Sometime recently I noticed that most of the systems I use to organize my life had to go through multiple serious revisions before they actually became useful. I agree that what would be super useful to read would be something about the process of finding/creating particular systems that work best for you. I haven’t really seen any productivity/self-help stuff that wasn’t talking about their own particular system. At some point in the nebulous future I intend to write such a guide.
Also, resolving disagreements is something I’d like to see a guide for. LW has a lot of great recommendations for how to do so, but I haven’t read a “Here’s everything together” guideline.
Feynman: “He opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”
Workflowy is stupendous for this due to how easy it is to rearrange your ontology on the fly. I tried something similar to the above in several areas and it caused a level up. Not just in the object level areas I tried it in, there was a level up in the meta process.
I was thinking of “systems I use to organize my life” very broadly, not just in terms of building one’s ontologies (though that’s also something I’ve been thinking about lately, and I’m going to look into workflowy). Things like how have I designed the basic structure of my days, how does my calendar get used, in what contexts will I take notes, how do I manage habits.
A blanket productivity recommendation might be, “Implement GTD”. I’m imagining a guide that would offer a process that one could use to determine what parts of their life could benefit from systematization, and how to design, test, and tweak systems so that you end up with one’s that work for you.
Sometime recently I noticed that most of the systems I use to organize my life had to go through multiple serious revisions before they actually became useful. I agree that what would be super useful to read would be something about the process of finding/creating particular systems that work best for you. I haven’t really seen any productivity/self-help stuff that wasn’t talking about their own particular system. At some point in the nebulous future I intend to write such a guide.
Also, resolving disagreements is something I’d like to see a guide for. LW has a lot of great recommendations for how to do so, but I haven’t read a “Here’s everything together” guideline.
Feynman: “He opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”
Workflowy is stupendous for this due to how easy it is to rearrange your ontology on the fly. I tried something similar to the above in several areas and it caused a level up. Not just in the object level areas I tried it in, there was a level up in the meta process.
I was thinking of “systems I use to organize my life” very broadly, not just in terms of building one’s ontologies (though that’s also something I’ve been thinking about lately, and I’m going to look into workflowy). Things like how have I designed the basic structure of my days, how does my calendar get used, in what contexts will I take notes, how do I manage habits.
A blanket productivity recommendation might be, “Implement GTD”. I’m imagining a guide that would offer a process that one could use to determine what parts of their life could benefit from systematization, and how to design, test, and tweak systems so that you end up with one’s that work for you.
Something that worked for me and a couple others: try GTD, Marie Kondo, and YNAB, and in bouncing your attention between them notice the similarities.
Have you made a guide or made any progress, or maybe have resources that can help someone looking to develop their own system?