Tiago’s First Principles of Workflow
Finishing every work session with a clear deliverable or milestone
Optimize for intensity (via time tracking)
All priorities are local
Go to extremes of sociability or isolation
Document everything
Make pivots to new tasks or working styles as dramatic as possible
Push non-value added tasks as late as possible and pull value-added tasks as early as possible
Satisfice wherever possible
Don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t do things — look for excuses to do things
Getting out of bed in the morning is always the first bottleneck
Tiago’s Toolkit
For task management: Things
For knowledge management and general reference material: Evernote
For reading things later: Instapaper
For collaborative documents: Google Docs
For filesharing / backup: DropBox
For digital calendar: BusyCal
Khe’s First Principles
Limit cognitive overhead
Beware of asymmetric options
Deep Work
Batch tasks (and single-task)
Manage energy over time
Khe’s Toolkit
For task management: Omnifocus
For knowledge management and general reference material: Evernote
For reading things later: Instapaper
For collaborative documents: Quip
For filesharing / backup: DropBox
For digital calendar: Fantastical
Tiago Workflow Deep-Dive
Principle 1: Finishing every work session with a clear deliverable or milestone
Why? Because high-value work has a huge of the ramp-up period. If you complete 90% of a deliverable, and say you’ll “do the last 10% later”, you have to ramp all the way up again just to finish the last 10%.
Khe: “But what if it’s a BIG problem that’s taking you a long time?”
“Make packets of work small”
If your packets of work are 3 hours, you won’t accomplish anything unless you you have 3 uninterrupted hours — And this is rare.
Instead: you make your packets of work smaller (i.e. 30 minutes), you’ll be able to get things done anytime you have 30 minutes. ⏱⏱⏱
Khe: “What if your task NEEDS cognitive momentum and takes longer than 30 minutes?”
“What really creates momentum is an accelerating pace of rewards. Break down work into smaller and smaller packets, to create an accelerating pace of rewards
Momentum in knowledge work isn’t like momentum in horseback riding 🐎 or running 🏃where you see the trees 🌲🌲 as you pass by. Momentum is completely defined internally by how you feel.
Here’s a blog post by Tiago on the topic:
Mood as Extrapolation Engine: Using Emotions to Generate Momentum
I believe that moods (or less colloquially, states of mind) can be used not just defensively, making the best of…praxis.fortelabs.co
Principle 2: Optimize for intensity (via ACTIVE time tracking)
“You must actively track your time. The point is deliberate awareness of your time allocation, not data collection.”
To actively track your time, you’d say “I am now done with project A, I consciously open my app to clock out of project A, and consciously clock into project B”
Tiago prefers an app like Hours Tracker, where you clock in and out, as opposed to RescueTime, that passively tracks your activity.
Time Tracking Pro tip: there are all kind of issues with time tracking. Don’t miss the forest through the trees — it’s not an exact science. The 🔑 is to be aware and consistent in how you track.
Principle 3: All Priorities are Local
What does it mean? look for “excuses” to do things. Change the order of your priorities based on context.
In productivity, priorities are a BIG deal. You’re supposed to make a list of priorities #1 through #10, and then cross out #2 — #10 and do #1.
But this ignores an important point. The priority # of something is totally context-dependent. It’s not an inherent property of the thing itself.
It‘s based what I’m trying to accomplish. If it can go on Evernote, it should.
We need Multiple ways to resurface things. Because the mind is so good at making arbitrary connections.
Tiago has an “Idea Tickler” that he uses instead of checking social media.
You’re tapping into human idea to want novelty and distraction. Don’t treat this desire like a moral failure, use it to your advantage!
Text expanders
Text expanders have quite valuable to Tiago. A text expander = when you type a keyword (such as: #p) it replaces that text with your phone number.
People use them all the time time on mobile, but Tiago believes the most valuable is on desktop. [computer emoji]
There are a few different options for text expanders:
TextExpander
aText
Typinator
Dash 3
TypeIt4me
Keyboard Maestro
Alfred 3
DIY in “System Preferences