Video Creator’s Channel Chris Williamson

Were Not Trained Or Educated In Any

way to think of ourselves as creators and that’s the term I like to use creator. You know because you can be creating anything. It’s wet its websites, its videos its interviews its events right but until you actually step out and you really we’re you’re putting yourself on the line right like people who are endlessly just accumulating knowledge and queuing up. I mean that is that is it’s such a it’s such a non-participatory way of living in my view. You know better to read one consume one-tenth as much as much information online and actually put that to use rather than just like racking up the you know the vanity metrics, ladies and gentlemen welcome back I’m joined by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs.

We Have Already Bonded Over The Fact That

he too is an air pods evangelist. I think that gives you a bit of an idea about what we’re in for today We’re going to be talking digital optimization and how we can become more efficient in our online lives. Thiago welcome to the show thank you Chris it’s really really good to be here. Yeah I’m excited to go through today. So I’m gonna get straight into it.

The Digital Productivity.

Pyramid was a blog post that you wrote about a year ago and me and a couple of friends came across it and it was a real frame shift for us. I was super impressed with it and I think pretty much. Since then I’ve been hassling you in your inbox to try and get you on. So I’m very glad that we’ve found some time to get the air pods in your ears and amazing to run through this so let’s take it.

From The Top Can You Explain To People

who’ve never heard of yourself or Forte LAbs, which is the the blogging company that you run and or the digital productivity pyramid? Can you explain what it is and your philosophy behind it to begin with sure sure so the pyramid really is not a pyramid scheme. I promise it is a it’s a framework. It’s a framework that I developed maybe a couple years ago. I mean I for as did a couple years ago, but it’s definitely been rattling around my head for some years and it really came about when I when I just realized you know as this productivity experts productivity trainer productivity blogger. I run around every day, making grand promises of revolutionising people’s work performance and I just realized well.

You Have To Have Some Theory

of what improvement even means right yeah and I. looked around and what was out there and all the available ones you know more tasks completed seemed completely outdated. You know minutes of focus even kind of seems like overly simplistic. I looked at a ton of metrics. I was super involved in the quantified self-movement For some years.

Ive Given A Bunch Of Talks And

I just realized none of those did the trick and so instead of focusing on metrics on measuring some output which I think with creative knowledge work is basically impossible. I chose to focus on the skills what is the ladder. The Pyramid of skills that a modern knowledge worker would need to acquire in order to execute their work successfully and a large part of it came about accidentally. I actually looked at my courses that I developed. You know each course that I’ve done came out of the needs of the previous course.

Right I Would Create A Course And

then look and then see you know the people completing it what what are they still meeting what are they still lacking and then I created the next course and I’ve only done three courses. But those are the first three levels of the pyramid and now I have my eye on the fourth level, which is starting to emerge really it’s emerging it’s it’s appearing before my eyes as the next thing that people need we can get into what each of one of those are but that’s the basic story I understand yes I was reading deep work by Cal Newport. Recently I know it’s overdue and these publishers sent me very kindly thank you. Carl has sent me digital minimalism as well, which is next on the list to read but going through deep work. listeners at home who are knowledge workers may not quite understand what we mean when we say that the output is difficult to define, but if you were to think back to a typical job 50 to 100 years ago, Cranking widgets.

I Think Is The The Term That

Cal Newport uses which is where you would have some shop worker. You would have a bucket of unde important one side. A machine that was a process in the middle and a bucket of completed parts on the other side. It was very easy for you to see when a part was uncompleted in process and completed. It was also easy for you to track how much was to be done and how much you had done.

Whereas Its A Lot More Kind

of nebulous and cloudy and just difficult to define you wake up with an amount of emails. in your inbox and sometimes you go to bed with more having done loads all day and you have These serendipitous were open workspaces which Karl’s very critical of and yeah I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, saying that it’s difficult to define when work gets done and your solution to that as you’re suggesting is to focus on building a latticework of effective skills and frameworks that you can work upon and hopefully allowing the outputs to kind of look after themselves. On the other side is that right it is it is yeah and it’s it’s not that the outputs don’t matter or something like that it’s it’s that they’re sort of outside of my purview. You know I I don’t I don’t think there is a way it’s like all the mechanical sort of widget jobs like you said have now been taken. By machines, the only ones that are left are inherently ambiguous, inherently undefined, inherently unstructured and by definition, you can’t you know metrics require repeatability.

