I want to describe calm productivity. And I want to contrast the results of attention management to the results of efforts to do time management.    I’m going to take you over to a recording of a public talk I did at a conference at UA. It’s titled: "The Three Enemies of Productivity".   The actual thing that we all want is productivity or efficiency (which are probably synonyms, for the most part).    Productivity and efficiency both mean outputs per unit input.    When we talk about productivity, we typically think of outputs per unit time. On the other hand, when we're talking about organizational productivity we may be talking about maximizing output per dollar cost or other things.  But when we talk about individual productivity, personal productivity and knowledge work, then typically we're going to wind up talking about maximizing results per unit time. And that's fine.    But maximization of that is not a “flow” state. It is not calm productivity. It’s “hurry culture”.   The equations come from physical product studies

• Physical product is not variable
• Delivery mechanisms are critical in knowledge work because information must be comprehensible
• Part of the product is this comprehensibility
• Less so in the physical product world
• Implications of the physical-product-based efficiency equations

How this plays in “time” management

• The first thing is to get rid of waste
• The notion of “wasting time” is challenging - many things LOOK like waste.
• So, we try to shrink time. But “speeding up” is bad for us, although “less time” is often good.
• Poor utilization of the asset (downtime) is the first waste.

We've got to understand what the asset is

• What's being challenged for us is not exactly our time.
• It's our attention. And, there's lots of ways that our attention could be wasted.

There is no real way to ‘overclock’

• If I can make you go faster than you're comfortable going, then you're going to start making mistakes.
• Trying to make somebody go faster than they can is the result of a focus on time management. 
• In the extreme, rushing to make time efficient is cutting  corners 
• Rushing does nothing to give us a sense of of calm, and peaceful.

Macro waste of attention

• I don't Talk about macro waste. Use the Covey quadrants.
• We can't be Attention intensive for 8, 10, or 12 hours a day.

“Losing” our attention

• We don't yet know what "leaves" when we lose our focus.
• An example of talking about attention in the wrong way

Micro wastes of attention. 

• Task switching has an enormous cost in attention.
• Two reasons for focus

The three primary 'micro' wastes of attention (the Keynote)

• Interruption
• Multitasking
• Distraction
• ...and how to deal with them

I enjoy giving this keynote. It helps me spread the message about the core of productivity. If you know someone who needs to hear it, share or get them in touch with me for a keynote. www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble [email protected]

Our attention is over-allocated by a nexus of events. This episode is what to do about that.   I'm gonna acknowledge something that I'm not a big fan of. Apparently April is stress awareness month. So, if you weren't aware of stress, stress is a thing. I think most of us are aware of it.   I don't want to be a curmudgeon but oh my word. Yes, I'm already aware of all of the different months that have some awareness attached to that.   About stress… My promise to you is: if you practice good attention management, that will lead to a new level of productivity for you. That productivity will interact with your level of stress around 1) your to-do list and 2) the information that you need to manage such that your level of stress will go down. In this episode, I'm going to try and do a couple of different things.   One is I'm going to tell you a little bit about stress. I’ll give you a great resource around stress.   Two is we're going to talk about a really strange notion in our modern world; it's called contentment. If you've never heard that word before I get it, and we'll talk about what that is. Stress versus contentment and achieving some sense of peace, calmness, and clarity. And dare I say it, happiness?   This is all based on our attention and the fact that we're at a nexus of events. These events are colliding such that the world is putting us, more precisely our attention, under intense pressure. The intensity of pressure is something that we have not dealt with before, as a culture, as a society.   There’s an attention-based stress challenge. Society and culture are placing huge demands on us. It's not a published demand; nobody notified you that this would be happening. That set of forces is the third thing that we'll talk about today.   What is stress? 

