Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1 by Tiago Forte

Foreword

I Have to Write to know What I Think. All My Ideas Sound Brilliant in Echo Chamber of My Mind. It is only when I Put down my thought, Letting them stand on your own Strength, that I Start to see the cracks and Imperfection.

I Have to Write to know What I Think. Otherwise old ideas keep circulating round and round, clogging the synapses. Writing is not result of thinking - it is thinking itself, Scaffolded by the external props of keyboard and screen.

Manifesto of Human-Centered Work

Productivity is Excellent Sandbox for Life

Success in productivity is easily translated to success elsewhere. If we want to free up time and energy to pursue what matters to us, it’s a good idea to start by streamlining the boring but necessary activities we have to do to get by.

What's Wrong with Productivity

It is Driven By Clickbait

I’ve come to believe that the main purpose of the thousands of productivity articles published every day is to allow bored office workers to procrastinate without feeling too guilty about it. It counts as work if you’re reading about work, right?

A vast echo chamber of blog posts, listicles, Twitter bots, and “content marketing” survives solely on the advertising revenue generated by millions of unsuspecting visitors, each one drawn by hyperbolic headlines into believing, if only for a moment, that this time will be different, this time they really will learn the Ultimate 5 Productivity Hacks that will instantaneously and magically transform everything they hate about their job.

What I Learn About Future by reading 100 Science Friction Books

As futurist Jason Silva says,

“Imagination allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.”

Tagging is Broken

The real potential of a digital organizational system is to be a tool for capturing and systematically reminding you of past ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections. The heart of creativity and innovation is making spontaneous connections between seemingly unrelated things, and note-taking programs can, when used correctly, serve as a cognitive exoskeleton, both protecting us from the ravages of forgetfulness and amplifying our blows as we take on creative challenges.

When I look at successful people, I notice again and again that it is this — the ability to systematically capture and review and deploy their ideas, further strengthening their creative self-esteem, leading them to value and generate more ideas, and so on in a virtuous loop — that really sets them apart. Not the original quantity or quality of ideas, not their brilliance from birth, not luck. The best of the best use organizational systems as a means to a very worthy end: to create rapid, self-reinforcing learning and feedback loops aimed in the direction of their goals.

The Habit Graph

There’s something about the current thinking around habit formation that has always bothered me: we think of habits in isolation. This is typically Western of us, preferring analysis (breaking apart) over synthesis (putting together) and understanding the world in terms of modular mechanisms instead of holistic organisms. Thinking of habits in isolation not only misses much of the rich context that characterizes human behavior, it also happens to be absolutely exhausting. You can build a few habits using the “highly targeted, analytical, structured” approach, but as soon as you try to scale you run into plummeting and then negative returns.

The problem is that when I really ask myself “Why didn’t I have a healthy lunch today?”, it usually isn’t a faulty trigger, a lackluster reward, or flaws in any of the dozen supporting strategies I’ve researched and taught. It’s usually because I didn’t have a filling, healthy breakfast. And that was because I didn’t get up early enough. And that was because I went to bed late. And that was because I worked late, because I didn’t get enough done that day, because I didn’t have enough energy, because…I didn’t have a healthy lunch. In other words, the answer seems to often be “Because I didn’t do other habits.” Each habit seems to loop back onto itself, influencing and being influenced by many other habits in complex, interrelated patterns. I see the same phenomenon at work with the people I teach and coach. If it was a simple loop then this would be a simple problem, just a matter of snapping the vicious cycle into a virtuous one. Classic strategies like “Don’t break the chain” and “Never miss two days in a row” attempt to do exactly that. But it’s not a simple loop. It’s a network.

These quotes are taken directly from the Wikipedia article on network theory, but could just as easily be from a book on behavior change:

When a critical fraction of nodes [or habits] is removed the network becomes fragmented into small, disconnected clusters.

**Have you ever had the sensation that your habits are grouped into “clusters” based on time of day, location, or interactions with other people? One cluster can fail without affecting the others.

