My Productivity Revolution: A Story of Progress

In this article I want to share my productivity journey with you: starting from my first job in applied science to my current position as a manager in digitalization & IT.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Starting to navigate the waters of productivity

Since I work in a corporate environment I am flooded with information daily: e-mails, meetings, phone-calls, charts & visualizations, reference material, offers, …

This was not always the case. As I started my first full-time job in applied science, I was tasked with a hand full of industrial research projects. There was a lot of information to work through: the topics were very specific but overall they existed within a similar niche.

There were of course project meetings I had to attend and there were notes to write down. At first, I applied the strategy that had proven itself at university: I wrote down everything that seemed valuable with a pencil in my trusty notebook and did a brief post-processing as soon as I had the chance.

Back then the number of daily e-mails was relatively low - how lucky I was!

As most of my e-mails were project-related tasks anyways, I got away with utilizing my inbox as some kind of to-do list. When I found out that my e-mail software also had tools supporting me by keeping track of tasks I delegated, I felt above and beyond: I had everything I needed to keep track of my tasks (and the few tasks I delegated).

Then my career changed.

Productivity in the corporate world

I made a transition from applied science to the corporate world and got the responsibility of digital transformation management at a company producing high-end steel and metals. Also, I got the chance to lead a small team. This had of course an effect on my e-mail count: they quickly went up and also I had to attend dozens of meetings.

Just using pen and paper and jotting down everything that seemed important was not sufficient anymore.

Using pen and paper without much structure had the disadvantage that post-processing the notes was cumbersome and time-consuming.

I found myself doing no post-processing at all, relying on my handwritten notes from the meeting alone. This was not that productive: sometimes I just did not find the information I was searching for.

I started mind mapping during meetings. Instead of jotting down bullet points, I would draw a mind map.

This really reduced the workload for post-processing. But it had a new disadvantage: for each meeting I attended, I had a mind map. The ideas, notes and learnings could not easily be connected. Also, mind maps are not suitable for all kinds of meetings - especially for those with a lot of hard facts to remember, mind maps are not the best. As the number of projects grew, I found myself partly reverting to my old strategy of writing down bullet points and drawing mind maps.

I was back were I started: meeting-post-processing ate up a lot of time. Additionally, it felt somewhat strange being responsible for digital transformation management, but writing down notes by hand. I decided to switch to digital notetaking.

I started using OneNote as it was the most common tool at my company. At the beginning I was not very fond of it.

But I quickly learned how to structure my notes.

As I am a very structured person in general, I quickly created folders for projects and sub-folders within. For even more structure I created sub-sub-folders. Also the post-processing of meeting-notes became more efficient: I just had to edit the notes a bit and store them in one of the folders.

After about a year I got promoted and now also had the responsibility for IT, in addition to digitalization. With the promotion, my teamsize grew and a new problem with my productivity system was emerging: with so many topics in my area of responsibility it became difficult to decide where a certain note would go. “Is it related to the project, or the overall topic?” I would ask myself more often.

And yes, there can be too much structure. As soon as there are multiple sub-sub-folders, it becomes difficult to navigate the structure. It is hard to memorize the whole structure. In my case, redundant sub-structures emerged as there were too many folders to memorize in parallel.

The problem with structuring notes/information in folders is: most of the time notes can and should be used in multiple projects/areas/… and this is not possible with a folder-structure.

My method needed improvement.

The Zettelkasten

I started reading productivity books and articles and stumbled across the method “Zettelkasten”. This is a method initially developed by the German professor Niklas Luhmann for structuring his research notes and made popular by the book “How to Take Smart Notes”.

The core principle of the “Zettelkasten” method is to create individual, self-contained notes for every idea or piece of information. These notes are then connected with links (or tags) to form an organic structure of notes and most importantly: one note can be linked to more than one topic (folder).

“Why not giving it a try?”, I thought.

