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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.

Relevant resources

Thinking transparently in the ATmosphere
whtwnd.com

"This post was extracted from the draft of my December newsletter and published on Whitewind, demonstrating how a new array of apps on the ATmosphere - the ecosystem built with ATProto, Bluesky's protocol - could potentially usher in seamless decentralised collective intelligence."

Knowledge management, synthesis & communities for better policy (LinkedIn carousel)
www.linkedin.com

"I rarely work for the same client for more than a year or two - generally enough to help them figure out their strategy, pilot and demonstrate it, and set up the team to mainstream it. But I make an exception for the Joint Research Centre"A few slides, repurposed for LinkedIn, setting out "some of the key innovations underpinning t…

The best content I read over the summer (newsletter)
mailchi.mp

I hope you had a good summer. I stayed and worked from home, and got a lot done thanks to the mercifully fewer meetings. I also read a lot of good stuff, and published one piece. Here's a selection.

Cultivate your creativity to survive AI
mathewlowry.medium.com
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"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."

Personal Productivity Framework
mathewlowry.gumroad.com
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A quick to learn framework to build your own personal productivity system without falling into the "productivity porn" trap.

12/07/2024
How to respond to your managers when they ask "Can AI fix this?"
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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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!

JRC M365 strategy
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

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.

Helping PMO adopt SPO (and the rest of M365)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

How can a reasonably conservative corner of the European Commission adopt M365?

From Personal to Social Knowledge Graphs: a vision statement
medium.com
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I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

Integrate podcasts into your second brain with speech-to-text
mathewlowry.medium.com
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A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.

Proof of concept: AI-supported knowledge management
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

Post-Alpha Feature: AI-supported MyHub authoring toolkit
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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An innovative writing toolkit will further extend the productivity tools offered to MyHub editors.

Post-Alpha Feature: Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud
mathewlowry.medium.com
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What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

Don’t just Build a Second Brain: share (part of) it
medium.com
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I’m exploring how MyHub.ai could become a unique hybrid of personal publishing and productivity tools by launching a newsletter powered by Zettelkasten knowledge and idea management, all hosted on my Hub.

Integrating Zettelkasten Pages into MyHub.ai
medium.com
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I needed to review everything I had ever Hubbed relevant to surveillance capitalism, polarisation, social media and society... As I cast around for something interesting to say, I realised a MyHub.ai Service Page could help organise and clarify my thoughts: I would use it to create a Zettelkasten Permanent Note...While not a blog post, it is defin…

Planned: supporting your personal productivity
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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Behind the scenes, your Hub will help you extract the most value from the best content, rather than being drowned in a firehose of meh.

Refocusing a Community Platform
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

Don’t #DeleteFacebook. Take back control with digital minimalism
medium.com
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To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

Knowledge4Policy Medium Publication
medium.com
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Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018
medium.com
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“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.

Listen & Learn: how to absorb podcast knowledge
medium.com
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This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

Listen & Learn: how to absorb podcast knowledge (Top3Pods, September 2017)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

Why you need a Personal Content Strategy
medium.com
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Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

Psychology: One topic, three angles (Top3ics, Feb 2)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

What if you can’t quit social media, because you’re career does depend on it? (Topics, Nov 22)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Today I have just one Topic: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. This advice, from Professor Cal Newport in the New York Times, may seem counter-intuitive. Which is exactly the point.

Nurture your mind (Top3ics, Nov 18)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

How to Stop drowning in your Inbox
medium.com
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This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

Digital equivalents to dog-earing pages and underlining passages when reading on a PC or phone
medium.com

In response to The Power of Writing About the Things You Read, by Srinivas Rao: "Fortunately, there are loads of digital equivalents to dog-earing pages and underlining passages for when you’re reading on a PC or phone. My favourite tools and processess: ..."

My EuroComm2016 Rapido on the Future of Communications
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

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