Productivity

Systems, habits, workflows, and personal optimization

  • More Exercise Needed

    Since I stopped running due to ankle pain several years ago nothing has really filled the void of regular exercise to keep me fit and healthy. Every now and then I do use percussion massage guns to ease my back pain, but the pain due to no exercise just comes back. For several months now I’ve…

  • Taking Daily Notes

    One of the productivity hacks I tried this year was to keep a physical notebook with daily handwritten todo items following the Bullet Journal idea. It became part of my morning routine to try and think of 3-4 things I wanted to get done each day.  I’d refer back to my monthly goals every few…

  • Maintaining Focus and Passion

    My current side project is a bit bigger in scope than I had imagined when I set out my goals at the beginning of the year. With any large project it can be difficult to stay focused and passionate about continuing to work on it. For this project, the more I think about it, the…

  • Focused Effort vs Shotgun Approach

    There are proponents of both cases for building a business.  Should you identify the vision and strategy for one amazing product and chip away at it until it becomes a success, or should you try 10 small experiments, see what sticks then focus on the winners? David Heinemeier Hansson of BaseCamp started his venture with…

  • Goals and Processes

    A goal without a process to back it up is just an idea.  It is the process which actually will help you reach that goal and it’s more important to focus on developing on an actionable process than to have the best idea or goal. A business idea is worthless unless you do something with…

  • Passion for Productivity

    Personal passion is an undervalued driver of productivity. Experience has taught me that when you work on something that you are passionate about it becomes easier to focus, you care more about the quality and are less distracted. If you can find your passion, it means you will never have a job – Richard Branson…

  • Summer Recap

    With summer coming to an end I thought I would recap all the things we managed to get done in our first Ontario summer. The general theme for the summer was HOT!  Right from the start we had one heat wave after another.  Particularly memorable was that while I was in Mexico, it was hotter…

  • Agile Methodoligy For Achieving Goals

    At the beginning of the year I, like many other people, set some goals for the year.  I also took the step of putting a reminder in my calendar to revisit my goals list every month to assess my progress. After a couple of cycles of that I recognized the pattern, I had inadvertently applied a…

  • Writing a Bot

    Facebook recently announced and opened an API for building applications that can have conversations through Facebook Messenger.  This is a huge thing.  Messenger has 900,000 active users and it presents a huge business opportunity for new ways at interacting with people. Many people are calling 2016 the year that conversational interfaces will take off, and…

  • Next Generation Productivity

    Computers have a long history of replacing the work of humans.  Before mainframes large businesses would have armies of people with punch calculators to do the work that is now in a single spreadsheet (each person performing just a cell of that sheet). Over the past 60 years the primary productivity benefit from computers has…