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Which is why the work of improving the productivity of knowledge workers is really the work of guiding personal growth. It involves helping people understand themselves, get in touch with what they really want, and reframe limiting beliefs,
Organizations can become platforms for humans to reach their full potential, and in the process benefit from unleashing that immense source of energy.
In design, you create affordances when you want your user to do something, and anti-affordances when you want them to not do something. Thus you encourage desired behaviors by making them easier, and discourage undesired behaviors by making them harder.
We’ve reached the point where search is so good, effectively the whole document is made up of tags, and the cognitive load of meticulously tagging every note becomes truly unforgivable.
Reading @tiagoforte book and agree with this. im now using OneNote and see this
The real potential of a digital organizational system is to be a tool for capturing and systematically reminding you of past ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections. The heart of creativity and innovation is making spontaneous connections between seemingly unrelated things, and note-taking programs can, when used correctly, serve as a cognitive exoskeleton, both protecting us from the ravages of forgetfulness and amplifying our blows as we take on creative challenges.
Don’t worry about creating the perfect system, as if that exists. Just start capturing. Your mind, noticing you start to record and value your ideas, will respond in kind and start producing more.
When I look at successful people, I notice again and again that it is this — the ability to systematically capture and review and deploy their ideas, further strengthening their creative self-esteem, leading them to value and generate more ideas, and so on in a virtuous loop — that really sets them apart.
Not the original quantity or quality of ideas, not their brilliance from birth, not luck.
Source: I rely heavily in this post on the excellent paper Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity from the Free University of Brussels
We simply can’t handle the cognitive load of acquiring, learning, maintaining, and using multiple strategies and tools for multiple habits. In fact, trying to keep so many balls in the air aggravates the very problems we are trying to solve with our habits in the first place — stress, energy, mindfulness, willpower, presence.
Have you ever experienced such a “phase transition,” when a single core habit is disturbed and suddenly your whole life goes to pieces? Dependencies may lead to cascading failures… and a relatively small failure can lead to a catastrophic breakdown of the system
Opening this time capsule, I realized that past gratitude is an excellent predictor of future happiness.
What the brain does best is thinking. Evernote is most valuable not as a remembering tool, but as a thinking tool.
If a tool like Evernote doesn’t add much value performing low-level tasks like “remembering things,” and it’s incapable of performing high-level creative thinking, what is it good for? My proposal: Mid-level thinking that interfaces between low-level memory and high-level creativity, making the latter as easy, fast, and efficient as possible
What exactly are the conditions required for high-performance creativity, and how can we use Evernote (or other note-taking programs) to create these conditions?
“creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections…” Evernote’s ability to capture an extremely diverse range of media formats is a strong hint that this is what it should be used for. It prioritizes this kind of flexibility over speed (it’s not the fastest program around), collaboration (which it doesn’t support very well), and even stability (some features are buggy).
By externalizing your ideas in a variety of formats — text, sketches, photos, videos, documents, diagrams, webclips, hyperlinks — you create a system of distributed cognition across “artifacts” that can be moved, edited, rearranged, and combined. You don’t need “artificial intelligence” to do the thinking for you (the stupidity of even the most advanced personal assistant app is testament to this). You just need visual and spatial anchors for the most advanced supercomputer on the planet — your
I don’t feel is getting the attention it deserves: increasingly, it is not low-skilled and routine jobs that are being replaced, it is jobs requiring skill, advanced training, complexity, and even human contact.
“knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work — tasks that almost anyone, with a minimum of training, could accomplish.” If you work like a dumb machine, your job is easily replaced by a dumb machine. His solution is straightforward, if not exactly actionable: “We need to spend more time engaged in deep work — cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results.”
which kinds of jobs best survived the technological replacement of the last tech boom. What they found was interesting: it wasn’t jobs requiring advanced skills, or comprehensive knowledge, or years of training that fared best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”
building, maintaining, promoting, and defending a particular perspective.
First, don’t think quantity, think quality.
Instead, use resonance as your criteria. As in, “that resonates with me.” We know from neuroscience research that “emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking.” Often, when something “resonates” with us, it is our intuitive/right brain/System 1 mind telling us something is valuable before our analytical/left brain/System 2 mind even knows what’s going on. It’s no coincidence that the former is the same part that drives creativity, spontaneity, and self-expression.
