Last Friday, my partner and I attended a one-day introductory workshop to orgasmic meditation (OM), as taught by a company called OneTaste. OneTaste has taken the self-development world by storm since being founded in 2011. Robert Kandell and Nicole Daedone (see her TEDx talk) set out to research and teach the practice, borrowing from Buddhist Tantra,…
Imagine if we had a learning curriculum for modern knowledge work. This curriculum would reliably produce elite performers, training them in the fundamental skills required to thrive in the digital age. It would impart concrete skills that could be generalized to any kind of knowledge work, not just one discipline or career path. In our…
In Part 19, I argued that continuously finding new sources of motivation was the most important challenge for knowledge workers, and that the best way to get started was to generate momentum through a series of small wins.
Although Progressive Summarization can bootstrap you to a minimum level of motivation, at some point you do need to go from faking it to making it. The mind can be tricked, but not fooled for long.
In Part 18, I introduced the idea that our states of mind come and go in “waves of motivation,” and that we should try to use them to our advantage, instead of forcing our mind to conform to our will.
A “motivational state” is more colloquially known as a “mood.” Moods usually have a negative connotation when it comes to productivity. Feeling “moody” is generally not considered a desirable thing while working.
In Part 17, I argued that unique states of mind are the most powerful resource available to knowledge workers. But these states are difficult to reproduce on demand, and come and go unpredictably.
Our challenge becomes clear: how do we capture the value from a series of valuable, yet fleeting mental states?
Let’s take the following states of mind for example:
By Ryan McCarthy of the Global Kindness Initiative You’re a fast runner. You’ve trained for years, worked with great coaches, studied the best techniques and workouts, and you’ve got all the best equipment. You’ve mastered your skill. The field you’re currently running through, however, is extremely foggy. You can barely see more than a few…
Writing is its own reward. – Henry Miller The Writing Habit Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. As a wise man once said:…
In Part 16, we refined our understanding of Return on Attention by taking into account our biggest constraint as knowledge workers – not just our attention but our deeply focused attention in particular.
But human attention is not a simple commodity like oil or gold. It can’t be stored in barrels or vaults or measured in liters or grams. Attention emerges from deep within the human psyche, which means that all aspects of human psychology come into play.
In Part 15, I advocated for multithreading, or weaving together multiple projects to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and synergies.
To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM). Traditionally found only in large companies with hundreds of simultaneous projects, digital technology has made it possible and necessary for each of us to manage a portfolio.
In Part 14, we looked at the potential for massively increasing our bandwidth by creating “personal productivity networks.” These networks are made up of packets of work that move between “nodes” where some kind of intelligence is applied, whether human or software-based.
But what does it look like to operate such a network in our day to day work?
There are many practices that have emerged in recent years to accelerate progress at work: daily stand-ups, weekly review meetings, and my favorite – sprints. In this context, a sprint is a set period of time that is dedicated to achieving a goal. Many tech companies have adopted this method in some form based on…
In Part 13, we looked at the benefits of Component Thinking, which involves thinking of any product we are working on as made up of subcomponents, which can be evolved or swapped out over time.
Now I’d like to take a step back and consider the big picture of what it means to work in small packets.
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