Most of the productivity discourse seems to be about top-down planning

Most how we think and talk about project management is in that paradigm too

My focus is on bottom up project management:

Breaking things down into ever smaller pieces - then exploring how they fit together
I find that when folks try to organize big projects in @RoamResearch their first instinct is to try to use kanban boards and lots of pages to approach things in this top down way

The real connective tissue of big projects is the block reference though.

Do less. Accomplish more.
If you're going to do that - you very often need to think from first principles.

Get skeptical of conventional requirements.

What is really the fundamental need?

What REALLY delivers the most value?

What constraints are self imposed, simply because you didn't question them?
The search for Pareto Efficiency was for a long time the gospel of @tferriss

Some of the best work on this is inside the Four Hour Chef.

A bit ironic - but in order to package the teaching effectively, he taught the meta alongside a practical example

Result was a huge book!
So much of my personal need for @RoamResearch as a user was because I was trying to apply DSSS to EVERYTHING I needed to learn to build the company

Engineering, Design, Hiring, Marketing, Fundraising, Community Building, Fundraising, and on and on and on

Parkinson's Law: The amount of work will expand to fill the time you allot to it.

Pareto Principle: 80% of the output comes for 20% of the inputs.

The 4 hour work week is low key the first mainstream book about modular thinking - and it's effin DEEP.

Science is not a set of facts passed down from great minds before us - it is the search for GOOD Explanations - and a way to test how good they are

@Roamresearch is a tool to help you DO SCIENCE on your life

Isn’t that design more than PM?

At the frontier are the same
Great example of Modular learning with Guitar.

Can’t wait to have these rigs as blocks in Roam

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More from @Conaw

19 Feb
I'm a big fan of writing down what I plan to do, and how I plan to do it (in detail) before I get going.

Why?

Because sometimes I realize as I am halfway through writing things out that there is a fundamentally better approach

then I can skip a ton of needless work!
Folks have asked for more videos of how I use Roam - here is a VERY concrete example - you can ignore the technical details of the problem I'm working on and might still find helpful.

Uses #.Falsified tag + one line of roam/css to crossout work I avoided

loom.com/share/1e18358e…
Ok, so... turns out one of my main reasons for writing things down is because I want to find out if there is work I can safely avoid.

Laziness is a virtue!!!

Another example: in a big project with a lot of moving pieces - always looking for smaller chunks that can stand alone
Read 15 tweets
16 Feb
Request for #RoamGames submission

@houshuang's Roam/Inter + @cortexfutura's smart blocks based tutorial.

My guess is there is a way we could have a public intro db that published via a roam-inter channel - and what it published fed a choose your own adventure tutorial
@cortexfutura's tutorial is great - but it's not like we want to start the user's off with a JSON export -- would be way easier to start them with a single block that "channelled" into a help graph

(we could also always iframe + have easy copy action)

Other thing I was imaginging when I heard the idea of @cortexfutura's submission but hadn't seen it yet -- if the smart blocks listened to their sibling blocks and needed you to complete some action before they could be activated.

Just realized this could be done with css
Read 4 tweets
16 Feb
Testing out the [[roam/js]] [[Twitter]] integration from [[@dvargas92495]]

{{[[video]]: loom.com/share/59efa052…}}
Definitely works - but I'm thinking there are a few upgrades that would be nice.

Twitter iirc provides a callback, so after sending, you could

A) add a link to the tweet, and a #sent tag on the same block
or
B) create a new block on [[roam/js/twitter]] with ref + link to tweet
wondering now also if [[@dvargas92495]] has done anything about querying twitter - and converting those into roam blocks.

I feel like [[@roamhacker]] has built a few extensions that would get him like 80% of the way.

[[@houshuang]] also figured out some nice ways to work w refs
Read 10 tweets
9 Feb
Alright - @thepericulum and I are working through the night to try to pick winners for #roamgames 1 and 2

These submissions are absolutely unreal - and we're only 2 weeks into the planned 12 week experiment.

I'm just going to start by tweeting out top contenders and comments
For Challenge 1:

The obvious pick for me was going to be @houshuang's Roam/inter

it's a solid MVP that pushes true multiplayer graphs forward by at least 6 months

What shocked me here were two things - even though I hinted this was a likely winner, only two (+ me) put forward anything that I could see as "riffing" on the idea, or nudging it forward at all.

@nathanlippi and @kvistgaard



Read 15 tweets
9 Feb
Cool hearing @pmarca cite “Never Eat Alone” by @ferrazzi

Rather that worrying about how to break into “the network”, flip the problem, and be the person who connects people. Be the network, doesn’t matter what stage you’re at.

One of most important books in my career.
Example - when I wanted to learn #Clojure, I went to a conference, and asked the speakers whose talks or prior work I really respected to join a “remote research club”

An email list with one rule

you had to tell the group about an open question you had every week.
I was super new to Clojure, but that didn’t matter, because this weird norm got some really smart folks sharing really interesting problems with each other.

I had no business being at that table, except that I was the one who set the table.
Read 8 tweets

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