George Magazine

WHAT'S WRONG WITH PAPER? Nothing. It's still an excellent fast and easy 'capture' tool for brainstorming, mind mapping and writing 'to do' lists. In 2004, Merlin Mann's 43 Folders blog designed the Hipster PDA: a pocket-sized wad of index cards bound with a bull-dog clip. For his intuitive time- management scheme Autofocus, business coach Mark Forster uses handwritten task lists. Scott Belsky's Action Method, a simplified GTD for creative professional teams, is based on his company Behance's popular Action Books. "We use a different part of our brain when we write with paper than when we click on a screen," says Fiona Kerr, arguing that doing so engages emotions that trigger our creative and complex-thinking capacity to see overall patterns and connections more clearly. management such as capturing and sharing (e.g. Microsoft OneNote, Evernote) or scheduling in calendars (e.g. Apple iCal, Google Calendar). Or you can choose integrated functions in whole GTD-style task and project management packages (e.g. Omnifocus, Wunderlist, Firetask, Action Method, Basecamp). Mike Vardy, editor of productivity blog Lifehack, has a golden rule: email is not a good task manager. The right choice of task management tool is about what work habits and behaviours you want to improve and your level of commitment to that improvement. He advises "don't switch tools continuously; stick with one for at least a month before deciding if it's right for you". He also warns that tools do not replace mental discipline and work but facilitate them. Vardy's 10-point 'productivityist' manifesto is a user-friendly introduction to the topic (see 'Resources'). Fiona Kerr, visiting research fellow in organisational complexity and neuroleadership at the University of Adelaide, argues the human brain is still the optimal tool for 'complex decision-making'. Emotions are needed for judging consequences as well as speeding up access to our highly compressed and efficient ('chunked') intuitive knowledge, gained through experience. Echoing Raduescu's views, Kerr is sceptical about relying on generic and linear programs that perpetuate hierarchies of decision-making control in companies and fail to capture intuitive knowledge. "Mind mapping and [programs like] MindManager are the closest tools I've seen to the network structures of complex thinking," she says. george.productivity 28 Nothing has emerged to rival or replace human judgment. Not yet anyway. Cue, an iPhone app released in June 2012, searches through the tsunami of information (an estimated 63,000 words a day) in our emails, web searches, social media networks, project management and other business applications and puts it all in a snapshot calendar of daily tasks. It even finds the recent tweets and Facebook updates of people we are scheduled to meet. A Bloomberg Businessweek review calls this a big move towards 'passive computing', whereby "our devices should intuit our needs and present the right information at the right time". Let a thousand clever productivity tools bloom as long as they help us find more time to think, plan and share our knowledge and ideas.

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