A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you fromthe burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If youcan trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everythingtogether in your head and you can start focusing on what isimportant:

just speaking instead of having to type with my with my fingers is that i can 00:02:11 kind of think out loud a little bit more and get more information and i sometimes find i generate more insights being able to speak versus uh type things so i find that really useful

Exposing myself to addictive interactions trained me to self-interrupt - whenever I encountered a difficult decision or a tricky bug I would find myself switching to something easier and more immediately rewarding. Making progress on hard problems is only possible if I don't allow those habits to be reinforced.

Organizations as varied as Y Combinator, MIT’s Radiation Lab, and ARPA have astonishing track records in catalyzing progress far beyond their confines.

In a recent paper, Pierre Azoulay and co-authors concluded that Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s long-term grants to high-potential scientists made those scientists 96 percent more likely to produce breakthrough work. If this finding is borne out, it suggests that present funding mechanisms are likely to be far from optimal, in part because they do not focus enough on research autonomy and risk taking.

Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.

Productivity is a virtue only to the person you're producing for.

“What is your definition of success?” I hemmed and hawed a bit, until I finally said, “I suppose success is your days looking the way you want them to look.”

It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.

Have an external to-do system.

Set your focus: define the problem or area you will be looking at. It can be as narrow as a specific annoyance you face in your life, and as broad as a whole industry, but you can’t just have a vague brainstorm with no predefined focus.Gather new material: give yourself—and the team if it’s a group brainstorm—time to familiarise yourself with the area of focus. This means reading articles, watching videos, etc. If it’s a group brainstorm, this step should ideally happen before the session to give time to your brain to incubate these ideas, but if not you can block a bit of time at the beginning of the session.Generate ideas: remember, quantity over quality. Use the three creative modes presented earlier. Combinational to mix old ideas together, exploratory to investigate new potential ideas within the rules of a given space, transformational to break the rules and come up with radical ideas.Test your ideas: this is where most brainstorming sessions fail to take the one extra but necessary step. Instead of selecting your ideas on the spot, you need to test them in the real world. Select the few most promising candidates, and see how your audience reacts. For a book, write a blog post. For an app, build a landing page or a quick MVP.Select and refine your ideas: use the feedback your receive to adapt or drop your ideas. If a particular problem or area keeps on coming back in the feedback… Go back to step 1.

Remember the principles laid out earlier: quantity versus quality, building a creative routine, and using all three creative modes to ensure you don’t leave any ideas off the table.

Transformational creativity: this method takes things even further. Instead of exploring a space and questioning its rules, transformational creativity is about ignoring fundamental rules to come up with potentially impossible but highly creative ideas.

Exploratory creativity: in academia, exploratory creativity is defined as “the process of searching an area of conceptual space governed by certain rules.” This means that you try to generate new ideas within a given space, taking into account its specific rules

Combinational creativity: we are often seeking original ideas, when in reality most creative concepts are a combination of old ideas. First, collect as many old ideas as possible. This can be done by reading science fiction or just taking notes every time you hear a commonplace idea in a conversation. Then, let these old ideas incubate for a while. Yes, there’s no second step. Let your brain do the work.

Whether your goal is to write a book, become a better illustrator, or build an app, don’t leave creativity to random bursts of inspiration. Block some time every day or every week to generate new ideas and new work. I personally use mindframing to ensure my daily creative output aligns with my bigger goals, but as long as you flex your creative muscle consistently, you will be on your way to do your best creative work.

It may sound counterintuitive, but science shows that quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity. In simpler terms, this means that the more ideas and work you produce, the more creative they will be.

Holiday’s is project-based, or bucket-based.

