There's so much out there written about personal productivity that it can be difficult to know where to start.
Most is what I call "productivity porn" - content created by and for people more interested in endlessly polishing and tweaking their "productivity stack" than actually using it. Some of the most successful content creators in this space, after obsessively developing highly sophisticated systems based around a particular combination of productivity tools, monetise it in the form of books and courses.
However there's a problem with this approach:
You're better off developing your own - the question is how. The answer is to use a Framework - a way of thinking about personal productivity that helps each person find their own system, meeting their specific needs and preferences.
A lot of the content curated below went into my own personal productivity system, from which I've distilled a personal productivity framework which divides productivity into three pillars, with each pillar supporting the other two:
I've written a fair bit about this myself (see what I think tagged #productivity), and recently boiled it all down to a short and inexpensive online course: Personal Productivity Framework.
"There are now several Obsidian plugins available that allow you to use local LLMs instead of a commercial LLM provider", so PKM explorer tries Copilot for Obsidian plugin on his Windows laptop, because this plugin "not only offers the possibility to have a question and answer dialogue ... but also lets you [index your vault]... you…
"The problem is not that AI is smarter than us, the problem is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for us to outsource our skills to AI... If we outsource our writing skills, we lose our writing ability... If we depend on AI to analyze information and make decisions, we lose our ability to think critically and analyze complex situations ours…
"Good tools can ... corral the daily deluge of research, interviews and half-formed thoughts into something coherent" - Westenberg's (Mac-focused) productivity stack consists of "Butter for drafting, Linear for managing projects and to-dos, and Readwise for wrangling research material".Reading up on her use of Readwise, in…
"I had just finished recording the final video of my personal productivity mini-course when I turned on the camera and ad-libbed from the heart. I was unprepared for what came out."
Really brilliant monologue on creativity and AI, putting the current moment in a historical context of industrialisation stretching back to the invention of the printing press."If we really could substitute for our labor with machines — ones that don’t pollute or create even more work — it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we all felt okay ab…
A quick to learn framework to build your own personal productivity system without falling into the "productivity porn" trap.
"NotebookLM is powered by Google’s latest Gemini language model which supports up to 1 million context window... [you can]:upload documents, create multiple notebooks based on specific topics, and query notes...up to 50 sources per notebook, with each source supporting up to 500,000 words...type questions in the search box, and the AI pulls r…
consilience is "the aspiration that the cross-pollination of ... perhaps initially unrelated snippets [of knowledge] can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs", but just downloading a notetaking app is not enough. "Folio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian... a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian’s…
"what causes the flow state, and what happens in the brain... a new study claims to have answers".There were 2 theories:"Hyperfocus... two brain networks unlock the flow state: the default mode network (DMN)... involved in things like daydreaming... spikes the most when we’re not engaged in any tasks" and "the executive co…
"Web search ... more like a rummage sale. Your chance of finding an item that addresses your specific issue... is pretty low. You’re not walking into a custom tailor. You’re in the thrift shop... seeing if you can put something together. Some sewing may be required."This, of course, "is mentally taxing", so either they skim, ad…
Copy paste this into your nearest Word document or enterprise chat window, replace <> with your organisation's name and <> with whatever tool it uses to manage its knowledge, and you're good to go!
"a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better", by Sublime.app founder Sari Azout.
Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI i…
Google's AI-powered assistant: "Duet AI is a powerful collaborator that can act as a coach, thought partner, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data... you must first have an eligible Google Workspace plan."Via this post on "creating the perfec…
Short video. Pretty mindblowing.
"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."
Is your organization more like a jellyfish or a flatworm?The author's "Jellyfish and Flatworm story has been remarkably effective at helping ... [executives] visualize the impact of AI on their customers, their products, and their employees... this story is about why Knowledge Representation (KR) must be the core of any cost-effective lo…
"despite the immense potential of LLMs, they come with a range of challenges... hallucinations, the high costs associated with training and scaling, the complexity of addressing and updating them, their inherent inconsistency, the difficulty of conducting audits and providing explanations, predominance of English language content... [they…
insights into the complex relationship between AI and knowledge work, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of AI's role in enhancing productivity and quality in different task domains - Harpa
Asks: could LLMs be used to "create tools that sift and summarize scientific evidence for policymaking... [for] knowledge brokers providing presidents, prime ministers, civil servants and politicians with up-to-date information on how science and technology intersects with societal issues... [who must] nimbly navigate ... millions of scientif…
How to use LLMs to solve "really hard problems"? The "AIdeas Collider" approach, piloted by Head of Innovation Design at MIT's Collective Intelligence Design Lab.
"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…
Borrowing heavily from an article "about social media platform saturation inspired by the craze to sign up on Threads (only to sign out a week later).", Alberto Romero does the same for generative AI to explain "why it isn’t worth getting generative AI fatigue.After providing a potted timeline of the release of the major LLMs for th…
An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.
"ChatGPT only looks at the past... [it's response] based on an “average” of everything already said on the issue. It’s pure reversion to the mean"
"AI-generated advice represents a huge shift"convenience: whereas a google search inundates you with results mixed with spam, splog and ads, "ChatGPT streamline this process... people choose convenience over almost anything else... [cf]Fogg’s behavior model: Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt". With AI, it's finally …
While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.
"“Document Search Chatbot” ... field common questions (FAQ’s) based on the content of several documents.... Azure Search to extract and rank key highlights from a set of text documents based on a user query. This user query and Azure Search results are then passed to OpenAI to be interpreted and formatted into a chat based response..."Wh…
" a step-by-step guide for building a document Q&A chatbot in an efficient way with llama-index and GPT API... ask the bot in natural language about your own documents/data... [see it] retrieving info from the documents and generating a response [1]... customer support, synthesizing user research, your personal knowledge management"K…
How can a reasonably conservative corner of the European Commission adopt M365?
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