On designing the perfect workflow — Crystal Lee (she/她)

If you've read other posts on this blog, you'll find that I am somewhat obsessed with the realm of personal knowledge management, productivity, and the entire idea of designing the perfect workflow. (In other words, the Andy Matuschak, Johnny Decimal, and Oliver Burkeman extended universe.1) Once I have those down, I say, then I'll be able to start writing. My partner tells me that all of this sculpting and pruning that I do is really just yak shaving -- productive procrastination that gets in the way of actually doing the work. (This includes spending an hour writing a script to automate a process when you could have done it by hand in 20 minutes -- oops. I even engaged in a little bit of this right this second by trying to find an etymology of yak-shaving, which apparently stems from an email at MIT CSAIL, of all places.) In Oliver Burkeman's Time Management for Mortals, he argues that we often spend our one precious life forever preparing and refining how we might do something, rath

If you've read other posts on this blog, you'll find that I am somewhat obsessed with the realm of personal knowledge management, productivity, and the entire idea of designing the perfect workflow. (In other words, the Andy Matuschak, Johnny Decimal, and Oliver Burkeman extended universe.1) Once I have those down, I say, then I'll be able to start writing. My partner tells me that all of this sculpting and pruning that I do is really just yak shaving -- productive procrastination that gets in the way of actually doing the work. (This includes spending an hour writing a script to automate a pr