How I Stay Productive
I take pride in my productivity. Outside of work I have gotten a lot done this year, as my personal OKRs have been verifying. I’ve created software, blog posts, short stories, traveled, read over 140 books, and spent quality time with friends.
So I figured I’d write up a short blog post today on my current productivity system. Maybe in a year this will change, but this has been working well for me so far.
Learning
Learning is critical to doing good work. It’s hard to understand the world on your own, and it’s valuable to listen to others and make connections between different ideas and sources.
I have a lot of ways of doing this, but the main way is just to read a lot. Feedly is a great tool for doing this, allowing me to collect articles from hundreds of different sources including email newsletters. I follow a lot of blogs and news sources. And unlike algorithmic newsfeeds, I can be sure that I’m not missing anything.
Articles that I find from other sources, such as those people recommend to me, I can throw into Instapaper for reading later. In order to make sure I’m staying up-to-date on these articles, I created a service called Evening Discourse which is available for you to use as well. It pulls your unread Instapaper articles and converts them to a podcast feed using text-to-speech which can be imported into any podcast app like PocketCasts.
I do read books as well, as many as I can. I have a Kindle and try to spend time reading very night before I go to sleep. I’ve been tracking my books on Goodreads.
When I’m not at home, I still want to do some reading. I’ve downloaded ReadEra on my phone and even paid for the premium version. It’s a great tool that supports the many eBooks I’ve collected over time, in a variety of different formats. I can add highlights and comments as I’m reading. I regularly use its audio playback throughout the day, turning it into a makeshift audiobook.
These book highlights, Instapaper annotations, and more all get placed into Obsidian. My vault has grown larger over time with a variety of different content. I’ve also cleared out my Twitter bookmarks and sorted them into different files to better keep track of them.
Doing
Once you’ve learned from a lot of people, you’re able to synthesize that into something new. Obsidian has been useful in bringing together a lot of this data, allowing me to make connections between ideas.
I’ve been using Google Tasks to manage things to do every day, with a primary list and a backup list. (I also have a few other lists for things like Shopping.) I like Google Tasks for its simplicity, as it works great on my phone and offline. Things sync when it reconnects. So I can easily add tasks wherever I am in a few seconds, even if I have an idea in the middle of the night.
I’ve used the Google Tasks API to create a custom app called Ethereal Tasks which can organize tasks without a lot of metadata or form-filling. This lets me spend more of my time actually doing things.
Over the last year, I’ve been moving away from Digital Bureaucracy and towards Digital Zen. I think too often we can get stuck doomscrolling or into some other loop where our phones make our lives worse. They are tools, but tools can easily get misused. And some tools are not right for the task at hand.
I’ve been trying to not necessarily stop using social media and stop using my phone, but have a healthier relationship. I’ve been trying to make sure that what I’m doing has value, in even the flimsiest of definitions. Our phones should be used to enrich our lives, but not replace them. Using it to connect with others in real life rather than get sucked in has been great for my well-being.
Productivity for the year
I’m fairly satisfied with my processes right now. I have managed to accomplish a lot in the last year.
In the next year I want to spend more time looking at how to use AI to further these goals. The chatbots are neat, and could be useful. Though there are also examples where you can develop an unhealthy connection to chatting with something that isn’t real. As Jeremiah wrote in Infinite Scroll, you need to do more in life than just passively consume content all day. You need to do something.
I want to explore ways for language models to make my life easier, more human, so that I can spend more time enjoying life rather than more time using my phone. Right now I’ve been thinking a bit about data types standardized by schema.org. Could I use AI to convert unstructured data to these types as the input to deterministic workflows?
For example, can it read my email and extract an upcoming sale to a SaleEvent automatically? Can it intelligently determine the dates of the sale, so the email can be archived as soon as it expires? Can I take a photo of a flyer and have it create an event on my calendar? Can I have it scrape my Goodreads to-read and library checkout lists, so that when I return one book it automatically places a hold on the next?
Whatever I manage to do, I’ll be sure to write regular blog posts about my progress.
