Another classic post by Dave Pollard setting out the core issues in personal productivity and the development and sharing of useful content (also known as Knowledge Management).

It's been clear for a while to us here at Qumana that, theory notwithstanding, many people have developed work habits based on the early tools first available in the computerized work environment - MS Word, email, cut-and-paste, hierarchically structured file directories, and so on

Dave Pollard is one of the world's best thinkers on knowledge management and personal productivity, and has a lot of valuable insight and practical wisdom to share.

The rest of his most recent post on personal productivity can be found here.


I've written a lot already about Personal Productivity Improvement (I've also called it Work Effectiveness Improvement), a bottom-up, face-to-face, one-on-one approach to helping front-line workers make better use of the knowledge, technology and learning resources at their disposal. It's received quite a bit of traction in business circles, especially among those struggling in Knowledge Management functions, since it might help solve the problem Peter Drucker identified as the greatest business challenge of the 21st century -- improving the productivity of what he calls 'knowledge workers' (i.e. anyone whose job requires processing a lot of information and making appropriate decisions with it).

In doing some additional research, I've been looking at the root causes of 'personal unproductivity', and concluded there seem to be three:

1. Poor worktools and resources (inadequate, hard to use, hard to find what you need, over-engineered, poorly filtered, poorly formatted, poorly indexed, poorly summarized, poorly explained, poorly organized, and not adequately updated or regularly cleaned out)

2. Poor training: It's not always possible to make the tools intuitive and simple, and put the content out just when and where it's needed, so some training is needed, and it should ideally be personalized training in the context of how each individual worker employs the available tools and resources

3. Poor work habits: Even with the best tools and the best training, some people are just disorganized, sloppy, forgetful, uncommunicative, procrastinating, or lazy.