,
12 tweets,
2 min read
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1/ I’m starting to realize that the common theme of my work is the power of centralization in a decentralized world
2/ We live in an era of intense decentralization, from government to media to communication to information to networks to terrorist organizations
3/ But downside of decentralization is often dissipation, diffusion, degeneration of value. Without a central authority to protect it, it’s hard to preserve or make progress on a body of knowledge
4/ At the level of the individual, adding just a little centralization has huge benefits. One central to do list (GTD) gives you direction, clarity, focus with a next action always at hand
5/ One central knowledge base (like digital notes, as I teach in BASB) gives you one place to save things and one place to always look. Allows for interconnection and searching at one unified interface
6/ And even when it comes to outputs, having one central showcase (like a blog, as we’re teaching in Write of Passage) allows you to create a feed of your learnings, deliverables, outcomes, and achievements that someone can consume with a single link
7/ This is really my approach to blogging that allows me to publish consistently: my blog is a feed of nearly everything I’m thinking about, learning, working on, growing toward. Therefore a mishmash if different kinds of things, with my journey as the centralizing theme
8/ Same thing with a calendar: it’s only useful if you have One Source of Truth (as devs say). Otherwise, you won’t be able to catch conflicts, see the day/week/month at a glance, or move things around
9/ When I look at my life, those are the 4 control points: calendar (for time), task list (actions), second brain (knowledge), and blog (output). And each of these is effective to the extent it is the centralized source of truth for that kind of information
10/ You can tell when someone doesn’t have one of these kinds of information centralized; they drop the ball, make mistakes, repeat themselves, waste time, don’t make progress, lose focus. Focus is not an abstract mental property. It is the effect of a centralized info source
12/ The more centralized these are, the more uncertainty and ambiguity you can handle in that area. The most crazy busy ppl I know have very accurate, precise calendaring. Most productive people under difficult circumstances, have finely tuned task lists
13/ I know that I can acquire knowledge from any source, because it all goes one place. Effective downstream systems let you play with certainty and confidence in the upstream