I changed the structure of my OneNote notebook to suit the method: I created a section for each month and in each section, I created one page per day. For each meeting/phone call/etc. I would write down the notes on the page of that day (e.g., as a bullet-point).

Now I needed a way to keep the notes structured which supported an organic growth of the different knowledge topics: I needed tagging.

As I still used OneNote I needed to find a way of implementing tags - a feature the software does not support natively. I also could not simply use hash-tags as the search-function just ignores the “#”. After some research on the web I found that I could use “99” as a substitute for the hashtag. Additionally I created custom categories within OneNote. Every entry would get a “99*” marking with all the relevant tags and a category. If I wanted to find all related notes I could now easily use the inbuilt search-function with the custom tags and the categories and voila I would find all related notes.

This helped tremendously and my productivity was once again on-par with my requirements.

However, I did not want to stop there. I wanted to become more productive.

Why Typing Speed Matters

To increase my productivity, my next goal was to increase the speed of generating notes. My bottleneck was my typing-speed: With 45 words-per-minute (wpm), I was not a slow writer at all, but there was definitely potential for improvement.

The problem was my typing-method: Over the years I had adopted a strange four-finger-method and I could not increase the movement-speed of my fingers anymore – I had to use more fingers. I needed to learn ten-finger-typing. I took an online course.

At first my writing speed plummeted – I went down to about 15 wpm. I struggled at the beginning, because now I could not even input as much information to my system as before. In important meetings I had to revert to my old method to keep up with notetaking. After work, I would stay a bit longer every day and would transcribe texts to practice my writing-speed. Slowly I became better.

Then there came my milestone: I reached the wpms of my old method.

Now I could constantly use ten-finger-typing (also in important meetings) and by simply writing notes and texts I was able to train my typing skills and improve further.

Three months in, I increased my wpm to 60 and knew: down the line I will improve further. It felt great to be able to write down ideas and notes almost as fast as they occur.

At the moment I am at 75 wpm.

My goal is reaching 100 wpm.

Building A Second Brain

While focusing on my writing-speed I noticed that it got harder for me again to find the notes I searched for. There were too many tags. At this point I had over 100 “hashtags” and just as many catagories. When I was searching for notes to a specific topic, I had to go through multiple tags as in many cases they were somewhat similar.

I found myself using the free-text-search way too often - not utilizing the strength of my notetaking system.

I had to change something, again.

Recently I had read about the “Second Brain” method and it seemed as it would be good a solution to my struggle.

I always liked the idea of using a system to store / keep and organize all my knowledge in one place and have the information readily available if I needed it.

But I was not sure how to incorporate a Second Brain in my workflow. So, before changing my set-up at work, I started small and created a structure in notion for my personal notetaking. At that time, I had started reading a lot of books and needed a way to “store” this valuable information somewhere anyways.

To create my Second Brain I tried out different structures and ended up following a tutorial on Youtube. I thought I had found a good structure for me.

I did not.

I just did not use the Second Brain I had created. I found myself inputting a lot of notes and information, but not using it at all. Therefore, it did not make sense to me to incorporate this method in my professional life. I continued using my Zettelkasten.

The PARA Method: How I Found a Path to Better Organization

As I followed some of the productivity-gurus on Youtube such as Ali Abdaal, Elizabeth Filips, Tiago Forte, Matt D’Avella and more, after some more months down the line I was made aware of another method related to the Second Brain: PARA.

It is an organizational system that classifies information and tasks into four categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives (PARA). Projects are for specific, short-term goals, while Areas encompass broader life categories or topics of long-term interest. Resources store reference materials, and Archives hold completed or outdated items, providing a clear and flexible framework for personal knowledge management and productivity.

It sounded easy and as I had learnt: easy is robust and robustness wins. At first I slightly changed my notetaking: I now would not have one page per day, I would instead have one note per meeting/phone call/etc. This would make my notes more atomic and easier to handle.

Furthermore, I set-up a PARA Structure in OneNote. But I did not create sections as folders. I created one section for each PARA-category and one page within each section for a particular project / area / …. So, I ended up with an empty page for each project or area of interest waiting to be filled.

