In Part 8, we looked at divergence and convergence as the two fundamental modes of all creative work.
Now let’s see what this looks like in our day to day schedules.
The main feature of the modern workday, you may have noticed, is fragmentation.
In Part 7, I argued for the importance of interacting with information, instead of just passively consuming it. Interaction results in better learning at the same time as it creates valuable deliverables.
But incorporating all these new ideas about how work is completed – flow cycles and intermediate packets, downscoping and evolving deliverables, interaction over consumption
In Part 6, I recommended treating any deliverable (whether it’s a simple email all the way to a full-fledged product) as a series of evolutionary artifacts, each one intended to test an assumption or make forward progress.
But there is a deeper reason for downscoping deliverables and then evolving them through a series of stages.
In Part 5, I introduced The Iron Triangle of Project Management and the idea that any given deliverable can be reduced or expanded in scope at any time.
How should you use this newfound ability? You should use it to:
Get started
Maintain momentum
Test assumptions
In Part 4, I introduced the idea of “intermediate packets.” Instead of delivering value in a big project that spans huge amounts of time, we want to deliver it in smaller chunks at more frequent intervals.
This follows a basic principle that has revolutionized many industries: small batch sizes.
In Part 3, I argued that having a personal knowledge base is the linchpin of success in a creative economy.
A knowledge base allows you to reuse past work, draw from past experiences, share your knowledge in concrete form, and eventually, build products and services out of that knowledge.
This requires strategically structuring your work in the
In Part 2, I described the sublime and powerful experience of flow, which could be considered the “holy grail” of productivity.
I argued that there is theoretically no minimum amount of time necessary to get into flow, contrary to popular belief. But in reality, as always, it’s a bit more complicated. Let’s look at what this
In Part 1, I introduced Return-on-Attention (ROA) as a way to evaluate how we invest our most precious resource – our attention.
But there is a key difference between investing money and investing attention. Units of currency are always uniform and interchangeable. Units of attention, on the other hand, are not at all created equal.
Technology has transformed every aspect of business, from the tools we use to communicate and collaborate, to how products and services are built and delivered, to how we conceive of organizations and communities. But it hasn’t yet transformed the heart of how we manage and execute work – project management (PM). A new paradigm for…
Modern digital tools make it easy to “capture” information from a wide variety of sources. We know how to snap a picture, type out some notes, record a video, or scan a document. Getting this content from the outside world into the digital world is trivial.
It’s even easier to get content that is already digital
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my work is really about attentional design. Becoming aware of attention. Shaping and directing it. Shifting its quality and inner experience. Leveraging it to produce work of real value. Tell someone what to do, they might be more productive for a day. Tell them what to pay attention…
Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head (Affiliate Link) is the most important book I’ve read in quite some time. It makes a sweeping argument about what it means to be an ethical, autonomous human in the digital age. Crawford draws a strong connection from the distractions buzzing on our phones, to the evolving…
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