I’ve been “threatening” to write about the Personal Productivity Platform (“PPP”) for years now. The concept comes from my own productivity journey and what I’ve learned supporting thousands of clients, all seeking greater productivity. Not surprisingly, most of us sought out productivity software to relieve information overload or feelings of overwhelm from the deluge of information and decision-making required of modern life. Watching both the productivity failures and successes, I landed on the concept of a Personal Productivity Platform as key to greater personal efficacy in the modern world.
Briefly, a Personal Productivity Platform (“PPP”) is a small set of foundational software whose mastery works together over years to build your personal efficacy toward your personal and professional goals. In this article, I’ll explain the key elements of a PPP, but first you need to know why it’s important in the first place.
Why “Personal” Software Is Important
There’s lots of productivity software that exists, but the vast majority was never intended to be “Personal”. By personal, I mean focused on the needs of an individual, not a team or company. Many of us got our start with productivity software in the workplace and our primary usage was for work-related activities. There is nothing wrong with that, but it misses two-thirds of our lives.
As we select our foundational productivity software, we need to focus on its application to our full lives, not just activities related to work or business. But, why?
We’ll invest in it
After 20 years of switching software in the workplace, how much do you think employees devote to mastery of the next software suite management decides will transform the organization? If that software is helping us transform our whole lives, how much more would we invest in and achieve mastery?
We’ll build good habits
There’s a saying, “you are what you habitually do”. When we invest in learning a tool or process deeply, it becomes habitual. We free our mind from the details of the process and instead simply reap the rewards. This is true whether you’re waking up at 5am daily or jotting down your three highest priorities for the day.
We’ll outlast our current employment
Private sector employees in the U.S. are expected to stay at their current employer less than 4 years. If you’re like me, you’ve transitioned company productivity software more times than you’d care to remember, with all the associated headaches and learning curves. Did you transition any of your brilliant ideas or learnings? Were you able to seamlessly incorporate your prior good habits?
Personal productivity is actually about you as a person. The tools aren’t just to improve your outcomes, they are to improve YOU. They should not be subject to your changing employment as it will slow down the self-mastery that leads to personal efficacy. More on that now.
Why Productivity Equals Self-Mastery
The conventional view of productivity often revolves around efficiency—maximizing output from given inputs. However, when considering personal productivity, it’s not just about what your tools can do for you, but also how they can transform you. For seasoned professionals, becoming more productive means evolving—using tools that not only enhance output but also foster personal growth and self-improvement.
I’m arguing that personal productivity is about self-mastery toward the end of achieving your goals. Ideally, our tools help us master and extend ourselves which is ultimately the key to reaching the goals we set for ourselves. If some of those goals are consistent with our current employer – great.
The journey of self mastery
By self mastery, I am thinking more about habits of mind than willpower or self-discipline. Ideally our productivity tools would be more than just tactical support for implementation, but tools that help us with self mastery. But, for most, tactical implementation is how these tools enter our journey.
After serving thousands of clients, let me share a typical journey:
- Developing. Early in your career, the need for sophisticated productivity software might not be apparent. As a student or a young professional, basic tools like calendars and email may suffice.
- Adulting. As you move further into higher education or the professional world, life grows more complicated both at work and home. Maybe an employer provides project management software for work. You use it for work projects, but that’s it. Outside of work, you can manage fine with primarily a calendar and email. Maybe you keep a journal for bigger thinking.
- Managing. As you get more senior, you are now managing projects/colleagues at work and a partner and household at home. You’re thinking of longer-term goals for a family or career. It’s usually at this phase, you acknowledge the limitations of memory and the overall complicated nature of adult life. You are also dealing with the need to integrate your efforts with others. You reach for whatever tools seem right or are recommended for the task at hand, but nothing seems to tie your personal and professional lives together.
There is nothing wrong with this tactical approach to adding tools as you go. But, what if you had a toolset that traveled this entire journey with you? What if those tools help you build great habits AND support the tactical objectives all toward greater personal efficacy?
This is why you deserve a Personal Productivity Platform.
Why A PPP Is Different
As stated earlier, Personal Productivity Platform (“PPP”) is a small set of foundational software whose mastery work together over years to build your personal efficacy toward your personal and professional goals.
But what does it do? As a collective system of software, a Personal Productivity Platform helps us master and extend our abilities to:
- Capture & Retrieve
- Prioritize & Act.
- Integrate & Sustain
Capture & Retrieve
This is the key process that allows you to go beyond the limitations of your brain and capture any ideas you come across and retrieve them at the appropriate time. Note-taking software like Evernote, OneNote and Notion are examples, but focus on software that has the following attributes:
- Ubiquitous – easy to use wherever you find yourself. This means both where you are (home, work, beach, grocery) and how you work (stylus, phone, web, offline).
