🔋 A Productivity Nerd's Top 5 Lessons of 2024
The end is here!
As we chill the champaign and put the finishing touches on 2024, I've edited my swirling mess of reflections into the top five productivity lessons of the year. Regular readers know this already, but I'll share here for anyone who is new: "productivity" in these pages doesn't just mean the classics like time blocking, but my broader conception that seeks to incorporate a more personal, human approach.
Let's get to it, in rough reverse order:
Lesson 5: I Offboarded My Brain, and It Changed My Life
Talk to me about anything in the professional realm for more than five minutes, and chances are I'll find a way to work Obsidian into the conversation. This software and the way I use it changed everything for me. I wrote about my first year with Obsidian in my 2022 review and followed up with my progress at the two-year mark in the 2023 review. If you want to learn more about the system itself, start there.
I actually have yet to read Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, the canonical book on the topic. For me, it has been less about adhering to a hyper specific method prescribed by someone else, and much more about building a steady practice of writing down essentially everything that I may need to recall in a reliable digital place that allows me to quickly link together and access my notes.
Three years into my near daily use of Obsidian, here's what my database looks like. Each bubble is a note, and each line a link between two notes. The larger the bubble, the more items are linked to it.https://videopress.com/v/n2PKjqIh?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true
I only reference this graphical representation a few times a year, but it is a helpful demonstration of just how much I store in this database. This is my offboard brain, and I use it all. the. time.
For anyone looking to give Obsidian and the offboard brain / linking system a shot, I always recommend this YouTube series. And you can always send me questions or thoughts! If it isn't clear, I love talking about this stuff, and I love helping other people build systems of their own.
Lastly on this topic, Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, is a brilliant blogger. Incisive, to-the-point, and very well written. Check it out.
Lesson 4: Weekly Publication is Hard but Worthwhile
On May 26, I published my first weekly blog post, turning this from a blog of sporadic updates to a regular column. This post you're reading marks the 40th week of consecutive Tuesday posts in a row, with the exception of one off week due to a family emergency.
I have learned an immense amount through this process. I captured a lot of those lessons in my "Why I Write" post from a few weeks back. There were plenty of weeks I wanted to stop, and plenty of excuses I tried to give myself. But I kept at it, and I'm thankful I did.
You better believe I'm keeping this thing going in 2025. The conversation, self discovery, and creativity it has generated has been a highlight of this year.
Lesson 3: Yearly Themes Work
I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, as I have found them to be too rigid and unattainable. For years, I've been listening to content creators CGP Grey and Myke Hurley talk about the concept of setting yearly themes instead. This six-minute video does a good job of explaining the basics.
The rough idea is that a theme can spark far more meaningful and lasting change than resolutions. A common example is reading. If you say, "I'm going to read 50 books this year," and then you only end up reading 40, you will feel like you failed, even though you read 40 effing books! Or if by the end of January you've read none, a feeling of failure sets in deeply and early. If instead you set a theme of "the year of reading," you can build a practice of reading more regularly without measuring success against an arbitrary goal.
In early 2024, a theme came to me even though I wasn't really searching for it: the year of clarity. That certainly didn't mean that I was going to set a goal of having absolute clarity on everything going on in my life, but it did give me a framework to work from. When I'm at some type of decision point, what things could I do to help clarify the various paths and what further steps could I take to move with focus? This has been an extraordinarily bizarre and challenging year, and having this as a background theme helped move me through many major decisions.
My 2025 theme is locked and loaded, but I'm not quite ready to share it yet. Stay tuned.
Lesson 2: AI Has Its Place
2024 was, for so many of us, the year that AI and LLMs really came into the forefront. I was convinced by AI researcher and practitioner Ethan Mollick that the best way to really grasp what it's all about is to spend ten hours using one particular model on a particular set of tasks. He was right.
I have so, so many concerns about AI. In some parts of my life, I maintain an unflinching firewall to protect against its influence. AI doesn't touch my drafting or editing on this blog, for example, because this is all supposed to be a manifestly human expression.
But in some areas, I've fully allowed it to enter my home and set up camp.
One area is superwhisper, a slick and powerful dictation program from an indie developer that puts the dictation behemoth Dragon to shame. For those unfamiliar, my disability requires me to rely heavily on dictation for things like heavy typing. I've tried just about every dictation product on the market, and I'm very content with superwhisper.
It basically takes your dictated text, runs it through WhisperAI to get a first pass transcript, then filters it with customizable prompts through an AI service of your choice. I can use it for single clauses like this one (that took about two seconds to process, from the time that I finished saying the sentence to it appearing on the screen), or for long form paragraphs. You can also use it for all types of AI summarization, email drafting, etc., but I very rarely experiment in that area because what I'm really looking for is a rock-solid, reliable way to take what I'm saying and get it onto the page in front of me quickly.
Another area is Snipd, a podcast app that cleverly allows you to easily snip auto-generated transcripts from the podcast you're listening to, which is then saved along with an AI-generated summary. This pretty quickly became a part of my system, as I now have podcast snips transcribed and fed automatically into the system I use for reading highlights (through Readwise Reader).
And yeah, I use ChatGPT frequently now, but only in very particular circumstances. It is increasingly the place I turn to for quick answers, at least where potentially wrong answers are tolerable. That, plus the time it saves me in summarizing info from spreadsheets, has made it a regular part of my toolkit.
Lesson 1: Time is Fleeting
If you and I have had a conversation of any type since September, you've probably heard me talk about Four Thousand Weeks. Sorry! It's just that this book continues to rock my world, and I think about it every single day.
I am a sucker for a good framing device, and I have found it wonderfully helpful to think through things as that book advises. If I likely only have 4,000 weeks on this earth, I better be spending them wisely. Critically, wisely doesn't mean maximizing work productivity at the expense of personal satisfaction. Quite the opposite.
Trust me. Read that book.
I also thought about death a lot this year, but not from a place anyone should be concerned about! Sebastian Junger's In My Time of Dying took hold on me. There's a clear connection for me between his work and the duty I feel to spend my time wisely and with purpose.
In addition to the creative spark I've found through this blog, I also got to start exploring a more artistic side of life this year. I found myself in a position where I was casting an important vote on the sale of a Monet. That's one of the funniest, most unexpected sentences I've ever written. I also found myself swept away by Henry V at The Chicago Shakespeare Theater, an experience I won't soon forget.
If life is to be about more than work product, surely I should find time for art in more of its dizzying forms. I'm thankful that I was able to move the needle on that this year.
That's a Wrap
If you will allow me to be even more self-indulgent than usual, I'll share a bit of poetry here to close. When I'm in an acutely emotional state, I often think in verse. It's an outlet I found at an early age, and one I've nurtured inconsistently ever since. I shared one example as part of my blog series already this year.
Midyear in this time of profound change, I wrote:
This life of mine
Is sifting
And I don’t know what it’s sifting through
Or to what it sifts into
All I know
Is that it’s sifting
Months later, I am still sifting, and I think I will be for some time to come. Perhaps forever. But I am genuinely excited for what I'm sifting into.
Thanks for being with me on this journey, friends. See you next year.
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