Prioritisation
Dwight Eisenhower never drew the matrix that now bears his name. In a 1954 speech, he quoted an unnamed university president who distinguished between urgent and important problems, noting that "the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of
Mental Models
Charlie Munger, who died in November 2023 at 99, spent sixty years as Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway. His annual speeches at the Daily Journal meetings and at Berkshire produced a distinct body of work on what he called "mental models" — the cross-disciplinary thinking tools
PKM
Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain (2022) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned a cottage industry of courses, templates, and YouTube walkthroughs. The promise was appealing: your life contains too much information for one biological brain to retain, but a structured digital system — a "second
Learning
Between 2018 and 2023 I watched two colleagues — similar age, similar starting point, both analysts at the same consulting firm — take measurably different career trajectories. One is now a director at a top-tier fund, running a portfolio worth nine figures. The other is still an analyst, at a different but
Learning
Richard Feynman had a specific test for whether he actually understood something. He would pick a technical concept — a mathematical proof, a physical mechanism, a derivation — and try to explain it to a class of freshmen, or sometimes to himself out loud as if to a freshman. If he got
Reading
The speed reading industry is worth roughly $200 million a year globally, built on courses, apps, and books promising to triple or quadruple your reading speed while maintaining comprehension. Evelyn Wood, who founded Reading Dynamics in 1959, claimed to teach students to read 1,500 to 6,000 words per
PKM
I have used Notion since 2019, Roam Research from 2020 to 2023, and Obsidian from 2022 through today. At one point, for about eight months, I was paying for all three and actively using all three. This was, with hindsight, a mistake. Each of these tools is genuinely good. None
Note Taking
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who between 1951 and his death in 1998 published 70 books and around 400 academic papers. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most prolific social theorists of the twentieth century. When asked how he did it, he never attributed the output
Goal Setting
George Doran coined SMART goals in a 1981 management-review article. The idea, reasonable at the time, was that vague managerial objectives produced vague outcomes, and that forcing people to write goals that were Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound would pull performance upward. For ordinary corporate work — hitting a quarterly
Goal Setting
John Doerr introduced OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — to Google in 1999. He'd learned them at Intel under Andy Grove, who had adapted them from Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives from the 1950s. The format became internal company currency at Google, and from there spread to
Habits
The business of New Year's resolutions is worth somewhere between $30 and $60 billion globally — gym memberships, nutrition apps, productivity tools, self-help books, language-learning subscriptions. Most of the economic value is generated in January and is gone by mid-February, because 92% of new resolutions, according to University of
Communication
Slack, like Facebook and TikTok and every other growth-stage consumer or prosumer tool, is built on engagement metrics. The product team at Slack is measured — explicitly — on Daily Active Users, messages per user per day, and session length. This is not evil, but it is a conflict of interest you