Productivity

What even is productivity? As I've gotten older - and the scope of my life has broadened, and the boundless energy of my twenties was replaced with the slower, more considered experience of my thirties - I think my definition has changed.

Stage one: tools

I first feel like I "got into" productivity (by which I mean: started caring about how you kept track of what you were supposed to be doing) when I was a postgraduate at university. Before that I'd just kept track of stuff by...remembering, I guess. At high school they gave us these nice little organisers and taught us to write down in them all the homework we got and when assignments were due and all that, but it went out the window as soon as we were let out into the world.

I discovered what feels like the grandparent of all modern productivity systems, Getting Things Done, through Merlin Mann's [43folders][], and that was like a shock to the core. As someone with a certain level of chronic anxiety, a system that allowed you to track all your work was like a balm to an enflamed soul - especially as I moved into a world where my work was amorphous, hard-to-pin-down, and new to me.

I have a feeling that there may be something generalisable here. When you're younger, you have energy but not experience. As a result, what you really need is some almost micromanage-y guard-rails on your work - this is how you know what to do next in a project, this is how you can group your tasks up so you can work out what to do and when.

(more to come)

Related nodes

• Analogue productivity
• Productivity systems
• Productivity apps I've used
• OmniFocus
• TaskWarrior

And of course: It's not about the tool, it's about the practice.