Embarking on the journey to construct your personal productivity stack? Let's delve into the process, exploring the tools, techniques, and strategies that can help you create a system tailored to your unique needs and work style.
From the Dawn of Email to the Rise of Personal Dashboards
All great technologies begin as blessings… but end up expanding so wildly that they become a curse
- Each wave of technology does legitimately solve a new problem from the previous wave
- If harnessed correctly, technology can move us closer to our goals: the experiences and feelings we want more of
Notetaking Apps: Your Own, Personally Curated Solution to Information Overwhelm
Digital notetaking apps like Evernote, Bear, and Simplenote rose to meet the demand for easily capturing notes from anywhere
- They offered incredible speed and flexibility compared to traditional office documents and databases
- However, over the last few years, the wheel of history has turned once again
- The new generation of tools takes over certain jobs, but not others
- Notettaking apps are ill-suited to the way we need to track and organize our knowledge today
Personal Dashboards: a Just-in-Time Springboard to Knowledgeable Action
Personal dashboards are a new term for higher-order, more sophisticated documents than standard digital notes apps can manage
- They provide the big picture, using your curated knowledge and data to guide action and help you make better decisions
- The main purpose of a dashboard is to facilitate fast, informed decisions, but there is also a need for accurate and up-to-date information at the same time
- Dashboards proactively inform the actions you take every day, and they have to be dynamic and responsive to changing needs
- There is no right way to present information, it depends on the person and their needs at the moment
How to Stop Using Email as a Task Manager and Everything Inbox
Email started out as a blessing, but over time the management of emails grew to consume so many of our waking hours that it now feels like a curse
- Automobiles seemed miraculous, until they started crowding the highways and blackening the skies (this is called a Progress Trap).
How to Craft Your Personal Productivity Stack
Each new generation of productivity software adds a new layer on top, instead of completely displacing the ones that came before
- The correct response to these technological innovations is to wait until the dust has settled and it is clear what the new layer is and what it’s for
- Layering is about layering – if and when you find that one layer doesn’t meet your needs, then consider adding another layer to your repertoire
Task Managers: How to Get Your To-Dos Off Your Mind
Task overwhelm occurs when the actionable items in your list are crowded out by the non-urgent ones.
- When your ideas, list of someday-maybes, inspirations, and random learnings make it difficult to find the singular, next important action.
