Posts tagged "productivity"

Detailed write-up by Michael Leibovich on how he used Claude Code (inside the Claude Desktop app) for implementing his own Chief of staff setup.

As someone running a very similar setup myself, I particularly liked his use-case descriptions and the insights coming out of “externalizing your thinking”. I can totally relate to that!

Also, I agree that installing Obsidian and giving Claude access to it through its REST API plugin and MCP are great for giving it a structured, extra memory layer beyond its own memory mechanism. Claude can write Obsidian-style Markdown documents directly to the file system which is faster than going through the MCP/API, but the real value is the ability to search for existing documents through MCP that allows Claude to discover notes, make cross-correlations and more.

I would add a few things from my own perspective here:

Most people use AI like a search engine with extra steps. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. I did too, until I accidentally stumbled into something completely different.

Over the week, I’ve turned Claude into my personal Chief of Staff. What’s a Chief of Staff, you might ask? Think of these people who follow executives around, whispering important things into their ear, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

If you’ve watched The Fifth Element (go watch it, if you haven’t, it’s a great movie!), you know the scene: the president’s aide leans in and whispers something absurdly specific like “You have 19 more meetings after this one.” That’s essentially what Claude does for me now. Except I’m not a president. And thankfully, I have less meetings. I’m a freelance consultant living near a forest in Bavaria.

This post is a bit of a recap: how it happened, what the system actually looks like, three lessons I learned along the way, and, at the end, an unedited interview where I asked Claude seven questions about what it’s like to be my Chief of Staff, with some interesting insights. Don’t miss it!

A 25-year career without goals—and why that worked better than the alternative This guitar is more than 15 years old. It’s my second one—the first was bought and sold in the ’80s. I tried lessons. Self-teaching. Regular practice. Still couldn’t play a recognizable song. Now it collects dust, remindi…

I had a problem.

I wanted to create a YouTube channel and had my first video ready to go, but then… nothing. Weeks passed. I had ideas, I had equipment, and I’d watched enough tutorials to edit like a pro. But I couldn’t get myself to shoot video number two.

Classic procrastination.

So I did what I often do when I’m stuck: I talked to Claude. But this time, I didn’t just ask for advice. I invited two experts into the conversation to help me figure this out.

It’s December 2024. I’m at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, coaching speakers on how to communicate effectively with technical audiences. Meanwhile, 9,258 kilometers away in Munich, a room full of homeowners is debating whether my 7.6-kilogram solar panels will blow off my balcony in the wind. This story…

Working for my then employer’s Munich office in 2011, I felt it—that hollow sensation when your career becomes a treadmill. The acquisition of the company I originally joined had stripped away the technological beauty and purpose I’d thrived on for more than a decade. The rigid culture, the pure commercial focus, the loss of autonomy.

I wasn’t incompetent, broke, or irrelevant… I was just bored.

And boredom, I realized, was the first horseman of a dying career.

What are office hours? Office hours have their roots in academia, where professors would publish certain hours at specific days of the week where students could simply come in and ask questions. It’s an easy way to meet without the back and forth of finding a date/time that works. Why office hours? …

I remember a colleague, let’s call her Sarah, who was checking her phone every minute during our 30-minute meeting, apologizing for being distracted, mentioning her endless to-do list. She was drowning, and she didn’t even know it. Sounds familiar? Here’s what I learned: overwhelm is not a time mana…

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his books. Currently, I’m reading his latest one: “A World Without Email”

Every email comes at a small cognitive cost to the sender, and a small cognitive cost to the recipient. It has become easier than ever to “just send an email”, instead of diving deeper, solving the issue, or using a more appropriate, more efficient, or less stressful way of communication. Multiplied by the amount of companies, employees, emails per employee, the wasted time and cognitive cost of (over)using email for everything has become enormous. And instant messaging only amplifies the problem again.

I’ve become very good at filtering and processing email over the last years. But this is just trying to solve the receiving end of the problem. Now I’m curious about learning ways to fix the problem at the source. Not just for me, but for my colleagues, too.

Don’t worry, this is not a desperate attempt at SEO for my blog (although I do appreciate your likes, Tweets, RSS subscriptions and other ways you help me reach a wider audience), nor is this my entry into the latest contest of IT BS Bingo.

It just occurred to me yesterday that Big Data is everywhere. Even during your weekend jogging run.

The year 2011 is almost two weeks old, and by now you’ve probably read every other review/resolutions/plans blog post out there. Now you have time to read this one :).

But first of all: Apologies for not having blogged for weeks. I’ve been moving to a new home over the last two months, the holiday season took its toll and there were a few other personal and job projects that demanded my attention.

Now, normality (whatever it is) is starting to come back and I can start devoting more time to this blog again.

This blog is now one year old, although I had been blogging for more than five years before. Time to reflect, plan and flip some switches for the future.

Here’s a quick recap of 2010, some plans and ideas for this blog, a call for feedback and hints to some other projects for 2011.

Yesterday, I cleaned up my home directory at work. I went from ca. 15 GB of data down to 1.1 GB. And I only stopped there, because I didn’t want to spend too much more time cleaning up. Here’s how to do it.

In the previous post of this mini-series, we looked at why it’s important to have our emails and files organized, then attacked our INBOX to reach zero-message-nirvana. I’m happy to see that others are living by these principles, too. Thanks, Gregor!

Now let’s look at that other dark spot in our IT lives: Our Desktop and file system. If you’re like me, you see this very often, too: Cluttered desktops with so many files and folders and downloads and icons and stuff, you can barely make out the underlying desktop background.

Spring’s around the corner and the Easter weekend is upon us, giving us some time to sit back, relax and do some spring cleaning!

This also applies to your data, in particular your Email folders and your home directories. In this two-part series, we’ll clean up our email INBOX to zero (yes: null, nada, zip) emails, simplify email folders, then clean up our home directory file structure. That’ll save us time, help us find peace of mind and make us more efficient so we can concentrate our energies on what really matters to us.