Tech Productivity Issue #259 (How to Be a Better Planner)

Issue #259 (How to Be a Better Planner) 01/29/24

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I've included quite a bit of content in this newsletter since I started it in early 2019. I've tried to make doing this newsletter as easy as possible for me while still providing quality content. So I never bothered to create a local archive of each issue of this newsletter. The only archive of the newsletter that currently exists is the one automatically produced by MailChimp, which I link to on the newsletter's archives page.

Unfortunately, MailChimp doesn't seem to allow content on these archived pages to be findable via web on Google or other search engines. You can maybe pull up a few issues at most.

To correct this problem, I'm currently going through and archiving each of the issues, just as I do with my primary newsletter Web Tools Weekly. Having a local archive that I can put online helps me a lot. This allows users to do a search when they can't quite remember a specific link or tool that they know they found here. I do have a text-only archive of all the links I've included (which I use to avoid duplicating content) but it doesn't archive the intro or any of the text I add to each link.

I hope to be done the local archive in the next week or two and you'll be able to search via keyword for topics like remote work, procrastination, note-taking, health, wellness, or whatever else you want to look up.

Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!

Tools & Apps

Safe — A platform to share passwords, messages, files, photos, and more, securely via private links, for use on team platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, etc.

Zhook — A service to easily save bookmarks, text, images, and notes, all of which is indexed and searchable for future use.

Techpresso — Receive a daily summary of the most important AI and Tech news, carefully selected from 60+ media outlets. Join 30,000+ professionals from OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Hugging Face, JP Morgan, and more. sponsor

YouTube Summarizer — Chrome extension that uses ChatGPT to summarize YouTube videos and get transcripts via a service called Syllaby, for research, learning, etc.

Calendar — A printable single-page calendar that displays all of the year’s dates on a single page and will automatically fit on a single sheet of paper of any size that you can take wherever you go.

Notionway — A set of templates for Notion that include a second brain, finance tracker, a daily life planner, small business kit, e-commerce kit, and more.

Audio Writer — iOS voice to notes app that lets you record your spontaneous thoughts and it will turn them into clear and coherent writing, for brainstorming, journaling, and large-form content creation.

Articles & Resources

What Kant Can Teach Us About Work: On the Problem with Jobs — Immanuel Kant was an 18th century German philosopher who had some specific things to say about how the definition of good work.

Stop Saying “Technical Debt” — Originally published in early 2023, this was republished on the Stack Overflow blog in December as one of the most popular posts of the year. It looks at how teams tend to incorrectly define technical debt and what this means for productivity and communication.

The Mistake Smart People Make: Being In Motion vs. Taking Action — From 2014, an excerpt from James Clear's popular book Atomic Habits, outlining an important distinction to understand.

Free Your Newsletters From the Inbox — The inbox is full of distractions and too many subscriptions lead to inbox chaos. Time to liberate your inbox and move to Meco, a newsletter aggregator built for reading. sponsor

The Happiest Workers Ignore this Common Piece of Career Advice — This is according to a Harvard professor and the advice is 'find work-life balance', which he believes is better handled by having continuity between your personal and professional routines.

How to Be a Better Planner: Avoid the Planning Fallacy — A meaty guide on how we often guess wrong about the length of projects and how dealing with this can help improve our ability to plan ahead.

What Your Company Probably Got Wrong About its Return-to-office Plan — Summary of some main points from an episode of the Fast Company podcast called The New Way We Work, where the host interviews Gleb Tsipursky, author of a book on hybrid and remote working.

Suggestions?

Have a suggestion for a productivity-related tool, article, or other resource? Send me a direct message via X (@LouisLazaris) and I’ll consider including it in a future issue.

Stay productive!

Louis
techproductivity.co
@LouisLazaris

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