Happy Friday!

A 144-year-old Amusement Park

Every spring, the Easter Bunny brings my family season passes to Idlewild, an amusement park in the Pennsylvania hills southeast of Pittsburgh. It’s the third-oldest park in the United States, and as with many things near Pittsburgh, the Mellon family created it (think “Carnegie Mellon University”—that Mellon family).

On one of our Idlewild outings this past summer, my wife and daughter rode the Spider while I watched the boys, who are too small for that ride. As my lovely ladies rotated, lurched up and down, and swiveled unpredictably, it suddenly struck me that all of the old-school carnival rides in Idlewild were excellent models for productivity systems.

Let me explain.

How the rides work

The primary movement of all these rides is the same. A driveshaft rotates, and from its simple rotation, addition components generate interesting and complex effects for the riders. (Note that the videos below aren't my videos, just useful ones I grabbed from YouTube.)

The Merry-Go-Round

Consider the Merry-Go-Round. The rotation is the primary motion, but there’s a secondary up-and-down movement for the interior horses. Watch the video below closely: you’ll see that the up-and-down is also rotational, powered by separate shafts that connect back to the main one inside the center of the ride.

The 1931 Merry-Go-Round at Idlewild park. Driveshafts upon driveshafts. (Jump to around 4:10 to see it in motion.)​
​

The Spider

On top of the Spider's main rotating shaft, there’s a sphere offset by a couple of feet. That sphere is rotating in the opposite direction. Both rotations are in the same horizontal plane, but the offset of the second rotation, combined with beams that connect it to the ride cars, creates vertical motion. Simple, but complex.

The Spider at Idlewild. Two directions of rotation—in one horizontal plane—creates vertical motion.​
​

The Paratrooper and the Round Up

Both of these anchor their rotation on a long arm that raises to create an “angled Ferris wheel” effect. But the Paratrooper has riders facing the direction of movement, while the Round Up has the rider facing the center of rotation. Same mechanism, completely different effect on the riders.

The Paratrooper at Idlewild

​

The Round Up at Idlewild

​

💡 Build simple systems, allow complexity to emerge 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

The rides at Idlewild create a variety of complex effects on the human body, but they use simple mechanics to create that complexity. Driveshafts and gears move horses up and down, slight offsets of the rotation create movement in new planes, the direction the riders face changes the entire feel of a ride. Small additions or adjustments, but significant effects.

When we build our productivity systems, we often fall into the trap that complex results require complex inputs and complex relationships. But that’s not true—and, worse, it’s counterproductive. What we need instead is a system built from simple mechanisms.

And what is the core mechanism? What represents the gears and driveshafts of our system?

The humble list

Every piece of my productivity system is a list.

• My daily agenda is a list of what I intend to do that day.
• My log is a list of what I actually did.
• Every project is a hub of related lists that point toward a specific outcome: tasks, resources, a history of meetings, conversations, calls, and so forth.
• My Recurring Tasks are on a list—and that list has enough smarts to know what to show me on a given day of the week, month, or year.
• My goals are on a list, my priorities (i.e., areas of responsibility) are on a list, my project templates, procedures, and system reviews are on lists.

Everything is a list. What powers them is two-fold:

1. The lists interact in specific ways

My Agenda is my core list. If a task is truly “in my system,” it has a viable path to my Agenda.

Tasks in projects or on other lists are designed so they can surface to my attention when appropriate—on a certain day, in a certain context, etc. That simple relationship between the Agenda and other lists allows my system to encode an extraordinary amount of complexity and detail without becoming difficult to use.

2. Time

My Agenda is where my tasks meet my time. I distribute the tasks around the scheduled events and meetings for the day.

Likewise, various project templates or system reviews arise based on the day of the week or month or year, as appropriate. The driveshafts and gears are my lists, but what gets them spinning is time.

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 Tana, Amplenote, Roam Research, Logseq, and Obsidian.

Dedicated task apps come with driveshafts and gears pre-built. That’s not a criticism: a lot of people want to be given a structure for their system. But when you use a Tool for Thought as the core of your system, you gain flexibility and power that task apps can’t match.

Most TfTs are driven by Daily Notes (or pages/files/nodes, depending on your TfT of choice) which effortlessly add the time component to your tasks. If you use that for your Daily Agenda, it keeps your attention on the right work—work brought in from the other lists in your system.

And it’s easy to build those other lists and link them to the Agenda and to one another. I use Tana as my primary TfT, and compiling lists is simple with Tana’s powerful, user-friendly queries. If I want a list of the tasks in my “Weekend Upgrade 22” project, for example, those tasks don’t need to be created in the project. They can simply be gathered there with a query.

Beyond that, I can build dashboards (in Tabs View) to compile multiple queries into lists, tables, kanbans, and so forth. Those dashboards ensure I accomplish exactly what I set out to accomplish. The same task might even be part of several different lists, each organized around different priorities or parameters, and each providing a valuable perspective on what work I should do.

(If you’d like a deeper dive into how to set that up in Tana, a link to my Tana for Tasks course is in the P.P.S. below!)

What does that mean for you?

When you feel your system misfiring—when you identify friction between the way you work and the system you’re working with—assess your lists.

• What are the fundamental lists you work with? Your Agenda, your projects, your recurring tasks, your procedures, your system maintenance, etc.
• How do your lists connect and communicate?
• Are there lists disconnected from the main driveshaft? Hook them up!
• Are there lists attached to the main system that you don’t use—or that are overfilled so they’re bogging everything else down? Address that list specifically. Disconnect it, or take it apart and diagnose what’s wrong.

Simple components combine to create complexity. If you create complexity to model complexity, your model will be of little use. But if you link simple things together—lists, for instance, or theme park driveshafts—you can create complexity in a lot of different ways without sacrificing the simplicity at the core of 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) Review your system for unnecessary complexity that is causing friction.

How can you make each list, and your interaction with it, simpler and easier?

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:

Keep it simple, like the old-school rides at Idlewild!

R.J.
​rjn.st/links​

P.S. My great friend Tracy Winchell and I will be hosting an event in December, the Intention & Identity Workshop: Simple Planning for a Guilt-free 2023. More info to come soon!

P.P.S. If you want to use Tana for productivity, dive into my course Tana for Tasks! The course comes with a Tana invite (though the invite may take a few days to become available!)

P.P.P.S. Sorry this came out Saturday instead of the usual Friday. My middle child decided to use the edge of our stair railing for gymnastics practice. Everyone is fine, but I’ve been tied up designing and building a half-wall to replace the railing and prevent him from walking along the edge of the staircase anymore!