• Stress is the difference between our expectation and what we experience in reality
• In this sense, it is closely related to frustration. The feeling is like frustration
• The Myth of Stress – Andrew Bernstein
• The only way to deal with it is to learn new expectations (not easy)
• Our stated expectation – this is just a busy time (month, quarter) – is not reality
• Also, there seems to be an unstated assumption that we’ll just get better at this as a culture or society. Another false expectation

Contentment

• Example of escalating expectations: the notion of a 'prom-posal'
• The only term I can come up with at present is: child inflation.
• Contentment is counter-cultural
• The present culture has associated contentment with inability - inability to achieve - or poverty, inability to pay for it. We don't want to be seen as incapable of living up to this cultural Norm

The factors around our attention

• Fact 1: the level of attention getting is higher than ever. We’re all trying to get each other’s attention. The level is rising
• Fact 2: our levels of information and communication are continuing to rise
• Fact 3: more of us are using our attention as our productive asset
• Fact 3.5 we are the most entertained society in history And entertainment is a pleasant deployment of our attention.
• We feel trapped in our frustration over attention

My hypothesis is that we wandered into this situation and, therefore, we don't have good tactics to deal with it. That's what I do: give you good tactics to deal with the information- and task-based claims on your attention. That will lower your stress and help you perform better in work.   Email me with comments or questions: [email protected]   And connect with me on LinkedIn to see occasional announcements on episodes and other stuff: www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble (please mention the podcast).

The happiness at work episode. Yay. I’m happy to be at work.   Last time we talked about pessimism versus optimism. A closely related subject is happiness versus misery. I do think that optimism is critical. I've heard it said that your number one goal as an entrepreneur is to protect your optimism. I think it's that important.   If you’re in the knowledge Work World and think you're not an entrepreneur and then you probably need to reconsider the definition of Entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is somebody that makes their own deal, that makes their own job. And you should probably be a lot closer to doing that than maybe you think you should be. Standing around getting told what to do all the time. Is not. Fulfilling satisfying, or really very enriching. You got to bring something to the party. So figure out what your thing is and bring it because we need it. And then protect your optimism that you can make a difference in the world.   As I'm recording this, it's Easter week and I'm a Christian, I'm very happy. Today is Thursday of Easter week. Which is Maundy Thursday. For those of you who aren't familiar with Christian tradition, Maundy is m-a-u-n-d-y. Traditionally, it's where we celebrate Jesus serving his disciples at the Last Supper and Loving on them in that way.   Tomorrow, of course, will be Good Friday, which you may be even more familiar with. If not, Good Friday is traditionally the day that Jesus was crucified. We say good to make the point.    A lot of people are particularly happy at Christmas. I like Christmas too, but Easter is nore theologically sound. So I hope you're happy this week too while we talk about happiness at work.   Happiness and optimism go hand in hand. If you're optimistic about an outcome, then generally speaking that's going to correlate with some degree of happiness about where you are in the world.   It's a confusing topic to some degree. I don't think it's necessary that we get into the controversy, but let's talk about what we all agree on.   I think a lot of people don't like work. I think a lot of people have made up their minds that they're not gonna like work. In the minority of cases we don't like work because we work in some nasty environment, really dangerous, those kinds of things. Of interest, of course, is the fact that many of the people who do that sort of thing are really, really passionate about what they do and their unhappiness about it seems at least to be limited if not totally subsumed. People in the military, people in the medical profession, a lot of these areas.   That said, if you're listening to this podcast you probably work in a nice comfy office - comfortable chair, air conditioning, you’ve got the tools that you need. You’re pretty comfortable and well-treated. Maybe there's bits and pieces around the edges that you'd prefer were different, fine. I just think we've got to recognize that as part of this happiness equation.   Optimism is more productive - last podcast

• Happiness and optimism go hand in hand

Charley Gilkey: happy = 31% greater productivity

• Attitude is important, particularly in service businesses – “my pleasure”

Challenges to happiness at work

• Last podcast… the meme that realism is a sophisticated approach
• Desire and "wanting it."
• Flow state is NOT hard, grunting work I do think that the desire piece is overstated in the culture.
• Avoid this part of the hustle culture
• I don't think it has to be hard to be morally good work.
• Negativity and pessimism around work have two primary components

