Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.
I first became self-employed in the spring of 2013, after quitting a promising consulting job that I could no longer tolerate (that’s a story for another time). I had no plan and no savings, and for quite a while my only goal was to pay the next month’s rent. Since I didn’t have a clear…
From the Dawn of Email to the Rise of Personal Dashboards In the beginning… was email. The very first email was sent 50 years ago, in the spring of 1971. The incredible spread of email since then unleashed an unimaginable torrent of information into our everyday lives. And to this day, we still haven’t recovered….
In my PARA Method, I teach people how to organize all their digital notes and files using a simple, 4-part system. Your computer is your working environment for many of your waking hours. Until you take control of it and design it to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there…
This is a comprehensive guide to creating a profitable online course, based on my experience developing 6 courses over 7 years, which have been taken by more than 25,000 students and produced well over $1 million in revenue. It introduces my 4-P model for developing a course, referring to the 4 main stages of Planning,…
This article was originally published on the FugBugz blog. With the new year just around the corner, we’re entering the season of New Year’s’ Resolutions. Prepare yourself for overcrowded gyms and inspirational Instagram quotes tagged with #bigdreams. If that’s not quite your style, I’d like to introduce you to a very different way of making…
By Kathryn Tongg 1. Establish the preferred method of communication right away. Everyone has a way they prefer to communicate. Whether this is via phone, text, email or other app such as Slack, determine upfront what your client prefers. This will ensure you’re both on the same page with clear expectations. 2. Be patient in…
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…
Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work?
Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what kind of situation they are best suited for.
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:
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