Our next question comes from Troy. Troy says, "Tracking deep work projects versus GTD projects, are your systems for tracking deep work, such as quarterly/weekly planning, and for tracking GTD-style projects, i.e. Trello, exclusive?" All right, so it's a confusing question. Troy has a long elaboration which I won't read on air, but if you do read it, it clarifies what he's really asking about here.

So what he's asking about is the connection between, let's say, weekly planning and quarterly planning and task capture and task organization. That are these completely independent or are they somehow mixed together, at least in the productivity system I espouse? It's a good question. I see them as relatively independent.

So you should have some sort of system where all of your obligations are written down, a place where you can clarify them, a place where you can add extra information about them. I'm a big believer of that concept from David Allen that you should not be keeping track of things just in your head.

I also think, by the way, here is an amendment to that. You should also be not keeping track of things just in an inbox. Get things as soon as you can out of your inbox into actual tasks. Because when you're looking at tasks on a task board or a task list, you can make sense of them, you can organize them, you can see them all at once, you can attach information to them.

It is a much less mentally taxing way of encountering your professional obligation landscape than looking through an inbox and just noticing old messages and trying to remember what they imply. However, how you do this, how you organize these tasks, how you capture them, how you get them out of your head, I'm a little bit agnostic.

I like task boards. That's not a David Allen idea. His idea was list separated by context. So you put work in context. I like task boards where I have boards per role and columns per different statuses. I also like that modern task board software allows you to attach a lot of information to these virtual task cards.

But there's other people I know who use bullet journals, and they keep track of all their tasks in a bullet journal. There was a time when I was a grad student early on at MIT where I had paper notebooks. So I kept track of all my tasks on legal pads, and it would cross them off.

And so I don't really care. You just need some way to get that out of your head. Then we shift over to the other part of my productivity system, which is the multi scale planning where you have a quarterly plan that lays out your vision for the quarter. This quarterly plan usually contains a more stable vision.

So here's my vision. That's pretty stable. Here's how I'm going to make progress on that vision this quarter. Each week, you used a quarterly plan to make a weekly plan. Each day, you look at your weekly plan and your calendar to build a reasonable daily plan, preferably using time blocking.

This is, as Troy points out, kind of a separate thing. In theory, you could be terrible about task and task systems. You could have a vendetta against David Allen. You could say, I want to keep track of everything in my head, my inboxes, my friend. If someone needs something for me, they'll bother me enough times on Slack that'll answer them.

And you could still run the other part of my system, you could still run the multi scale planning and get the benefits of it. So they are pretty independent. I like to combine them because I don't want the stress of keeping track of task my heads, I don't want to forget things, I don't want to waste time.

So in my implementation, when I'm working on weekly plans, and daily plans, I'm looking at those systems to see what's on my plate. But yeah, in theory, these are independent entities that exist without each other, you could, on the other hand, just have a good David Allen task system, but no multi scale planning.

And that's reasonable as well, you're not gonna be making good progress on long term goals, you're going to be much more haphazard in your work, you're gonna be much more reactive, but it's logically feasible. So these are two separate things. They both have benefits. But when you do them both, I think you get a really good productivity consilience.

And what you're able to accomplish becomes a lot better.