Ways to be happier at work

• Human beings have a great capacity to enjoy the things that we do.
• A definition of discipline(s)
• Strong relationships require disciplines.
• We call this discipline and learn as small humans to dislike it.
• I’m disciplined in some areas and not in others. You're likely the same
• Work-life balance vs. chore-craft balance - from Cal Newport and Scott Young.
• Craft – doing “the thing”
• Chore – peripheral to “the thing”
• Craft transcends the work life conflict

Happiness at work is certainly possible. Believing that is half the battle. How we do our work with happiness.

• Engage the disciplines
• Understand the indirect relationships

  Happiness is a big part of Doing Busy Right. Part of it is stress reduction. Part of it is greater throughput. Part of it is greater confidence. In addition, consider some of these other ways to be happy at work.   [email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble

This one's about optimism and pessimism, and what that has to do with productivity. I and the whole thing is a productivity concern for me. We talk about confidence around these parts. That’s because I think confidence ties to productivity. The tie there is imposter syndrome. We struggle to understand what confidence is. But confidence is fundamental to what we're trying to do, particularly as knowledge workers. By the same token, optimism is fundamental to productivity. A lot of this has to do with long term career growth rather than just simple productivity. We'll leave that career growth potential aside, and just talk about productivity now. The problem

• The problem is that many people are pessimists
• If you are not confident in your ability to do something, then your ability to do that thing is going to be quite limited
• The invisible work that we do leads to negative mental gymnastics like writer's block and imposter syndrome.
• Our feelings about a thing do have a lot to do with our ability to do and thus I think we should cultivate optimism

I’ll give you some tools and motivation to embrace optimism, if you’re an optimist and work to become an optimist, if you’re not Realistic positivity - optimism

• vs “Toxic positivity”
• Definition of discipline
• Mental landscape and productivity

The science

• Learned helplessness
• Growth mindset is pretty close to a good definition of optimism
• Grit

Counter arguments

• I'm not a pessimist about me. I'm a pessimist about the world.
• Optimism as naivete, realism is rational
• Limiting disappointment by managing expectations

Engineering mindset

• Definition of work
• Problem solving
• Tenacity

Recap I hope I've convinced you that optimism is the most productive, practical mindset. You should now have some tools to help you cultivate optimism in your life and work. Remember, you've solved many problems and (to date) have survived the worst news you've received. You can do it. [email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble

I want to talk about the history of knowledge work productivity. And it's going to involve a lot of different names. It's going to involve the triumvirate, well, the quadrumvirate (that’s the real word), the Mount Rushmore.   Only through understanding what they were thinking about can we extend that thinking. Then we can work on knowledge work productivity.    We'll go all the way back to the start of the 20th century.   We have Frederick Taylor studying “Scientific Management”, which is a study of work, not ‘management’ per se.   Then we've got Peter Drucker, and he's important because he was doing all the thinking around knowledge work and how that came about.   Stephen Covey taught us that we have to get our mindset right in order to be effective people. David Allen taught us how to use tools and stop using our brains for task and attention management.   I might bring in Cal Newport and Thomas Davenport and these different kinds of names, just because of the curiosity factor there. But anyway, Drucker, Covey, Taylor, David Allen,   This episode is about:

• What problem do businesspeople and managers (in particular) have to deal with
• Why is it an important problem
• What ways have we tried to deal with this previously
• What tools are at our disposal to try to solve it now
• Who is currently presenting solutions and what are they

The issue is that our economy, particularly our economic productivity, is changing. We have yet to fully understand how to react to that change.   Some history to give us perspective and hints on what to do.

