Productivity 2013

I wanted to jot down a few quick points about productivity, which has been one of my interests for quite some time.

People I learned from

I am a long time follower of Cal Newport’s blog (medium-length introductory talk to his main points here) and his motto (taken from Steve Martin): Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Also, like nearly everyone who has ever come near the topic of productivity in IT, I have been using my own kind of GTD-like workflow and I would recommend Allen’s approach when looking for a good place to start.

Aaron Swartz’s post on the topic has brought me some insight, for example not all kinds of activity having the same priority:

my list is programming, writing, thinking, errands, reading, listening, and watching (in that order).

His words have stayed with me over the weeks since I’ve read them first. I admire their brevity, simplicity and clarity.

Let’s not forget Lars Wirzenius’ GTD for Hackers. It’s a well-written description of a GTD implementation, giving a practical introduction to the topic.

Tools I use

• Redmine for everything larger than three items or running longer than a week.
• A notebook for errands and quickly write down whatever is thrown at me.
• E-mails to myself for longer ideas when on the move.
• Online calendar for everything that has a concrete date attached to it.
• feed2imap for fetching a selected few RSS feeds and delivering them to a special mailbox.
• Instapaper for postponing interesting articles for later reading when skimming through said mailbox.
• An e-book reader to actually consume the postponed articles and mark relevant passages.
• Zotero for organizing academic texts and bibliographies and larger topical text collections.