One of the things I have noticed about modern life is that there is more information you have to handle than your brain can naturally process. I am writing things down constantly, otherwise I forget. I describe the sum of all the tools I use to keep track of everything as my life management system, so in the interest of maybe providing some useful information, here is the stack that composes my life management system. ### Time Management ##### Time Tracking [Toggl Track](https://toggl.com/track/) is an intuitive, clean, and free service that lets me track how I spend my time. Tracking the way I spend my time is an essential component of my workflow because it lets me see how much time I spend on certain projects, what times I am more productive, and what times I have more difficulty spending a long time on projects. ![[toggl-trtack.png]] The above image shows one week of time tracking. I track time spent on several projects such as schoolwork, my job, and my internship, and then I tag them based on what activity I am doing, such as writing, reading, or meeting with people. Toggl also integrates with Google Calendar, which leads me to... ##### Scheduling [Google Calendar](https://calendar.google.com/) is another intuitive, clean, and free service that lets me schedule my commitments and include any and all relevant information pertaining to them. If I don't put things in my calendar, I will almost certainly forget about them, so this is a critical component of my system. Sometimes there are concerns about the free nature of Google, since there is a flipside where they are almost certainly collecting tons of data from you. From my research on data responsibility, Google seems to take the management of their data extremely seriously, and they mostly use it to improve their services. As far as ads go, I already have ads blocked on everything, so if their data collection is tailoring ads to my preferences, I see no evidence of it. :) ![[google-calendar.png]] The above image is mostly a normal picture of the Google Calendar interface, but I wanted to draw attention to one way I use the Calendar that is especially useful. I find the description box in each event to be a great place to store notes in preparation for events as well as in review of events. For every important event, I take debriefing notes, and instead of having to file them somewhere else in my system, they can just live in the event object that I created in the first place. Google Calendar also has great integration with Google Tasks, which leads me to the next category... ### Task Management [Trello](https://trello.com/) is a very easy to use Kanban service that is ridiculously extensible. You can do pretty much anything you want with it, but the basic principles are extremely straightforward. You create lists of cards where each card holds a task or some other such object that you are concerned about, and then you can move the card into different lists based on the status of the object. I use Trello to manage my projects and school assignments. Here is what my school board looks like: ![[trello-managing.png]] You can use labels and lists to be extremely fine-grained with your workflow, which I find nice since I have a lot of classes, but also different sorts of activities that every class requires such as writing assignments or reading assignments. Further, you can use the description to put important information into the task object, and then my favorite feature is using comments to talk to myself about each task object. Some of them are straightforward and get processed quickly through my system, while others are more complicated and I have to talk myself through getting them done in the comments. This simple feature adds a lot of clarity to my process, since I generally find that the more I write things down when I am confused, the better I perform and the more painlessly I resolve my confusions. ##### Eliminating Redundancy with Automation Trello also allows you to assign due dates to your cards, but since I manage my time with Google Calendar, I at first found it kind of redundant to use Google Tasks and Trello to do essentially the same thing. So I automated that process with [automate.io](https://automate.io/). Now, each time I add a due date to a Trello card, a Google Task is automatically generated in my Google Calendar so that I can see the due dates on my Calendar as well. [automate.io](https://automate.io/) is very easy to use, so I was able to get this process set up quickly and then refine it very easily. ### Knowledge Management ##### Short-Term I spend a lot of time concerned with knowledge. This is obviously important in school, but I also get to do knowledge work at my internship and my goal is to have a career in knowledge work. What makes knowledge work challenging is that not only must you process a lot of information every day, but that information is contextually influenced by other information that is changing constantly. Some knowledge is relatively stable; I don't expect to wake up tomorrow as a cat. Other knowledge is highly unstable. A passage from [[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]] is useful here: > The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else. > > He *(Phaedrus)* studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. > > *Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pp. 115-116* In order to avoid diving into the densely interconnected web of thoughts that forms our collective knowledge base, I will simply say that the more effort we spend thinking about something, the more we will change the way we think about it. Thus, in order to stay relevant, we have to constantly learn and unlearn. > The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. > > *Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century* In order to do this, I keep track of what I am thinking in vigorous detail. However, a lot of what I am thinking about on a daily basis is not rigorously structured. I might work on pre-existing projects, which allow me to file my thoughts into a pre-existing structure, but I am also always thinking about new things that I don't know what to do with yet. So, I keep daily notes where I record my thoughts in [Dynalist](https://dynalist.io/). There is a lot I would have to say in order to describe the way I use Dynalist here, so I'm just going to embed one of my lists so that you can look through it and see what you think (Hint: click on bullet points with a circle around them to expand the list). <iframe src='https://dynalist.io/d/kcF9dCJjRoyzWjHryIk2pwIK' height=800 width=600></iframe> ##### Long-Term As time goes by and I think more about things I have learned, then I will begin to organize that knowledge into a framework that lasts for a while. I refer back to my notes frequently, so I have selected a system that allows me to connect my notes together easily and optimize for searchability. The best system I have found that allows me to do that securely is [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/). Obsidian deserves its own long post where I describe how I actually use this thing. The gist of it is that I use it for long-form writing, both as notes and as potentially finished work. I also use Obsidian to host my website, so this website is one example of how you could organize your Obsidian system! Although this website is structured for as much ease-of-use as possible since I know a lot of visitors won't be familiar with the linking-your-thinking paradigm. Here are a few pictures of my primary Obsidian vault, which is built like a [Second Brain](https://fortelabs.co/blog/basboverview/), although I take more inspiration from [Andy Mutaschak](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes). ![[knowledge-graph.png]] $\text{Knowledge Graph}$ The Knowledge Graph is kind of a fun way to show off your work in Obsidian. It can also be fun to zoom in and look through to see how your thoughts link up. Basically, each node on the graph is a file, and each edge is a link from one note to another. You can see clusters emerge, and in my graph, blue notes (for example) are my thoughts on psychology, and orange notes are my thoughts on philosophy. Green is math, light blue is [[Systems Thinking]], and purple is AI. ![[file-tree.png]] $\text{Folders}$ A lot of people into the linking-your-thinking or second-brain paradigm disavow folder organization, but I'm still using it. It's another way you can organize your knowledge. ![[neuron-note.png]] $\text{Note Example}$ This image just shows off what a relatively fleshed-out note will look like. You can include lots of materials that are useful for connecting knowledge and understanding concepts. I refer to these frequently, and update them when I learn things that are important. You can also rig the system to let you do spaced repetition with them, although I usually use anki if I really need to do that. ##### External Knowledge For papers and books that I read, I record their metadata in [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/) in case I ever have to reference them in formal work. Zotero also has some features that are great for organizing a library of work you have read, such as allowing you to put notes in the file holding the work they are written about, and also allowing you to create collections for various projects. Ultimately, Zotero is more of a convenience tool than something I use to facilitate my thinking, though. ### Conclusion That's the basic stack I use to manage my life. Well, excluding Excel for my budget, but I feel like that's so normal it wasn't worth including. I posted this so that maybe you can find some useful information; a new idea you haven't tried, a new software you haven't tried, etc. I find it to be informative when I read other peoples' posts of this nature, so I can only hope to potentially pay it forward. I tried to keep this short as well, so I neglected to go in detail on the philosophy behind my usage of some of these tools, especially in knowledge management. Contact me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ethanshamilton) if you have questions! --- #Productivity #Blog *October 9, 2021* #2021/10