Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1

by Tiago Forte

I believe design is very close to the core of what it means to be human.

pick and choose what you capture very carefully. Think of Evernote as a Cliff’s Notes to everything valuable that you’ve learned in the past — it should include only the key points, not every single detail. Like a cheat sheet for life, but you get somewhere between 60 MB and 10 GB per month, instead of just a 3 x 5" notecard.

use resonance as your criteria. As in, “that resonates with me.” We know from neuroscience research that “emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking.”

There’s a reason we want to keep all these “layers” within a single note, by the way, instead of, say, creating a master note containing “key points” from various sources: often, the keywords you’ll search for won’t actually be in the “best parts” you’ve highlighted.

A profound quote on productivity very often won’t actually contain the word “productivity.” But the surrounding text is much more likely to contain these “meta-descriptive” words; thus, every word in the entire document serves as “tags” that increase the likelihood of turning it up.

“I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t quite know what problems are worth working on… He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. … [T]here is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.”

In order to consume good ideas, first you have to consume many ideas. This is the fundamental flaw in the “information diet” advice from some productivity experts: strong filters work best on a larger initial flow. Using your friends as your primary filter for new ideas ensures you remain the dumbest person in the room, and contribute nothing to the conversation.

Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the notion or experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.

It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Let’s turn back the tide and strip email down to its original function, the only one that it does better than any other tool: collecting new inputs. That’s it. Every other function is much more effectively handled by one of four purpose-built productivity apps, in the same way that our fictional handyman could have benefited from a to do list, an agenda, a filing cabinet, a magazine rack, and a trash can.

Your email inbox is someone else’s To Do list.

Every conceivable email you receive can be handled by just 4 downstream systems: a digital calendar, a task manager, a reference app, and a read later app.

There are a lot of benefits to using a digital task manager, but for One-Touch purposes, there is one single most important feature: the program’s ability to capture and link back to email-based tasks.

There must be an easy way of forwarding something from your email inbox directly to your Reference app. Evernote, for example, generates a custom “Add to Evernote” email address. Forwarding an email to this address automatically saves its contents and attachments in the app.

Read Later apps allow you to save online content (web pages, articles, blog posts, videos) for later reading or watching. You use it like a mobile magazine rack — a holding area for non-urgent things you want to read/watch/review at some point, but don’t need to take timely action on (in which case it would go into your task manager) or aren’t sure you want to keep (in which case it would go into a reference app).

We need to create the option (but not the obligation), of scaling down this cutoff to something closer to the 10-Second Rule, processing hundreds of emails within 15 or 20 minutes when necessary, so that you can quickly get down to real work without worrying about a ticking time bomb in your inbox.

As Donella Meadows writes, positive feedback loops are sources of growth and explosion, but also sources of erosion and collapse. A system with an unchecked positive feedback loop will ultimately destroy itself — thus we’re now seeing the demands of 24/7 connectivity encroaching on our fundamental biological and neurochemical limits.

That is our real goal — lowering our reactivity is an end in itself, because anything that forces you to react controls you.

You will start to understand that a red High Priority label is just a theory — someone else’s theory about the meaning of an action and its relationship to a goal.

I will argue that the fundamental driver of creative work today is not values, goals, or processes, but unique states of mind.

My favorite alien race is The Festival from Charles Stross’ sci-fi novel Singularity Sky. It is a civilization evolved thousands of years beyond our own, for whom space and time and matter are mere playthings. Having long ago outgrown the drudgery of science and progress, they use their godlike powers to roam the universe in a carnivalesque menagerie of spaceships, partying through each galaxy in search of intelligent life.

States of mind drastically influence the amount of energy it takes to complete a given task, which gives them leverage. When you’re in Errand Mode, running an additional errand not only doesn’t take much extra energy, it actually increases your energy as you feel the delicious alignment of necessity with inertia.

My point here is that I believe states of mind are not just cool trips, but concrete competitive assets. The more states you have access to, and the better you are at juggling them from situation to situation, the more you will be able to leverage intellectual knowledge with more-difficult-to-Google tacit knowledge.

For me personally, giving states of mind their due has helped me understand how misfortunes, undesired circumstances, and mid-life crises can become the seeds of great strengths: people avoid these things so aggressively that the states of mind they impart are rare, and valuable.

