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 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
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…
Here are the step-by-step instructions for the Anti-Book Club for easy reference. And so you can run your own Anti-Book Club if you want. I’ll update this article with future improvements as I discover them. The Premise Start by reading my original article introducing the concept and why it’s important. Here’s a short version: Books…
One of the most common questions I receive is how I write long-form blog posts. And especially how I write them frequently, at high quality, drawing on numerous sources. It’s taken me a long time to be able to make the process explicit. The Building a Second Brain course is basically my long-form writing workflow…
A couple months ago we launched the first Anti-Book Club. It was a phenomenal success by my criteria, with 41 books on productivity, creativity, learning, and related topics summarized over the course of just a month. More importantly, the feedback was almost unanimously positive. It ranged from “interesting experiment” to “I’ll never read any other…
In Part I, I introduced Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you examples and metaphors of the method in action. Part III included my top recommendations for how to perform it effectively. Part IV showed how to apply the technique to non-text media.
In Part V,
Here’s how participants of Building a Second Brain, our online course on digital note-taking and personal knowledge management, described the course in one tweet (140 characters or less): How to take digital notes, increase their value, store them for easy retrieval, and use them for projects and/or to create new connections. — Greg Scholes BASB…