Happy Friday!

Unlocking a paradox

Have you ever wrapped your mind around a paradox?

Consider a classic: “This sentence is false.” Pay attention to your thoughts as you try to make sense of it. If it’s true, it’s false. If it’s false, it’s true. You can close your eyes and try to shake away the confusion, but you can never completely hold both possibilities in your head.

Using Tools for Thought to build a productivity system isn’t a full-fledged paradox, but you will encounter many mindbending moments: How do tasks and projects fit together? How do I get the right tasks to surface at the right time? How do I use finished work as templates for future work?

Those seem like simple enough questions—until you actually dive into creating the mechanics. Mentally keeping track of all the moving parts in a workflow puts you in a paradox-esque state. It’s especially daunting in a tool like Tana, not because there’s anything inherently confusing about Tana, but because it’s so powerful and flexible that the implementation itself becomes mindbending.

Unfuzzing the fuzzy

Three months ago I introduced Narrative Dictation as a tool to wrap our minds around first drafts of novel chapters, blog posts, workflows, or whatever it is you create. Just open a dictation app and start talking about your topic. When you’re done, you’ll have something written down—something chaotic and disjointed, but at least it’s a place to start iterating from.

In this newsletter and the next, I’ll discuss my Diagram and Deploy method for building the workflows that serve as components of our productivity systems. We’ll talk about Diagrams today and how to Deploy them two weeks from now.

Diagramming our workflows is similar to the Narrative Dictation approach. When my mind gets bent, I can turn to a whiteboard tool to make visual sense out of frustrating structures and relationships.

💡 Unbend your mind with Diagrams 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade

A few weeks ago I introduced my Hub and Subsystems approach to Productivity. In brief, Subsystems are workflows that handle different aspects of your work and life. The Task Management Hub activates them by managing the tasks that point you into your Subsystems as well as the tasks that your Subsystems generate. Your Hub is at the center, and your Subsystems “plug into” it.

In my AP Productivity course (Cohort Seven launches January 13!), we use diagrams to help us build custom Subsystems. I use Obsidian’s new Canvas feature for diagrams—both Obsidian and the Canvas feature are free, so you can use it too!

To illustrate Diagramming, I’m going to show how my Task Management Hub is structured.

Three types of diagrams

To model my workflows, I use practical, functional, and structural diagrams.

Practical Diagrams

A Practical Diagram answers the question “what does this workflow do?”. It’s always best to start here, because you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish “in the real world” before you try to build it.

My practical diagram for the Task Management Hub demonstrates what I need it to accomplish and how I need to interact with it. The hub needs to:

(1) Store potential work in various forms

(2) Allow me to plan work for the day or week ahead

(3) Help me complete work.

Functional Diagrams

Functional Diagrams illuminate how aspects of your workflow will function. This is the bridge between how you interact with your workflow on a day-to-day practical basis and what the actual components will need to be. The functional diagram ensures you have accounted for every aspect of the workflow.

For my Task Management Hub, this means:

(1) Determining how potential work is stored. Note the addition of Bins (tasks related by category but not aligned toward an outcome) and Projects (tasks and other supporting information aligned toward an outcome), as well as varieties of recurring work—Recurring Tasks, Procedures, and Project Templates.

(2) Determining how tasks are surfaced to me to create my plans, especially my Agenda. I use Horizons and my Calendar to ensure the right tasks arrive on the right days, and that they don’t arrive on the not-right days.

(3) Determining how it helps me complete work. Note that “Completed Work” has become my “Now Lists”—the Agenda and Log.

Structural Diagrams

Structural Diagrams build the actual workflow components and flesh out the details of how the components interact. Since I build my system in Tana, my final diagram in Obsidian Canvas details the required supertags and the fields related to them.

Here’s what that means for my Task Management Hub:

(1) Specific supertags are assigned to store my potential work: Bin, Project, Recurring Task, Procedure, Template. A List field within my Todo supertag easily assigns tasks to the appropriate Bin or Project.

(2) The Day supertag will be the home for my Now Lists, the Agenda and Log. Horizons and Due Dates within my Todo supertag will surface tasks to each Day for inclusion my Agenda.

(3) Agenda and Log are not supertags themselves, but rather information on each Day node. Throughout the day, my Agenda becomes my Log, and tasks that are created immediately go into the appropriate Bin or Project. This is not as obvious from my diagram as it perhaps should be—when you encounter this (and you will!), another iteration is in order!

How can Tana help?

Normally I would detail here how to do this in Tana. But for this topic, I’m deferring the Deployment in Tana to the next Weekend Upgrade newsletter on January 13!

In the meantime…

If you like the concept of the Task Management Hub I diagrammed above, join my Tana for Tasks course and I’ll show you how to create the Hub in Tana. Once you have that in place, it’s easy to build workflows (subsystems) to customize your own productivity system.

And if you’d like to explore the process above in more detail, and how you can build customized workflows for yourself, enroll in Cohort Seven of AP Productivity! The cohort is January 13 through February 24. Tana for Tasks is included for free (as is a Tana invite if you need it), and we’ll have videos, live sessions, and a community to make your productivity system do exactly what you need it to do. And if you enroll before January 2, you’ll get a 15% Early Bird discount.

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) Identify a workflow you use regularly but is filled with friction.

Create Practical, Functional, and Structural Diagrams of the workflow. You’ll “un-bend” your mind and discover better ways to work!

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:

Draw your work—your brain will thank you!

R.J.
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