Over the past few months I've had multiple friends ask me about my productivity stack in various shapes and forms. Rather than repeating it with half the articulation I'd like to, I thought why not create an article about it!
I love to maximise the most I can out of my limited lifetime. While most people think you can't have it all, I believe you can -- provided you plan effectively and ensure correct sequencing of operations for efficiency.
In addition, man is also a primitive being without his tools. Most people employ close to 0 software for the personal development stack. This is as good as being a cave-man, in the information age. If you feel like the things below are "too many tools" then you will be limited in your output.
The reason why I chose these systems was based on the following truths:
Our brain has weak storage and strong compute abilities. When we have too much to remember, we feel stressed.
As we go through life and experience things, we're often limited in our ability to effectively action our thoughts to the Next Best Smallest Action (tm lol).
Software that can accurately map our mental state means we can examine ourselves from a unique perspective.
Once I identified these truths from my lived experience, the next part was experimenting to find what worked. The below is the most MVP version of my personal productivity stack that I think gets someone in shape. There are many more levels to this that I deliberately do not show to avoid overwhelming you.
Principles
To solve these problems I realised there were a few principles that were very important to me to respect.
Live by the system like your life depends on it: if you can't fully trust your system then it won't fully be able to support you.
Enforce the minimal amount of structure possible: don't create unnecessary busy work for yourself and optimise for things that are flexible to accomodate for your non-linear brain.
Bake in freedom to follow what your heart feels like doing: I hate feeling like I'm a slave to my systems. These tools are here to support me but I choose what I feel like doing and when. People who timebox their entire days via a calendar sound like NPCs (or they're lying)
Okay now that you've understood the context and why this is all important. Let's get into the actual substance of it.
Drafts
Most people use Apple Notes to write down things that they need to remember or come across. All of them claim to defend that their system works. When I ask them if they've actioned all the things they've written in it they often don't even know what they were meant to do a month ago. Using Apple Notes is a rookie mistake and don't fall for the trap of One Massive Note. I'll tell you why it doesn't work:
Your thoughts are not in a modular form because you keep adding many atomic thoughts to the same note so a single note has many sub-thoughts encapsulated in it that makes it hard to break down.
In order to action each thought, you have to manually copy paste text or open some other app to manually copy information over from Apple Notes to your destination source.
Enter in Drafts: the optimal way to process your thoughts. The way I think about it is: imagine your brain as a powerful machine that powers your biological existence for survival and reproduction. In order to optimise this machine we need to be able instrument it effectively. Now until we get thought reading EEG sensors that track everything we think, your best bet is manually writing anything that's significant down. When the thought comes you want to ensure:
You can have the shortest possible time to enter the thought into some digital system
Write the least possible down to ensure you can get back to the actual moment/continue your stream of consciousness
Apply minimal energy to be able to process that thought into the Next Best Smallest Action.
What's the deal with this Next Best Smallest Action thing Kerman?. Great question, let me explain. Essentially each thought has a source (your brain) and a destination to apply action. It's kind of like f(x) -> y, where x is your thought and the function f(x) is what happens in-between to get to y. What happens in between to transform x to y can be very complex or drawn our process. To make this less abstract let's use a few example thoughts:
You call a friend and decide to get lunch and commit to a certain time but need to figure out where. You're on the run so you don't want to create a full calendar entry either. You write down "lunch bob tue 12pm".
A customer you're working with requests a feature that you think would be cool to discuss but you want to provide more context before sharing it to the team. "Secondary table sorting" you write as a reminder to yourself.
One day you're walking in the streets and see someone play the violin and it reminds you of your long lost dream to play an instrument, but you're still not sure which one and need to see how it stacks with your other goals and time commitments. You enter "learn violin or some instrument"
You're going for a walk and then think of the best idea for a blog post so you capture "thinking of productivity like software dev stack content".
All of these could be simple todos but you're going to start having a list that looks like:
"lunch bob tue 12pm"
"secondary table sorting"
"learn violin or some instrument"
"thinking of productivity like software dev stack content"
Now you're sitting Monday morning at your desk looking at your todo list trying to figure out what you need to and when and you're utterly confused given the sparse details, multiple hidden steps baked into each task and lack of prioritisation/ordering. This is the death of thoughts and actionability. Not all thoughts are todos and some thoughts require enrichment before being created.
So what we have now is an issue where everything is captured in Drafts (hopefully) but we need to ensure that these thoughts can reach a state of adding value to our life. We're going to take a quick pause from Drafts and now talk about the destination sources that our thoughts can move to and at last talk about how Drafts helps connect the dots.
Calendar
Some people use their calendars to todo lists. I think this is the wrong use of a tool. A calendar should ONLY be used to tell you where you need to be and when. Anything that is in your calendar is law and marks your commitments and strength of word. This is an example of a system you want to enforce the least amount of structure in. Don't put blocks for exercising, eating, random todo items etc. You want to have the least committed possible calendar to maximise the things you truly want to do or feel like doing in each moment.
It's important that you respect this system because without time everything cancels to 0. An overloaded calendar doesn't give you the opportunity to feel like you have time/space to think. An inaccurate calendar is a landmine of broken promises waiting to happen. Your calendar is your law and should be the truest state of reality. For example, I won't add going to the gym in my calendar, but I will add my personal training gym session. I won't add time to eat, but I will add lunch with a friend. There's almost nothing on the calendar that doesn't pertain to someone else. It is a mark of your external commitments, not internal ones.