• 20th century productivity growth
• Organizational structures - sociology (business structures were not theorized/engineered)
• Original organizational structures (government/church/military) were monarchy/hierarchy
• The notion of trade, business, and getting wealthy (via the “business” way)
• Apprentice -> employee -> growing organization -> modern business problems (management)
• Used to be everybody worked for the king, who distributed wealth and work

It needed to scale and be ‘optimized’, but was never engineered

• We don't know exactly how it works
• You got three blacksmiths. All of a sudden it's a managerial problem
• Most things cultural or sociological there isn't hard science - like business
• Atom bomb derived from theory and we ‘engineered’ a way to construct one. Same thing with NASA and the space program. Business really was not that way
• Railroad/telegraph as a management problem (distributed locations). If you need to tell somebody the train's coming, there's no faster way for that information to travel than the train itself. 
• The history of information really correlates to the history of business and culture
• We can’t communicate quickly enough between different locations for ‘real-time’ management
• These business/communication structures grew organically, business is perhaps more Darwinian than Darwin Well, all of this was command and control.

So what about leadership/governance/control of the organization

• Now, we have to explain leadership, and this notion of who gets to tell who what to do
• The ‘great man’ theory
• Mid 20th century, there was a cult of personality
• Huge corporations, like General Motors, and they're selling stock, and nobody really understands how that works
• Government: we've got to understand how this business thing works and explain it to people and regulate it

How we began to understand and explain

• Frederick Taylor "scientific management" and notions of the efficiency of individual workers
• Peter Drucker In "The Concept of the Corporation" is trying to explain the notion of governance structures, some way to get people to work together
• We've got big organizations and factories. Got to produce a lot, and so we need to break this down, because nobody, no one person, can produce it all
• Drucker developed technique for management and the ideas of knowledge work
• Stephen Covey comes along. He's exploring this idea of technique for ‘effectiveness’. 
• Covey talks effective people in terms of psychological, psychosocial properties of behavior and modes of thought. This is different from previous thought.

Now, Knowledge Work improvement (and management)

• Drucker’s hypothesis: improve the productivity of knowledge work. How do we manage versus how do we strategize? Now, we’ve moved to KW (and management)
• So, how do we manage ourselves and others
• The goal of such management is to improve the productivity of knowledge work.
• David Allen started to use Taylorist thinking in improving knowledge work.
• My offering on how to manage Knowledge Work is the Attention Compass - a successor to Allen's methodology.
• Focus: What are the components of knowledge work and how can we improve them? What is the system that needs to be put in place?

Our community is working on this and needs your insights and voice. Get in touch. [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn.

I started out talking about the lies of productivity, but I’m going to change to fables because it's just things we collectively believe without much evidence. Plus, I don't think anybody's intentionally trying to mislead us. We just move without much actual data.   A couple of those fables collided with a post by Cal Newport with the evocative title of “productivity rain dances”, which is a pretty humorous mental picture.   Apparently, rain dances are those habits of work that we believe make us productive but actually don’t. We don’t develop evidence, so we are engaging in superstition.   So, fables and rain dances probably have some overlap. Let’s explore Cal’s post and investigate some of our own practices to make sure we’re not wasting our time and energy doing things that don’t improve our productivity.   What is the discussion?

• Cal’s post about Chris Williamson’s podcast
• It’s not that nothing is useful in productivity, it’s just that the field is not scientifically organized.
• Experiment means think, gather data, analyze situations. It does not mean “I feel like…”.
• Technique is a real thing and it exists – there is a better way to manage your tasks and attention.
• Is a new tool really that helpful? Or is AI another ‘rain dance’
• Cal’s post: https://calnewport.com/productivity-rain-dances/

Examples of rain dances (or Fables)

