Sunday, 9.05pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. – Warren Buffett
How many productivity systems have you tried? Sometimes I feel like I’ve tried all of them.
Each one’s strengths is also a weakness.
Here are some of the challenges I struggle with.
1. Notebook or loose leaf?
Notebooks are beautiful to work with but information, once captured, is stuck like a dinosaur in a tar pit.
You need to remember where things are and if you write a lot going back to book 3 when you’re working on book 8 to find a quote or paper summary can be trying.
Loose leaf sheets are easy to move and we can keep related information together but after a small amount of use becomes a nightmare to administer if you’re not on top of things.
It’s just easier to throw the pile away and start again.
Track everything or just the important stuff?
Do you list every action or hope that the world will remind you when something needs doing while you focus on the one or two things that you really have to do?
Losing track of tasks leads to problems. Sometimes they’re small things and can be fixed easily. Sometimes they’re bigger and customers get upset. Sometimes it’s missing your taxes and you’re then in trouble.
The danger with being on top of the small stuff is that at the end of the year you have nothing to show because all the little details were done but you had no time left to work on your big goals.
Analog or digital?
Do you go straight to the computer or work offline first?
Are computers for data analysis and text editing while paper is for thinking and first drafts or are you just making it slower to get your work done?
This is a difficult one.
Computers make things faster. But it also makes our lives slower.
I spend too much time scrolling and not enough time thinking and reading.
When I was younger, I could read five books in a day. These days I have to wait for holidays or eke out a few tens of pages at a time.
Is that progress?
I’m not convinced. We’re so afraid of missing out, about not being visible, that we give away our time for free – the one non-renewable resource that you can’t produce more of.
End note
We could have a long chat about just these three topics.
People have been successful using different methods. Richard Branson and his notebooks. David Allen favoured loose leaf sheets. Some people have many lists. Others have none.
The tools you have aren’t going to do the work for you.
They’re there to support you in doing the work.
So the only person that can decide if a tool is good or bad is you, by using it in action.
The test is whether using the tool helps you produce the outputs you want to create. Then you can decide whether to keep it or not.
What really matters is that every day you take another step into the future.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 