Notion Calendar is an excellent choice given multi-timezone support and the native integration with Notion, which I cover below.
Notion
I think majority of my readers use or are familiar with Notion. However if you're not then you need to be ASAP. Notion is a truly unique piece of software that lets you represent information in a highly flexible and connected way. For example, you can create a database called "Goals" that then has a property that can link to items in another database (Milestones). I won't spent too much time going into why Notion is unique or how to use it, that's independent research you need to do. However the way that I use Notion is to create digital representations of my life for things such as:
Goals: what do I want to achieve currently
Milestones: what are the quantified items to mark success in my goals
Fitness goals: numeric measurements expressed as a percentage of my body composition
Bucket list: what are all the things I want to do before dying and what status of commitment are they at
As you can see they're rich information structures that can be intertwined with each other.
Todoist
I've tried almost every todo list under the sun and there's one reason why Todoist is a cut above: the programmatic power it has internally and externally. I'll explain more about it below but I can almost guarantee there won't be a better tool that Todoist when it comes to a personal productivity stack, starting with API support. This is important when dealing with drafts.
Now let's talk about how to use a todo list. The biggest mistake that people make with todo lists is they assign due dates to most/all tasks that eventually get missed then make them feel guilty and promote negative self talk of being lazy. Here's my key principles for using a todo list:
Nothing should have a due date to it unless something bad happens by not doing it on that date. Examples include: financial penalties, lost opportunities and critical commitments. The number of things with due dates should be minimal.
Tasks are simply ordered with 3 simple priorities. Red means "do ASAP whenever you have free time". Orange is more of "you need to do this but you can take a bit of time". Blue is "yeah do it whenever you're bored or don't want to do an orange/red". This simple system keeps prioritisation easy.
Each todo item should be absolutely clear what the next step is and require 0 thinking. If you can't do it in one step then it's a bad one.
Create a project called "one day" where you dump all the things you'd like to eventually do.
Now, when you have free time you simply: check what are the absolutely critical things you need to do that are due today. Then, if you have free time start going through your traffic light of reds, oranges, blues.
Back to Drafts
Okay so now that we've kind of explored the major destination sources for thoughts (there's many more but these are just key ones I think everyone should have), we can now come back to Drafts. One thing that is special about all the software in this blog post is that they have strong APIs that make interconnection between them very seamless. So remember how we had all these individual thoughts in Drafts:
"lunch bob tue 12pm"
"secondary table sorting"
"learn violin or some instrument"
"thinking of productivity like software dev stack content"
We can now, inside the Drafts app, apply programmatic actions to each of our modular thoughts. So going through the list:
"lunch bob tue 12pm": Apply Todoist action -> Triggers modal in Drafts with fields for title and priority. You enter "Find place for lunch with Bob next Tue @ 12pm" and orange priority because you know you'll probably get around to it soon -> Enriched todo item is now in Todoist without leaving Drafts. You also quickly add in your calendar "[TBD] Lunch with Bob" so you don't double book.
"secondary table sorting": This requires you to first do some research then present to the team -> You create a page in Notion adding your key thoughts in a more fleshed out way -> Create an orange Todoist item that talks about finishing off the document and then sharing with the team, you include the link to the newly created Notion document in the description to give yourself a nice place to pick off next time.
"learn violin or some instrument": Given this is a goal of yours, you simply go to Notion and then add it as "Not Started" and "Research an instrument to learn, preferably violin". You could automate this by creation a Notion Goals action which would automatically add it to Notion from Drafts!
"thinking of productivity like software dev stack content": Your re-write this thought as: "Personal Productivity Stack (new line) Talk about how you can think of your productivity as a software development stack and how it all links together". This thought can now have the Notion Content Idea action applied which will take the first line and add that as the title of the Notion DB row and the contents of the page as the second line of text.
As you can see with all of the above examples, you would go through this exercise typically every day or two and enrich each thought with the right amount of information to make it probable for the NBSA to happen. All your Draft actions can be done by existing plugins from the community or your own hand rolled JavaScript powered by ChatGPT! As your action library grows or gets refined, processing your thoughts should take less and less time!
Pulling it all together
While this can be a new system to get used to and time to actively management, the result means:
You capture every thought that is significant enough to change your life for the better
Each thought will eventually find it's place to be effective in the world
Your calendar should only reflect your external commitments
Your todo list tells you what is critical to do today and what would be nice to do if you have more time
You can live each moment based on your mood, energy and desires
I've been able to significantly improve the quality of my life with this system and hope it can do the same for many more. This is a very rough template and you will have to invest the time to tweak it to your preferences and workflows but that's the price of being effective. Before using the tools the best way to approach this is just a piece of pen and paper to map everything out and seeing how your information architecture would flow.
Anyways, that's it for this post! Join the Telegram channel if you have any questions about the system :) With this I hope you are now empowered to:
Do interesting things and lead a fulfilling life you enjoy
Record your thoughts as you gain entropy
Find the next best action to progress your thoughts with
Reap the benefits of being to do a lot at once!
