productivity - Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership (Page 2)

Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

productivity

A collection of 36 posts

Pareto in Practice: Finding Your Actual 80/20 Without Fooling Yourself

Pareto in Practice: Finding Your Actual 80/20 Without Fooling Yourself

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed in 1896 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He extended the observation to wealth distribution and then to peas in his garden (20% of the pods produced 80% of the peas). Over the century that followed,

The Eisenhower Matrix Is Too Simple — How to Build a Real Prioritisation System

The Eisenhower Matrix Is Too Simple — How to Build a Real Prioritisation System

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

How to Build a Second Brain — and Why Most Attempts Fail

How to Build a Second Brain — and Why Most Attempts Fail

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

Obsidian vs Notion vs Roam: Which Personal Knowledge Tool Is Worth the Switch

Obsidian vs Notion vs Roam: Which Personal Knowledge Tool Is Worth the Switch

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

Habit Design: Why New Year's Resolutions Die by February and What Actually Replaces Them

Habit Design: Why New Year's Resolutions Die by February and What Actually Replaces Them

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

Inbox Zero Is a Lie — Here's the Email System That Scales Past 300 a Day

Inbox Zero Is a Lie — Here's the Email System That Scales Past 300 a Day

Inbox Zero, as a concept, was invented by Merlin Mann in 2006. By 2009, Merlin Mann was publicly arguing that Inbox Zero was a lie — or, more precisely, that the cultural version of Inbox Zero had become the exact opposite of what he'd intended. The original idea was

Time-Blocking for Executives: A Calendar System That Survives Real Weeks

time management

Time-Blocking for Executives: A Calendar System That Survives Real Weeks

The CEO of a 200-person SaaS company in Dublin shared his calendar with me in March. It was, by any objective measure, a disaster. Sixty-three meetings in the week, average length 38 minutes, gaps between them rarely exceeding 15 minutes. He had recently read Cal Newport's Deep Work,

The Pomodoro Technique Is Overrated — Here's What Actually Works for Deep Tasks

The Pomodoro Technique Is Overrated — Here's What Actually Works for Deep Tasks

Francesco Cirillo invented the Pomodoro Technique in 1987 using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. The method — 25 minutes of focused work, 5 minutes of break, repeat — was designed for a specific person: Cirillo himself, a university student trying to study for exams with a short attention span. It worked for him.

How to Read 30 Business Books a Year Without Wasting a Single Hour

How to Read 30 Business Books a Year Without Wasting a Single Hour

The number 30 is arbitrary. I didn't choose it by research — I chose it because it was the highest number I could sustain without my marriage or my work suffering, and it turned out to be achievable with about 35 minutes of reading per day. Most people overestimate

The Real Reason You Procrastinate (It's Not Laziness, and Willpower Won't Fix It)

The Real Reason You Procrastinate (It's Not Laziness, and Willpower Won't Fix It)

You know the pattern. A big report is due Friday. It's Tuesday, and you've got the time, the brief, the data. You sit down, open a blank document, and immediately feel a vague dread — not panic, not boredom, something closer to a low-grade nausea. You check

The Deep Work Protocol: How to Protect 4 Hours a Day When Nobody Else Will

The Deep Work Protocol: How to Protect 4 Hours a Day When Nobody Else Will

A friend of mine — a VP at a SaaS company in Munich, 38, two kids, a wife who runs a legal practice — told me last month that he hadn't done four hours of uninterrupted thinking since 2022. Not in one sitting. Not even split across a day. His