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Has anyone written about scaling phenomena of personal productivity? As understood for eg in startup scaling? Stuff that changes when you try to do more things, or more of the same things, and how to adapt? Eg: writing 10k words a week requires different systems than 3k.
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I don’t mean stuff like outsourcing (virtual assistants etc) or expanding yourself into an organization with partners. More intrinsic... like workflow disciplines above the GTD/BASB abstraction level?
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Like, there’s a point in activities requiring routine brainstorming where getting a whiteboard is a scaling tool. There’s a point where it helps to plan at month rather than week scale. A point where weekly batched rotations work better than daily multiplexing.
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I think about this a lot. It seems like as output grows each step/stage of personal productivity methodologies get abstracted into its own system to handle the higher load
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Capture becomes not just a keyboard shortcut to grab your own personal open loops, but an amalgamation of different tools (web clipper, Readwise, zapier), channels (multiple email addresses, separate social media DMs), people (assistants, collaborators, contractors)
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Best, most nerdy and unknown source on this is a little book called “The CIO’s Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Mgmt.” I find the idea of a “project portfolio” very fascinating
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That looks promising. Portfolio management is definitely the level I'm trying to refactor in a more robust way. Right now, it's a mess because I only recently recognized the critical importance of building different kinds of workflow scaffolding for different types of projects.
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I realized a mistake I made last year when I took a 6-week vacation from both my newsletters at the same time, to try and sort out the flow. Shoulda done one, then the other, to get both into a sort of batch mode with some inventory/fat in the system. Now I'm back where I started
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Yeah gotta work on that “quick exchange of dies” action. I now consider loading and unloading of mental states to be my biggest expense
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Makes sense. Seeking to keep output constant while scaling back personal effort is a pretty interesting problem. Much more relevant to most ppl after their 20s and 30s when effort levels peak
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