This phenomenon is called percolation and it represents an order-disorder type of phase transition with critical exponents

Have you ever experienced such a “phase transition,” when a single core habit is disturbed and suddenly your whole life goes to pieces? Dependencies may lead to cascading failures… and a relatively small failure can lead to a catastrophic breakdown of the system Have you ever watched your good habits fall one after another like dominoes, beginning with some seemingly unimportant event?

My Habit Graph

My Habit Graph I started by narrowing my analysis to “medium difficulty” habits. These are habits that I perform consistently, but not as consistently as I’d like. They are the low-hanging fruit of behavior change — strengthening them would quickly and relatively easily improve my quality of life.

Here is the list I came up with:

Out of bed by 8am
One Priority every morning (this involves opening an app on my phone and typing in my #1 priority for the day)
Healthy breakfast
Brush teeth in the morning
30m morning meditation
Exercise every other day (running, sailing, biking, yoga)
Tea instead of coffee
Email 2x per day
Work breaks every 90m
No working after dinner
Lights off by midnight

I then asked myself the following question for each pair of habits: Does [habit A] directly and unequivocally make [habit B] more likely to happen? For example, “Does waking up by 8am directly and unequivocally make meditation more likely to happen?” If the answer was yes (based on my subjective experience), this was counted as a positive one-way relationship. I worded this question in black-and-white terms because I wanted to avoid subtle, global effects (such as meditation increasing my overall willpower, thus making all my other habits more likely to happen). I was looking for direct, unquestionable influences. I then used the 56 positive relationships I came up with to produce the following habit graph: Red are morning habits, green are daytime habits, and blue are nighttime habits (for those reading on non-color devices, moving clockwise from 12 noon, the first 7 habits are morning, the next 2 are daytime, and the last 2 are nighttime habits) Note that the habits are in chronological order moving clockwise, and that relationships can run in one direction or be bidirectional. At this point I could simply create a ranking based on how many other habits each habit supports. But this isn’t quite enough. I want to know not only the absolute number of other habits each one supports, but how influential these supported habits are themselves. In other words, what makes a habit important is not only that it supports many habits, but that it supports habits that are themselves important. This is where eigenvector centrality comes in. Launch the Eigenvector!

Although the visualization is helpful, the eigenvector equation allows us to rank the habits according to their influence on the entire network in a way that is not apparent visually. Here’s the relevant equation: Centrality / CC BY-SA Applying this equation to my habit graph, I came up with the following eigenvector centralities. The eigenvector number in purple next to each habit measures that habit’s “influence” on the network as a whole: My habits labeled with eigenvector scores This graph shows quite clearly that my most influential habits happen first thing in the morning, and in the evening (mostly, I imagine, because of their strong influence on subsequent morning habits). Here’s a radial version, highlighting even more clearly that early waking is the critical “node” in my habit network. It is the only habit that positively influences every other habit I’m seeking to strengthen.

The Potential

I already knew morning and evening habits were important, and that early waking set the tone for my whole day. The centrality scores I came up with for each habit are probably pretty close to what I would have guessed. But this exercise and research have given me glimpses of a whole new way of thinking about behavior change, one that approaches the holy grail of being both more data-driven, while also more human-centered: Imagine a future where we could map the topology of a person’s habits

More tangibly, imagine if we could create an app that, with some relatively simple inputs, could map your habits. It could tell you exactly which habits were the most important, the ones you should focus your willpower and planning on. You would know which habits you could strategically retreat from when life got crazy, and even if a keystone habit failed, you could have contingency plans in place to limit the damage. If you wanted to change something about your life, this app could tell you not only which habit would be most likely to have the desired effect, but how and where this habit would fit into your existing landscape. It could give you strategies that have worked for other people with similar habit graphs. If you wanted to eliminate a bad habit, it could suggest ways of destabilizing the supporting network around it, instead of attempting a frontal attack in isolation. Understanding the topology of a single human being’s behavior would be the first step toward personalized behavior change, just as genome sequencing is the first step toward personalized medicine. We would be able to study the properties of the terrain that are unique to each individual, instead of forcing people into the silos of individual habits.

