[thenerdhead]

While new acronyms are born every year for the productivity/organizational world, I personally believe it all is the same thing that is taught by the greats like Peter Drucker & Orison Swett Marden. You have people like Brian Tracy, David Allen, Kop Kopmeyer, Zig Ziglar, and many more that expose you to these success principles. Some through organizational method, some through mindset.

The most important principle? You find an expert who will take you by the hand and give you the success formulas. You can do that through reading in many cases in which you then add your own special tweaks to improve it. If you read a number of books in the topic of information organization, you'll realize that these people who are "experts" are really just in the same position as the people before them with their own special tweaks to improve the previous generation's work.

[codemac]

How do you see this different from "systems thinking"?

My current thinking about how this works is:

- Identify that there is a system

- Learn, document or describe the system

- Align your behaviors as an individual to use or change the system

The hardest part for me is the last, actually getting my behaviors to change to take advantage of an identified system.

[thenerdhead]

This is the trap of productivity. You find a system and fail to figure out how to change your behavior to take advantage of it. Instead, think in systems and deconstruct what makes said system great and apply that slowly to your life. For example a great concept is having a “information capture system” of some sort. Now go figure out your own unique version of that.

[codemac]

Right, that seems to echo my last statement, that I struggle to do exactly that. "Now go figure out [the part I struggle with]"

[thenerdhead]

Well look at the post for example. The author is explaining their system of the specific apps and flows they use. Are they the right apps or flows? That’s up to you.

Personally I don’t think of Tiago Forte as a productivity expert. He just happens to be a social media personality that does productivity stuff. Like other “productivity gurus” on social media, if you pay close enough attention they switch their systems regularly. Maybe it’s to have fresh content, who knows. I think it is because they fell in the trap.

It’s all FOMO at a certain point. Like the pioneers I mentioned earlier, their advice is to not be afraid to do your own thing even if the masses are going in the other direction.