• Williamson gave a few examples:
• Why do I sit at my desk when I'm not working?
• Why do I thrash around about emails?
• Why do I take phone calls that have no goal?
• My fables are more habits of thought around specific tasks
• “I'd better do it before I forget about it”
• Usually means “… forget about it again”
• Sometimes we do it just because its late
• I feel guilty because I'm not any better at my stuff
• In order to resolve that guilt, we pop up and go do it now
• Overlap with “not finished” syndrome
• Avoiding the knee jerk reaction 
• Our systems don't dictate our priority; they reflect our priority. 
• If we often say, "I better do it before I forget about it", then your system is broken.
• Instead, say to yourself, I'd better capture it before I forget about it.
• We create tasks that implicitly have the Title of "Make progress on X"
• “Thrashing is a rain dance.”
• Rapid task switching, multitasking is a rain dance
• When we measure time, we switch from measuring outputs to measuring inputs
• Faster, in and of itself, is not more efficient.
• Efficiency is a property of a system and only makes sense when the goal is clear.
• Don't maximize inputs to try to maximize outputs.
• Only time saved at the bottleneck step of your process improves your productivity.
• every process has a bottleneck, and the bottleneck governs the overall throughput of the system,
• Some commentary on the comments
• Inbox zero: rain dance, or not?
• Inbox Zero is not efficient behavior in and of itself
• “Tweaking” your system is a rain dance
• We spend a lot of time and a lot of stress buying tools to speed up parts of the process that are not the bottleneck, and then we don't get better productivity because of it.
• You don't need a system to help you handle email faster. You need a system to reduce the amount of email you have to deal with. It's an input.
• Increasing the inputs for the same number of outputs is the opposite of productivity - the opposite of efficiency,

Where have we gotten today? 

• Define your outputs; identify them very cleanly, and then focus on those and work backwards
• Identifying a bottleneck is not a trivial challenge
• Faster is not more productive. Faster is simply faster.
• Many of these things are signs that your system is broken or incomplete
• We do our rain dance and it doesn't rain so the process is broken 
• Understanding which part of a process is broken is not trivial or simple. 
• Don't deal with a system in a piecemeal fashion (See the previous episode about optimizing sub processes is not a reliable way to optimize the overall process.)

[email protected]; www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble

Most everybody involved in knowledge work is involved with technology. It's what we do. We deal in information, so we deal with information technology. We believe that it makes us more productive – “better” at our jobs.   But what is the evidence that information technology is helping us be more productive? After all, that is its purpose in the modern workplace. I’d suggest that many people believe that the tech companies are dealing with that on our behalf. And the software companies would agree. They want to tell you that, yes, they're improving your productivity. But there's a ton of contrary evidence to that.   Also, both solopreneurs and companies are just hurling themselves into AI. The argument is, as the argument has always been with IT, that AI will make us more efficient, more productive. There are good reasons to doubt that. We’ll get into them.   What is the productivity paradox?

• The mismatch between the belief that IT spend on improved productivity and flat economic productivity
• The Y2K Bug and the aftermath of the Dot Com Bust
• The productivity paradox is making a return
• You need to know as you plan your own IT spending, for yourself or your team
• look for two problems: 1) you’re wasting money, and 2) you may not have another plan for improving productivity

What is the ‘modern’ productivity paradox?

• process “accretion”
• We struggle to learn from each other
• Vendors are a little unreliable on this point, for obvious reasons an
• accumulation of point solutions doesn't make a system

Challenges of managing technology

• 2003 Nicholas Carr , "IT Doesn't Matter"
• Carr’s point: technology wants to be a commodity
• Carr’s conclusion: you can’t gain a strategic advantage with a commodity resource

Systems theory

• efficiency is in automating processes, not in automating tasks.
• the difference between automating tasks and automating processes
• optimize a sub process then you sub optimize the whole process
• Systems engineering example – The Goal, Eli Goldratt
• Modern productivity paradox

What to do?

