- Tags:: #META - Last updated:: [[2024-08-18]] ![[Pasted image 20230501103314.png]] Some people have been curious about what is my writing process, how do I manage what I read/learn, my tasks... and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to review that. All these things are interconnected in my case because I keep everything in my [[Personal Knowledge Management Systems|second brain]] (or "Personal Knowledge Management System", or "Digital garden" if you want to read more on this topic). There is just one exception: tactical work stuff, which I leave in whatever doc/task management system is in use there (since it will be easier to share with others). I will focus here mainly on my personal productivity: to manage my team's productivity I have other mechanisms. From the outside, my practices may look too complex, but I didn't start doing everything at once, they evolved organically. In any case, I'm a firmly believer in (a good and flexible) process (see [[Process allergy]]): - I tend to run on autopilot mode and obsess over things which may or may not be important. Process forces me to be more strategic and then have a better impact and [[✍️ Memento mori|less regrets]] about what I did with my time. - I have a [[✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management#^cb1e88|high need for control]] and following a process is a great way to have [[✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management#^25d519|evidence-based confidence]]. The following are practices I follow, from more strategic and longer term to the most tactical day-to-day stuff. ## [[⛵ Life principles and long standing challenges]] Just like a typical startup team, I have an ideal I want to reach (vision), a plan to get closer to that for some years to come (mission), and some means and constraints (values). I read them when setting my [[OKRs]] (or whenever I need to!), but review them yearly, and if triggered by a significant event: time between jobs, holidays, a book that blows my mind (e.g., 5/5 score on [[> Book library]]), a personal crisis ## Quarterly Personal OKRs This is the usual stuff of [[Christina Wodke]] in [[Personal OKRs - ElegantHack]]. They are about my personal life (although I may also have professional objectives there), and are in addition to those specific to the company I work for. ### Weekly OKRs review Each week I do a weekly review of my personal OKRs, in which I: - Review: - Read that week [[⏳ My second brain management. Workflows and funflows#Daily notes|Daily notes]], particularly my "Personal thoughts". - Update a log of the OKRs. - Set priorities: - Update #🍩LifeEpic . - Update [[🏫 Deep work epics]] (not frequent). - Schedule tasks for the next week (on the calendar if possible). ## Tasks All my personal ToDos are distributed among the following sections: - Personal tasks: - #🍩LifeEpic (s) - [[🏫 Deep work epics]] - Work tasks: weekly priority log. ### #🍩LifeEpic (s) Since there are always some large initiatives I need to take care of, I have the same Agile concept of "Epics". Most of them will be linked to either a personal OKR but not always (important things that are not explicitly an objective, e.g., dealing with health issues). These epics usually get the their own Obsidian page so it is usually there where I break them down in smaller tasks, have a log... I manage fine-grained tasks with the [Obsidian Tasks plugin](https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks), which allows me to retrieve them in different contexts and manage scheduled and due dates in my [[⏳ My second brain management. Workflows and funflows#✅ Daily checklist| Daily checklist]]. ### [[🏫 Deep work epics]] This is a set of topics and timebox to get deeper into things that matter to me and that require focus (usually very related to my personal OKRs). Unlike most #🍩LifeEpic , these are not really "mandatory" tasks, they are self-imposed. It is structured around: - **Creative** tech work: to train my builder skills, enjoy working without legacy stuff and with full creative freedom, and for visibility. The "practice" part of learning. - **Studying** or **summarising** tech books/articles. The "theoretical" part of learning. - **Writing** original pieces: for deeper introspection. - **Meta** time: to figure out what to do. - And **ruminating**: topics I am somewhat interested in but not doing anything specifically about them at the moment. By facing them frequently, it's easier to gather related material, thoughts and links (e.g., instead of doing a lot of free reading, I favor these topics. I still do some free reading for discoverability). If they get traction, they may move at some point into any of the other categories. This is inspired by the [12 favorite problems](https://fortelabs.com/blog/12-favorite-problems-how-to-spark-genius-with-the-power-of-open-questions/) of [[Richard Feynman]]. I force myself to have only one item of each category (except ruminating, where I can put several). I work on one of each of these items on the afternoons, and often for 2-3 hours during the weekends. I usually focus on one of them until I have something to publish, and then move to another. However, I have a selected item per type of activity because sometimes I get tired of one of these activities before having something to publish and prefer to switch for a while. ### At my job: weekly priority log I use OKRs for my team at work too and the typical process to review whether we are on track. But the most impactful thing for my personal productivity is setting my priorities at the beginning of the week following [[Leader's Week - How to Maximize Your Weekly Impact]], and reserving time slots