Personal Productivity

For years I used Evernote to store my notes and Trello to track my actions. For the past 2 years, I have been using Obsidian for both. This post summarises how and why I am using Obsidian. Credits again go to Henry Franks for putting me on to this! Why I like Obsidian Obsidian is a note-taking tool based on Markdown, an open document format that creates formatted text. It has a huge community who have built a wide range of awesome open-source plugins and themes. After the pain I went through migrating away from proprietary tools like Trello and Evernote a few years ago, I like that Obsidian is based on an open format. It makes it easy to migrate all my content to a similar tool if I so wish, which should keep them competitive. I also like that I can have all my actions and notes in one place. This minimises the need to duplicate information in different places. ...

In 2018, I wrote a blog post which turned out to be one of my most popular: How I stay organised using Trello, Kanban, GTD and Inbox Zero. A lot has changed in the past 6 years! Wunderlist is no more. Trello has been acquired by Atlassian. I am no longer using personal Kanban. And there’s a lot that hasn’t changed: I am still a big fan of all the principles like 80/20, GTD and Inbox Zero. In this post, I summarise my current process for staying organised and focused on what matters, and go into more detail about topics like personal vision, regular reviews and habits. ...

One of the best books I have read in the past decade is Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The book explores techniques to help readers “focus on what matters every day”, and it has had a big influence on how I try to spend my time. This blog post covers the two concepts from this book that have been most useful to me: busy bandwagon and infinity pools. ...

In this post, I’m going to explain my system for keeping myself organised and productive. This system has been working well for me for the past two years, and I have helped a number of people to set it up for themselves. ...

Wunderlist is a free-to-use task management tool. Available on desktop, web browsers, smartphone and more recently the Apple Watch, it allows you to stay organized wherever you are. Initially created in Germany it is one of my favorite productivity tools, and after it’s recent acquisition by Microsoft, it should be around for a while to come. Here I explore how to use Wunderlist to keep yourself organised, and get things done. ...