What are we optimizing for?
In the creativity-driven, exponentially changing world we live in, the opportunity cost of missing a note because it’s “in the wrong box” is simply too high.
The conclusion I came to was that there is no substitute for the deeply creative act of seeing two puzzle pieces, and applying focused attention to intuit how they fit together. No system can directly replace this kind of thinking through “hard links,” so the only option is to make the process of creating “soft links” on the fly as easy as possible, thus conserving the amount of attention applied.
The value of a note corresponds to how much attention you’ve spent on
This in turn suggests an entirely new purpose for Evernote: A system for tracking how much attention has been paid to a given note
The way to balance these competing priorities is to: Progressively summarize the most important points of a source in small stages (compression), and… Preserve each of these stages in layers that can be peeled back on demand (comprehensiveness).
This not only is comforting in an insecure digital world, but allows me to do something otherwise unthinkable: share my most valuable notes.
In this system, I know that any source with notes attached is at Layer 1, any bolded parts indicate Layer 2, and any highlights indicate Layer 3. As long as I stay consistent with this much simpler and more natural system, I’ll know how much thinking has been done at any point in the future. Evernote gives us a second brain by allowing us to distribute our thinking across two brains, instead of one. It doesn’t matter that this second brain is nowhere near as smart as your original one — by
This is exactly what we’re using Evernote for: if you start acting like you are creative, your body and mind will respond, and you will be. Start acting like every idea you come across or come up with has the potential for brilliance, and that potential is more likely to be realized.
Knowing not only how to get things done, but what is worth doing in the first place.
In other words, don’t pursue goals; instead create systems that encourage attractors to emerge on their own. With such a system in place, the more chaotic your environment, the more randomness and uncertainty you are exposed to, the faster you will be propelled to interesting places, as long as you’re open to wherever that may lead. »
The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) also complains that they have “no time” for reading. The fact is, the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage in the world.
What has become exceedingly scarce (and therefore, valuable) is the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time.
I have a different approach: waiting periods. Every time I come across something I may want to read/watch, I’m totally allowed to. No limits! The only requirement is I have to save it to Pocket, and then choose to consume it at a later time.
There’s only one rule: NO READING OR WATCHING!
I regularly eliminate 1/3 of my list before reading. The post that looked SO INTERESTING when compared to that one task I’d been procrastinating on, in retrospect isn’t even something I care about. What I’m essentially doing is creating a buffer. Instead of pushing a new piece of info through from intake to processing to consumption without any scrutiny, I’m creating a pool of options drawn from a longer time period, which allows me to make decisions from a higher perspective, where those decisions are much better aligned with what truly matters to me.
As the inimitable Venkatesh Rao has written, we’re moving from a world of containers (companies, departments, semesters, packages, silos) to a world of streams (social networks, info feeds, main streets of thriving cities, Twitter). Problems and opportunities alike resist having neat little boxes drawn around them. There’s way too much to absorb.
When you’re immersed in a stream, the faster it goes, the more novel perspectives and ideas you’re exposed to. You develop an opposable mind — the ability to juggle and play around with different perspectives on any issue, instead of seeing it through one lens.
the only metric that will matter in your journey of personal growth will be ROL: Rate-of-Learning.
There’s another way to learn faster: assimilate and build on the ideas of others. Sure, you won’t understand every tacit lesson their experience gave them, but you can incorporate many of them, and in a fraction of the time it would take you to make every mistake yourself.
You are essentially developing a rapid placeholding ability, delegating each task you identify — do this, store this, read this, delete this — to a future time and place that is perfectly suited for that task.
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.
based on the tools at your disposal, the location you find yourself in, your energy level, the person you’re with, or other constraints. You only look at one of these lists at a time,
Mood-First Productivity. States of mind, or more colloquially, moods, are bubbling up to the surface as every external constraint on work falls away, one after the other.
showing that unusually creative people are characterized by “their ability to mix seemingly incompatible states of being depending on the task, whether it’s open attention with a focused drive, mindfulness with daydreaming, intuition with rationality, intense rebelliousness with respect for tradition, etc.” (also called “blends of emotions”). Affective engagement — the extent to which people are open to the full breadth and depth of their emotions — was found to be a better predictor of artistic creativity than IQ or intellectual engagement.
