(2017-05-22) Fortes Approach To Productivity

Podcast: Tiago Forte’s Approach to Productivity. But, like with the example of Toyota developing this entire culture around it, using small batch sizes requires skill, and requires a different way of thinking and doing things

Freelancing has been around a long time, but almost by definition you had to be a specialist.

one of the great, great insights that took decades and decades to discover was small batches

I’m constantly managing this portfolio of products and services

Deep work, spending hours and hours in deep flow, is a big batch size.

trend with deep work. I’m opposed.

I call it the rise of the freelance generalist.

holdover from that freelance specialist mindset.

there’s no inherent structure to work. Work has no inherent unit. We make units; we make tasks, and projects, and milestones, and goals. But nothing about those is inherent in the nature of work

I almost like using different words. I have this one word “intermediate packet.” Instead of “deliverable,” I say an intermediate packet. Try to finish every working session, whether it’s 15 minutes or 8 hours, with an intermediate packet that you expose to the world; that you get some sort of feedback on.

employee tenure is at, I think, 2.3 years. We spend a couple of years at a company. We do a few projects, a certain number of projects, and we’re gone. We need a better way to take knowledge with us. Not proprietary, confidential stuff, but actually just the insights and the breakthroughs

I have this method I’ve developed called PARA, which stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives. And the inspiration from this — a little bit of historical background — is something called the OODA loop

You divide your work into projects, which I’m using here the GTD definition, a series of tasks linked to an outcome

Areas of responsibility: Some standard or area of your life that’s an ongoing concern; that you want to maintain on an ongoing basis.

And then Archives, which is anything from the previous three categories that’s no longer active

Resources: Basically, interests or topics.