(2017-07-05) Beyond Productivity Porn Moving From Tips And Tricks To A Personal Knowledge Base

Doug Toft: Beyond Productivity Porn — Moving from Tips and Tricks to a Personal Knowledge Base (PKM). Last week’s post summarized Tiago Forte’s critique of the productivity advice that litters the Internet. So what’s beyond all those tips and tricks? Start with a personal knowledge base (or commonplace book).

You can take your productivity to an even higher level by redefining the word deliverable. I once took that word to mean only the final draft of whatever I’m writing. Tiago reminds us that deliverables can also include intermediate packets. These are documents leading up to the final draft — brainstorms, organized notes, outlines, prototypes, zero drafts, first drafts, and more. Submitting these to clients allows me to get feedback early on and define precisely what the client wants.

Tiago says that he’s made a living from his collection of digital notes by turning them into a variety of deliverables — blog posts, online courses, workshops, trainings, slide presentations, and in-person presentations.

Spot significant patterns in your thinking and learning. Look for unexpected connections between notes. (associative)

You move from being a passive consumer of information to an active user of it. Your personal knowledge base becomes a resource for making decisions and changing your behavior. This is where you make the transition from information to knowledge.

Armed with a personal knowledge base, you can:

what can you do with that quiet space? Use to it take on more ambitious and exciting projects. Use it to write books, fuel podcasts, script videos, launch new services, and develop new products. In short, use that space for creative breakthroughs.

Knowledge work, he says, starts with capturing information in its most humble and mundane forms

You need tools to help you remember, so you can focus on thinking and creating.

knowledge workers are constant curators.

Tiago and I are fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method. When asked to reduce this method to one sentence, David often says: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

We can now expect to spend only a few months to a few years with one organization, which means our ability to capture, organize, and retrieve our ideas, and transfer them effectively from project to project and company to company, becomes more important than ever.