This excellent paper on “Self-Organization in Communicating Groups” by Francis Heylighen at the Free University of Brussels (which I’ll be borrowing from liberally) describes the four requirements for any group of independent “agents” to reach a goal. I

Or as Craig Mod more eloquently says, “To return to a book is to return not just to the text but also to a past self. We are embedded in our libraries. To reread is to remember who we once were, which can be equal parts scary and intoxicating.”

Joseph Campbell: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life,…[but] I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of life, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

When you feel resistance to flossing even one tooth (which will inevitably happen), you have to come to terms with the reality that the friction is not between you and the world. It is between your conflicting motives.

Or consider the ego depletion vs. non-depletion debate, which has recently been in the news. Voluminous research has shown that willpower is like a muscle — using it too much makes it tired, leading to poor performance and poor choices. Equally voluminous research indicates that willpower is unlimited, or actually increases with use, or depends on your beliefs about the nature of willpower.

But my favorite model is that willpower is a story. People do what they enjoy, and then narrativize it as self-discipline after the fact. When we see someone with high performance we desire, we extrapolate from the immense amount of effort it takes for us to perform even at a low level, and conclude that if they perform at 10x our level, it must require 10x the willpower. But this ignores the critical fact that they enjoy doing it. It doesn’t take willpower for a hard-core runner to get up at 5 in the morning. It takes willpower for them not to. The hard truth is that no one really does anything they don’t enjoy for long. At most, they focus their efforts on finding the elusive intersection between what they enjoy and what they must do.

You can’t even understand an already existing emergent pattern by analyzing its components — because it is more than the sum of its parts, disassembling the parts will not reveal the essence, the “more.” Thus the pointlessness of all the books and websites chronicling the habits of successful people in tedious detail: success is an emergent pattern of emergent patterns, even more resistant to imitation.

They are two sides to the same coin — you need self-efficacy to believe you can do it, but you equally need self-compassion to be ok when you don’t.

the more I think about it, the more I suspect compassion is the far more radical and important side.

the conclusion that project creator Matt Killingworth came to after analyzing many thousands of participants’ data (as told on this NPR podcast) especially intriguing and personally relevant: the single factor with the highest correlation with unhappiness across the entire study was mind-wandering. The more someone had their mind on something other than what they were doing, regardless of whether they were thinking about something more pleasant or less pleasant than what they were doing, the more unhappy they were likely to be both while mind-wandering and in general. This is powerful evidence for the importance of what crunchy types would call “presence.” It’s also difficult to imagine how such a conclusion could be reached without random sampling via mobile devices.

When it comes to individual self-experimentation, the Hawthorne Effect is turned on its head: who cares if you change your behavior only because you know you’re being watched, when watching yourself continuously is the whole point?

Discrete experiments give you more attempts by turning the fundamental attribution error to your advantage: containing failure to a particular experiment, while taking general credit for successes. Experiments do this by increasing the number of ways to win, while reducing the number of ways to lose. Experiments cannot fail — they can only produce results. At worst, the null hypothesis is confirmed, helping you narrow down the solution space. Either way, you learn something, making your next try more likely to succeed. By treating changes as situational and temporary, and holding your character constant, you mitigate permanent damage to it. Instead of tying a single habit to a single goal — where the failure of the habit is interpreted as the impossibility of the goal — you identify multiple routes. If one doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

I often recommend “habit cycling”: trying one new habit per month, on a regular schedule. Start on the first of the month, even if you feel unprepared. Especially if you feel unprepared, since your expectations will be lower. It can be as easy as trying drinking a glass of lemon water each morning (one of my personal favorites), or as big as starting a new exercise routine. The point is to avoid analysis paralysis and lower the stakes by making new experiments just part of the routine, not some pivotal crossroads. I recommend stopping the habit after 30 days, even if, especially if, it’s going well. Take a few days off and reflect on what you learned, why it worked or didn’t, and what you want to change going forward.

The reason? It is a terrible feeling to fail, and not know why. But in some ways it’s even worse to succeed, and not know why. Was this a fluke, or did you just uncover a fundamental new truth about yourself? Su...

Nearly every science-fiction novel seems to agree on one thing: in the future, work will be indistinguishable from art.

what I believe are the two pillars of self-knowledge when it comes to productivity: meta-skills and macro-laws.

The most extensive and explicit example of personal macro-laws I know of is Buster Benson’s wonderful Book of Beliefs. He lists his metabeliefs, perceptions, opinions, and predictions in the form of an annually updated, open-source Github repository.