I have been pouring over articles and blogs about personal knowledge management the last couple of weeks, to up the productivity quotient. Here are some of the things I learnt.
1. Almost all the productivity GURUs who are successful talking about productivity - be it bloggers or youtubers - are almost always known for just that. They are essentially content creators focusing on productivity and not people who were successful elsewhere with productivity.
2. This brings us to another thing. You don't see highly successful people giving you productivity advice. While you may read about it years later in their biography in a subtle, implicit manner of sorts (ex: Bill Gates' 5min time block system) it's almost never explicitly said.
3. The entire space of productivity - goal management, time management, energy management, etc., is cluttered with a lot of conflicting advice, that if you start reading about it, you'll go down a rabbit hole that when you return, you'll not be better off than where you started.
4. If you look at all the advice on productivity that's available today, you'll find that they are all essentially bloated versions of the advice given in the self-help classics.
5. Personal Productivity is highly subjective - and there are 100s of digital tools out there to support you. But, if you start going down the rabbit hole of which tool is better for you, you are likely to clutter your digital workspace and become confused and give up eventually.
6. Reading books, listening to podcasts, watching youtube videos is like the process of eating. Most of us stop with eating, thinking digesting will happen automatically. What we essentially do is, we eat, we don't digest, and we excrete almost everything.
7. The digestion process is what transforms the KNOWING into BEING. Digesting the content you consume essentially makes theoretical knowing into practical being, enabling you to apply it. Almost nobody does this except a handful of people highly intentional about it.
8. The intention to digest what you consume is important. When you eat good, high quality food rich in nutrition, the body sucks the good stuff from the food helping you grow, sends out the bad stuff. When you work out regularly, your body uses those nutrients to get fit.
9. The fit body you then obtain and maintain as a result of the process gives you the motivation and energy to do better things in life. Now relate this to consuming brain food. You eat good, high quality/cognition brain food (good content), you absorb the nutrition from it,
and eventually forget the useless part. You work out your brain every day in applied thinking, ideating, and working, and it grows with the food you feed, the nutrition you absorb from that food. What happens if you eat good food, absorb all that nutrition, and don't work out?
Nothing. Nothing happens. You don't grow much. You may probably lose muscle. You would lose flexibility. You'll experience issues as you age. Now relate it with the brain. The same thing happens if you don't exercise your brain regularly by utilising the nutrition you absorb.
The absorption process is the digestion of the food you feed your brain. If you feed crap, you'll only absorb crap. If you don't digest at all, all that you eat goes to waste. So then, what should one do?
i) Be mindful of what you consume. Consume only the highest quality content. Set your standards so high that only fewer content passes the filter.
ii) Establish a system to absorb and store only the highest quality content (nutrition) among the high quality content you consume.
ii) Establish a system to absorb and store only the highest quality content (nutrition) among the high quality content you consume.
iii) Your brain can't store everything. So create a personal knowledge management system digitally - detached from your brain. You can look up everything with Google. But having an organised backup for your brain is important.
iv) Throw out everything else other than the highest quality content that you absorb and retain through your PKM system. Delete all the clutter and don't hoard/save/store content more than what's absolutely essential.
v) You exercise your brain by working it out. Think, research, apply - and come up with novel thoughts, solutions, etc., through the associations you make between the different things you accumulate knowledge on. Spend max 40% time consuming and rest creating.
