Happy Friday!

Notes on the loose

Here’s a scenario I’ve encountered many times during my coaching career:

ME: What do you use to take notes?
NEW CLIENT: I write notes on my legal pad.
ME: And when do you look at your notes again?
NEW CLIENT: Never. I never know where they are when I need them.

Notes have a way of getting lost. And since tasks are just “action-ier” notes, tasks have a way of getting lost, too—as do the checklists they live on.

We gather ideas then misplace them. We overfill our checklists until we never want to look at them again. We run our procedures from memory, riddled with errors, inefficiencies, and eccentricities.

And even if we’re digital—even if it’s not a physical legal pad that’s giving us fits—we still lose our trains of thought or threads of action. No matter the medium, we need a systematic way to keep track of our work. We need a productivity system.

Practical Productivity

There is a psychological component to productivity—and it’s critical!—but for right now let’s focus on the practical side. There are really only two practical fundamentals in a productivity system: checklists and operations performed on checklists.

Checklists include daily agendas, inboxes, projects, procedures, and so forth. The operations performed on them allow your system’s checklists to talk to each other. And when your checklists talk to each other—effectively—you don’t lose track of what you need to do.

💡 Connect your checklists 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Quick exercise: Take a few minutes and write down, on a simple list, everything you want to accomplish tomorrow.

I’ll wait…

…

Hey! Welcome back!

The exercise you just did is valuable by itself. Most people don’t bother to plan anything for tomorrow, so you’re already ahead of them! And if writing an agenda for tomorrow becomes part of your daily routine, that alone will make you more productive.

But let’s explore that agenda a bit more deeply.

What if, instead of being a handwritten list you create from scratch every day, your agenda were a “mother list”?

What if you had other checklists detailing your various projects, and tasks from those projects showed up in your Agenda?

What if your Agenda pointed you toward still other checklists—exactly when and where you need to do that work?

That’s the promise of well-designed, well-connected checklists.

Four types of Checklist Connections

Checklists are a broad topic. You could write a book about them—and, in fact, Atul Gawande did write The Checklist Manifesto. (You can see my takeaways from the book on Twitter or Medium.)

For this newsletter, I’m zeroing in on four types of processes that connect checklists:

(1) Manual
(2) Prompted
(3) On Demand
(4) Fully Automated

Manual

When checklist connections are Manual, it means you are remembering the connection yourself. You’re doing the work, with no help from your system.

This is almost always where you should start, but rarely where you should wind up—because Manual connections are easy to forget! But when you’re building your system, you’re learning how you want your checklists to talk to each other. For that, Manual connections are fine. You can’t automate processes until you know what you’re automating.

But once you do know how you want your checklists to interact, start prompting yourself to do the work.

Prompted

When checklist connections are Prompted, it means you’re doing the work, but the system is reminding you to do it—and, often, reminding you how to do it. This is the base level of automation. You’re still executing the connection, but you’ll receive a prompt.

Prompted connections are good for recurring processes or projects. For example, the newsletter you’re reading needs to be set up as a project checklist every other Sunday. My system reminds me to do it, and then I call up the correct template.

If a Prompted connection becomes so predictable that you can let the system do even more of the work, shift it to On Demand.

On Demand

When checklist connections are On Demand, it means your system is doing the work whenever you ask it to.

An example of this is what I call my Daily Cycle—my checklist that guides me through my day. Each day, I have different tasks I’ve assigned to the date, as well as many tasks that I do everyday. Because it would waste time for me to type in all those tasks every day, I use an automation to assemble the agenda from other relevant checklists.

When I’m ready to plan for tomorrow, I prompt the system to prepare my Daily Cycle. It does that work On Demand, when I ask for it.

If an On Demand connection is as simple as pushing a button, it might be a candidate for becoming Fully Automated.

Fully Automated

When checklist connections are Fully Automated, it means your system is doing the work entirely in the background, without any intervention from you.

My Recurring Actions system is fully automated. I prompt the Daily Cycle, as I mentioned above, but inside that process another automation runs without further intervention from me. That automation looks at my Recurring Actions checklist and determines what tasks I need to see based on what day of the week, month, or year it is. Then it feeds the tasks back into my Daily Cycle and places them in my Agenda checklist for me.

Which type of connection is best?

All four types of checklist connections have their place. Most start as Manual as you figure out the checklists you need and how they interact. And there will be certain automations that you’ll never need—or want—to move beyond Prompted or On Demand.

But there is a natural flow from Manual toward Fully Automated. If your system is operating at a high level, it is likely that there will be a lean toward automation.

How can Tools for Thought help?

If you’re new to the Weekend Upgrade newsletter, I explore how processes can be created in Tools for Thought (TfTs). TfTs are apps optimized for linking your ideas, thoughts, notes, etc.—apps like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, Obsidian, and Craft.

Dedicated task apps come with structure and detailed task logic built in. If that is what you need, a good task app can be a godsend.

But building your checklists and the connections between them from scratch creates a powerful system—and TfTs are perfect for that. It takes a bit longer, but when you get it working smoothly, it is unique to your needs and the way you work. You understand how it fits together, and you know exactly what you need to do and when—because you and your system are functioning as one!

With your favorite TfT serving as the spine of your productivity system, you can start with a blank canvas, and easily add on new processes and link them together as you go.

You might encounter gaps—processes you simply can’t accomplish in your TfT. No problem: fill the gap with an app that can accomplish the process! As long as you have a Prompted, On Demand, or Fully Automated way to bridge your TfT spine to the app performing the other process, it will still function as one overarching system. It doesn’t need to be one app—just one system!

The flexibility of TfTs makes them second-to-none for brainstorming, developing, prototyping, and refining any checklist you could ever need, and then making sure you have a connection between that checklist and the others in your system.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) This weekend, go back to basics. Create your daily agenda as a simple list, and stick with that simplicity for a few days. As you encounter other processes you need to complete, build checklists for those and make sure they connect to the agenda in some way.

As you explore this fundamental approach, consider what connections you can further automate in Prompted, On Demand, or Fully Automated ways. In a few days to a few weeks, you’ll have a robust system churning away, all built from the simplicity of checklists and the way those checklists connect to each other.

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Get your checklists to talk to each other, and watch the magic happen!

R.J.
​rjn.st/links​

---

P.S. Cohort Six of my flagship AP Productivity course will launch on Friday, October 7. To get an email reminder when Early Bird registration opens (about three weeks from now), visit rjn.st/ap-productivity-cohort and add your email to the reminder list.