To kickstart the new system I took half a day and “translated” my most recent notes from my old system to the new system. The empty pages quickly were filled and with it summaries of projects and areas emerged.

But why setting up PARA with one-pagers?

I wanted to have the capability of putting/linking each note in multiple buckets. The point I want to make here might be easier to understand with an example:

• Imagine you have a research project on how to use machine learning in production planning and control. Therefore, you create a section in “Projects”.
• Additionally, you have defined “Machine Learning Methods” within your Resources and “Data Science” as well as “Production Planning” within your Areas.
• You now have a project meeting and take notes. Of course, the note is linked to the project section. But now comes the real boost: During the meeting a novel machine learning library was discussed. So now you can link this note additionally to the “Machine Learning Methods” Resource for later use and also link it within the “Data Science” area, as you intend on using the method in the next weeks. Did something new come up to “Production Planning” as well? Add it to the particular area.
• If you now want to utilize your system for a new project in the realm of machine learning, you can easily find the library in the Resource section. But you can also find the note from your projects, if you have to e.g. create a project-summary.

From my Zettelkasten experience I learnt that there can be too many tags/categories. So I tried to keep them at a minimum (< 30). To increase the visibility of the tags, I created a PARA one-pager containing a link to all sections within Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive.

In the process of post-processing a note, I just have to have a look at this one-pager and would instantly know where to put a link to.

Merging Methods: A Peek into My Present Workflow

Up to this point, I still used my e-mail software’s task-section in combination with jotting down to-dos in my notes as my solution for task management. It was quite OK, but searching different places for my to-dos was not that effective and lead to somewhat redundant lists.

As I had recently read “Getting Things Done”, I decided to integrate my learnings into my task management strategy:

I integrated a “Waiting For List” as well as a “Someday Maybe List” and multiple “Next Action Lists” as sections in OneNote. To increase the efficiency, I also incorporated the process of adding a link to the relevant notes to my next actions: This reduces (i) the barrier of starting a task (which does not seem that enjoyable) and (ii) the time before I can get active working on a next action. Hence, keeping me productive.

I then had one place where I stored my notes and one place where I managed my to-dos.

But there was still my e-mail software which I used as some kind of knowledge storage as well. I still found myself searching for important information in my e-mails: bills, documents sent by colleagues and past decisions of fellow managers.

I had to move this important information to the place where my notes live. As David Allen says in his book about GTD: You need a system you can trust.

I needed a system where I could find all important information - not just my personal notes.

There was an easy fix: I forwarded all important e-mails to my notetaking software, treating them exactly the same as all my personal notes. Each important e-mail gets a distinct page and is linked within the PARA sections it belongs to. If I need relevant information to a project or to a topic, I have it readily available within the page linked to the full note.

This is my productivity system as of right now:

• All important information in one place
• To-do lists linked to related notes
• A one-pager for each project/area
• Atomic notes linked to from the one-pagers
• PARA one-pager for good overview

My learnings

In my journey I tried different methods: Some of them did not really work for me or did not suit the software available in my company. Other methods needed to be adjusted to my working style and some I could directly implement.

What did I learn?

• Easy is robust and robustness wins: As soon as I found myself creating a complex structure of folders and sub-folders or coming up with 100s of tags, I struggled keeping track of them.
• You need to trust your system: This one is from GTD. If you are unsure if your system is complete, it won’t bring you stress-free productivity.
• Redundancy is a killer in knowledge management: Redundancy is similar to completeness. If the information on a certain topic is scattered across multiple lists/tools/etc. you will quickly find yourself having different versions not being sure which one is the current one.
• The system should minimize the effort required to initiate an action: A good system must ensure that notetaking is not only seamless but also enhances your effectiveness by reducing the pre-action effort.

To me, the world of productivity is fascinating, and I am already curious what tools and methods I will stumble across in the future!