Metric One Is Only Meaningful With The

repeatable process. So when you’re doing essentially art and I know people hate the idea that they’re artists but basically in a way. We are all artists now defining the problem is like most of the work right so I guess you can make a metric you know problems define but it just gets it just gets really weird and actually can be can be bad. When you focus on a metric to the exclusion of the experience of the satisfaction of the fulfillments, which when you’re doing work like we’re doing that’s creative you it being motivated and satisfied fulfilled is not optional that’s not like Oh. It’s great that you like your factory job It’s like.

You Literally Cannot Go On You

cannot give of yourself what you have to give to do that work If you’re not fulfilled. I understand there is an inherent degree of satisfaction that comes with crossing things off a list. We are as well as being airport evangelists. We’re also big lovers of the Pomodoro Technique and using the very obvious crossing off of the list or the colouring out or the ticking off of an item. There is such a and it’s so it’s such a comment right on modern knowledge work that we need to kind of artificially create This done big button that we hit that identifies the fact that we’ve actually completed something but it’s it’s the antidote to a degree of this I don’t know when work begins and work ends.

I Think There Was A Statistic That 80%

of American knowledge workers check their. emails after UK at night and before UK in the morning Like both of them, so you like you may be getting up at UK in the morning to check your emails like who so I think you’re totally right with what you say so moving on to the pyramid itself. There’s some core principles and then there’s some layers. Some levels should I say where we gonna start. I mean we can just start at the bottom and work our way up.

Lets Go Okay So The Well First

of all let me just say what the the five layers or levels of the pyramid are the first base layer is what I call digital fluency and I’ll describe that in a minute. The second one on top of that is task management and workflow basically to-do lists. The third one is habit formation and behavior change which you’re. Familiar with the fourth level is what I call personal knowledge management UK which is essentially storing your knowledge in some sort of digital tool. You know offloading that knowledge from your brain onto onto a software program and the fifth level, which is the most currently ambiguous the most mysterious, but also I think eventually kind of the culmination of all of this is a framework.

Im Developing A Methodology On Developing

called just-in-time project management interesting. Josée is that gonna be tip of the spear for you probably oh yeah yeah it all comes back to the same stuff so yet so the basic idea is that the the levels go from more I’d say more basic at the bottom to more advanced or more sophisticated at the top, but I wouldn’t really say they go from easy to hard right because what’s hard is just whatever level. working on right and in some ways the base level, which is is essentially just like how to use a computer is the hardest right if you know someone, you know I know people my parents age, you know if they never learn to do that basically they’re they’re kind of not going to be able to take advantage of all the other levels. So so yeah I’ll just talk about that um actually I’ll say one more thing about that so each level builds on the one before and so what that means is that each level is sort of enabling or setting the ground for the level above it it’s kind of like a hierarchy of skills or a hierarchy of knowledge. It’s like you have to start at the bottom, but then once you create a layer for yourself.

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You Have Then The Skills And The Knowledge.

to start building the second layer and then the last thing I’ll say about that is. There is also this kind of a spiral effect. Sometimes I get people like Ok I’m just gonna finish one level a hundred percent completely and then do the whole second level perfectly, but that’s not quite how it works.

Its Kind Of More Like A

cycle. I mean that the truth is that we’re all always working on all levels right you never completely master any one domain, so you know I just took a course on UK learning how to use you know an email newsletter program and that is that at the base level that’s how to use a particular technology. But I found that I wasn’t able to work at the higher levels until I kind of put that brick in the base of the pyramid, which is how to use them how to use UK So you can’t do tasks and management workflow of your UK system until you’ve got level one digital fluency with UK yes.

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Summary

Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs, a blogging company that runs Forte LAbs . He is also an air pod evangelist . We’re going to be talking digital optimization and how we can become more efficient in our online lives. We’re not trained or educated in any way to think of ourselves as creators and that’s the term I like to use creator. It’s wet its websites, its videos its interviews its events right but until you actually step out and you really we’re you’re putting yourself on the line right like people who are endlessly just accumulating knowledge and queuing up.& I mean that is that is it’s such a non-participatory way of living in my view. We know better to read one consume one-tenth as much as much information online and actually put that to use rather than just like racking up the you know the vanity metrics. We have already bonded over the fact that he too is an air pods evangelist….. Click here to read more and watch the full video