• The Real Meaning of Productivity: Why Oliver Burkeman Gets GTD (and Cal Newport Doesn’t)

    I am an Oliver Burkeman fan. I deeply enjoyed Four Thousand Weeks and have been a long time subscriber to his newsletter, The Imperfectionist. His new book, Meditations for Mortals is currently on my nightstand. What draws me to Burkeman is his “reformed productivity enthusiast” point of view which we both share, perhaps for different reasons.

    Promoting his current book, Burkeman made an appearance on a recent episode of Cal Newport’s podcast, Deep Work. I enjoyed the episode but what really stood out to me was a brief exchange between the two about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The exchange seemed to point to much of what I find interesting about productivity and productivity systems. 

    In additional to being a fan of Burkeman’s, I am a long time (probably 20 years or so) adopter of Allen’s Getting Things Done system. It is a lens that I look at my life through that helps keep entropy at bay, a little. Several years ago, Cal Newport wrote a New Yorker piece that, if not disparaging of GTD, was less than enthusiastic about it. Reading the New Yorker piece, I got the deep sense that Newport was misunderstanding a lot of what GTD is about.

    When Newport and Burkeman discussed GTD on the podcast, it was clear to me that not only does Newport misunderstand GTD, but Burkeman, in a very polite, non-confrontational way seemed to recognize that Newport was also misinterpreting GTD. So I feel like I’m in good company here. I really wish that Burkeman were a bit less passive here and dug a bit more into the spiritual side of Allen’s GTD.

    Newport’s “Deep Work” idea of productivity focuses on cognitively demanding tasks. He has amazing tips and takeaways about focus and concentration, but makes a lot of assumptions in a way that to me has a bit of an air of privilege to it. It lacks (and frankly dismisses) the practical, real world approach that David Allen offers. Burkeman didn’t exactly spring to the defense of GTD in the podcast, but I do think that Burkeman’s approach to productivity serves as a defense of GTD, especially when considering life’s inherent limitations.

    Newport is dismissive of GTD, I assume, because he believes it is to focused on the process or the focus on organizing shallow tasks. Rightly so, Cal Newport, seems skeptical of systems for the point of systems. And I agree there. But his “Deep Work” approach assumes a control over time and the agency or freedom to say no to shallow tasks, or at least the freedom to lead a life where failing to tackle these shallow tasks don’t have massive consequences. This kind of life isn’t accessible to everyone.

    One of the reasons GTD has played such an important role in my life for 20 years now is that it easily handles large and small tasks in a trusted, structure way. This structure has allowed me to deal with real-world complexities and balance work, family and personal responsibilities. For someone like me who doesn’t have the luxury of adopting an organizational system that can ignore shallow tasks, GTD has been essential in allowing me to manage my day to day tasks without losing sight of bigger goals.

    in Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman writes about the importance of accepting our human limitations and the finite nature of time. Burkeman functions as a bridge between Newport’s (privileged) idealism and Allen’s practicality by focussing on prioritization and making meaningful choices with the realization that not everything can or should be done. Burkeman compliments Allen, and I think this is why he didn’t just nod along in agreement with Newport’s disparaging of GTD on the podcast.

    For me, and I suspect many others, productivity isn’t about eliminating shallow tasks. (note: the idea of how you approach shallow, tiny or routine tasks is worth a dive, and a great place to start is this piece on the “tyranny of tiny tasks” vs. “fidelity to daily tasks” from LM Sacasas.) Sure, life is short and I want to engage in meaningful work and Newport does provide some great models for this (checking email on a schedule, time blocking, etc.). Likewise, I think the idea of creating overly complex organization/productivity systems seems like an ineffective use of our limited time on earth. But I do think that GTD offers just the right framework for managing the unavoidable shallow tasks of life while also making space for deep, meaningful work. 

    The goal of Allen’s GTD is to achieve “mind like water.” For those of us who don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore or at least not track shallow tasks in some system, life can become filled with the noise of these smaller tasks if we don’t put them down into a trusted system and get them out of our heads. Failure to do so leaves a mind that is cluttered with a lot of shallow tasks, the very opposite of mind like water. The whole point of Allen’s GTD is to free the mind of the distractions of these shallow tasks so that you can live life with your best possible attention and concentration. I think Burkeman gets that. I think Newport is confused by this and his New Yorker piece and exchange with Burkeman highlight this misunderstanding.

    In any case, all three of these guys have done a lot to help me keep my act together. For that, I’m grateful and was happy to spend some time thinking about how they relate to one another this morning.


  • HiFi Woes

    For unknown reasons, my streaming audio isn’t working this morning. For years I’ve been streaming from my iPad to an AirPort Express connected to an external DAC connected to my amp. This morning, nothing. The CD player plugged into the amp works fine and is functioning as an enjoyable fallback but I’m going to have to spend some time sorting out what’s going on here. Not sure where the failure point is here.

    [update; errr, restarted iPhone, all good. I was secretly hoping to fiddle around with Moode and a raspberry pi this weekend, but I’ll shelve that effort.]


  • audio & self-hosting updates

    It’s been a busy few weeks as I reorient myself from the warm-weather version of me that spends almost zero time on personal technology projects to the cold-weather version of me that spend most of my time on personal technology projects. As always, I know I contain multitudes but sometimes the difference between some of those multitudes is downright shocking.

