Weekend Upgrade provides tools to improve your productivity and communication, especially if you use Tools for Thought like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, or Obsidian.
Weekend Upgrade 23: Hub and Subsystems
Happy Friday!
Unproductivity
There are two varieties of unproductive.
The first is when you have a decent grasp of your big picture, but you’re so overwhelmed by the many possibilities that you freeze and don’t work on anything at all.
The second is when you have no grasp of your big picture, but you vigorously dive into whatever work is directly in front of you. Unfortunately, it’s not the right work, and you make no real progress.
The problem with most productivity systems is that they try to turn you from the second type of person into the first type of person. You go from working your tail off with no clear direction to seeing distant goals in so many directions that you freeze right where you are.
Our challenge when building a productivity system is to encourage the drive to work hard right now while also providing a larger perspective to improve the direction of that work.
The Hub and Subsystems Approach
To work optimally, your productivity system needs two things:
- A task management hub at the center,
- Subsystems that power the regular, repeatable, trackable work in your life, and that organize the information required to do that work.
Task management hubs without subsystems are like the second people from above. They churn out work, but it isn’t necessarily the right work, and it’s often inefficient and inaccurate.
Subsystems without a task management hub are like the first people from above. They're adrift in a sea of information, with no way to activate it.
A task management hub provides the mechanics to turn information into action: tasks, recurring tasks, projects (one-time and reusable), templates, routines, agendas, and so forth.
Subsystems then plug into that task management hub. Recurring tasks remind us to engage with our subsystems, tasks generated in subsystems surface to our agendas, and reusable projects—think “deals” for salespeople or “cases” for attorneys—serve as the primary work that the subsystems keep tabs on.
Task management is mostly the same for anyone. But the subsystems you choose to assemble are unique to your work and interests.
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Plug your subsystems into a Task Management Hub
👆 That's your weekend upgrade.
Imagine you’re a salesperson. You have a reusable project you call “deal” which gathers all the information you need about the customer and transaction and also houses the tasks required to complete the deal.
That’s powerful on its own. But when you can track multiple deals in a sales pipeline, and surface the generated tasks in a reliable way, now you’re reaping the rewards of a subsystem plugged into your task management hub.
Or imagine you’re an attorney. You have a reusable project you call “case” which connects all the information about a specific client, your opposing counsel, the evidence, relevant dates, etc., and produces the tasks that keep the case moving forward.
When you have a portfolio of cases that allows you to track their progress and reliably surface appropriate tasks to your attention, that’s another subsystem plugged into task management.
When your recipes subsystem helps you prepare the week’s meals, or your CRM subsystem prompts you to reconnect with an old friend, or you’re reminded to process reading notes and that causes you to generate three new ideas for blog posts that you then shepherd from concept to completion, you are benefitting from the Hub and Subsystems approach.
How can Tana help?
Those of you who’ve read Weekend Upgrades 1 - 22 might find that heading jarring. Previously I’ve always asked “How can Tools for Thought Help?”
I want to be clear: I am not dismissing the value of other Tools for Thought (TfTs). But, as I have developed my productivity system in Tana these past two months, I’ve become convinced that Tana’s feature set is uniquely suited to my approach to productivity. Techniques I mention will still be readily adaptable to other TfTs—but I’ll use Tana-centric vocabulary in my descriptions.
(If you haven’t explored Tana because you’re waiting for an invite, you can bypass the waitlist with the purchase of Cortex Futura’s Mastering Tana Core course, Ev Chapman’s Tana Fast Track course, or my own Tana for Tasks course. To be clear, the Tana team is not withholding invites until people pay for them—they’re steadily working through the waitlist. But they also need feedback from engaged users, and people who take courses to learn Tana are more likely to be engaged users. By providing additional invites through vetted course creators, Tana wins, we course creators win, and you win by getting early access to Tana and learning how to make use of it!)
(Oh, and those links to the other courses are not affiliate links. They’re just people and content I believe you’ll find valuable.)
Tasks Hub and Subsystems in Tana
A complete breakdown of my system in Tana is beyond the scope of one newsletter. But here’s an overview.
My tasks hub uses #todo as its core supertag. It stores information like Due Date, Horizon, Context, and—critically—which #project or #bin a #todo is associated with. By assigning tasks to projects in this way, as opposed to merely listing them on a “project page,” I can better leverage Tana’s powerful fields and live searches.
The tasks hub also includes reusable project templates which extend the #project supertag. An unsurprising example is #weekend upgrade. It’s a project, but it is preset for the specific requirements of a weekend upgrade newsletter.
As for subsystems, a simple example is the one I use to track recipes. My #recipe supertag asks for standard recipe information—Ingredients, Directions, Prep Time, etc. It also asks for an image, which allows me to make my Recipe subsystem pretty!
The subsystem plugs into the tasks hub in two ways. First, recurring tasks remind me to plan some of our meals for the week. Second, the subsystem itself produces tasks for grocery shopping (and accompanying shopping lists), as well as task reminders to prepare certain meals on certain days.
Neither the tasks hub nor the recipe subsystem require Tana to build them. But Tana makes the structure and function clear in a way that no other TfT I’ve used can.
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) Ask yourself: What are the subsystems in your life?
What work would be more efficient and accurate if you could track it and activate its information with tasks?
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:
Activate your work by plugging your subsystems into a task management hub.
R.J.
rjn.st/links
P.S. Tracy Winchell and I will be hosting an event before the new year, the Intention & Identity Workshop: Simple Planning for a Guilt-free 2023. I’ll share the sign up information in the next newsletter.
P.P.S. I currently have Tana invites available via Tana for Tasks, so if you’re interested, sign up!
Weekend Upgrade (by R.J. Nestor)
Weekend Upgrade provides tools to improve your productivity and communication, especially if you use Tools for Thought like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, or Obsidian.
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