How to use Evernote for Your Creative workflow

What would it look like to use Evernote as the basis for a creative workflow, in line with known neuroscience principles? To answer it, we have to drill down into Evernote’s original mission:

“To give you a second brain”

What does that mean exactly? What, in fact, would we use a second brain for? I want to dispel a myth: It’s not just “remembering things.” Our brains are not particularly good at that anyway, so having a second one wouldn’t help much. This includes the storage and retrieval of straightforward factual information: parking tickets, receipts, user manuals, packing lists, recipes, menus, business cards, language materials, doctor’s notes, government documents, tax documents, logins/passwords, school assignments, etc.

This is “dumb” information by design, so an intelligent tool doesn’t add much value. What the brain does best is thinking. Evernote is most valuable not as a remembering tool, but as a thinking tool.

We learned in the New York Times recently that storing a single human brain’s connectome (the complete map of all neurons and the interconnections between them) would take half the planet’s digital storage capacity: 1.3 billion terabytes. In other words, to store just a static map of the physical brain structure of two individuals would require 100% of global storage capacity. And that’s just the structure, not counting any actual processing. We only have the roughest idea of what that would require, but last year the world’s 4th most powerful supercomputer took 40 minutes to simulate just 1 second of 1% of a brain’s activity. So, we’re not even close.

A tool like Evernote doesn’t add much value performing low-level tasks like “remembering things,” and it’s incapable of performing high-level creative thinking, what is it good for? My proposal:

Mid-level thinking that interfaces between low-level memory and high-level creativity, making the latter as easy, fast, and efficient as possible

creativity is connecting things, especially things that don’t seem to be connected.

“creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections…”

Richard Feynman put it best:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

A big part of the problem is that, as Cal Newport says, “knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work — tasks that almost anyone, with a minimum of training, could accomplish.” His solution is straightforward, if not exactly actionable: “We need to spend more time engaged in deep work — cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results.”

But just try ignoring this “shallow work” (email, meetings, etc.) for a couple days and see what happens. The solution is suggested by another study, seeking to identify which kinds of jobs best survived the technological replacement of the last tech boom. What they found was interesting: it wasn’t jobs requiring advanced skills, or comprehensive knowledge, or years of training that fared best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”

In other words, the jobs that seem to best resist technological unemployment are those that involve building, maintaining, promoting, and defending a particular perspective. Think of a salesperson citing past results to close a sale. Or a researcher using data to back up their interpretation of an experiment. Or a project manager citing a couple key precedents to support a decision. All these perspectives can benefit from a repository of supporting information. And here’s where a tool like Evernote comes in. Because defending a perspective takes ammunition. And by ammunition, I mean examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes, book notes — these are the kinds of things you should be capturing. The more raw material you have to work with, and the more diverse your sources are, the stronger and more original your argument will be.

“Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards — some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong — long before the conscious mind realized anything was amiss.” Their conclusion: “Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.” Misdirected optimization is the root of all evil Knowing what secondary thinking functions we need Evernote to help us with is a good first step, but since they still require our involvement, we need to perform them as efficiently as possible. Efficiency is a function of inputs and outputs. So the next question we need to answer is, “What is our most scarce resource?” Or in other words: What are we optimizing for? This turns out to be a fairly profound question, with radical implications for how we organize the information in our lives. To illustrate:

Loading and Unloading What then is the main cognitive barrier to comparing two ideas? It’s the process of “loading” an idea into your brain. Initially this takes a considerable amount of time, as we consume close to 100% of the material to get the 5–10% (at most) that is actually valuable. The problem comes when we step away from our desks, promptly forgetting (“unloading”) the superstructure of ideas we’re holding in our short-term memory, since we don’t make any effort to preserve the thinking that was done. This is best illustrated by the experience of putting a complex project aside, and only returning to it months later. The relevant ideas are no longer in RAM, and it takes you a lot of time/energy to get “back to speed.” On the other hand, think of the immersion you feel after spending a couple solid hours on a problem, where you have all the main ideas at your mental fingertips. Think about the investment reaching this state of mind entails. It’s not just your years of education and training, your vast store of work and life experiences, the effort of managing stress, nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. so that you’re functioning at your best. We could consider all that your “administrative overhead.”

