A new year always brings a rush of energy, resolutions, and to do’s. Since I haven’t written here in quite a while, I thought it might be helpful and interesting to share my current lens and productivity themes entering 2025.
Big picture headline: I want to hit the right balance intentionality and serendipity. Do fewer things better and more efficiently, but be open to novelty, experience, and, let’s be honest, some chaos (it’s 2025 – there’s gonna be chaos).
Here’s five steps I’m taking:
1. Define a concise, structured view of what success and improvement looks like
Let’s walk through a simple logic example and goal-setting sequence:
End goal: Success for you (and your people) this year
Then itemize and break it down:
Your vision (north star and top of the planning hierarchy)
↳ Personal goals
↳↳ 2-3 most important themes
↳↳↳ Plan(s) and actions
↳ Professional or career goals
↳↳ 2-3 most important themes
↳↳↳ Plan(s) and actions
↳ Company, department, or team goals (for executives, founders, leaders, managers, etc.)
↳↳ 3-5 most important themes
↳↳↳ Plan(s) and actions
Keep this tree (or list) crisp, focused, and impactful. You can only do so much. If you’re striving for excellence, most likely you can do even less. Everyone should value their time, if you’re a founder, leader, or creative it’s especially precious.
Need more of a starter framework for how to think about and approach this? Read my essays “What I’ve Learned so Far” and “How to Develop a Winning Strategy”.
2. Prioritize deep work
We often fall into the trap of going broad on a lot of things (“multi-tasking”, “busy-work”), particularly if you’re (a) proactive &/or (b) intellectually curious. I’m guilty of this too. Somehow it’s taken me a decade+ to really internalize “busy” and “effective” are not the same things, they’re loosely correlated (at best).
In a world of infinite information and potential sensory input, deep work is a modern productivity imperative. It’s also a lens that forces you to ask: “What’s this one thing that, if done well, makes everything else easier? Is this really strategic?”
3. Automate the easy with AI
Related to point two, the AI productivity tooling space is so richly helpful I’m now looking for opportunities to re-engineer any time-consuming, recurring, or ‘non-strategic’ task I do. I’ve honestly never seen anything like the current Precambrian-level ‘evolutionary’ momentum in my professional career. Even the original iPhone and social media launches (Facebook, Twitter) feel tame and slow by comparison.
Example: inspired by Fabric (https://github.com/danielmiessler/fabric) I’m customizing ways to automate my content consumption to stay informed on important news in less time. I still need to read and track a lot of research, policy, ideas, insights, and trends, now I can do it in minutes instead of hours. Pair basic programming knowledge with a modicum of intellectual curiosity and the only real rate-limits here feel like imagination and time – while everything continues to get easier and better.
For tools like Fabric specifically, the starter progression I recommend:
1. Start with the pre-built patterns (a ‘pattern’ is essentially an AI prompt recipe for an API or service like ChatGPT) – you can get a lot of mileage out of these alone.
2. Experiment by chaining steps and patterns together:
[save a text file of a YouTube video overview]
$ fabric -y "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myvideolink" --transcript -o my_transcript.md
[have ChatGPT or the AI of your choice summarize a block of text]
$ echo "Here's some text I want to pass to Fabric as an input for it to do stuff" | pbcopy | pbpaste | fabric summarize
You can also customize your .zshrc with multi-step functions and file path organization.
If this is too technically advanced don’t worry about it, the principles are what’s important here. Think like a chef: you have ingredients, tools, and recipes – the rest is what you make of it.
3. From there, start thinking about your common or daily workflows (example: research, write, publish, and share an article), break each one down into individual steps, and look for opportunities to design your own prompts, patterns, templates, and recipes (or chains). Prior to Fabric I never found anything I liked better than Notion for organizing and saving AI prompts I commonly use – now I’ve transformed my Fabric config my prompt library, with easy command line recall for everything.
There are many learnings and extensions here I’d like to productize at some point, ideally. Both within Brightest and other avenues and projects, conceivably.
4. Program creative blocks
This might seem counter-intuitive since I just wrote about automating and saving my time, but it’s equally a mistake trying to optimize every hour in the day or allow everything you do to revert to the mean with AI. I’m experimenting with 2-3 hour blocks for open-ended exploration – learning or doing outside my field, random conversations, tinkering or hacking on stuff, or letting my mind wander.
Increasingly, I like splitting my work-day in two (block one: morning, block two: afternoon / early evening), living additional blocks for early afternoon and evening if and when I feel inspired.
Insights and great ideas often arrive when you’re not chasing them directly, particularly while in motion (i.e., walking, hiking, cycling, jogging, etc), so this has second-order benefits for mental and physical health. Most of the humanity in being human also lies in these margins, happy accidents, and rough edges 🙂
5. Set a few “anti-goals”
We all know what we want to achieve, but I’ve started writing down what I absolutely don’t want my year or life to look like as well – this can range from burnout, unnecessary meetings, or overcommitting, to more philosophical, life, or family goals like relationship quality, time allocation, or fulfillment.
Defining failure is just as powerful as defining success – and sometimes more so. It clarifies and sharpens priorities, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Hope that’s helpful. Back to it…
What intentional steps are you taking in 2025? Share your thoughts in the comments or drop me a line on Linkedin. Let’s learn from each other 💡 and have a great year 🌟
