The Productive Student

I am in Abu Dhabi until the end of the year. This trip has been rivetingly educational so far, and has forced me to test my own ability to adapt with all my tools and workflows in a completely new environment. The problem with tools is that they are not ubiquitously available, they are not a part of you, they are appendages that you need to think about and remember. They lock you into some sort of basic context that you always assumed to be fixed. As students, this status quo is bound to last for no longer than a few months. We change aprtments, friends, schools, jobs, and so much more. The ability to adapt is inversely proportional to the number of tools you need to work.

I find it really hard to work without my usual physical inbox-tray and filing cabinet. I find it hard to work on a Windows computer with Office 2000. But I didn’t make these choices. I can however, mitigate these risks in the future.

Some basic learnings I’d like to share:

1. Become electronically independent from your operating system, your applications, and the internet. The last one was a major learning for me. In my quest for independence from OSes, I started moving applications and files to the cloud, using services like SugarSync. The service is great, and I will continue to use it. But I will also start using a keychain-attachable USB thumbdrive. This way, I won’t lose it (as I don’t tend to lsoe my keys but tend to lose every other thumb drive) and it’s got a small material footprint in my life. I now carry my entire simple filing system around this way. I don’t have fast internet here, and sometimes none at all. This practice would have saved me.
2. Have one computer. I’m currently stuck with working on a Windows laptop from work and a Macbook Air side-by-side. I can’t virtualize Windows on the Mac as it’s just doesn’t have enough juice, and the Macbook Air is just not a real Workbench. Once I’m home, I’m giving up Windows laptops, my iMac and the Macbook Air for a single, maxed out Macbook Pro. This reduces luggage, worries about sync and horsepower.
3. Have a single, unelectronic capture tool. I’ve spent too much time pondering whether to use my iPhone as a capture tool or just go with paper. Paper is the final answer. First of all, I write faster with a pen. Second, the iPhone is useless abroad unless you’re willing to pay huge bills or have a SIM-unlocked phone. So I need to carry a second phone? Blech.
4. Stop fiddling with other tools, and systems, and apps. I see a lot of people use Evernote as part of a productivity system. Bullshit. I see no value in having a huge bucket that you can fill to the brim and then forget about it. I call that a trash can, or sometimes, my desktop. I like David Allen’s take on it. See how he owns Scoble in this video around 19:05 onwards:

So what my tools turned out to be? Well, at the moment, a simple text file, enhanced using Taskpaper on the Mac, and Todopaper on Windows. That’s all. And even that isn’t really optimum, because it required me to download the corresponding apps on this new, temporary machine. I also had to license both, which was a pain. So plain text it is.

There’s a lot more scope for this kind of simplifying, and as opposed to a lot of people obsessed with minimalism, I prefer to be obsessed with simplicity. Not the same thing.