    Anyway, I’ve setup a Jellyfin server so that I can watch a bunch of old series that I have downloaded to my media server (things like the original Tenacious D HBO episodes, Tales from the Tour Bus, etc.) This has been a fun exercise in part because I deployed it in docker and my docker-compose file has really grown over the past year or so.

    dash screen grab
    Dash. doing its monitoring of my NUC where I do most of the self-hosting.

    From a self-hosting perspective, and all running in docker, I’ve got:

    • Navidrome for my audio server. Amazing.
    • Photoprism for my photo storage and archiving so the I can just keep my favorites on my iOS devices and push the rest up to this archive
    • pi-hole – I go back and forth on the convienece of having this though being able to blacklist sites like news.google.com and such so that I don’t just thoughtless check the news is helpful
    • watchtower to keep my docker images up to date
    • homarr – a dashboard for the services that I’m self-hosting
    • dash. – monitor resources on my NUC
    • nginx proxy manager – an easy way to manage the nginx reverse proxy stuff so that I can access my music library when I’m outside of my house (using play:sub to listen to my navidrome library via CarPlay is killer).
    My Navidrome Recently-added screen

    On the audio front, I’m still really happy with the Cambridge Audio swap that I did for the NAD amp I used to have in my listening room. For the icing on the cake I used a room analysis tool (HouseCurve) and modified the PEQ/eq curve that I use for the room. As I expected there were some spikes down in the low frequency range and this tool helped me not only figure out the frequencies but gave me some guidance on how much to adjust.

    This, combined with the small eq curve adjustments I made following my AirPod listening test (shocking I don’t have more hearing loss after so many years of standing in front of stupid-loud amps), I feel like albums just sound a bit better now though that could be totally subjective.

    I recently started futzing around with Tailscale, it seems like a shockingly easy way to securely tunnel between devices but as I’ve already got reverse proxies setup for my key services, I’m not sure what I’ll use it for.


  • Freddie King

    Stumbled across this album yesterday afternoon:

    The entire album is gold. After years of listening to live album (that I can’t seem to find the name of anywhere) it was great to hear some of the original studio versions.


  • Links, agh.

    Just spent 15 minutes trying to surface an article from a blog I read a couple of weeks ago. Coudn’t find it in Reader, or my Shaarli instance. Eventually found it by digging into my RSS feed reader and reviewing all of my feeds. Fortunately I pruned that number down a bit a few months ago but was still tedious. This should be easier but I’m not sure how to improve my bookmarking+feed reading+long form article reading+highlights.

    For fun, I pasted the above into Claude and asked for help, here’s the suggested solution

    This is a common challenge in personal knowledge management. Let me help break this down and suggest a more streamlined approach.
    
    Here's a suggested system that might work better:
    
    1. Content Capture
       - Use a read-later service like Raindrop.io or Readwise Reader as your primary collection point
       - These modern tools can handle RSS feeds, newsletters, and manual additions
       - They typically offer better search, tagging, and highlighting features
    
    2. Processing System
       - Implement a quick triage system when content comes in
       - Use tags consistently (e.g., "to-read", "reference", "archive")
       - Add brief notes about why you're saving something
       - Consider using progressive summarization (highlighting key points when you first read)
    
    3. Long-term Storage
       - Move important content to a knowledge management system (like Obsidian or Logseq)
       - Keep only what you'll reference again
       - Create connection points between related pieces of content
    
    4. Search Strategy
       - Use specific tags for broad categories
       - Include contextual notes about why something was important
       - Consider adding your own summary/key points when saving
    
    Would you like me to elaborate on any of these points or discuss specific tools that might work for your workflow?

    Food for thought, I guess.


  • Twitter

    My journal entry from 17 years ago today was a copy of a message i sent out to few friends of mine:

    So but anyway, I’m sjwillis on Twitter.

    If you’re not signed up, you should check it out. You can go to Twitter to do so or you can do it right from your cellphone by:

    – texting “help” to 40404

    – twitter will reply with some stuff.

    – reply to it with a msg like “yo”

    – twitter will reply, prompting you for a username and send you a

    message back confirming that username.

    – make a note of that name and send it to me


  • Reminders Quick Entry

    I was looking for a quick way to add reminders to Apple Reminders on my Mac similar to Things hotkey quick entry.

    There are several out there that I found through Google but ultimately landed on this one for its simplicity and natural language processing:

    https://github.com/surrealroad/alfred-reminders


  • New Releases

    A lot of new releases to check out from the past 2 weeks:

    The Windham Hill Guitar one isn’t new but I just added it to my library, the rest though, I’m excited to check out. I’ve already been really loving the new Vasen/Hawktail release. Can’t believe the Brand New Heavies album is 30 years old. Stoked to check out the Billy Strings album especially after reading the great interview from last week in GQ.


  • Jimmy Bruno has the best musical instruction channel on YouTube in case you are interested:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk2x_VVq-Do


  • Generative AI tools further the importance of quality over quantity in employee evaluation. Another key future skill: managers who can spot true excellence amid AI-enhanced mediocrity.


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Reading Notes

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