• Be aware that there is an ongoing argument about how to do this. It’s not trivial.
• Think about optimizing and automating Processes rather than Tasks
• Measure at the process level and experiment

Recap   I guess the primary takeaway is a reminder to not let the IT hype be a distraction from what you're trying to do. Some tools will help you and others won't. Just understand that convenience and 'time-savings' are actually pretty low on the list of useful targets for IT interventions. Stay focused on what you produce that creates the value you deliver to the world. Things that help you produce more are productive, everything else is not really.   www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble [email protected]

There's an article in The New Yorker "What If The Attention Crisis Is All A Distraction" by Daniel Immerwahr. I think the attention problem (if there is one) is important for us to understand and resolve and, frankly, to have a debate about.   I thought I'd report out on this article, and the state of play. Where are we? What's the evidence? How do we form an opinion on what's going on with society on this front?   My foundation for engaging in the debate: I think attention is the fundamental productive commodity in our current economy. I think as knowledge workers, our attention is what we use to make our economic productive way through life. It's how we create value and and the means by which we we earn our food.   Drucker's hypothesis: American economic growth that we experienced in the 20th century was based on huge increases in in labor productivity. Therefore if we're going to maintain our economic growth level, then we've got to do the same thing with knowledge work. We have to increase the productivity of knowledge workers   So our ability to deploy and manage our attention is important, both for us as individuals and also for the economic society at large. Do we have a problem with increasingly short attention spans?    Our question

• Work, particularly knowledge work, requires that we pay attention to it for periods of time.
• I'm mostly interested in the impact of attention on on work and economic productivity.
• I think that things that that interfere with our ability to focus for extended periods of time, hurts us.
• Humans have always been distractible and have needed to be taught to have an attention span of any duration

What does attention span mean? (Based on: The Distracted Mind, 2016, Gazzaley & Rosen)

• Attention is fundamentally selective - it has an object.
• The persistence of this selectivity is what we mean by attention span
• Therefore, logically it includes the ability to to block out other things
• So-called “compelled attention" interferes with our ability to block out

Attention Crisis? Really? There have been attention crises prior to the modern version.

• Plato didn't like the technology of writing
• "Amusing Ourselves To Death", Neil Postman, 1985. The threat of TV
• "The Shallows", Nicholas Carr, 2010. The threat of the internet
• "The Sirens Call", Chris Hayes, 2024. The threat of active technology

Hayes

• Attention is a commodity – it gets captured and sold to people who want us to buy something
• We have a thing called “compelled attention” (involuntary attention)
• “Attention engineering” is not a new thing, but its intensity is increasing as the value of attention increases
• We’re “Penned into a way of paying attention that we don’t like”

Immerwahr

• The data are equivocal and “distracted from one thing is to attend to another”
• Increasing length of movies, television, and video games as evidence that our attention spans are not shrinking
• The hand wringing comes from elite “attentionistas” who are in the old-school attention business

My thoughts

• Sometimes we must pay attention to that which is not attention grabbing, like work
• Advertising is monetized attention and is growing
• When it comes to utilizing our brains and our attention in functional ways, I think a decrease in the ability to sustain attention is bad.
• My concern is whether or not we control our own attention
• If we're gonna think well, then we have to think in long sequences. That's challenging to us

So attention span is important. The good news is that we can work on maintaining our attention and focus in the face of "Compelled Attention" and any shortening attention span. I offer coaching, Attention Compass implementation training, and this podcast as ways for you to combat the theft of your attention and the negative consequences for knowledge workers.

It's time to update on philosophy of work; I've got some more info for you. A lot of this is going to be review, but I think it's absolutely critical that we put ourselves in the right mindset towards work. It's important because work is what actually produces the things that we then associate with productivity. Unfortunately, there's a lot of a lot of weird stuff going on in our heads about work.   Our perspective on work has significant impact on our lives and our productivity:

• We’re more likely to procrastinate things we “don’t like”
• We have more stress around them, quality of life
• We tend to rush at them without thinking about how we could get better at them
• Your brain gives you what you expect - if you expect "miserable" that's what you get

So, can we change our mindset? We just want to get these things out and inspect them get our mindsets right about work, and get rid of some of the weird stuff.   We’ll cover:

• A historical perspective on work
• Cultural ideas about work
• What might work mean for humans
• More recent ideas 

