Whether operational or executive, any team working with knowledge and ideas will benefit
Disclaimer: I have no personal or commercial relationship with any person or company providing these skills / systems.
If productivity, creativity and innovation matter to what you do, here are 6 skills to elevate your team’s efficacy and efficiency.
Of course, you can pick and mix.
Adopt all of them though and rivals will be suing for unfair competition.
None need you to change IT infrastructure, none require significant capex.
In ascending order of complexity:
- Lean reading
- Lean writing
- Touch typing
- Notion
- AI as a digital intern
- Build A Second Brain
1. Lean reading
One of the most effective modes of learning is reading. Most successful professionals devour books. Their minds crave new thoughts and provocative ideas that are presented in books. You should set aside at least two hours every day to read and learn.
– Online Learning Academy for Operational Excellence
I coined the term ‘lean reading’ for this, inspired by ‘lean writing’ which we’ll come back to further below.
It starts with the counterintuitive idea of reading more.
So, start several books before finishing the one you’re on.
If you have many on the go, some will always immediately come to mind when you’re about to read.
Finish those, leave the ones you struggle to get motivated for.
If you adhere to the old fashioned principle of finishing everything you start, the number of books you’re able to cover in a year is drastically reduced.
Now, the odds of a game changing insight connecting with one of your team is massively increased.
Time is a precious commodity. Like land, there’s a fixed supply so it’s incumbent on you to make more of what is there.
Don’t finish crap books / films / TV shows / podcasts.
Lean reading is based on an idea by Morgan Housel, further developed by Billy Oppenheimer in this tweet thread.
2. Lean writing
This is a technique developed by Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush.
It uses short form writing (Tweets, LinkedIn etc) to identify what works before expanding it into long form.
As with lean reading, the resource required to explore each idea is hugely reduced.
Consequently it’s easier to get started, you can cast the net wider, then only double down on the data tells you is working.
https://www.ship30for30.com/post/the-lean-writing-method-how-to-expand-short-form-content-into-longer-form-assets
3. Touch typing
If any of your team don’t already touch type, it’s a surprisingly overlooked meta skill that will skyrocket their productivity.
There are a plethora of courses available online — free and paid for.
4. Notion
If you’re not already acquainted with Notion, it’s a versatile idea and project management tool.
See the Forbes review here.
There is a comprehensive ecosystem of tutorials, templates and courses widely available on Youtube, Udemy, Etsy, Gumroad etc.
Whilst many companies use it at the enterprise level, I promised at the start of this article you wouldn’t need to engage in systems change or significant capex.
The action here is to support your people in becoming familiar with it, and encouraging them to adopt it for organising their personal projects.
If they’re not already using it, it will transform their productivity and creativity in their personal lives, and their professional competencies and goodwill to you will surge.
5. AI as a digital intern
Don’t worry, this doesn’t involve a systems overhaul to integrate AI. It just needs access to an internet browser.
As Naval Ravikant puts it, think of AI as a calculator for reading and writing.
Nicolas Cole talks of using it as a digital intern. A super smart and well read, but often naive intern.
In both cases, your people determine the direction, and finesse the output. AI simply does the grunt work in the middle.
- You wouldn’t just show a calculator screen to your investors.
- You wouldn’t submit a report from an intern before checking it thoroughly.
Low risk ways of using AI
- Brainstorming
- Keyword research
- Summarising content
- Proofreading & editing
- Extracting data from text
- Writing & debugging code
- Writing product descriptions
- Rewriting text in different styles
- Ideas for copywriting (headlines etc.)
Invest in Chat-GPT Plus ($20 per person per month), and prompt engineering training for your team (lots of free courses on Youtube if budget is tight)
There are two main upsides:
- Productivity
- Your team become familiar with what AI can do and its limitations. You’re optimally positioned to take advantage of whatever opportunities arise in this fast moving industry.
6. Build A Second Brain (BASB)
This is Tiago Forte’s proprietary productivity system. It deals with a quintessential problem of the Information Age — overwhelm.
Its essence is captured in two 4 letter acronyms:
CODE — Capture, Organise, Distil, Express
PARA — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive.
- Capture ideas as they arise
- Organise them in a way that you intuitively know where to find everything
- Distil the vast amount of information into something workable
- Express your creativity in an effective manner.
PARA is a framework for the Organise stage that makes Capture, Distillation and Expression a walk in the park. Its power lies in its simplicity.
Fun fact I learned from Tiago — 4 is the maximum number your brain can instantly process without having to ponder what each of the letters means.
For many, BASB goes hand in hand with Notion. If Notion is the sword, then BASB is the ninja training to wield that sword.
My wife and I both use BASB on Notion for our respective businesses, as well as to manage our household.
That said, BASB is platform agnostic, and can work with any IT system you have in place, or indeed with Google Drive or any cloud based setup.
My Notion, Mac hard drive and Google Drive all have the exact same PARA structure, so my personal/professional knowledge base is consistently structured.
Here’s Tiago giving a talk on BASB at Google:
The book, which contains everything you need to implement BASB is less than £10 from Amazon — here’s a link for convenience (I’m not an affiliate and receive no commission for this).
Summary
Besides productivity and efficacy, these competencies will supercharge your team’s personal development.
The forward thinkers will eagerly embrace them, whilst those stuck in their ways may require some cajoling but will ultimately thank you.
In today’s everchanging landscape, the surest way of getting left behind is to stand still.
With these 6 skills, you’ll remain ahead of the curve.
Onwards, and upwards.
