The Rhythms of Productivity

Maximum Action, Minimum Effort, and a Meaningful March to Your Drummer’s Beat
I’m R.J. Nestor, Productivity Consultant and Musician, and I’m writing a book!

The Rhythms of Productivity is the product of ten years of productivity coaching and writing, and draws on a variety of sources and experience.

  • I used GTD, as described by David Allen in his well-known book, from 2014 – 2020. Todoist was my app of choice for those six years.
  • I developed a custom task management system in Roam Research and later in Tana, culminating in the most recent iteration, Tana for Tasks Core.
  • I led ten cohorts involving hundreds of talented people all in pursuit of the same goal: Working better and faster using less time and effort, by extending the GTD concepts with an emphasis on recurring work and using Tools for Thought like Tana, Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, and others.
  • I created the Action-Powered Productivity community, whose membership is nearing 1,000, to provide both a space for my coaching and courses and opportunities for community members to learn from one another.
  • I solved hundreds of real-world productivity problems for one-on-one clients.
  • I gained insight from my role as a Tana Ambassador, with a deep understanding of the tool as it is now and a bit of advance knowledge about where it’s heading.
  • I realized there was a surprising relationship between the musical concepts I’ve learned since I started playing piano at age six and productivity requirements in the business and academic worlds.
Join me as I describe what I’ve learned and how that learning can be applied quickly to generate double-digit productivity gains, lead to fewer errors (including errors of omission), improve the quality of the work that you get done, while also reducing stress and providing much more time for creative endeavors.

Watch me write the book!

The outline of The Rhythms of Productivity is below, along with descriptions of chapters and subsections. When the book is complete, it will include not only clear instructions for dramatically improving your productivity, but also études—exercises to develop your productivity skillset.
I will add the text of a few chapters here, as I complete them. I will update any changes to the outline here as well.
If you’d like to work through the material below with other productivity-driven people, Cohort Eleven of my flagship product Applied Action-Powered Productivity launches November 24. It’s 15% off if you sign up before November 12!
Cohort Eleven will be my final cohort, because after the book is done I’ll run a variety of more specifically-focused live group sprints. This will be your last opportunity to engage with the entirety of the Action-Powered Productivity system in a group learning format.

The Rhythms of Productivity: Outline

Introduction: Composing and Conducting

Overture: Rhythm and Flow

Take Action: Why everything you know is backward

Most productivity systems say that if you get organized, you’ll be able to take action. That’s backward. I explain why action precedes structure.

Capture Recurrence™: The most important skill you’ve never heard of

Almost every action you take is one you’ve done before and one you’ll do again. That recurrence is leverage, if you can capture it.

Build Productivity Bridges™

Use Productivity Bridges to capture the recurrence. Bridges manifest in different ways—templates, automations, procedures, and many more—and learning how to build them is the main content of this book.

Start in the Middle—Always

When work is effectively bridged, you’ll never start from scratch. Your ideal is to “start in the middle” of everything you do.

Your Rhythm, Your Flow

There are many relationships between music and productivity, starting with simple ideas like rhythm, tempo, harmony, and syncopation, and expanding into deeper analogies and connections. I’ll use these throughout to clarify your understanding of the productivity concepts.
Work better and faster using less time, effort, and resources. And when you’re using a Tool for Thought like Tana, Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, or something similar, you can take your work rhythm and flow to another level altogether.

Theme & Variations: Productivity Bridges

Take Action

The first set of bridges help you take effective action

  • Core Bridges

    Notes: The “note” is the most fundamental Productivity Bridge. Nothing else exists without it. The most important question with notes is not “how do we capture them?” but rather “how, and when, do we surface them?”
    Tasks: The “task” is the most actionable type of note. It starts with an action verb and surfaces on the date you scheduled it for. And if it’s not scheduled? …it’s not a task!
    Bins & Projects: When capturing tasks and notes fail, it’s not because you “don’t know where to put them”—it’s because you don’t even have a place to put them. Bins & projects are containers for tasks. Bins hold one-off tasks related by context or category, and projects hold tasks related by purpose and outcome. Projects are also hubs for notes, links, or any other reference material
    Events: An event note captures meetings or other appointments with predetermined start and end times, and provides a container for tasks or notes associated with that event.

  • Now Bridges

    The Ever-Present Now: “Now” is all we have control over, but we can invest current nows to make future nows more valuable. Our Now Bridges help us act more effectively in the moment.
    Agendas: Start in the middle of tomorrow by setting tomorrow’s intentions today. Your agenda is where your tasks meet your time, and a good agenda will make tomorrow far more productive.
    Logs: If your agenda is what you plan to do, your Log is what you actually do. It’s valuable in the moment because you log what you’re doing when you start, and this commit to it. And it’s valuable later because it’s much easier to “capture recurrence” when you have a list of what you did.

Capture Recurrence

These bridges help you harness past action to improve future action
  • An Ode to Recurrence: Repetition is divine. We shy away from it because we see repetition as tiresome, but nothing could be further from the truth. We can lean into the valuable repetition—like the pianist whose expertise and experience comes from 38 years of practice (that’s me, I’m the pianist). And we can capture the mundane repetition—and by capturing it, prevent it from capturing us.

