Notes on Productivity¶
It's kind of impossible to keep up with everything that's happening right now in AI, both at a research level as well as a tooling level.
What I realized is that the real skill is about building a personal system for curating and integrating information into your actual tangible workflows (keyword here is tangible), because all new tools, methods and insights only become actionable when they have a clear place to attach to, meaning, your own workflows, ways of thinking and so on.
Think of it like a Lego base plate. The base is your workflow. It has to be there before new pieces like tools and techniques can snap in meaningfully.
Before choosing tools, you need to understand what you do, how you work, what kind of tasks do you engage more often with, and where your time and attention go. Because the skills that matter most to your outcomes and the kind of knowledge that generally supports your progress sets up the foundation.
Once that foundation is clear, you can filter the endless stream of AI tools and updates based on their relevance to your real needs. The next step is to set up a pipeline for capturing and processing information without getting lost in it. There's no one perfect way to do it, but there are some common themes & principles:
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Quick capture effortlessly via notes, bookmarks, links, voice memos, quick capture apps. I changed recently to a single note system where I place both my unique insights and notes taken throughout the week as well as quick capture links, I was inspired to do that by a tweet by Andrej Karpathy.
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Having some sort of tagging or categorization system in place to avoid just accumulating things but actually routing them meaningfully
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Regularly reviewing and triaging (is that a word?) captured items either daily or weekly so they can be funneled into reading lists, task lists, etc...
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When I engage with content that I captured, I try to use a passes method approach, there is an interesting piece of writing from Stanford about a three-pass method for reading papers that I really like, which ensures that you don't waste effort on information or tools that don't have a high likelihood of benefiting your work.
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You should set aside probably weekly some deep work sessions specifically for exploring new ideas outside of your immediate project obligations. This ensures continued growth instead of only reacting to deadlines or ongoing tasks.
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Finally a synthesis step where you learn by either teaching writing (like I'm doing right now) or explaining to other people forcing yourself to be more clear and straighten your understanding of whatever it is that you engaged with that week.
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Over time, this loop — capture → filter → engage → deepen → synthesize — becomes the living system that keeps your learning both sustainable and meaningful (I also love using anki flashcards and I'll probably write about it soon).
Cheers!
B)