Selected Readings 2024-W47

Will Larson: Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track Currently re-reading this to broaden my perspective for the next year.

After finishing the Progressive Summarization series, I took some time to rediscover Forte’s writing.

Forte Labs: From Multitasking to Multiplexing: 5 Steps to Building a Personal Productivity Network This was the most fruitful idea this week for me. Forte uses IT networking as a metaphor to think about throughput of intellectual work and how classic tech concepts like encapsulation, splitting content and composability can apply to personal productivity.

Forte Labs: A Single Creative Project Can Change the Trajectory of Your Life Very personal story of how stepping out of your comfort zone a little with every project can form a life.

There’s a tremendous difference between reacting to the pressure of an externally imposed demand that forces you to be creative, and the internally generated spark of an idea that you just have to express or you will burst.

When you only respond to external demands, you train yourself to look for sources of motivation exclusively in the external environment. You get used to waiting for someone to choose you, to approve of you, or to give you permission to take the next step. It’s useful to know how to respond to external demands, but it’s not enough to sustain a creative life.

Tang Yau Hoong: How your to-do list shapes your personality — and how to use it to remake who you are Similar to Forte’s text, provides a framework to think about the psychological aspects.

the greatest value in thinking of personality as ‘doing projects’ rather than ‘having traits’ is in three powerful words: potential for change

Forte Labs: How Your Projects Shape Who You Are - Forte Labs Personality is not a fixed entity, you can change it sustainably and almost completely. Projects are a underappreciated way to achieve this.

(..) two ways in which you can think about your personality. The first is in terms of the personality attributes that you have, or your openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeability and neuroticism (what I call the Big Five personality traits). The second is in terms of what you do, or your personal projects.

greatest value in thinking of personality as “doing projects” rather than “having traits” is in three powerful words: potential for change

Forte Labs: Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension Pairs well with Kleon’s “Thinking outside your head” and Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind”.

Our consciousness is not just embodied — it is embedded in our environment. Our consciousness is distributed, simultaneously deeply integrated and loosely coupled.

Instead of putting that lump of soft tissue on a pedestal, we should focus instead on building enabling contexts. On helping our minds make more effective tradeoffs between mental, physical, and social sources of knowledge.

Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness, “I actually did the work on the paper.” Weiner responded, “Well, the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” Feynman pushed back, “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Checklists, when we can‘t trust our brains Collects the basics of the topic, of course referring to Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”. If you never thought deeply about checklists, and you probably haven’t, start here.

Austin Kleon: How to make a map of your mind One of my favourite thinkers when it comes to thinking outside your head gives a light-hearted intro to one of the most effective tools to think.

Cal Newport: Slow Productivity Finished the audiobook this week. Extends some of the ideas in Deep Work, a staple of my thinking about work and productivity.

Songs of the Week:

• Linkin Park: Casualty
  Simply love it.
• Poppy: they’re all around us
• Agnes Obel: Riverside