  • Recurrence Bridges

    Recurring Tasks: Recurring tasks save you time and effort in multiple ways: you capture them once and never need to capture them again, and because you remember your work, you don’t commit time-wasting errors of omission.
    Procedures: Capture repeating processes so you can work faster and more reliably, and make the processes better and better over time.
    Templates: Imagine if all your work were 80% done before you start! That’s the promise of templates. Learn a reliable process for creating templates in any environment, with the power of the Last Predictable Step, Placeholders, and Variants.
    Recurring & Date-Driven Projects: When you have a project you do frequently, it saves tons of time and effort if all the project’s tasks can be pre-scheduled relative to a specific date. For example, my Weekend Upgrade newsletter is a date-driven project to me. All the tasks for each edition are scheduled automatically based on the upcoming publication date. You need that leverage in your life!

  • Execution Bridges

    Keyboard shortcuts: Don’t knock the value of the humble keyboard shortcut, especially those you can customize. It’s two seconds faster to use Ctrl/Cmd-z than it is to click on the Edit menu and choose Undo. If you’re like me, you do that a hundred times a day. Three minutes a day is 15 minutes every work week and 12.5 hours per year—from one shortcut!
    Automation & Macros: Have you created some procedures that you’d like to speed up? If you know exactly how to do it, you can teach your computer to do it for you. The fastest work is the work you don’t even have to do.
    Text expansions: Sending the same three emails forty times a week? Stop typing it every single time. You’ll work faster—and far more accurately—with text expansion!
    AI Assist: You can sometimes avoid starting from scratch even when you haven’t done that work before. Ask your old pal ChatGPT where to start.
    Rhythm vs. Flow: When you can’t set aside four hours for deep flow (read: most of the time), you need rhythm. Learn to handle unfinished work with Open Loops, how to get into and out of work sessions quickly and reliably, and how to use my BOMR mindsets—Brainstorm, Organize, Make, Refine—to break down big work.

  • Vision Bridges

    Goals: If an Agenda defines my intentions for tomorrow, and Projects define my intentions for specific outcomes, Goals are the long-term intentions. Goals are not particularly good at telling you what to do—but they can be excellent at telling you what not to do, and that’s valuable if you want to stay on the right track.
    Strategies: All our previous bridges are tactics, addressing specific work and solving specific problems. Strategies ensure our tactics are performing the right work. Because nothing is less productive than optimizing the wrong work. Strategies align our projects toward our goals.
    Importance: What makes work important? Being aligned with a strategy!
    Metrics: We hate measuring things—probably because we don’t really want to know the answers. But the simple fact remains: if you can’t articulate a metric to track the progress of a strategy, then you don’t really have a strategy.
    Proven Ideas: Need help defining strategies? Capture someone else’s recurrence! You may not have pursued this goal before, but someone has.

Calibrate and Adapt

These bridges allow you to maintain and improve your system, and adapt to inevitable change

  • Feedback Bridges

    Documentation: You can’t recognize change if you don’t have records of past and current states of your system.
    Feedback and Action Cycles: Why do we skip reviews of our systems, even though we know they’re important? Because in our heart of hearts, we know there’s no meaningful action to be taken from those reviews. You have to align your feedback with your action. If reviews lead to meaningful action, it’s a lot easier to do them.
    Dashboards: We also skip reviews because we hate assembling all the information we need. That’s an easy fix: build dashboards for your reviews!
    Periodic Reviews and Polyrhythms: Why on earth would you review every project in your system exactly once a week? Some need to be seen more often, some less often. And the same is true with every aspect of your work and workflows. With recurring tasks, you have the power to establish reviews of anything at any cycle. The result is a dynamic mesh of reviews that would be super complicated to remember on your own, but that are simple when recurring tasks deliver the review dashboards to you.
    Prototasks: Remember above where I said tasks have to be scheduled? Prototasks are notes that are like tasks, but aren’t scheduled. Review them periodically, schedule them as tasks when you want, but don’t beat yourself up over potential work that never comes to pass

Rhapsody: Finding Your Rhythms

Saving time & effort… for what?

Is all this productivity for show? Or worse, will it lead to more and more work, with no end in sight? That’s not the goal. We do more with less time and effort so we can focus on loved ones, or pursuits we’re passionate about, or whatever we want. Set boundaries around what fulfills and nourishes you, so you don’t overwhelm that with endless work.

Friction & Bridges

When you don’t get work done, it isn’t because you lack willpower or discipline. It isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s friction. The challenge is that friction manifests in unpredictable ways, as hesitation, frustration, avoidance, and other seemingly emotional responses. But once you’ve identified the friction, you can fix it with a bridge!

Use first, trust later

People are afraid to use their systems until they’re perfect. They think trust comes before use. But it doesn’t. You can’t trust your system until you use it. Flip the script: use your system, and when you find something that doesn’t work, fix it.

Simple Ways to Improve Productivity

We won’t leave the book without covering a few handy rules of thumb.

Rhythms, plural

Why is this book’s title “The Rhythms of Productivity”—with an “s”? Because the power of a system means you can align all kinds of work and recurrence, with a wide variety of timings and periods, without burdening or cluttering your mind. You can be the conductor of a complex weave of productivity, without ever breaking a sweat.
Watch for The Rhythms of Productivity around the end of 2023!
Follow it here—I’ll share more details as the release approaches.
Or join the FREE Action-Powered Productivity community for updates.
Or sign up for Cohort Eleven: The Final Cohort to put these concepts into practice right away!
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