Friday Reflections # 5

It is another 14 days and a ton of learnings at my end. The highlights include includes declutter process, stacks, knowledge management, time management and more.

Decluttering

My 5 year old Mac almost died. Not dead yet but almost. There was a pop sound 2.5 months ago and a screw fell on my feet. From that day I am waiting for it to rest in peace. It is still breathing but I am not ready to take a chance with a mouth open Mac ?? So I now have the luxury of a New Mac Pro and an old Mac pro. I took this opportunity to draw a line and restart a new digital life with my new mac. The first thing I did was I did a white board planning on what I am going to do with my new Mac.

Clutter tries our brain and this is a known fact and yet we abuse it with a lot of clutter. So the first thing I did was deliberately chose what software to install and what to say NO to.

So here is my digital stack as a digital designer. I said YES to a few applications to be installed. Here is my total stack

By Pareto principle, I use Notion + Sketch (80%) and everything else 20% and that is it. From 30+ applications from my old Mac i have decluttered it to just a handful. Yay ??

Information Management

As a neuronerd, I cannot handle anything that overloads my cognition. I deliberately take action to reduce it. To do this I use all the three S (science, systems and sense).

The systems and routines power you up for efficiency and effectiveness. The science tells you what to do and what not to. The sense allows you to tweak it to your context and make it super relevant to you and only you. The highest form of productisation is personalisation as it is tailored to make things work for you in your context.

As a part of my life design exercise 3 years ago, I made a few systems for myself to handle three parts of my life: mindset, time and knowledge. I see time as a super master, knowledge as a biggest leverage for pushing the envelope and mindset being the catalyst behind everything. I adapted the system to my changing needs over a period of time. With the new Mac I realised it is time to debut the latest iteration of the system and remove some of the old features and clean up some bad karma finally. I set up my entire digital empire in the same style so that I bucket things appropriately.

Starting from my documents to Notion to GSuite to Mailbox to Task List to iPhone everything follows the same first principles. Things that end (projects) and things that don't end (Life Areas). Even the time management system (The Conduce as I call it) works the same way. The references and resources that power projects and routines. An archive or a storage keeps the souvenirs, deliverables, learnings of completed and dropped projects. I call this as K's Brain Vault. It is an extension to me and It works the same way everywhere. This way i don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out things and that reduces my cognitive processing to zero. Earlier this system was super complex when I started it 9 years ago and with time it has been simplified to Incoming and Outgoing and In between there is a simple processing machine.

Time Management

The Conduce, the system I created for productivity has become better over a period of time. I teach these aspects in my Life Design class. We give these beautiful productivity notebooks to all our students and now we developed an entire scalable system in Notion. With paper it was limiting and liberating at the same time. With Notion it is at another level. I conduct a monthly productivity Mastermind to our Maker's Guild folks and this month, we spoke about foundation of productivity and how to see it with a new pair of eyes. I specifically spoke about productivity for makers.

Creative productivity cannot be measured like factory productivity. We will fail miserably. We need a different system to measure the same. The Conduce powers creatives to care of self and boost their productivity at another level altogether. Time management has many parts to it and the holistic approach is important. We can't just be obsessed with Todo, we also need to care about what we eat, when we rest, when we work, when we perform, when we don't etc. Mental wellness is inevitable if you have a system that powers you everyday. With the new digital system in Notion, I am pumped. I love my notebook, don't get me wrong but the scalability of a digital system is powerful. That is set now. I can see my entire year to my entire day in one place. What a powerful way to feed the brain.

Leading with empty calendars

In the history of my career timeline, this is the first time, I am consistently having an empty calendar. This is super powerful. For maker's they are at the mercy of their neurotransmitters to get into the flow state. Bosses who empathise with this fact will allow emptiness in calendars. Your productivity skyrockets. All I did this sprint was just teach, coach, learn and tweak.

I wrote a thread on this topic: https://twitter.com/karthi2209/status/1296309238818430977

Coaching and Learning

Love these coaching calls where we solve real life problems. We take in context problems, slice and dice the possible solutions authentically. As a result some beautiful methodologies, frameworks pop up. The UKEA framework is thrilling. I am trying the same with my 11 year old at home and he is rocking it. In just one week, his class teacher got irritated with him as he knew all answers before the questions were asking. Youtube Zindabad. Nah, UKEA Zindabad! If we work with first principles, it should work on everybody in the context. I am super thrilled with the meta learning explorations with others. I use to be my own guinea pig and now it is interesting to see experiment results from others. Here is a thread on that as well: https://twitter.com/karthi2209/status/1296719489451454465

20X20 Book Review

A super cool thought wave struck me 2 weeks ago. It goes like this:

My first public speaking debut was in a pecha kucha edition in Hyderabad. I was wondering, why not use the foundation of 20X20 (pecha kucha style) and synthesise everything. If a book can be reviewed in 6 mins, so can be a movie, so can be a podcast and so can be current affairs and everything. Think about it. Here is my first book review in this format and I was super thrilled with the outcome and quality. I am trying a more murky book for the next book review. This was done for our Maker's Guild book club.

So much more happened at work that is worth reflecting but this will end up as a 2000+ words blog post. So let me stop here and let us catch up soon. How was your 14 days? Wishing you all a wonderful Ganesh Chathurthi tomorrow ??