#Gtd

Be your own streaming service with an easy setup. Free yourself from bad content and choice paralysis. Curation and focus beats unending libraries.

A major overhaul to my minimalist CLI habit tracker, moving over to cobra along with substantial other speed and efficiency gains. A really satisfying refactor and release milestone.

Getting real things done is hard. Inspiration versus grind can be fleeting. Use the technique of counting coup on achievements to keep yourself reminded of how awesome you really are and everything you’ve managed to do.

Yup, it’s that time of year again. My annual list of the tools I use and sharing what works for my productivity stack. I hope you find something useful for yourself or your workflows here.

Defend your reading time investments. Things off my 2024 reads you should definitely read as well as some perhaps suggestions and things to avoid. The TLDR are these top 5:

• An Immense World
• Americanah
• The Guns of August
• Fire Weather
• Born a Crime

(Though you should read the post for the whys).

We all set goals. Few reading this lack aspiration. But graveyards full of New Year’s Resolutions show there’s a deep disconnect between people setting and accomplishing goals.

So, how do you set goals that are actually going to move you forward and then get them done? Particularly, how do you work on the long arc goals that are the really satisfying ones that are accomplished over years? How do you even scan for a future in which you’ll very likely be a different person than the one you are now? And how do you And also, avoid the productivity-pr0n and hustle-culture that just keeps you busy all the time but effectively running in place?

I’m not really a stuff guy. I try to keep purchases minimal and to high quality stuff that lasts.

Why might my gear be interesting? I’ve been travelling as a digital nomad now for over a year, living without a real residence and often leveraging hotels and visa stays to bounce between various countries here in SE Asia (Singapore, Bali, Thailand, and now Hong Kong).

Riffing off my one-bag travel post from a few years back and it’s post-covid update , a number of things had changed, including my assumptions about how I would be travelling as a nomad, so felt an update was due.

2023 felt like it was about simplifying. Getting down to a non-aspirational, efficient, simple stack for productivity, planning, and collaboration. I focused more on my systems with simpler or fewer tools, rather than trying to find the one tool to do everything — and worrying less about aspirational (and heavily influencer influenced) goals like zettelkasten and knowledge bases and focused on good planning and getting things done. This is what that looked like by the end of 2023.

[This is the first in a multi-part series of posts on setting, executing on, and accomplishing your goals. This first post is on executing and about having a productivity stack to manage the various elements that affect your productivity.]

Systems trump tools.

Obsessing over the One True Tool is counterproductive and driven by insecurity, and is busywork versus real execution. Productivity is about how you manage processes. You need a tool/s to manage the element of your productivity stack, but the choice of tool is somewhat irrelevant as long as you have one that manages your underlying system well.

Like you, I struggle to set aside time to learn new things.

Time for learning needs to be extended, uninterrupted, reflective, and allow you to play with things in ways that modern workplaces, life, and task management time doesn’t. What’s my answer? Bowling Nights.

Let’s start with work. Since most people now depend on their jobs to be the source of training and learning. I’d argue, like Cal Newport, that the curse of the modern workplace is finding uninterrupted blocks of time to get things done and focus rather than shuffling information.