Productivity Town

Finding ways to deal with all the information that comes our way and pay attention to the right stuff is hard. There are a ton of systems and frameworks to help you manage all this and be productive. But, like project frameworks, they tend to use a lot of complicated jargon and very inflexible systems. I think this makes it challenging for people who feel like if they aren’t following the system exactly, or can’t keep all the terminology straight, they just want to give up. That’s why I’ve been finding the metaphor of a town to be a helpful way to think about how I approach personal productivity. I like to think of this as a small industrial town with a river running through it. In the town is a Factory, a Library and a University. The Factory takes in goods and requests, and ships them out to customers. The Library curates and organizes knowledge so that people can easily access it. And the University educates and innovates, creating new knowledge to be shared to the Library. In this town, all three of these buildings depend on each other, and most importantly, depend on the River to receive new things and ship things out. In some ways, then, the most important job is that of the Dockworker, who looks out for the right things in the river and gets them to the right place in the town. If we apply this metaphor to reality, the River is the flow of information that comes your way, be it through email, text messages, conversations, or even new ideas that spring to mind. The Factory is how you manage and do the things from the River that need to get done. The Library is where you store helpful information you come across so you can retrieve it later when you need it. And the University is a place to learn and experiment with different ways of doing things, which may make their way back to the Factory or the Library if they’re useful. I’ll walk through each part of the town to explain a bit more and discuss different ways this metaphor could be useful.

The River #

As I mentioned, the River is the most important aspect of the town. In real life, towns and cities are often formed on a river because of their importance for trade. And unlike everything else in the town, the river isn’t made by people. It’s a force of nature that can be tamed somewhat, but never really stops flowing. This is why I find it such a useful metaphor for information that we deal with. Like a river, information flows past us all day, and it’s very difficult to stop it. In fact, we probably wouldn’t want to stop it even if we could! Lots of important information flows through our River, and we don’t want to miss the good stuff. But realistically, a ton of the information that flows past is really not that important, and there’s usually so much of it that we end up missing the good stuff, or the important stuff that needs our attention. So, like the fictional Dockworker in our town then, we need to be on the lookout for the important, or useful information that flows past us and make sure we can capture it and get it to the right place quickly before it flows past us to be forgotten. Dealing with the River information is honestly the hardest part of getting productive. There’s just so much stuff, and it never stops! Email is a great example of something that flows along our information river. Our email inboxes are flooded with so many marketing emails, social notifications and other junk that it’s easy to miss the important stuff. Maybe it’s your kid’s teacher or that request from a friend asking to hang out will easily get lost. If there isn’t a way to look out for it and action it before it flows away in the mass of additional marketing emails, to be easily forgotten. I’ll share one quick tip about email that will make your inner Dockworker’s job a lot easier: use that unsubscribe link. Businesses in most jurisdictions are legally obliged to make it easy to unsubscribe from their lists and honour those requests. Make it a habit to unsubscribe from every email you get from a business that you really don’t care about anymore. If you do this for a couple of weeks, and keep doing it when new ones pop up, you’d be surprised at how much more useful your email becomes, and how less likely you are to miss something important.¹ So go unsubscribe now — it’s fun! So to sum up, managing the River of information involves two basic strategies:

1. Identifying and putting aside the good stuff.
2. Stopping as much junk and irrelevant stuff from flowing downstream as you can to make #1 more successful.²

The Factory #

In our metaphor, the Factory is a place to make things. It’s the Dockworker’s job to make sure that the right raw materials and requests for stuff are sent to the Factory for fulfillment. But it’s the job of the Factory Manager to process all the new work orders and materials coming in, making sure the requests are met in time, and continually improving the factory’s operations to make the factory more efficient. In our real life, the Factory can take many forms. One form is probably some sort of to-do list, where you keep track of the important things you need to do and when. The other is the way in which you do work or get things done, whatever they are. If you’re a tradesperson, this might mean buying a new tool that makes a routine job quicker. If you’re a video editor, maybe it means upgrading your computer to speed up video encoding. Or, if you’re an information worker of any sort, a new software application that can automate the routine tasks you do. Just like with a factory, even incremental improvements, if they are towards very frequent tasks, can make a big difference. One small example that is relevant to almost everyone, that is decades old at this point, is keyboard shortcuts. Sure, you probably know the basic ones like copy and paste. But it’s very likely that whatever application you use the most has keyboard shortcuts for almost every function in it.³ So let’s say there’s a function you do about 100 times a day. It takes one second to move your hand to the mouse, find the right command, and click on it. It’s likely that the equivalent keyboard shortcut would take about half a second to do. If you do extrapolate that over a week, that’s 7 minutes of your week back, just by switching to the keyboard shortcut for that task. Start doing that for more and more tasks, and those minutes really start to add up to something! So to sum up our strategies for the Factory, they are:

