forcing people to finish everything at breakneck speed at the last minute.

It’s curious to note that the same people who tend to oppose late starts also pay homage to Toyota’s methods, loudly proclaiming their allegiance to books like The Lean Startup that were inspired by it. Yet no one mentions that early starts are the very antithesis of the just-in-time vision.

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Just-In-Time PM #11: Late Starts on the Critical Path

In Part X, I argued that digital knowledge work was fundamentally different than other kinds of work, because its structure, features, and purpose could be added or changed after it was built.

Principle #4 of Digital Knowledge Work is therefore to “Start everything as late as possible.”

This practice is known as “late starts,” and is taken directly from Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), a methodology developed by business management guru Eliyahu Goldratt, based on his Theory of Constraints.

CCPM proposes that attention and people are now the most important constraints in projects, instead of time, machines, or raw materials. It is one of the first PM methodologies to put human psychology at the center of its recommendations.

To understand why and how, we first need to understand the concept of “critical path.”

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Just-In-Time PM XI: Late Starts on the Critical Path

In Part X, I argued that digital knowledge work was fundamentally different than other kinds of work, because its structure, features, and purpose could be added or changed after it was built.

Principle #4 of Digital Knowledge Work is therefore to “Start everything as late as possible.”

This practice is known as “late starts,” and is taken directly from Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), a methodology developed by business management guru Eliyahu Goldratt, based on his Theory of Constraints.

CCPM proposes that attention and people are now the most important constraints in projects, instead of time, machines, or raw materials. It is one of the first PM methodologies to put human psychology at the center of its recommendations.

To understand why and how, we first need to understand the concept of “critical path.”

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

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.