This exercise will help you consider various productivity tools and methods based on your own situation, rather than blindly applying a pre-made system. Ideally, a perfect productivity system should have the following characteristics:

The magpie approach = a truth that system-builders often obscure: productivity advice is contextual. What works depends on your job, your cognitive style, your life circumstances, and even your current season of life. And seasons...well, they change, don’t they?

A system that's perfect for a freelance writer might be completely wrong for a software... See more

To the extent stories of others’ routines are useful, it’s only to sample them for bits and pieces of what we may want to try applying to our own path. We should not expect to find the perfect answer to work and life in someone else’s structure. Rather, we should find a bit of stone, a bridge, or perhaps a nice planter, that we can borrow to see if... See more