From Brain Fog to Productivity: My 2023 Resolution

The New Year is a great time to start new projects and hobbies because we feel like we're able to move forward with a clean slate - the messiness of the previous year gets swept away and we can focus optimistically on the idea of not just having a better year ahead, but in most cases, being a better version of ourselves.

Personally, for me, 2022 was a pretty good year professionally and personally - I changed roles at work with a nice bump in salary, bought a new car, my son successfully completed his first year of university, and overall, things were pretty good.

Pretty good is not perfect, and there's always room for improvement... and that's what this brand new site is about, but we'll get to that in a little bit.

📈 Finding Structure and Making Progress

If I had to describe what 2023 is going to be about for me, it's about moving a whole bunch of things forward and to do that, I came to the realization over the Christmas Break that I need to get more organized.

I'm now heading into the last year of my 40's (I'll be 49 in July) and time is starting to slowly catch up with me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here saying that I'm old and breaking down, but I'd be lying if I said that I'm as sharp as I was at 28 or 38.

The most noticeable thing this year was a small, but noticeable decline in my memory.  I've always had a prodigious memory for names, numbers, and stories - I could sit in a meeting, not take any notes, and remember almost verbatim most of the things that were said, who said them, and in what context.  That's an impressive and powerful skill to have in life, in work, and in business.

But in 2022, I started to notice that I wasn't quite as razor-sharp as I used to be with remembering things.  

At first, I chalked it up to distractions and not paying attention, but the reality is, as you get older, the neurons don't fire quite as quickly.  I probably knew this over the last year, but it wasn't until I went through my own personal "year in review" over the break that it crystallized.

It led me to remember the quote, I think from David Allen, the author of one of the great productivity books, "Getting Things Done" (GTD)- "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."

The more I thought about that quote, the more I realized that there were whole parts of my life that could benefit from just writing things down more.  The structure and organization of lists and notes would allow me to get past some of this brain fog, but also be more productive and get way more done.  This idea excited me and I dove into it.

💡 The Greatest Ideas are a Confluence of Inspirations

It would be easy to say, "And having remembered that quote, a wave of self-actualization rolled over me and suddenly, I knew exactly what I needed to do."

Yeah, life doesn't work like that, unfortunately... especially for me, I'm somebody that needs to research and think about things for a little while.

I spent much of the last week of December reading about productivity and thinking about ways that I could better focus myself and stay sharp.  Every spare moment that I had (when I wasn't grinding the Orion Mastery Camo on Modern Warfare II 😁) was spent watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, and listening to my existing library of Audible books.

It's never one person or one set of ideas that creates the inspiration for your best ideas, it's several things resonating with you all at the same time.  Sure, there might be one thing that someone says or that you see that triggers the idea, but that overall idea is an amalgam of other things that you've collected into your brain over time.  The lighting of that brain fuse sets off an idea bomb in your subconscious and everything just aligns perfectly.

For me, this was almost predictable to some extent, I came to the realization that I needed to put in place a system.

🥇 Systems are for Winners

I have a technical background and I work in technology as part of my career, so it probably should surprise absolutely no one that I function really well when things are part of a broader, more structured system.  Having things like tracking, basic automation, and the guardrails of a system helps quiet the noise for me and allows me to focus.

When I came to this epiphany that I needed to have a system, I started diving more deeply into "Personal Knowledge Management" (PKM) on YouTube where I ran across Thomas Frank's "Ultimate Brain" template for Notion that was based on the principles of GTD and also Tiago Forte's "Second Brain" concept from his book (which I'd owned and hadn't read), "Building a Second Brain".

Going back to the idea of "ideas being a confluence of inspirations" - I was already familiar with Thomas' work from some of his previous content in a different area years ago.  I was also a Notion user already for tracking some other hobby activities AND I'd implemented a free version of one of his Notion templates previously without even realizing it.  On top of that, I was following Tiago Forte on Twitter and had previously downloaded his book on Audible.