Returning to Cal Newport: “…Unlike every other skilled labor class in the history of skilled labor, [knowledge workers] lack a culture of systematic improvement.” And it’s true. If we consider these periods of intense, focused work as our primary asset as knowledge workers, and think about how precious few hours of quality attention we have to spend each week, and how few weeks and years we have on this planet to make something that matters, it is unforgivable that we make no effort to build a knowledge base that appreciates over time. Each day we start again from scratch, trading something invaluable for something merely valuable.

The value of a note corresponds to how much attention you’ve spent on it In an economy where attention really is currency, the value of a note is based on how much attention has been invested in it. In the same way that the price of a physical product is based on the cost of goods that have been invested in it.

This in turn suggests an entirely new purpose for Evernote: A system for tracking how much attention has been paid to a given note

My conclusion was that the global structure of Evernote’s notebooks and stacks is relatively unimportant. I keep notebooks just specific enough to make it obvious where a particular note belongs, mostly to satisfy my organizational itch. The most salient factor in making ideas accessible for day-to-day use is instead the design of individual notes. Let me give you a tangible example based on this note: 1. I originally clipped this Amazon product page, reminding me that I wanted to read this book. Almost no attention was spent, so the value of this note is 1 on a scale of 1–10 2. A couple months later, when I had some free time, I read the book, highlighting the parts I thought were most interesting in the Kindle app and exporting them (I use Bookcision for Kindle or the built-in “Share to Evernote” feature in iBooks and Pocket) to the note. Some time and attention were applied, so its value is now 4, although it’s still too much information to “load” quickly 3. A few weeks later, I reviewed this note and spent some time re-reading my notes, bolding the most insightful and unique sections. Value now equals 7, as I can much more quickly assimilate the key points by scanning only the bolded sections 4. Some time later, when I started a project drawing on this area, I reviewed only the bolded parts and highlighted (using Evernote’s separate highlighting feature, in yellow) only the very most important parts, leaving me with only 15 highlighted sections from a whole book. Considerable time and attention has now been applied, and it would be difficult to justify this “expense” if the results of my thinking were not stored in a durable, easily loadable format. Note that as the total amount of content highlighted has dwindled, it has become much easier to quickly grasp its key points, increasing its value proportionally to 10 This note has now become a potent information weapon, its ideas and facts ready to be used in a wide variety of future contexts, at a moment’s notice.

Comprehensiveness values knowing all the facts. It is the voice in your head that says, “Prove it.” It wants more data, and examples, and cited sources. It is the fear that you’ll remember the main point, but forget why it matters. It helps us not let anything fall through the cracks, but also drives us toward packrat insanity. The way to balance these competing priorities is to: Progressively summarize the most important points of a source in small stages (compression), and… Preserve each of these stages in layers that can be peeled back on demand (comprehensiveness). Basically, you need to be able to quickly assimilate the main points of a source to evaluate its relevance to the task at hand, while simultaneously preserving the ability to quickly “go deeper” into the source if you judge it to be highly relevant. But even this “going deeper” must be staged, because you want to avoid creating a black-or-white, all-or-nothing choice between reading just a few key points, or having to go back and re-read the entire original source.

Most notes will fall somewhere on a spectrum of relevance, and you want to be able to calibrate the corresponding time you spend “loading” them. This layering turns a note from a dense, impenetrable jungle into a rocky landscape: Mt. Everest from Space / NASA Sometimes you want to do a high-elevation flyover, seeing only the highest peaks. Other times you want to explore the middle ranges by helicopter, perhaps identifying stories or juicy factoids to illustrate a point. And sometimes, you want to parachute in and hack your way through the underbrush, poring over each source and following every rabbit trail. Designing your note in easily uncoverable layers is like giving yourself a digital map of the terrain that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need. You’re creating an environment in which your “radar” — your semi-conscious, rapid scanning ability to recognize complex patterns and non-obvious connections intuitively —works to maximum effect.

Self Organizing

I said previously that the purpose of Evernote is to “track how much attention has been paid to a given note.” But even this tracking shouldn’t be done explicitly. We humans don’t do well on consistency, thus any system that requires us to use tags to explicitly “track” how much attention has been applied (i.e. Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3) is bound to fail. Instead, use the appearance of the note itself to tell you how much attention has been applied. Just like ants don’t try to remember the path to food — they leave pheromone trails to guide their efforts and others’ — imprint your progress on the terrain itself, allowing your future self to pick up instantly where you left off, whether it was yesterday or a year ago.

