The shiny new thing introduces novelty that seems to help for a short time. But it soon becomes just another layer of complexity, exacerbating the original problem.
The Pyramid shows how higher-order productivity skills build upon and extend lower-order skills. It shows how each skill can be leveraged using a particular kind of digital technology, which is our focus.
Non-linear
The key breakthrough we needed to develop this model was that digital productivity is not a linear learning process. You don’t learn one skill at a time, in strict order, mastering one completely before moving on to the next.
It’s more like a spiral staircase, ascending through increasingly advanced versions of the same core skills. I would estimate that 90% of full-time knowledge workers are proficient in level 1, while less than 1% are proficient at level 5.
Skills + technologies
Each level of the Pyramid is a combination of human skills augmented or extended by some form of digital technology: hardware, software, or online platforms.
These skills range from very meta (noticing what you notice), to very actionable (using a text expander). Pairing each of them with a digital tool gives them scale and leverage.
Emergence
Each level emerges from the one below it, either extending or abstracting the same core principles. Each level also makes use of the time and attention freed up by the level below.
Building up each level involves an initial design/setup stage, during which key systems and habits are put in place, followed by a longer optimization/customization stage.
Information flows
The blocks within each level are ordered from left to right, not in chronological order, but in terms of which direction information flows. The actual behaviors involved with each skill may take place in any order, but are generally organized to process information from one state to another.
Level 1: Digital Fluency
Includes:
Basic computer usage
Web browsing
Basic email usage
Keyboard shortcuts
Digital calendars
Scheduling apps
Read Later apps
Inbox Zero
Password management
Speed reading
Time tracking
Text Expanders
Digital literacy refers to the most basic familiarity with computers, such as how to visit a webpage or create a text document. Level 1 of the Digital Productivity Pyramid extends this concept to digital fluency.
Mastering computer skills is a learning process that never ends. Even the most advanced users continue to learn new keyboard shortcuts, discover new features of their devices, and optimize their settings.
We’ve placed these core capabilities at the bottom of the Pyramid because everything else depends on them
Focusing on your actionable tasks (Level 2) will involve a lot of friction if you don’t have a dedicated place for reading online articles (Level 1)
Building routines (Level 3) will be very challenging without a reliable digital calendar (Level 1)
You’ll have trouble finding the time to organize your files (Level 4) if your email inbox is out of control (Level 1)
Tags: favorite
Level 2: Task Management and Workflow
Includes:
Capture: collect what has your attention
Clarify: decide what it means
Organize: put it where it belongs
Reflect: review what you’ve collected
Engage: take action
Task management is essentially “advanced to-do lists.” Popular digital task managers include Omnifocus, Things, Wunderlist, Todoist, 2Do, and Toodledo.
A workflow is simply the sequence of steps you move through to manage information using a task manager, from first identifying a potential action, to completion.
Although there are many ways to create a task management workflow, there is one that stands above the rest: David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method. The five stages of GTD are so fundamental to how actionable information is captured and managed to completion that we’ve used them to label this level:
Incomplete capturing (i.e. writing down) of your tasks will absolutely become a bottleneck to any ambitious project you want to take on, as decisions and commitments get lost
Trying to complete tasks that haven’t been properly clarified (i.e. formulated in a way that makes them actionable and outcome-oriented) is difficult and frustrating, since it won’t be clear why you’re doing them
The most comprehensive collection of potential tasks is useless if not organized in a way that they can be quickly identified and acted on
Strategic decision making depends on dedicated reflection time, to make sense of all the information being collected
And of course, all of these tasks amount to excessive record-keeping if not actually engaged with and acted on
Level 3: Habit Formation and Behavior Change
After an initial setup period, each one of the five principles from Level 2 must be put on autopilot to have their full impact. The key is to adopt a critical, automatic habit for each one:
Capture => Collection Habit
Clarify => Next Physical Action
Organize => Project List
Reflect => Weekly Review
Engage => Contexts/priorities
Includes:
Progressive summarization
P.A.R.A.
Workflow Strategies
Whereas Level 2 is about taming the flow of information related to actions, Level 4 is about the flow of knowledge.
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a set of skills and tools for an individual to capture, organize, and deploy the knowledge they accumulate while completing their work. It draws from diverse fields such as digital archiving, process management, and project management, and includes software programs for e-reading, digital note-taking, word processing, cloud storage, and others.
Personal knowledge management is the topic of Building a Second Brain, an online course in which we help people unlock their creative potential using digital note-taking software.
Level 5: Just-in-Time Project Management
As working professionals, we don’t have time to consume a body of knowledge upfront and then regurgitate it for a test, as in school. Professional education has to take place right alongside daily work. We have to build the plane (and learn to fly it) as it’s taking off.
For PKM to be sustainable, it needs to directly enable the execution of real projects. That’s why Just-in-Time Project Management is the capstone of the Pyramid. The knowledge we are collecting and managing needs to have an immediate return to be justified, instead of only far in the future.
While you don’t need to build levels 1-4 before starting to work on real projects, the scale and ambition of the projects you can successfully execute is constrained by the structural integrity of your Pyramid. The taller the building you want to erect, the deeper and stronger your foundation must be.