- Searchable – easy to find what you’re looking for quickly. This doesn’t necessarily mean an amazing AI-based search functionality, but it does mean you don’t dread trying to find something you saved 5 years ago. If you don’t trust you’ll be able to find something, you’ll stop capturing things in the first place.
- Flexible – adjusts to your changing life. I hate to break it to you, but what you capture and how you capture it will change over time. Your tools have to support that now or evolve with you.
Prioritize & Act
Unlike much of the discussion of a second brain which focuses on the life altering ability to capture and retrieve ideas at any time, a PPP is equally focused on action toward all of our goals, personal and professional. Our PPP must help us understand which ideas require action, when, by whom and then adjust when all of that changes (because it will). Asana, Todoist, Trello, Google Calendar are good examples, but focus on software that is:
- Layered – able to display action items at different levels of detail. For me, once I set my daily priorities, I don’t need to see the noise of tasks unrelated to those until they are finished. You always want to be able to zoom out to the big picture, but zoom in to what is needed now.
- Structured – able to focus on different attributes of action items. In capturing ideas, we want the most flexibility to easily capture everything. When it comes to organizing and prioritizing action items, we benefit from more structure. Due dates, repeating status, labels, prioritization level, collaborators, attachments and even custom fields are important in structuring and restructuring what we’re going to do and when.
Integrate & Sustain
Most productivity enthusiasts will be familiar with the attributes explained above, but what makes the best Personal Productivity Platforms stand out is their ability to help us Integrate and Sustain our efforts. This is what helps build the long-term habits that lead to greater personal efficacy.
Let me explain.
Integrate across boundaries
If I haven’t said it yet, it is unlikely that one app is sufficient to be your entire Personal Productivity Platform. However, even if you choose the all-in-one route, it’s important that you consider how your efforts will integrate with others. Are you part of a family that needs to share a calendar? Do you collaborate with work colleagues on tasks? Do you want to share some of your ideas with friends or even the public? For all of these reasons and more, your PPP needs to integrate with the outside world.
Integration allows you to:
- Collaborate with others with less friction. For example, sharing tasks with others who need to work on them or just be aware of progress.
- Use your favorite tools for different aspects of your PPP. For example use Notion as your capture tool and Asana as your task management and collaboration tool while ensuring you don’t retype items in either and progress stays in sync.
- All of this is possible if your PPP is capable of integration. The more integrations available the better. Remember, integrations provide flexibility which reduces friction and allows you to sustain.
Shameless plug:TaskClone was born from frustration with the lack of integration among foundational apps. Give it look to integrate your foundational apps.
Sustain your system
To build great habits takes time. Jumping on the hottest trend might bring immediate benefit, but if you don’t sustain it, how will it sustain you? For greatest value, your Personal Productivity Platform needs to be with you long enough for you to build and refine a system that becomes a habit that benefits multiple areas of your life.
And yes, you can move your system from one app to another, but there are usually immense amounts of switching costs in learning, customizing and refining in each app. Think about learning and re-learning keyboard shortcuts. The more you put into an app, the greater those switching costs will be. But, if you don’t invest in the relevant workflows and capabilities of an app, you are limiting its intended benefit. Further, each app has unique capabilities that take time to integrate and master. Think about learning and re-learning keyboard shortcuts as the simplest example of this.
When looking at the foundational apps for your PPP, consider these additional attributes to sustain your long-term investment:
- Enjoyment. This encompasses being easy to start using and aesthetically pleasing to use. This attribute helps you stay consistent and engaged over the long haul. It’s sorta like in fitness, where coaches say, “the best exercise for you is the one you will consistently do.” You will spend hours with your capture and retrieval app each week so make sure it’s not drudgery.
- Habit forming. Includes some kind of incentives to help you build the habits needed to revisit your priorities, complete tasks or other processes that build self-mastery.
- Stability. Is the company that produces the app stable? Is the app an important part of their business so that they will continue to improve it over time? You are free to take whatever risks you want, but I’d recommend stable foundational apps. Nothing is guaranteed, but if you are going to invest your ideas, your time and build sustainable habits, you need partners that are going to be there with you.
Recap – Personal Efficacy Awaits
Beyond a second brain, you need a Personal Productivity Platform of a few foundational apps that work together over years to build your personal efficacy toward your personal AND professional goals. You should invest in learning the intricacies of these few tools enough to build robust habits that support your own self mastery.
While choosing the foundational apps that will form your PPP is based on your personal context, get the compound benefits of tools that help you prioritize and act toward your goals and will be enjoyable and sustainable over the long-term.
We Want To Hear From You
Do you have a Personal Productivity Platform in place? Which apps are in your arsenal, and how have they changed the way you manage your professional and personal life?