Here's a framing I like from Gary Bernhardt (not set off in a quote block since this entire section, another than this sentence, is his). People tend to fixate on a single granularity of analysis when talking about efficiency. E.g., "thinking is the most important part so don't worry about typing speed". If we step back, the response to that is "efficiency exists at every point on the continuum from year-by-year strategy all the way down to millisecond-by-millisecond keystrokes". I think it's safe to assume that gains at the larger scale will have the biggest impact. But as we go to finer granularity, it's not obvious where the ROI drops off. Some examples, moving from coarse to fine: The macro point that you started with is: programming isn't just thinking; it's thinking plus tactical activities like editing code. Editing faster means more time for thinking. But editing code costs more than just the time spent typing! Programming is highly dependent on short-term memory. Every pause to edit is a distraction where you can forget the details that you're juggling. Slower editing effectively weakens your short-term memory, which reduces effectiveness. But editing code isn't just hitting keys! It's hitting keys plus the editor commands that those keys invoke. A more efficient editor can dramatically increase effective code editing speed, even if you type at the same WPM as before. But each editor command doesn't exist in a vacuum! There are often many ways to make the same edit. A Vim beginner might type "hhhhxxxxxxxx" when "bdw" is more efficient. An advanced Vim user might use "bdw", not realizing that it's slower than "diw" despite having the same number of keystrokes. (In QWERTY keyboard layout, the former is all on the left hand, whereas the latter alternates left-right-left hands. At 140 WPM, you're typing around 14 keystrokes per second, so each finger only has 70 ms to get into position and press the key. Alternating hands leaves more time for the next finger to get into position while the previous finger is mid-keypress.) We have to choose how deep to go when thinking about this. I think that there's clear ROI in thinking about 1-3, and in letting those inform both tool choice and practice. I don't think that (4) is worth a lot of thought. It seems like we naturally find "good enough" points there. But that also makes it a nice fence post to frame the others.

Another common reason for working on productivity is that mastery and/or generally being good at something seems satisfying for a lot of people. That's not one that resonates with me personally, but when I've asked other people about why they work on improving their skills, that seems to be a common motivation.

As with this post on reasons to measure, while this post is about practical reasons to improve productivity, the main reason I'm personally motivated to work on my own productivity isn't practical. The main reason is that I enjoy the process of getting better at things, whether that's some nerdy board game, a sport I have zero talent at that will never have any practical value to me, or work. For me, a secondary reason is that, given that my lifespan is finite, I want to allocate my time to things that I value, and increasing productivity allows me to do more of that, but that's not a thought i had until I was about 20, at which point I'd already been trying to improve at most things I spent significant time on for many years.

A specific example of something moving from one class of item to another in my work was this project on metrics analytics. There were a number of proposals on how to solve this problem. There was broad agreement that the problem was important with no dissenters, but the proposals were all the kinds of things you'd allocate a team to work on through multiple roadmap cycles. Getting a project that expensive off the ground requires a large amount of organizational buy-in, enough that many important problems don't get solved, including this one. But it turned out, if scoped properly and executed reasonably, the project was actually something a programmer could create an MVP of in a day, which takes no organizational buy-in to get off the ground. Instead of needing to get multiple directors and a VP to agree that the problem is among the org's most important problems, you just need a person who thinks the problem is worth solving.

Unlike most people who discuss this topic online, I've actually looked at where my time goes and a lot of it goes to things that are canonical examples of things that you shouldn't waste time improving because people don't spend much time doing them. An example of one of these, the most commonly cited bad-thing-to-optmize example that I've seen, is typing speed (when discussing this, people usually say that typing speed doesn't matter because more time is spent thinking than typing). But, when I look at where my time goes, a lot of it is spent typing.

It is commonly accepted, verging on a cliche, that you have no idea where your program spends time until you actually profile it, but the corollary that you also don't know where you spend your time until you've measured it is not nearly as accepted.

I'm not a naturally quick programmer. Learning to program was a real struggle for me and I was pretty slow at it for a long time (and I still am in aspects that I haven't practiced). My "one weird trick" is that I've explicitly worked on speeding up things that I do frequently and most people have not.

