My name is Itamar, and I’m an addict. My addiction is hardcore productivity porn (don’t worry, it’s SFW).

I do my best to keep my addiction controlled. Under normal circumstances, I don’t tamper with my “productivity system”, beyond minimal maintenance, and the occasional incremental targeted workflow improvement.

The issue with the statement above is an underlying assumption that “the system is mostly good, and fits my current situation in life most of the time”. That assumption has been overwhelmingly false for a little over two years now.

In the beginning of 2014, I went through the following major life changes, all within one month:

• I became a father of twins.
• Left my previous job. After over 7 years of working in one field, in a very strict IT environment. Windows only. No synchronization what-so-ever between my “life” stuff and my “work” stuff (strictly forbidden in said IT environment).
• Started my current DayJob. A completely different field. A completely different IT environment (one I happen to control 🙂 ). Mostly Linux. Started using a MacBook Pro as my main machine.

My last “productivity porn blitz” was circa 2010, after reading David’s Allen Getting Things Done for the first time. Back then, I tried to adapt the philosophy, and implement a system that worked for me, given my situation at the time. It was Outlook and OneNote-centered. Mobile technology wasn’t even an integral part of the system, as I didn’t even own a smartphone until summer 2011.

With the amount of change come 2014, I had to make some modifications, but it was in survival mode (newborn twins, remember?), not methodological. Maybe I’ll write another post about the current state of affairs, but the point is that it’s been bothering me since then. It reached “critical levels”, and it’s clear to me that time has come to take significant action. I started to fiddle with ideas and tools that completely reinvent my systems, and as any good addict, I’m quite excited about it 🙂 .

If you’re into such things, I believe you will find it interesting to follow my posts on this topic as I go along, tinkering with my workflows, and reinventing my systems. This is especially true for those who use OS X as their main computing environment, but are not willing to go “all in” on the Apple ecosystem. I require that I can do most things also from my Android phone, secondary Windows & Linux laptops, and iPad Air. Although I have two “Apple ecosystem” devices, I am definitely more into the Google-verse than the Apple-garden.

So far, my intermediate conclusion is that my requirement for wide interoperability is the most challenging one. I could not find any resources out there about effective and simple systems that cover OS X, Android, iOS, Windows & Linux. If anyone knows about existing solutions with such a wide support, I would love to know about that! Please do share via the comments! In the following posts I will go into more details about the specific use-cases and workflows, and it will be clearer what I am trying to achieve, and how I’m trying to accomplish this across all the platforms.

Post thumbnail image from Flickr user neetalparekh, licensed under CC-BY.