I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Stephan Spencer, a well-known marketing and productivity expert, on his podcast Get Yourself Optimized. You can find a short description of our discussion below, or visit the podcast webpage for a full transcript: Our brains can hold only so much information. If you’re an ambitious person like…
Learning productivity is a journey. We have a good map of the territory, in the form of the Digital Productivity Pyramid. Often, when we embark on this journey – learning digital fluency, task management (GTD), personal knowledge management (BASB) and beyond – our motivation is primarily one of utility. We want to stop procrastinating, to…
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work. I teach people how to master PKM in my online course Building…
Over the past five months I’ve worked closely with a virtual assistant (VA). This article summarizes what I’ve learned about the best ways to handle the working relationship, in the form of a guide for anyone who wants to do the same. Hiring a VA can be an absolute game-changer for your productivity, effectiveness, and…
Guest post by Nat Eliason I took Tiago’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) and Getting Stuff Done Like a Boss (GSDLAB) courses in the fall of 2017. At the time, I was a solo operator working on my blog and doing some marketing consulting, and the strategies worked perfectly. But over the next year, I…
I recently did my first interview in Portuguese, for the Growthcast podcast hosted by Max Peters. We talk about productivity, knowledge management, and then get pretty deep into personal growth as a path to personal effectiveness. See a summary here, or listen below:
In our course Building a Second Brain, we teach people how to capture, organize, and share their most valuable knowledge and know-how using technology. We call this practice Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM. One of the most common questions I am asked is “Why digital notes?” This article will explain why, out of all the…
I recently read and took notes on You Need a Budget (YNAB-Affiliate Link), a popular book on personal finance and budgeting (with accompanying software for managing budgets) by Jesse Mecham. My interest in this book is three-fold: I’m terrible at budgeting and need help I want to borrow principles and methods for managing money to help people…
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…
Just a month ago, I had ~100,000 work-related and personal emails in my inbox. Nearly 60,000 of them were unread. I had haphazard systems of tags, folders, and various inbox extensions to help me manage it. Suffice it to say, my email organization “system” (if you could call it that) wasn’t working. me everytime I…
In Part I, I described a new kind of worker called the Full-Stack Freelancer.
I argued that more affordable and user-friendly software-as-a-service (SaaS), among other things, has enabled individuals to manage portfolios of complementary income streams, instead of focusing on only one specialized skill.
But you may have noticed something missing: what is in the stack?
Here’s mine:
In The Weekly Review is an Operating System, I detailed the process I go through each week to capture any new open loops, clear my workspaces, and nail down the events and commitments for the week. In this article, I’d like to do the same for my Monthly Review (MR). Because the MR touches on…
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