The Sub-Disciplines of Productiveness
A new mini-series on the various subfields of modern productivity
This post is part of The Productivity Chronicles, a slow series exploring the history and future of personal accomplishment. The first part in this series was Beyond GTD – Pioneering The Future of Personal Productivity. The second was Pursuit of Productiveness – The Mindful Art of Harmonizing Deep Focus and Fractal Awareness. A third essay appear as Can We Rescue Personal Productivity? – A foray into the "lost crispness problem" of the self-help genre. Today we kick off a mini sub-series about the various subdisciplines of modern productivity—or Productiveness, as I like to call it nowadays.
The world has become an intricate place.
Our calendars are jam-packed with appointments, our inboxes overflow with newsletters to sift through, and we scramble to save on groceries with vouchers. We juggle our finances across multiple apps and respond to wearable devices nagging us about daily health goals. Slack and WhatsApp pings light up our phones at all hours, pushing us into perpetual fast-forward—booking dentist visits weeks ahead and locking down childcare before our kids can even walk.
Since it doesn’t come naturally and isn’t exactly taught in school, we turn to productivity advice for help. Such advice has been around for thousands of years. But it’s only in the last century that it’s really been formalized, initially, under the label of “time management” which nowadays gets a bad rap. Nowadays, if we look at how people talk about personal productivity, it’s clear the concept has grown into something much broader than a simple input-output calculation. For many people, it has become a holistic approach to how we work, think, and live.
In this mini-series, I want to explore what I see as the five key sub-disciplines of modern Productiveness:1
Personal Time Management (PTM) is the oldest and most recognizable pillar of productivity. No matter which system you follow, effectively managing your time is usually part of it. Our everyday lives are inseparable from the flow of time, and we can’t accomplish much if we don’t spend that time wisely.
Personal Effort Management (PEM). PEM is an umbrella term I use for practices such as personal task management, personal project management, and personal program management. As a distinct discipline, it arose as work and life grew more complex towards the end of the 20th century. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to just track and schedule tasks anymore but to look at work and life from a higher perspective.
Personal Aspiration Management (PAM) is all about the bigger picture: reflecting on core values, defining life goals, and making sure your daily actions align with your aspirations. Goal-setting tends to be a star player here because it’s easy to understand and backed by solid research.
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). In an era flooded with information, PKM tackles how we collect, organize, and use knowledge to boost productivity rather than bury us under a sea of data. While PKM is almost commonplace among productivity enthusiasts by now, there is a new field that few people talk about yet: PKB (personal knowledge building). I suspect PKB will soon be the sixth field of Productivity.
Personal Self-Mastery (PSM). Finally, there’s the internal dimension. It’s tough to be productive if we lack resilience, discipline, or patience. Such traits aren’t just given; they can be developed over time. PSM focuses on cultivating the personal virtues and habits that make all other forms of productivity truly sustainable.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll examine the origins and complexities of each of these subfields, as well as why and how they matter in modern productivity.
I also cover this topic in my new book which is now available for purchase. So, if you want to read about it now, grab a copy. I release one chapter of the book on Leanpub every two or three week. Every time I do, I increase the price a bit. The next update is due tomorrow, so if you are quick you can still lock in the lower price.
Because personal productivity has strayed far from its original economic roots, I nowadays prefer to call it Productiveness—with a capital “P.” Adding a simple modifier (like “slow” or “fractal”) to a field creates a subfield of it, rather than indicating something larger. With Productiveness I aim to preserve the core idea of productivity while emphasizing a broader, more holistic scope—one that stretches beyond the confines of classic productivity. The capital “P” adds another bit of grandeur, suggesting we’re talking about something bigger and more nuanced than just checking off tasks.