Tag: productivity

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Review

“Deep Work”

Cal Newport

I’m of a thoroughly mixed opinion about this book. It’s a mix of good examples and aged-like-milk references, useful thought technologies and toxic productivity. Many of the best ideas are things I already do, and have been doing for quite a while—but I suspect they trace back to this book, as filtered through some of the podcasts I was listening to around the time the book came out.

To try to pull out the most useful pieces:

  • Deep work, intense uninterrupted focus, is the productive part of the knowledge worker’s day. Shallow work—checking email, going to meetings, responding to Slack messages—will expand to fill as much space as you let it, and is more about performing productivity than actually producing value.
  • Focusing on doing more deep work than shallow can improve your career, productivity, et cetera et cetera. Take as a given that that’s a goal; the book explains why, but many of the examples are where those “aged-like-milk references” come in.
  • A few techniques for doing this:
    • Embrace boredom and practice the skill of not picking up your phone/going online whenever you feel like it. This is “calisthenics for the mind.”
    • Have a fixed productivity schedule. Make a hard line that you’re done with work at (suggested time) 5:30pm, and don’t even touch your work computer/phone after that. Now, backsolve how you spend the rest of your work hours to make that possible.
    • Consider simply… not answering emails. If you do answer an email, don’t jot out a quick response, drop a tactical nuke of focused response—basically, try to accomplish a week’s worth of back-and-forth in a single, cringe-inducingly-over-written email. It’ll save you time in the long run.
    • Try block scheduling! At the start of the day, fill out every single minute of your calendar with things you’ll be doing. It’s okay if your estimates are wrong, and if you’re doing the Deep Work Thing, just ignore the block scheduled things, go back and rebuild the schedule once the Deep Work Thing naturally ends.1

I’m not going to pretend that this is a 100% complete summary of the book, but I do think I’ve hit the key points here. Even knowing—and doing—most of this already, I still found it useful to read: it made me focus on these thought technologies, and re-evaluate my use of some of them.2

One last fun thought I had while reading: he’s got a description of a hub-and-spokes model for office design. The hub is a common shared space, room for those Steve Jobs-ian ‘serendipitous moments’ of collaboration. The spokes are individual office, ideally soundproofed, to which one can retreat for focused deep work sessions. And I thought about that, and thought about the current3 vogue of combining hybrid in-office/remote work schedules and cubicle-farms, and wondered: have companies accidentally arrived at this hub-and-spokes model, on the scale of the week? The hub is the office, a cubicle or open-plan hellscape, and the spokes are the home office? That sure is a cost-efficient way to do it. Insidious.

Anyhow, I did wind up enjoying the read, and thought it was a useful consolidation of a bunch of helpful techniques, so I’m quite comfortable recommending it. Give it a read.4

  1. Protip: any given calendar software will let you have multiple calendars, and these can often be color-coded. My work calendar has the actual Scheduled Things I Must Do in red, and I do the block scheduling in blue, so I can see at a glance if that upcoming event is a thing I actually need to interrupt my flow to do, or if I can ignore it. ↩
  2. I’ve got some thoughts about adjusting my email and Slack usage, for one. I may write myself a little utility to just quit out of both those apps outside of designated Communication Times. We’ll see. ↩
  3. As of this writing – who knows, maybe by the time this scheduled post goes up, the style will have changed! ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Articles Education Tools

Productivity and Organization

Over time I’ve acquired a reputation for being an organized (and, presumably, productive) person; occasionally, people ask me for tips.

Be as efficient as you can.

In the interest of following my own tips, I’m writing this up as a blog post so I have something I can quickly send to folks when they ask. Automate things where you can; if you’ve got the time to learn it, Workflow is a wonderful tool.1 I’ve got a good chunk of my morning routine compressed into pressing a single button on my phone and, depending on how complex my calendar is for the day, answering a question or two.

Don’t trust your brain to remember things

The human brain is a wonderful machine! Unfortunately, it’s terrible at remembering things, but also convinced that isn’t the case. The good news is, we invented writing, and then computers, both of which make it much easier to remember things. So don’t just put stuff in your head and assume it’ll stay there; it doesn’t matter what you use, but have somewhere permanent that you can put stuff. Depending on what you prefer, you can use a planner or notebook, or go all digital like I have. Personally, I use a combination of the system-default Calendar app, syncing through Google Calendar, with Drafts 42 as my “writing thoughts down in the middle of the night” app, Day One as a journal, and Ulysses for any longer-form writing or note-taking.3