In this system, I know that any source with notes attached is at Layer 1, any bolded parts indicate Layer 2, and any highlights indicate Layer 3. As long as I stay consistent with this much simpler and more natural system, I’ll know how much thinking has been done at any point in the future.

Non-universal This system is very purposefully NOT universal. The last thing you want to do is put every single note through multiple layers of compression. That is a terrible waste of attention. Instead, customize the level of compression based on how intuitively important the source is to your work. I would guess my personal breakdown, with about 2,300 notes, is approximately as follows: 1 layer of compression (saving any notes on the source): 50% 2 layers (bolding the best parts): 25% 3 layers (highlighting the very best parts): 20% 4 layers or more (restating the ideas in my own words, applying them to my own context, creating summary outlines, etc.): 5% or less Although less than 5% of the sources I save go through more than 3 layers of compression, these sources are more valuable to me than all the rest put together. In general, avoid the temptation to apply the same system everywhere. Not everything needs to scale.

The Point

As per Richard Humming

“I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t quite know what problems are worth working on… He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. … [T]here is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.” That is next-level productivity right there. Knowing not only how to get things done, but what is worth doing in the first place.

In other words, don’t pursue goals; instead create systems that encourage attractors to emerge on their own. With such a system in place, the more chaotic your environment, the more randomness and uncertainty you are exposed to, the faster you will be propelled to interesting places, as long as you’re open to wherever that may lead.

One Touch to inbox Zero

Your email inbox is someone else’s To Do list.

email operates more like chaos theory: at some point the time/energy required crosses a critical threshold, an unpredictable, invisible boundary. It undergoes a phase transition, like ice changing to water and then to steam. The parameters change and the effects explode, cascading across the rest of your workflow with mounting consequences.

Productivity for Precious Snowflakes

“…optimally taking advantage of self-created contexts and triggers to produce creative ideas, perspectives, and actions that wouldn’t normally occur.”

what do we do with this information? We’ve muddied the waters beyond simple prescriptions like “follow your passion” or “develop useful skills.” Mood-first productivity may even seem disheartening, like we are slaves to our emotions. But I think states of mind can shed new light on an old idea: that we are actually different selves across time, and reaching our goals requires getting them to cooperate. The main difference between these selves is not information content. It is in their respective states of mind — how they feel about themselves and their place in the world.

Changing your mood to match the task is the realm of self-talk and environmental cues, like the Cathedral Effect — a team working in a high-ceilinged room will use more abstract and integrated ideation, while a team in a low-ceilinged room will use more discrete and concrete approaches. Changing the task to match your mood is the goal of distributed, self-organizing tools like kanban boards and ticketing systems, where each person works on whatever matches their skills and state of mind at that moment. Personal kanban boards are an example of applying these tools to a team of selves, instead of a team of people.

Emergent Productivity: People Centric Equation for Modern work

your employer agreed to pay you the same for your worst work as your best work, averaging out somewhere in the middle. Career advancement consisted not of breakout performance, but of consistently getting your average just a little higher than those around you.

The purpose of the work is to serve as a vehicle for learning and personal growth for each employee, however they define it.

Immersion. Experimentation. Leverage.

tinkering can equally be defined as “play,” and in this way it mimics the random walk of children’s games. This is an uncomfortable analogy in professional contexts (we don’t like the idea that we go to work to “play games”), but it reflects a historical insight: the future of work lies in today what we consider play. The well-paid virtual reality designers of today were the “video game addicts” of yesteryear. The drone pilots of today were the model airplane enthusiasts of the past. There is someone in a garage somewhere with an amusing hobby that will one day be a multi-billion dollar industry.

Examples of this type of open collaboration include opt-in staffing of projects (allowing people to choose their work based on what interests them), promiscuous forking (creating parallel versions of a project to allow them to evolve in different directions), and teams drawn from across roles, functions, and departments (to combine different flavors of curiosity).

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works”

The best way to surf the stream, it seems, is to become part of the stream.