Overview: Personal Productivity

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:

• each system has been painstakingly honed by the author for the author...
• ... but you're not the author, and - unfortunately - what works for them won't necessarily work for you
• moreover, trying to reverse engineer someone else's finely tuned system risks breaking it apart.

Personal Productivity Framework

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:

• time management: an “ideal day” ensures you work in synch with your brain’s ability to focus and ringfence your day’s Most Important Task, and carves out time for daily and weekly routines to support ..
• task management, which borrows liberally from Getting Things Done (GTD) and integrates it with …
• knowledge management: a content pipeline for managing everything from random thoughts to published content, and ensuring you get the most out of what you read.

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.