Productivity & tech shortcuts, so you can get on with your day.
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined November 2009
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How to complete high value projects in 2025.
A project has multiple tasks, and a clear outcome.
They may be
📝personal projects
- 🏡🏋️♀️🥗🏦
📈business projects
Most projects require:
✅ skills 👷
✅time ⏰
✅tools /apps /materials 🛠️
✅money 💰
🗺️a process
Where to start? 🧵
Pick projects which use your existing skills, time, materials, money, and have minimal friction to implement.
Set clear, concrete, measurable milestones.
Build on skills you already have.
Automate, shortcut, simplify, streamline major points of friction and frustration.
Ideas are cheap.
You don’t need a great original idea to build a business or side gig.
Enough to identify a costly pain that a business has … especially if it’s one which their competition is already doing better at.
It’s not switch tasking exactly. The task may still be the same, and I might be hyper focused on it.
Still, frequent alt-tab switches, or clicking between tabs in Chrome or Explorer is inevitable.
I asked @perplexity_ai how to address this, and discovered Unified Search (searching across apps) using office.com
I may remember a colleague sent me a spreadsheet, but was it through Outlook? Maybe as an attachment in a Teams chat.
Or perhaps they shared it via OneDrive.
I remember what the spreadsheet was about, but don’t recall its name.
“Can you send me that document again?”
I’m so sick of asking this (and being asked.)
I reckon we’re spending up to 20% of our time looking for documents, emails, Teams threads, or asking colleagues for a copy of them.
No solutions here, but here’s the problem:
🧵
Procrastination often is due to a lack of process.
I know a bookshop bookkeeper who does daily bank reconciliations, but has a quarterly royalty report that takes 4 days to compile.
The bank rec is super easy. The royalties report is friction on steroids.
Find the friction.
I created a document this week, which was semi-automated … and a complete waste of time.
It purported to document steps in a process, as evidence the project team had followed those steps.
IF the team needed to create this document, my approach was an easy way.
But … 🧵
The document itself was superfluous. Every step has some other proof further downstream that it had been run.
My automation was clever … but unnecessary.
Here’s are two important #productivity lessons for me:
1) sometimes automation is worth trying
Make things simple, especially forms or applications.
Don’t ask me to re-enter information you already have (unless it’s for security purposes).
I’ve set my alarm to 5:08 am for the next month.
Why 5:08 specifically? And how can I be (almost) certain I’m not going to hit the snooze button?
I’m not a resolutions/goal setting sort of a guy, so why am I confident I’m going to hit this morning goal?
🧵
Lessons here for sticking to a project time line:
🔘choose something where if you fail, you know you’ll be letting others down
🔘make an incremental change (I’m getting up 20’minutes earlier than usual, not three hours!)
🔘choose a ridiculously specific time to start