1. Organizing the list of things to do
2. Making doing the things more efficient

The Library #

The next building in our metaphorical town is the Library. In our town, the Library is a place where people can access knowledge on various subjects (or, just find some entertainment and diversion.) The Library is managed, of course, by the Librarian. It’s their job to make sure the Library has materials on a wide variety of different subjects, and makes accessing those materials easy by having an accessible organization system so people can find what they’re looking for easily. So what’s the Library in real life? Real libraries, are, of course, an invaluable real-life resource that many people have access to and should take advantage of. But when I think of the metaphorical library, I’m thinking of the place or places that you organize all the information that is, or could be, important to you, so you can access it at the right time. This could take the form of a notebook or notes application, a filing cabinet, an actual collection of books, or all of the above and more. Just like with a real library, though, the important thing about your personal library is that it’s curated and accessible. Curated in that it’s a collection of things that are, or could be, helpful to you, and accessible in that it’s well organized and easy to find the right information at the right time. Think about the notes app that’s on your phone. This is one form of a personal library, in that it’s a place where you store information that you want to access later. I’m sure many people add countless notes of things to remember in their notes app. But how relevant is everything that’s accumulated in there? And how easy is it to find stuff? Maybe you wrote down an important piece of information like your eye-glasses prescription in your notes app a few years ago, and now you need a new pair of glasses, and you want to find it again. You could search for the note, but what if you named it “specs scrip” and you’re now searching for “glasses prescription”? Search won’t help you there. And if your notes are full of junk, all in one big folder, it’s going to be even harder to find it. So, if you’re a user of notes apps, it’s important to both find useful stuff to jot down and add, as well as to occasionally work on your list of notes to purge ones that are no longer relevant, and organize and make searchable the ones that are. Part of the former means working with your inner Dockworker to make sure they are sending you relevant stuff that you might want for later, and purging stuff that’s not really that relevant anymore. The latter might involve making folders for your notes, as well as giving them relevant titles, or using tagging functionality to make sure they easily pop up in various different types of searches you might do. So the Library, like the other buildings, has two basic strategies:

1. Curate relevant knowledge.
2. Make the knowledge easy to access.

The University #

The next building in our metaphorical town is the University. In our town, the University’s role is to educate as well as to research, experiment and develop new knowledge. So the job of the University’s Dean is to balance these two parts of its mission, by making sure there are good instructional practices in place, attracting the right students, and to create a good space for research and experimentation. And the Dean will work closely with the Librarian to make sure that important knowledge it creates is archived and catalogued, so others can make use of it (including its students.) In real life, universities, like libraries, are actual, invaluable resources for people who are eager to learn new things. And lifelong learning is an important part of a balanced life. But when I think about my metaphorical university, I focus more on its research and experimentation function. That means trying new things and new ways of working to see if they will stick. One type of experimentation I love doing is trying new software. Seriously, I constantly do this. I have a pretty well trusted to-do list and note-taking applications at this point, but that absolutely will not stop me from trying a new to-do list or note-taking app just to give it a spin. Many times, I end up not using them, but once in a while I do, and it becomes a game changer for how I manage my life. One advantage of trying new software in 2024 is that it’s straightforward and usually at no cost. App stores make it trivially easy to safely install new applications to your devices. And, love it or hate it, the subscription pricing model of many modern applications makes it easy to try new software before you pay for it. I may be an outlier in finding trying new applications fun, but that, of course, doesn’t have to be the only way to experiment with new ways of doing things. What are the areas in your life or workflow where you can try new experiments? So to sum up the University, its strategy again boils down to two things:

1. Continually learning new things.
2. Experiment with different types of things to see if they will be helpful.

The Church #

I didn’t discuss the Church above, so think about this as a little bonus building in our town. In our town, the Church is a place where the community congregates regularly to reflect about things that are greater than themselves. Sometimes we (well, certainly I) can get so caught up in getting things done and being productive that it leaves other parts of us unfulfilled. Like the other buildings, going to a church or other religious institution is a real thing that people can certainly do, and something that certainly can fulfill the need to congregate and contemplate greater things. But your metaphorical Church doesn’t have to be one of those places. I consider myself a pretty devout atheist, but I do sometimes envy my church-going friends, and I’ve been trying to find more ways to congregate. It’s probably not perfect, but I’ve been playing Badminton at my local YMCA for the past few months every Monday. It’s really nice to have a regular spot to interact with a group of regulars in my community. And while perhaps not as profound as contemplating the existence of life or the afterlife, I do find working on strengthening my badminton skills a rewarding activity.

The Town Charter #

So that’s a tour of my little productivity town. We have a River, with goods and information flowing through it, tended by the Dockworker who is on the lookout for good and relevant stuff and makes sure it gets to the right place in town. Next to the River, we have the Factory, taking in goods and requests from the Dockworker, and working to fulfill them as efficiently as possible. Then there’s the library, managed by the fastidious Librarian, curating and organizing a continually evolving collection of knowledge. The University educates denizens of the town and breaks new ground wth innovative research and experimentation. And finally, we have the Church, where the townspeople congregate regularly to stop and reflect on the greater things in life. Overseeing the town of course, is The Mayor, who works according to the Town Charter to make sure the town continues to be a good place to live for its citizens. While many towns are similar, each town is unique. So think about your little town, with you as the mayor. What would your town charter say? What buildings are in your town, and how do they work?