I spend a huge amount of time in front of a computer/laptop. I’d like to think that most of that time is reasonably productive, i.e.: I’m getting stuff done (as opposed to simply browsing Facebook/Reddit/Youtube etc). I feel it’s really important, therefore, for me to attempt to maximise the efficiency of the process. I don’t mean in the sense of “ensure that I don’t waste time on Facebook”, but more the sense of “I know what small action I want to accomplish at this moment, and I’d like for my computer to obey me as fast as possible

mill dam, attending a Baptist association and a public hanging.56 This general irregularity must be placed within the irregular cycle of the working week (and indeed of the working year) which provoked so much lament from moralists and mercantilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu

Build pathways between communal and private work. Too often, we celebrate one or the other, but thinking actually works best when it has the opporunity to be done both in private and alongside other people. Proximity and ease of movement between the two modes matters. If a person can work on ideas alone and privately for a little while, then easily bring those ideas to a group, then move back to the private space, and continue this cycle as necessary, the thinking will be better.

But despite this understanding, and the gains made more generally in promoting workplace diversity, prejudices keep the employment prospects for neurodiverse individuals shockingly low. The cost is personal — denying individuals the chance to do meaningful work — as well as social, sending individuals to the dole queue. It also means workplaces are failing to benefit from highly valuable employees, and missing the opportunity to become better organisations in the process.

draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked, “–” for what didn’t go so well, and “→” for what you plan to do next.

Improving our information diet is essential, not only to avoid getting distracted, but also to put our time to much better use and learn new things and skills instead.

more empathy for their future self, and that was related to a decrease in procrastination.” They realized that time wasn’t infinite. Future them was no longer a stranger but someone to be protected. To get us off our butts, it seems, we need to grapple with the finite nature of our time on Earth.

The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done.

districts won by Democrats account for 61 percent of America's gross domestic product, districts won by Republicans 38 percent.

Residents of districts won by Democrats generate 22% more output per worker, and have a 15% higher median household income.

Quick notes are perfect for capturing a thought on one device

You can take note in OneNote while on a phone call, quickly add check-boxes turning the notes into a to-do list.

and bullet journal for more modern take on commonplace books

The 8 Steps of Taking Smart Notes Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes: Make fleeting notes Make literature notes Make permanent notes Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Turn your notes into a rough draft Edit and proofread your manuscript He notes that Luhmann actually had two slip-boxes: the first was the “bibliographical” slip-box, which contained brief notes on the content of the literature he read along with a citation of the source; the second “main” slip-box contained the ideas and theories he developed based on those sources. Both were wooden boxes containing paper index cards.  Luhmann distinguished between three kinds of notes that went into his slip-boxes: fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes.  1. Make fleeting notes Fleeting notes are quick, informal notes on any thought or idea that pops into your mind. They don’t need to be highly organized, and in fact shouldn’t be. They are not meant to capture an idea in full detail, but serve more as reminders of what is in your head. 2. Make literature notes The second type of note is known as a “literature note.” As he read, Luhmann would write down on index cards the main points he didn’t want to forget or that he thought he could use in his own writing, with the bibliographic details on the back.  Ahrens offers four guidelines in creating literature notes: Be extremely selective in what you decide to keep Keep the overall note as short as possible Use your own words, instead of copying quotes verbatim Write down the bibliographic details on the source 3. Make permanent notes Permanent notes are the third type of note, and make up the long-term knowledge that give the slip-box its value. This step starts with looking through the first two kinds of notes that you’ve created: fleeting notes and literature notes. Ahrens recommends doing this about once a day, before you completely forget what they contain. As you go through them, think about how they relate to your research, current thinking, or interests. The goal is not just to collect ideas, but to develop arguments and discussions over time. If you need help jogging your memory, simply look at the existing topics in your slip-box, since it already contains only things that interest you.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you turn fleeting and literature notes into permanent notes: How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know? How can I combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by these new ideas? As answers to these questions come to mind, write down each new idea, comment, or thought on its own note. If writing on paper, only write on one side, so you can quickly review your notes without having to flip them over. Write these permanent notes as if you are writing for someone else. That is, use full sentences, disclose your sources, make explicit references, and try to be as precise and brief as possible.  Once this step is done, throw away (or delete) the fleeting notes from step one and file the literature notes from step two into your bibliographic slip-box. 4. Add your permanent notes to the slip-box It’s now time to add the permanent notes you’ve created to your slip-box. Do this by filing each note behind a related note (if it doesn’t relate to any existing notes, add it to the very end). Optionally, you can also: Add links to (and from) related notes Adding it to an “index” – a special kind of note that serves as a “table of contents” and entry point for an important topic, including a sorted collection of links on the topic Each of the above methods is a way of creating an internal pathway through your slip-box. Like hyperlinks on a website, they give you many ways to associate ideas with each other. By following the links, you encounter new and different perspectives than where you started. Luhmann wrote his notes with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript. More often than not, new notes would become part of existing strands of thought. He would add links to other notes both close by, and in distantly related fields. Rarely would a note stay in isolation. 5. Develop your topics, questions, and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box With so many standardized notes organized in a consistent format, you are now free to develop ideas in a “bottom up” way. See what is there, what is missing, and which questions arise. Look for gaps that you can fill through further reading. If and when needed, another special kind of note you can create is an “overview” note. These notes provide a “bird’s eye view” of a topic that has already been developed to such an extent that a big picture view is needed. Overview notes help to structure your thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step in the development of a manuscript. 6. Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Instead of coming up with a topic or thesis upfront, you can just look into your slip-box and look for what is most interesting. Your writing will be based on what you already have, not on an unfounded guess about what the literature you are about to read might contain. Follow the connections between notes and collect all the relevant notes on the topic you’ve found. 7. Turn your notes into a rough draft Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument. As you detect holes in your argument, fill them or change the argument. 8. Edit and proofread your manuscript From this point forward, all you have to do is refine your rough draft until it’s ready to be published. This process of creating notes and making connections shouldn’t be seen as merely maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process. Instead of figuratively searching our memories, we literally go through the slip-box and form concrete links. By working with actual notes, we ensure that our thinking is rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas, and verifiable references.

