The Personal Program

Real life example of a rare animal

We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, »You don't know what you are talking about!«. The second one says, »What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?« — Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

It's that time of the year again...

I'm participating in an epic online adventure—a cohort-based course called Building a Second Brain. 1000+ engaged productivity nerds are upping their game at creative content production.

It usually goes something like this: there are live lectures and mentor sessions to attend. Assignments to do. A capstone project to complete (you are currently reading mine). A community to engage with. And, of course, if any time is left, you also try to iterate on your personal productivity system along the way.

It's an intense learning experience that spans several weeks and takes up most of my free time.

But this is the fourth time I am doing this. So I took it a step further. I chose to become a forum moderator in the course. I took part in an extra beta program. And I am also preparing a PKM workshop for some friends.

This led me to question whether I could still call this a "project"?

To answer this, I went down a nasty rabbit hole. I dug up some interesting relationships, two of which I covered in the previous posts:

• In the first part, I sketched out how personal productivity repeats itself on many levels.

• In the second part, I introduced the program as a kind of project to manage projects.

These two pieces were abstract. So this time, we will get a little bit more practical.