I am continuing to use my life daybook, though it continues to be more diary-like than I would like. I envision this thing to work like an engineering daybook where I enter problems I’ve encountered and detail their solutions and lessons learned. So, there’s a reminder to myself.
I’ve got a theoretical, if not practical, handle on my personal knowledge management system. At the center of this is Obsidian. I use this application to hold daily notes, my nascent Zettlekasten system and my nascent second brain. I’m still developing these systems, but it all makes theoretical sense. And I have a place for these sort of things.
When it comes to a Personal Productivity System I have settled on Everdo. This is a good tactical tool to keep track of tasks and projects, containing lists of items that need to be done, perhaps grouped into projects. I’ve always been attracted to the GTD style of personal productivity and Everdo supports that nicely.
And I coasted on this for a while. Most things in my life are cyclical so I wasn’t surprised that I have hit and miss success here. It’s a process. However I stumbled upon this post that talks about the author’s understanding of the difference between Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS) and Personal Productivity Systems (PPS). The article states that PPSs differ from my idea of a PPS in that it should start with your life’s values and goals, which makes sense to me.
My “standard cycle” with PPSs (and most things, really) is an initial excitement-fueled period where I go all in, and then ever-decreasing in amplitude and period cycles of use, until I reset the meta-cycle at some point (like, say, this post). Imagine a damped sine wave, but with increasing space between peaks.
Things That Stand In My Way
Some issues I have are:
- My days are filled with small-time-scale tasks that I don’t record anywhere.
- I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I walk, and that makes it hard to produce notes.
- I experience motivational troughs that not only slide my schedule to the right but also derail my habits. This happens pretty frequently.
- Not having the targeted list, or the overall themes of “things I want to intentionally spend my time on” constantly in front of me makes it easy for me to drift. Which I do. Come to think of it, I likely would drift even if I did have these things constantly in front of me.
Another thing to consider, though I don’t think it’s that applicable to me, is the idea that 100% allocation of time is less efficient – but I think I end up with slack time no matter what.
Another thing to consider is that I have, best case, 2 hours of discretionary time for three weekdays, and 25 hours on the weekend (though, of course, I never get that much on the weekend, and what I do get tends to be broken up). When I look at it this way it seems like I get more time than I thought, though, coming in at 32 hours.
Initial thoughts on Personal Productivity Systems
As stated above, some GTD system is good for tactical planning. But I’m missing a strategic (long-range) view. Without that strategic view I don’t have a “north star” to steer towards, so I end up drifting about from one shiny thing to another. Keeping the overall strategic view in mind when determining how to spend my time at any given moment ensures that what I’m doing supports my long-range view or is aligned with my overall goals and values.
I have been attracted to physical notebooks here of late. I don’t want to use them for my PKMS because it’s too high friction (it takes too much effort to locate where to put something such that retrieval is easy) and I don’t have one with me all the time (unlike my phone). I’ve tried bullet journalling as a way to address the friction issue, but I find that I use computer-based solutions much more frequently and consistently. I don’t want to use them for a tactical GTD system for the same reasons.
However, I see physical notebooks as the perfect tool for the strategic vision. The ability to sketch (say, a mind map or a flowchart) and the fact that I enjoy using them makes me think that I’ll get a lot of usage, and thus a lot of value, from them.
So that’s the direction I’m going to go here.
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