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Deloitte, a consultancy, reckons that the internal rate of return on in-house R&D at a dozen big drugs firms fell from 10% a decade ago to 2% in 2019—below their weighted-average cost of capital of 7%. The average cost to bring a drug to market has increased by two-thirds since 2010, to some $2bn. And the forecast for peak sales for each new drug has also fallen by half over that period

From an employers perspective, I believe there are many advantages:

We know we can't hold a lot of things in our mind at once. While you’re focusing on deep work, minimise the number of things in your mind. Don’t connect to everything else.

Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21% lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Now fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make? How did it fail? In other words, think of your main goal and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?” This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail.

If you don't control your schedule, it will control you.

Create a note by selecting some text and clicking the button

You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct.

Now, it may well be true that Apple, and The Times, and The Journal intend to add extensive tools that encourage the textual productivity of their apps. If that happens, I will be delighted. The iPad is only about two weeks old, after all, and it famously took Apple two years to introduce copy-and-paste to the iPhone OS.

Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

Anyone can apply these same methods on the job. Say you have someone in your company who is a masterly communicator, and you learn that he is going to give a talk to a unit that will be laying off workers. Sit down and write your own speech, and then compare his actual speech with what you wrote. Observe the reactions to his talk and imagine what the reactions would be to yours. Each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the level of an expert performer.• • •

We believe good tools lead to excellent creations.

Progress in a scientific field has never been a function of total effort.

“Being under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse,” Heinemeier Hansson added. “Having to worry about looking busy for the stats is the last thing we need to inflict on anyone right now.”

For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in productivity score is aggregated over a 28-day period.

But by default, reports also let managers drill down into data on individual employees, to find those who participate less in group chat conversations, send fewer emails, or fail to collaborate in shared documents.

