While I don’t think Trello / Jira/ Notion have significant overhead, +1 for this tip because I think it illustrated something we often forget with productivity/ project management/organising : the best system is one that you can feasible use.
Richie
Karma: 17
Finish all bursts of work with a Placeholder.
A placeholder is note, even a sentence, that allows you to more easily ‘get back in the flow’ of a task after leaving it for some time.
A major drain of the productivity of modern knowledge workers is that we engage in too much context switching i.e. switching from task to task. When I move from doing emails to getting down to writing, it takes some time to ‘get into the swing’ of writing. If I then have to take a call, I have to restart the process of getting into the headspace to write. Often the previous task ‘drags’ on our attention. This is often called attention residue.
Many people try to solve this by reducing the amount of context switching they have to do (see deep work). But many eventually realise that it’s just not possible to reduce the amount of context switching to an optimal level.
Another angle to tackle the problem is to have systems that allow you to quickly change between tasks. If we can minimise the time taken to ‘get into it’ then we decrease the cost of context switching. Placeholders are just such a system.
Examples of placeholders:
TODO’s in code. Make them specific: “TODO: add type hints to this function”
Stopping writing mid-sentence. “There are numerous benefits of intermittent fasting, including....” or “One promising method might be mechanistic interpretability. Smith et al define this as....”
When problem-solving: describe the context and thought process. e.g. say I’m trying to decide how to solve a programming issue but have a meeting in 5. I might write: “this function needs to get all the files for a given fiscal week but they only have dates in the filenames, you think there might be a function to convert date to FW in Jacks’ utils package but haven’t asked him, he might be off today?”. This basically allows you to jump back into your thought process.
At the end of a few hours of online research, create a short summary of the best websites you found, and why you found them valuable