This essay was originally posted on the Ribbonfarm blog. The organizing principle of the modern world is pain. Avoiding it, yes. But also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool? We trade in…
This is a conversation with Allison Andrade, an undergraduate student at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was one of several cohorts of students taught to use Progressive Summarization by a professor, Wes Daniels (who has written about that experience here). In this wide-ranging conversation we talk about: My background in religion and how…
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
In Part 12, I described the shift from a just-in-case to a just-in-time philosophy of work, using late starts as an example of the benefits it offers.
But if nearly everything can be done later, and there are major benefits to doing so, one question comes to the forefront: what in the world should I
In Part 11, I introduced the concept of a “critical path” of tasks in a project, and the rationale for pushing tasks as late as possible on the timeline.
The late starts approach inspires a tremendous amount of resistance, especially from creative knowledge workers. It sounds an awful lot like taking control from individual employees,
In Part 10, I argued that digital knowledge work was fundamentally different than other kinds of work, because its structure, features, and purpose could be added or changed after it was built.
Principle #4 of Digital Knowledge Work is therefore to “Start everything as late as possible.”