on the calendar for them. Every week, I stick to: - 1 full focus activity (8h reserved time). - 2 important activities (2h each). - 4 "add value" activities (1h each). ## Daily checklist After the deep work period and before going to work (which now is just opening up Slack), I follow a [[✔️ Daily checklist]] to prepare for the day and populate that day tasks. On chaotic periods, it gives me a lot of feeling of control. It looks like this: ![[Pasted image 20230430202637.png]] where: - The header image comes from [[📺 Six Feet Under]] to remember that [[🦜 You can't picture this. It's already gone]]. - Carry from previous day: during a day, all the notes I take (e.g., meetings, thoughts, whatever), I take them in a paper notebook. It offers no resistance to capture, maximizes flexibility (e.g., quick diagrams), makes it less rude to take notes when talking to people (they can feel they have youe attention). "Carry from previous day" means processing the info of the previous day from the paper notebook to whatever makes sense in my digital notes (new tasks, meetings notes, etc.). - "Diary" is a brief moment to write about whatever I feel in the "Daily notes". I can also do that too both on the paper notebook or directly into the daily note at any other point of the day. There are two more sections making use of [Obsidian Tasks plugin](https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks) views: - Task due: pulls tasks from everywhere, grouped by (due date == {overdue, today, in two weeks, in a month}, note where they came from). - Task scheduled for: same but using the "scheduled date". ## Daily notes I use the core "Daily notes" plugin, with which Obsidian creates a daily page with the name format: YYYY-MM-DD, prepopulated with a template I created. It has a very minimal role in my setup. It just has: - [[Done tasks]]: self-explanatory. Again, it's an [Obsidian Tasks plugin](https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks) view which gathers all the tasks that were completed on this day. - [[💖 Diary entry]] (already described). - Links from all the other pages (whenever there are log entries for those topics on those days). Apart from the diary, I don't check them that often. Most of the times, I just check them out of curiosity to see what I was doing on a particular date. ## Media consumption and personal knowledge base Plain consumption leads to nothingness: ![[Consume less, create more#^f5d5be]] And [[Writing is thinking]]. So, in addition to be more purposeful on what I consume (for example with [[⏳ My second brain management. Workflows and funflows#🏫 Deep work|"Deep work"]]), I try to at least write what I think about it (it's worth it, sometimes it isn't): I started with #📚Books , #📜Papers , and #🗞️Articles , but I'm also starting to apply it to everything #🎬Movies , #📺TVShows , #🎮Videogames , #🎙️Podcasts ... I favor books over any other forms ([[✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants#Hey, at least I read Hacker News]]), and I hate podcasts ([[Ep. 238 — the Joys of the Reading Life#^610c51]]). (Update on [[2024-08-18]]: my wedding ended up being a podcast. See [[🎙️ Mi boda es un podcast]]). I try to concentrate my reading through Readwise (or Kindle -> Readwise) which allows me to highlight and write notes, and have them synced to Obsidian. Moreover I can already link to other notes and these relevant pieces will show up in the context of those other notes. However, I love physical books, so in that case I manually copy over highlights and notes to Obsidian. This would be the levels 1-3 on "progressive summarization" (although I just highlight): ![[Personal Knowledge Management Systems#^e1d0ea]] Even though I hate learning from podcast (and I think they usually have very poor quality), I use the [Snipd app](https://www.snipd.com), which allows me to highlight passages, tag and comment, and that also ends up in Obsidian, through Readwise. In the case of books and papers I consider particularly relevant at some point, I may do a summary on top of the raw highlights ( #✒️SummarizedBooks , #📜Papers ) , which would be level 4 of summarization. Apart from that, I don't really follow a strict process to grow my Obsidian graph. It is mostly opportunistic. Most of it is related to "Deep work": on a given season, I have all these topics close, and as I read about them (but also more broadly), I make links as they come to mind... At some point, I end up wanting to sort things out and writing longer pieces about those items, so they become a "Write" item of "Deep work", and then I already have a base of references and notes on the topic. These pieces that I want to write end up being something I publish ( #✍️OwnPosts ) or better structured notes ( #📝CuratedNotes ), which would be level 5 on the previous graph of "progressive summarization". Sometimes I'm going to pass some info to someone (e.g., collegues at work) and I use that opportunity to sort the information I have a bit better. Apart from linking, there is little hierarchy on my notes. Sometimes I build some pages that act as table of contents, such as [[Working in Data]] . These type of pages are called "Map of contents" in the world of [[Personal Knowledge Management Systems|second brains]]. There are a couple of things that I'd like to try: - [[Spaced repetition]]: I think it would help me to better use the information at the time I need it (and come up with better connections). - Semantic search over my notes: although I don't think I have a problem with information retrieval. Simple search and backlinks work just fine for the moment. # Now page An amazing summary of where am I at is the [[▶️ Now]] page.