Productivity is doing less stuff to get more stuff done. Managing its context is the key to becoming more productive.

via Managing the Productivity Context – Hilton Lipschitz

While I have been at home with my sick daughter this week, I have been able to clear out my Instapaper list quite a bit. I have been reading a lot about workflows lately. I am currently in search of the One Workflow (as Michael Schechter recently talked about). Hilton’s post is a great step-by-step general overview of how we can get productive. It does not confine to any one app, though he does talk about the apps he uses to stay productive, but rather it is a high level view of what you need to do.

For the first time in my life, things are better. For the first time in my life, it’s not about one app, one device, one trick, one tactic, or one methodology. It’s about one workflow that is helping me do my best work. And in a world of tips, tricks, life hacks, and all-in experiments, leaning in to a workflow that’s already working seem like exactly the kind of radical approach I need to take right now…

If you haven’t found a decent workflow for yourself, figure it out. If you have, stop screwing around and get back to work.

via My Radical Productivity Experiment – Michael Schechter of A Better Mess

WOW!

And I really mean that….wow! Kudos to Mr. Schechter and his bold plan to not tinker and work. You have knocked this one out of the park, both Jason and I agree.

This is something that I have struggled with for YEARS! After reading through A Better Mess, Productivityist and other great blogs, I have decided to take the rest of 2012 to find that one workflow that works for me. Jason and I were talking last night about how we both want to really make Life Above a destination for folks looking for a better lifestyle, and this is one way that I can work towards this goal.

Imagine you just bought a toolbox, one that came pre-filled with a selection of instruments you would likely need to get some work done around the house . A portable one, not one of those big red Craftsman jobs that you wheel around your garage when you’re pretending to fix that ’68 Camaro that is totally going to make you young and awesome again one day.

So anyway, you’ve got this toolbox and inside of it you’ve got a hammer and you’ve got a wrench and you’ve got whatever else one keeps in a box of tools. (I’m not so handy.) Maybe you’ve added a couple of things over time that didn’t come with the basic set and that you need for common jobs.
…
I’d like to think that devices like the iPhone and the iPad are toolboxes that can be approached in the same manner.

– James Gowans | Out of the Box

James was introduced to me by my good friend, Patrick Rhone, on his ‘enough’ podcast. Patrick and Myke had him on a recent episode to talk about his revamped index card task list. Well, James has taken it a step farther and is now using his iPhone and iPad with the stock Apple apps, plus 1 or 2 additional apps.

This is a fascinating read. I read all of James’ blog posts last night and they are wonderfully written and really resonate with me. He has found a place in my feed reader for a long time to come.

Being nimble is one of the best things you can do for your personal productivity, and I try to be nimble whenever and wherever I can. That’s one of the primary reasons I focus on task and not time.

Productivity needs to be taken personally. If you don’t take it personally then you’re not going to come close to realizing your full potential…and there’s no bigger waste of time than that.

– Mike Vardy, Personal Productivity

This is a great post from Mr. Vardy. He talks about how people seem to get too wrapped up on the tools of their productivity and not the focus of their productivity…the tasks that need to be done.

I want to talk about Mike Vardy’s present and future. I have followed from the outside the places that Mike has published. I listened to his stints on the WorkAwesome and ProductiVardy podcasts. Currently, he has a new podcast that he co-hosts with Michael Schechter of A Better Mess called Mikes on Mics. It is very good and I highly recommend it.

It his recent re-focusing on his own blog at Vardy.me and his writing at Lifehack is what has really brought him to the top of my daily readings. His thoughts on productivity fall right in line with my own thoughts. Productivityists FTW!

The other thing that has truly impressed me about Mr. Vardy is that he engages his readers. I have had numerous twitter converstations with him and he reads and comments on his posts at Vardy.me and he seems genuinely interested in his readers. There are many writers on the internet that output amazing work, but don’t ever seems to engage the regular guy, like me, when we want to engage them on their work. Mr. Vardy is NOT that kind of writer. He produces great work and wants to talk to his readers about it.

Thank you, Mike, for what you write and how you engage with your readers. Your writing is helping me to learn to be a better writer and I hope to one day meet and listen to you in person. Go and check him out at his site or on Lifehack. He is also known to toot on may varied subjects. You won’t be sorry.

Another blogger in the universe has come to his senses. Mike Vardy wrote tonight about how most people seem to not like productivity systems because “they don’t like systems.” I fully agree with that statement. We engaged on twitter shortly after that and I believe that we both have come to the same conclusion:

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a framework for personal productivity. You can use any (or all) bits of it in whatever form that make you more productive.

Jason and I have always felt that GTD as its core is a framework for people to construct their own system of productivity. I am sure that there are a good many who try to be as canonical as possible. They do this by following the GTD Flowchart to the letter of the law; they keep a separate projects-only list; the keep separate lists for every context they use; and do mind dumps by putting a single idea/task on a sheet of paper. I tried to be as canonical as possible when I was first implementing GTD in mid-2005, but quickly after that I realized that there were parts that I found I did not use.

Today my system is quite aways away from what is considered canonical. Today, a daily index card and a cloud based task list are all that is in my system. You can read more about it on a guest post that I wrote for my friend Beth’s blog. The only change is that I am looking at using asana for my task manager, based on Mr. Vardy glowing reviews of it.

Productivity is about getting things done (notice the lowercase letters). NOTHING ELSE.