Bringing this back to filtering, not only am I saving time and preserving focus by batch processing both the collection and the consumption of new content, I’m time-shifting the curation process to a time better suited for reading, and (most critically) removed from the temptations, stresses, and biopsychosocial hooks that first lured me in.I am always amazed by what happens: no matter how stringent I was in the original collecting, no matter how certain I was that this thing was worthwhile, 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 it becomes more clear what are specific functional jobs to be done, we see more specialized apps closely aligned with solving for that specific loop. And increasingly collaboration is built in natively to them. In fact, for many reasons collaboration being natively built into them may be one of the main driving forces behind the venture interest and success in these spaces.

To understand this is to understand that there is no distinction between productivity and collaboration. But we’re only now fully appreciating it.

Nine Changes I Made in the Shift from Busy to Productive

photographing their marginalia, markers, and books

I adhere precisely to The Bullet Journal System with no creative variations. No habit tracking, no elaborate designs or meticulously designed spreads. Does this make me a minimalist? No, I just use the system as it was intended. While social media loves artfully laid out spreads I use the system exactly as described in the website. Pencil to paper, usually in a basic notebook.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Neither ought anything to be collected whilst you are busied in reading; if by taking the pen in hand the thread of your reading be broken off, for that will make the reading both tedious and unpleasant.

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

Second, I have a not-very-well supported theory that’s paired with the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The behavior design implication of that book is that you need to speak to two systems of the brain. Speaking to the rational, Slow System is easy. Just lay out the facts.Speaking to the emotional Fast System is much harder, namely because it’s so hard to see or introspect on what’s going on in there. But if you accept that difficulty (and this is the part of my theory that feels like pop brain science), then you realize that you need to start looking for ways to rewire your emotional core.Then, having accepted that rewiring your emotions is part of most behavior design, I’ve started to notice things — like that most self-improvement advice is not very rational. That’s by design. A self-improvement book is mostly emotional rewiring. That is exactly why you need to read the entire book rather than cheating with a summarized version.

We have to know what to shoot for to simplify our lives. It means saying no over and over again to the unimportant things flying in our direction every day and remaining focused on saying yes to the few things that truly matter.

He simply mastered the art and practice of setting boundaries for himself.

Table 3. WBGT exposed levels in °C at different work intensities and rest/ work periods for an average worker with light clothing.

To be reliably able to focus on something, you need to be intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome.

The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be:<10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired.10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises.50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.

If you can't understand where it's coming from in the stack traces, please post screenshots or create reproducing sandboxes and we'll try to help. Most of these are probably coming from a few libraries, so the most productive thing to do is to reduce these cases and then file issues with those libraries.

The trick is to work at 85% capacity rather than 100%. It can be surprisingly challenging to take your effort down a notch and keep it there — especially right now when so many livelihoods feel precarious. But going full-throttle all the time actually works against you. When your mind is relaxed, you’re able to produce better, more thoughtful results.

How to Get into Flow States, Quickly

The dream of Slack is that they become the central nervous system for all of a company’s employees and apps. This is the view of a clean *separation* of productivity and collaboration. Have all your apps for productivity and then have a single app for coordinating everyone, with your apps also feeding notifications into this system. In this way, Slack would become a star. With every app revolving around it. Employees would work out of Slack, periodically moving to whichever app they were needed in, before returning to Slack. But productivity *isn’t* separate from collaboration. They are the two parts of the same loop of producing work. And if anything collaboration is in *service* of team productivity.

See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

Time management is more about a system that works and less about a tool or just a method

Why [[Tyler Cowen]] still responds to every [[Email]] and loves it. He finds time for this because of what he doesn’t do: he hardly watches [[TV]], **his social life is basically the same as his intellectual life **- his social life is geared towards thinking, discussing, exploring ideas. With no TV, you end up with a lot of [[time]]. #[[unproductive internet activities]] Isn’t [[email]] a low leverage use of his time? **He learns a lot from people that email him, and has filtered his audience so it’s mostly smart people. **He does this by being "sufficiently weird". He’s not even sure it’s highly leveraged. He met [[Patrick Collison]] that way. He doesn’t care if it’s highly leveraged if he’s learning from it. #[[Audience Building]]