What's next for personal productivity

I don't think that going "holistic" is the future of productivity. Something something dilution of focus.

My personal view: the next big improvement should come from tackling emotional self-management.

This is derived mostly from my own experience of ~15 years of struggling with personal productivity (and going through every trick in every popular book), as well as observing others close to me. In recent years I came to the conclusion that it's all about emotional state.

The planner, the TODO list, the Pomodoro timer, the Inbox & Someday/Maybe folders, the bullet journal - those are all complexity management tools. They address the problem of having too many things taking your attention, making you unable to focus. They don't address the problem of not being able to focus at all, not being able to open your TODO list, not being able to work on a task for more than 30 seconds before either feeling distressed, or beginning to question your life priorities. Conversely, when you're feeling really good and pumped about the thing you're doing, you don't need a complicated system to keep you focused - a notebook and some pens, or an open text file, is enough to keep the complexity manageable, and you'll figure out an effective enough system on the fly.

I've only begun exploring the space of emotional self-management, and so far, I haven't found any neat hacks or effective methods. A big problem is that the brain adapts to attempts at cheating it - like e.g. there was a time where I could control my emotional states through the choice of music, but it stopped working after I started exploiting it to make myself work on things. Similarly, all attempts at self-gamifying fail because I know I'm just manipulating myself.

But if anyone can crack that problem - effective emotional self-management - I'll happily shower them with all the money I can spare.

This lost me when it said that the internet enabled people to push things onto your plate, and then went on to: " No longer did you have the list of items assigned by your boss to handle; you had the world's task list for you to manage, too."

Well, OK... true, if you never set any boundaries in your life, maybe it does make sense to spend years learning new ways to handle it all. And really, the article almost goes there when it starts to talk about fulfillment and there being more to life than your to do lists. Sadly, it whooshes right on by that point and says "productivity 3.0" will help businesses find ways to empower their employees, and then just fades away into some vague idea of knowledge management.

It seems like the author came so close to realizing that they need to guide their own ship, but they have spent so much time dealing with how much they want to get done, they simply fail to ask whether or not they should have been OK with taking so much on in the first place.

Set some boundaries, people. Your job is an important part of your life, but there are limits.

I know this is going to sound controversial, but I think some of the most successful people in the world are the ones with the most stable emotions. Some people are able to harness what emotions they have, and damp the rest (or damp them most of the time). The most successful and "happy" people I know are the people that remain the most neutral (with slight positive affect).

Also I think this is why sociopaths are so successful. I believe they are not subject to the strong ebb and flow of emotions like myself and the person I am responding to.

Also I'd like to state that some exceptions are entertainers/sportspeople as many of them are notoriously mercurial but overall they are still largely successful enough at "harnessing" their emotions to profit from it.

Have you heard 'State not story' (sometimes 'Story follows state')?

This comes from trauma therapy, specifically Polyvagal Theory. Patients have their life story and often think of it as the reason for their current problems, when in reality a huge portion of that might be their body, ie the state of their nervous system, informing a story they tell themselves, making mental illness an infinite loop.

So for self management: Get into a happy state and you'll be productive.

Body:

-sleep

-food

-water

-sun

-posture

-exercise

Mind:

-well basically "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman

My main point being: How we learn what hard work is (the Hollywood version), and how work needs to feel (Stress! Panic! No sleep! Hustle! Endless To Do lists!) is very wrong and gives you anxiety => puts your body into a bad state.

And if you are in the bad state and unproductive, people usually resort to "I'm not doing this right, I need to put me into the bad state harder!". See the endless tools you listed. The problem lies elsewhere.

I did a complete 180 on my approach to personal productivity, and that change is similar to the transition from Productivity 2.0 to 3.0, as described in the article.

Before that U-turn I kept everything in my to-do list and had lots of recurring tasks. However, after several years I realized that I've become a slave to chores -- a very conscientious, diligent slave who has no time or mindspace for projects that really matter to me.

Nowadays, I use an opposite approach -- I don't keep a "general" to-do list at all, and I do chores only when they become really obnoxious. I do, however, keep a Zettelkasten with a dozen projects in it, and several stream-of-consciousness journals for ongoing projects.