Productivity #

Productivity is a difficult thing to define and to manage. It is very easy to get carried away with optimising your life around being productive - I have fallen into this trap a lot. It is one thing to be organised and manage to achieve and accomplish projects, and to take pride and interest in the tools you use to do that, and another to become obsessed with the act of doing things itself, to optimise that, to get better and better primarily at getting things done, rather than at the things themselves.

  • A nice article by Aaron Swartz about how productivity is more about optimising the types of tasks worked on during time slots with differing quality (focussed vs. unfocussed, stressed vs. unstressed, etc) than maximising the amount of time you have.
  • Creator of TypeSense, which looks like a potentially interesting search tool for the digital garden once it gets big, about the unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up every day and doing a little bit of work.
  • An article in Wired about how the pressure of GTD could be related to that all-too-human universal fear: of death.
  • An interesting take by Justin Dirose on the limits of current productivity tools and the more universal, human needs a new generation of tools will need to address. Resonated with me quite a lot this piece.
  • Some great tips here from Tony Ballantyne.
  • A classic post on implementing GTD in emacs.
  • Taskwarrior, a nice command-line app for handling tasks.
  • Another post about how the first step to doing things is admitting time is finite and you’re not going to do everything you want to do.
  • A reminder that “productivity is an ableist construct”.
  • Marvin, a personal productivity app.
  • Emery, another one.
  • xit, a plain-text file format for todo lists and such.
  • Akiflow, another interesting-looking todo/calendar hybrid thing.
  • General Task, another one.
  • About getting things done (in small increments).
  • A very nice command-line tool called Frame created to help remember the context of various tasks.