Have a to-do list

Technically speaking, this is an extension of the above, but don’t trust yourself to remember things you have to do in a day. If they’re at a specific time or meeting with someone, they go in your calendar; otherwise, they go on the to-do list. Again, this can be on paper if that’s your style, but if you’re a big ol’ tech nerd, you’ve got a bounty of options. The built-in Reminders app is… there, and it’s not great, but it’s free and meets the bare minimum of functionality. Personally, I’m a big fan of Things 3,4 but Omnifocus is also a big name in the field, if (in my opinion) over-complicated. That said, task management apps like that are a huge market on the iOS and macOS app stores, as well as just online, so you should be able to find something you like.
Once you’ve started using it, I recommend the “vaguely Getting Things Done” style, which consists of “write stuff down as soon as you think of it, and file it away in the proper place when you’ve got time.” The important thing is to not go “oh, I’ll remember that later,” because there’s a really good chance you won’t.

Figure out what you’re spending your time on

You know that feeling like you’ve wasted a whole day? That’s stupid, but it’s also hard to convince your brain you’ve been productive if you don’t actually know what you’ve been spending your time on. Having a to-do list helps with this; you can look at your list for the day and see all the things you’ve checked off.5 Beyond that, you may want to try time tracking; I’m a fan of toggl and use it all the time. I keep the website pinned in a tab on my laptop, and rather than use their app, I’ve got some Workflows built that interact with their web API.6 It works pretty well for me; I know what I’m spending time on, and I can also use it for some very accurate billing, should I need to.

Clean up

Finally, staying organized is not only helpful for quickly finding things, it also just tends to make you feel better about everything. Take time when you can to organize your work and living spaces. If you’re currently in college, you’ve probably got ten thousand pages of various papers drifting around; next time it’s time to buy textbooks, I recommend going digital (it’s slightly cheaper, and then you only have to carry around your laptop/tablet, which you were probably gonna be carrying anyways, and you can search in your books, which is quite helpful). For the zillions of pages of handouts you get, invest in a scanner that can do duplex scanning and a recycle bin; it’s amazing how much space you can save by getting rid of all the papers.7 Once you’ve got things digitized (or, preferably, as you get them digitized), come up with a neat organizational system and stick to it. For school stuff, semester/term lines are a nice dividing line; if you’re doing the whole ‘adult life’ thing, the tax year is a good one.8

I’m going to call it done there. If you skipped to the end, the single most important thing I’d like you to get from this is brains are bad at remembering things; write stuff down. That’s my number one tip, so if you only take one thing from this, that’d be it.
If you’ve got any questions, I’ve recently brought back the ability for people to leave comments, so go ahead and do that.9 And hey, maybe I’ll do more posts like this, I enjoy doing the writing, and it’s fun to be able to support the various apps I use.10

  1. In September 2018, or thereabouts, it’s going to disappear and be replaced by Shortcuts, but from what we’ve seen in public betas, Shortcuts has the same functionality, some new features, and a new coat of paint, so if that link doesn’t work, just search the App Store for ‘Shortcuts.’ ↩
  2. Drafts 5 has been out and received very good reviews for its automation capabilities, but all I really want from the app is a dark color scheme and the ability to open directly into a new document, so the old version works for me. ↩
  3. That link is to Ulysses’ iOS app, but thanks to their subscription system, you pay for it on one platform and get it on iPad and Mac as well; mostly I use it on the Mac, but it’s nice to have it available wherever. ↩
  4. That’s their macOS app; they’ve also got separate iPhone and iPad apps. ↩
  5. This is why I’ve got Things set up not to sweep things away as soon as I check them off, but to leave them there until the end of the day. If I look at my list and it’s empty, nothing to do and looking like I’ve done nothing, the “oh god I wasted the whole day” feeling gets so much worse. ↩
  6. If you’d like to know more about those, leave something in the comments that I’ve just remembered I opened back up. ↩
  7. You don’t necessarily need to do what I did, which was a roughly five-year-long process of clearing out every paper I own, but then, you’re hopefully less of a pack-rat than I was, too. ↩
  8. Oh, and don’t leave those files in a single place; the nice thing about being digital is that it’s easy to make copies, and when you’ve got copies, you don’t have to worry that you’ll lose the original. These days, I throw all the current stuff into iCloud Drive, but I used to use Dropbox; older things get moved from whichever cloud to an external hard drive that’s backed up with Backblaze. ↩
  9. It’s one of the only ways to get in touch with me. Bonus productivity tip, for those of you reading the footnotes: social media sucks, stop using it. ↩
  10. Shameless self promotion: as an app developer, I know how danged hard it can be to actually make a living from the App Store. Support the people making the stuff you use. ↩