If you are not getting things done, you are not being productive.

I believe that one’s education is a foundation of the person we become, but the books we read throughout our lives, the things we choose and turn to time and again, are what really shape us, cause us to be the people we really are.

I am an avid reader and a huge believer in everything that Randy says in this newsletter. My library is no where near as vast or varied as Randy’s but I definitely appreciate the sentiment…and maybe now I will ask, “I wonder what else I might like.”

This come from Randy Murray’s latest contribution to the Read and Trust Premium Membership Newsletter. Read and Trust is a handpicked collection of amazing writers that Aaron Mahnke has assembled. The newsletter comes out every Tuesday morning and features one of the amazing writers that are members. You can see the membership at the main website as well as links to their respective blogs.

I am not a member of the Read and Trust network, I am just a very satisfied subscriber.

BBP got pretty popular throughout 2006 amassing over 6,500 subscribers at one point, which was pretty big in those days. We were on the front edge of the burgeoning productivity blog movement that started in 2006-2007. We met many new friends and some very cool folks during that time. Some of them have moved on to some very cool things work wise. Some of them are published authors. Thankfully, there are a number of them that we are still friends with today.

We kept BBP up and running until late 2009, when we both started to realize that GTD was really not what either of us were doing anymore. In the spring of 2010, we transitioned our writing efforts to Life Above, and a new focus, not on productivity systems, per se, but areas that we felt were just as important in “helping people find the lives that they wanted to live.”

I guess, now, in hindsight, they were not as important…which leads me to today.

One of the great friends that I met that summer of 2006 is Patrick Rhone. Back then he was just a productivity guy from Minnesota who wrote out the first Productivity Whitepaper (his Org-Fu) that was starting his path to superstardom that he is now enjoying. Jason and I have spent many nights on skype calls with Patrick just talking about all sorts of differnet things. One thing that Jason and I always wanted to do was pick Patrick’s brain about writing. The one thing that Patrick always worked back around to was

“find something you’re passionate about and write about that.”

That worked well for me in the early days of BBP. I loved reading about and writing about productivity systems, tools and everything in between. As the productivity blog wave started to crest and die out, I found myself struggling with stuff to write about. I still struggle with that to this day, and I finally remembered the words that Patrick told us so many times: find something your passionate about.

I don’t have anything in my life that I am passionate about enough to want to write about it at Life Above, 1-Man IT Department or my personal tumblr. Don’t get me wrong, I am passionate about my kids, and my son’s baseball development and teams, and my wife and all sorts of things that are personal to me. I just don’t have anything that is inspiring me to consistantly write on the Internet.

I certainly have tried to get inspired by finding new writers out there on the Internet to start reading, but soon realized that their blogs are 95% offsite links, 3% original content by the author, and 2% sponsor thanks. There are a few out there that I still read all the time, but I have jettisoned most of them from my Google Reader because they were just adding to the noise.

I really have not even decided if I like writing anymore. I spend most of my nights either reading or watching Netflix to catch up on the series that I didn’t watch the first time around. I struggle both with the craft and process of writing. I stand in awe of Patrick for his ability to grasp life and make me think how I can be better. The same holds true for Aaron Mahnke, who (in my opinion) is one of the best designers on the Internet, and all of a sudden steps out and releases, not one, but two fantasy fiction novels that are out of this world! I want to be able to create like that, but I don’t think that I have it in me.

This is by no means a pity party for me, just a realization: I am done writing on the Internet for the foreseeable future. Maybe next year, I will get the itch to return, and I have many platforms in which to do that. I have always loved technology and in my job, I am knee deep in it all the time. I also still love to read about people’s productivity systems, but those posts are seemingly few and far between nowadays.

So, for now, I bid you all adieu! It really has been fun, and I hope that I was able to entertain someone. Go out there and find really great writers to start following. They are out there (I mentioned two above. Start there and you won’t go wrong), you just have to find them.

It makes me ponder the question: has an internet full of character limits, page views and retweets caused us to lose focus on the true heart of Reading? If the goal is to enter into the writer’s mind, follow the trail they blaze and earn the conclusion as they had intended it, perhaps our new way of reading has caused us to abandon that. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

via Respecting the Content — AaronMahnke

Many of us spend a significant amount of time and effort on methods, systems, and tools. Those things are all important. That being siad, it is just as important that we pay attention to our bodies and listen closely to what they are telling us. Obviously proper diet and exercise is a must for healthy living. But have you thought about how the food you eat affects you in the moment?

Energy management is not all about sleep and coffee (or other forms fo caffeine for those so inclined). The food and drink we take in on a specific day can absolutely affect how we feel and perform that day.

For example, Being a type 2 diabetic, I certainly have to manage the carbohydrates I take in. If I drink beverages with heavy sugars in them like soft drinks, for example, I subsequently feel sluggish and less motivated. Yes, those drinks have caffeine. But the sugar counteracts the caffeine affect and makes me tired. I know this about my body. I also know from experience that when I eat really unhealthy foods at lunch, I also feel poorly that afternoon. Heavily fried foods especially set me back. It is very important that I do not skip breakfast entirely, then eat a large meal at lunch. It is a one way ticket to a sluggish afternoon.

It is so important that we are able to feel and recognize messages that our body sends us. Not only to manage our long term health, but also to manage the energy we have on a daily basis to be our best when we need to be.