Historical view of work

• Hunter/gatherer to agriculture and herding – reduction of risk
• The rise of business (work for money)
• The era of slavery in the West and America
• Modern employment is sometimes compared to these other kinds of work
• Model of work as slavery, drudgery, serfdom

Cultural issues with work

• Only ‘hard’ work is virtuous; sweating is virtuous, and not sweating is not virtuous.
• Things that are easy (for us?) are not accorded much virtue.
• We glorify the hustle culture in America.
• Artifacts of a consumerist culture - The ’cash problem’

We're working critters

• We enjoy working as 'making the world and ourselves into what we want them to be'
• Most of us despise the idea of doing nothing. We call it boredom.
• We can't avoid goal seeking based on imagination and problem solving

Currently common ideas

• Start With Why?
• We can “choose our own adventure” to some degree
• Your standard (of quality) is your own; think about your standard.
• Minimum effective dosage (Matt Reynolds via the AOM podcast) there's such a thing as as doing it the easy way

Think through these mindsets and determine where yours has come from. Check it against reality to see if it matches up. If not, try to learn to think in different ways. If we consider our work to be joy, then we'll get joy from it.   [email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble

One of the primary uses of information is to help us learn. When we are explicitly learning, we work to collect information. It works the other way, as well. As we are exposed to new information, we have the opportunity to learn.   The relationship between learning and merely storing information in our brains is mysterious. Many people would say that ‘learning is more than storing facts’, but when we try to figure out what that ‘more’ is, there is no clear consensus.   To help think through the need for information, I’m going to argue that the commonplace book from the previous episode is a great target and goal for post-compulsory education.   So one thing that came out in the Personal Information Management podcast (Episode 68) is that learning styles have changed, and certainly the techniques and technology have changed to some degree.   So learning has changed a little but we want to think about our goal. Once we get done with the formal educational system, how do we go about learning?   Developing a definition of learning

• Learning has a lot to do with recreating the thought processes that another human being thought first,
• How do we go about learning? The modern view of learning in one sense: we practice thinking like the people that we want to think like later.

Learning and practice AI is a best in class practice machine.

• Part of learning then is collecting this existing information so that we can practice having our brains think in these ways.

If practice is involved, then we have tasks and, thus, attention

• We need to collect and manage information, and organize our attention such that we actually do the practice
• Multiple goals are in play at the same time, we've got to allocate our attention amongst the goals

The historical tie between learning and books is so tight that it must be useful

• Books are, at a minimum, a ‘required feature’ of pedagogy there's huge debate over whether or not the standard pedagogy is the best possible pedagogy
• In the 21st century, textbooks are the teaching books (and primary pedagogy) of choice
• But there was a time before textbooks. What did pedagogy look like then?

What about our own (personal) books and non-textbooks?? 

• When secondary education is complete, some sort of a commonplace book would be a reasonable target for further education
• At some level, this podcast is a commonplace book for me, where I go out and learn things and then try to bring them back in and put them somewhere where you can find them if you're interested.

What would our commonplace book look like?

• A book on a subject that I would write for myself would be structurally different from a textbook.
• We'd want some instruction about different advanced techniques that are rarely used.
• Cases, examples, war stories on applications of the knowledge.
• It's somewhere between authoring and scrapbooking closer to the scrapbooking end of the spectrum.
• Organizing so that you can find things, indexing and table of contents

What tactics would we use? What technology(s)?

• How can we collect in such a way that puts it in this position of being part of the record for what we're going to do anyway?
• Project folders as learning tactics
• I teach clients to collect a project file to have a storage location where data can live
• Let's have both a short term storage location and a long term storage location
• Notebook for the daily, have another one or more to collect up the considered, important information

Attention Compass is an ideal workflow to help you capture a commonplace book in real time.   Hit me up for a free session: https://calendly.com/larrytribble. Email me: [email protected] Or find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrytribble