Project management

Example of a personal dashboard

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

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….

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The Box: Twyla Tharp on Project-Based Organizing

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…

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Don’t Set New Year’s Resolutions – Create Reusable Components

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…

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10 Things I Learned as a VA with Tiago

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…

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PARA for Teams

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…

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Just-in-Time PM #21: Workflow Strategies

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.

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Just-In-Time PM #20: Speed as a Capability

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.

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Just-In-Time PM #19: Explosive Inspiration

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.

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Just-In-Time PM #18: Motivational Waves

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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