After a few days of research, I decided to push my chips in with building out my "Second Brain"... but because I'm me, I built two - one for my personal stuff and hobbies (like this site), and one for work.

Each of my PKM systems follows Tiago's PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives) framework across my notetaking, file management, task management, and to a looser extent, email.  My work system is built using the Microsoft tool suite (Outlook, OneNote, To Do, and OneDrive) because that's a requirement for that information sphere, but with my personal system, I'm using Notion (with Thomas' "Second Brain" template), GoodNotes, and Dropbox.

I put the work in over my time off during the early part of January and set up the structure for both systems.  I moved a bunch of files around and reorganised them, got the tools working together properly, and I even undertook the Herculian task of achieving Inbox Zero on my personal email.

I wrote a Twitter thread on how I achieved this with my personal inbox, so you can check that out and I'd appreciate a "like" and "retweet" it if you enjoy it and thinks it's valuable.

Overall, I feel pretty confident that I have enough structure and good enough systems in place to really attempt some audacious goals... so let's get into that, shall we?

🍽 Filling Up Your Plate With New Projects

I'm pretty lucky, I'm not someone who gets overwhelmed and lost very easily.  If too much stuff comes my way and I don't know where to start, I usually spin my wheels for a bit, but eventually, I just end up saying, "Right, let's get into this" and cracking on with it.

I also like to set fairly audacious targets for myself - shoot for the stars, aim for the moon. 

If you don't push yourself to achieve more than you're comfortable with then you tend to end up stagnating and if we're being honest, that's been my existence since about 2020.  I tended to not really give myself anything big to chase and so I did exactly what I prescribed for myself, I chased nothing.

Family and work are all great, I'm good in that sphere, but I need to push myself more with respect to hobbies and interests, I used to call them side hustles, but I've moved away from that term because rather than focus on the business side of these things, I want to lean into the action and process.

So here are some of the things I'm going to work on this year:

• Priority number one for me this year will be improving my fitness.  I'm not in great physical shape with respect to my weight - I'm healthy, my blood pressure is good, and everything works more or less as it should, but carrying this much extra weight is like strapping a time bomb to my chest, so that has to change.

• Keeping my systems and structure in place so that my productivity increases and I can spend the additional free time that creates doing the other things on this list.

• Learning new skills and challenging myself in new ways. I'm going to really push myself to start uploading to YouTube. In fact, my plan right now is to have three channels running in the near future - I know the "experts" will say that's mad, but this isn't about becoming the next Mr Beast, this is about me pushing myself and doing fun stuff.

• Writing more. I used to write a lot, over 1m words a year was what I used to publish and it kept my brain incredibly sharp. When you write more, your brain has to structure your thoughts better and more quickly, you become more mentally agile. This blog and the associated newsletter are part of this plan and integrate with the YouTube stuff.

Overall though, if I had to sum up my plans for 2023, it's really to push myself more, stay structured, improve my productivity, test myself by learning new things, and lift my overall fitness levels.

It all seems pretty straightforward when you summarize it like that.  😂

🔏 Being Accountable and Sharing

I've never been one for "public accountability".  I have always said that I don't need someone else to hold me to account, I'm pretty good at driving myself.

And that's true for the most part...

These projects that I'm taking on this year however aren't "required" (aside from the health thing, that just needs to be better) and so while I'm great at getting things done that I have to do, I'm only human and so doing these "extra" projects and hobbies when I'm tired or not feeling it will likely feel like a chore at some points.

That's where this site and the newsletter will come in.  I'm going to use these posts and some of the videos that I'm going to make on the associated YouTube channel to not just document my progress and hopefully share some insights along the way, but also as a way of holding myself accountable.

I think explaining what you're doing is one of the best ways of learning and I'm really looking forward to the experience.

Hopefully, you're interested in following me for the ride and if so, consider joining the newsletter where I'll send a weekly update of what I'm working on, some behind-the-scenes thoughts, and share some tips, tricks, and tools that I'm using along the way.