Yggdrasil

Most approaches to productivity are reductionist. They seek to iron-out complexity.

To-do lists focus on whatever is most intuitively pressing but they are reactive rather-than proactive.

Calendar/Time-blocking methods are proactive but rely upon having accurate estimations of required labour-hours.

Timer-based methods remove this assumption but rely instead upon the assumption that the current process is efficient for solving the problem at hand.

These traditional methods are great if the work you are doing is trivial, immediate or defined by a well-understood principles.

In short: They are good for handling every-day business.

They are not so good at helping you tap into your long-term vision. They do not help you to unlock creativity, initiative or rigour.

If the minutiae matter or the process is ill-defined, then the avoidance of the inherent complexity will only leave you feeling lost and confused as you struggle along blindly—climbing a steep mountain, not entirely sure if it is even the mountain you intended climb!

In these situations, long-term focus is not about reducing complexity, it is about reducing ambiguity.

Ambiguity makes you second-guess, daydream, lose faith. You try to struggle on using stubborn willpower.

Clarity eliminates all need for willpower or any other flimsy emotional constructs. A person with clarity just sends it... and keeps sending it until the job is done, is proven to be folly or they keel over dead!

Clarity is the superpower that allows you to stop thinking and just do.

Clarity is the removal of ambiguity.

You remove ambiguity by emptying your mind of all that is false. In its place you can build clarified processes, detailed implementation plans, creative initiatives and innovative experiments. You can also benefit from reasoning through a problem to the point of finding it intractable—killing it off early so that you can focus on the real opportunities.

Virtually all complex structures in nature have some kind of branching structure (neurones; branches/roots; mycelia; EM and kinetic waves in chaotic media; Web pages; routers; social networks; the human experience of time, opportunity, regret and becoming)

There is some sense, as yet ill-defined, that complexity IS, in some way dendritic in nature.

Consequently, it is useful to represent complex things as deeply nested trees.

Yggdrasil provides the scaffolding to do just this —to map out your vision as a deep, recursive tree, with as much detail as you need to hit clarity. It also allows you to link these trees with calendar events, and to manage the regular bits of business that might get in the way.

It is a tool for people whose work is inherently difficult.

Available for download Q2 2026