INTxK

INTxK INTxK is a Productivity Agency working on making Productivity Systems accessible.

We are developing 'The Polymod Framework', a versatile philosophy and an affordable system for building accountability and communicating value. Welcome to INTxK, an initiative by Muhammad Mustafa Monowar, designed to support graduates and early-career professionals navigating the complexities of personal and professional growth. INTxK offers training sessions focusing on Organisation, Execution, a

nd Problem-Solving catered towards Early-Career Professionals. It also runs workshops on Psychological Integrity, Learning, and Communication for new graduates. INTxK is committed to supporting independent learners' journey towards excellence. It exists to equip you with practical and effective tools for self-organisation and professional mastery.

24/05/2025

Kill the task before it lays eggs in your brain.

If you keep a task pending, it slithers into the back of your mind. It feeds on your neurones and starts laying eggs. And in no time you’re pacing around thinking, which egg do I kill first?

Task managers were built for managing tasks. But they serve excellently as a breeding ground. With its shiny, slick interface, you hoard what you can. Priorities, tags, labels and endless features. Perfect for letting the task grow arms and legs.

But who enjoys pruning a jungle of tasks?

What you need is fewer tasks and even less metadata.

In fact, for the majority of your day-to-day tasks, all you need is a notepad.

Keep it by your desk or bed. Tie your pen if you have to. At an opportune moment, record the task and slay it before it consumes your mind.

Your mind is your garden, and it deserves peace. How are you keeping it clean?

23/05/2025

🎯 How do I stay motivated if I can’t set deadlines?

Not everything can be tied to a deadline.

Some things just have to be maintained over a longer period of time.

For example, how do you become an expert in new software?

It's tough to stay motivated when you don't know how long the journey will take.

Here’s one way you can stay motivated:

✨ Start a micro-project linked to your goal. i.e., becoming an expert in Figma.

Micro-projects have deadlines and deliverables. i.e., a prototype in 2 weeks.

When you get it done, something amazing happens:

Your body releases dopamine.

You feel good, and it makes you want to do more.

To recap:

✨ Don’t worry if you can’t fix a deadline.

✨ Break down the goal and work on micro-projects.

✨ The projects you complete carry you forward.

20/05/2025

I find it harrowing that the 40-hour workweek is still a thing in 2025.

It's a standard from the 1940s, assuming that work means physical labor.

But we don't operate in a labor economy anymore. So it makes little sense that almost 80 years later, it is still the default scale of measuring knowledge work in many workplaces.

If you're working on a business idea, building systems for yourself and your business, try not to force yourself to overwork hours to feel productive. It can be counterproductive.

A fun exercise I encourage is to take a single activity (i.e., design, writing, or analysis) and do it as long as you can until you start to feel exhausted.

Do this for other types of work on a different day, and after several runs, you'll see an interesting pattern.

What you'll discover is your ability to perform a specific kind of work at your maximum capacity.

For example, I tracked my design work and found that I can go on for 6-7 hours on a good day in deep-work mode.

With intellectual work (that requires thinking and writing), I could go as much as 2-3 hours per day (without caffeine).

So not all types of work spend up our time, energy, and attention at the same rate.

PolyOS (The Polymod Operating System) was developed as part of this research, and I've never been so happy. The log-keeping was a bit tedious initially, but the returns felt revolutionary.

The golden rate I settled in for is around 4 hours of focused work per day.

Of course, as the owner, I can always do more (or less) if I wish to. But having that benchmark helps me stay grounded and consistent in my efforts. My system keeps me updated, so I know if I'm overworking or slacking.

If you're working on your own goals towards a project or an idea, don't hold yourself back; give your best. But be sure to understand what 'giving your best' means. Don't beat yourself up over outdated standards.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-20]

This mental model will improve your relationship with books and reading."See books like maps."Why do we need maps?To kno...
19/05/2025

This mental model will improve your relationship with books and reading.

"See books like maps."

Why do we need maps?

To know how we can get to our destination. We don't always know the route, so we are following instructions on how to get there.

It's not always necessary to memorise the whole map; we just have to be good at studying maps.

Some maps are well detailed. Others are shallow. One wrong sign in the map could mean falling off a half-finished bridge. The detail of cartography is therefore important too.

Now here’s where you want to pay attention.

Maps are sketches, made by people who travelled before us. There can be many maps of the same region, and not all of them will necessarily look the same.

Maps are useful, but they are still perceptions of a terrain, and even the best maps can sometimes be blatantly wrong about reality. The terrain could change; the cartographer could have been biased. So, maps are rarely identical to the terrain out there.

Like maps, books are also abstractions of reality; they are conceived hypotheses about what life is — written by people with limitations and biases.

This is why, it is important to consider the credibility of the author and the accuracy of the interpretation. This applies to reading materials, blogs, YouTube videos, and posts like these on social media, and even ChatGPT's insights.

Here’s a fun challenge:

Find a book that you’ve thought of rereading and go back to it. Take notes and think of how you might use it to solve a problem. Take some time to critique it too. You might end up appreciating it more.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-19]

In productivity forums, enthusiasts often debate choosing between Obsidian, Google Keep or Paper Notebooks when it comes...
18/05/2025

In productivity forums, enthusiasts often debate choosing between Obsidian, Google Keep or Paper Notebooks when it comes to note-taking (or note-making and note-keeping).

Knowing a tool’s strengths and weaknesses is important to reap the benefits well.

Any kind of knowledge work requires some form of a thought-capturing mechanism. You want to capture your ideas and thoughts as fast as you can before they disappear. This is note-taking.

Oftentimes you only have your smartphone with you. Which is why I think Google Keep is just perfect on those occasions. It offers the smoothest user experience when it comes to capturing ideas.

But capturing ideas is not enough. You want to sit and reflect on your ideas too. This is note-making.

Initially, your ideas are raw and will need to be fleshed out.

Technically you can use a digital tool for this, but I do not recommend it.

I suggest using the good old pen and paper. Believe me, it’s still the best way to think and organise your mental space.

Get a blank piece of paper and see how free and creative you feel.

And then, you’ll also need a proper way to record your data— that is, you want to keep your notes well.

Papers don’t tend to last. So transferring data from papers to digital media is important if you want to use them in the long term.

Tools like Obsidian give you opportunities to save your data without being dependent on a specific digital tool.

You save your data in plain text. And plain text is universal to most operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

So, even if you stop using Obsidian, you will still have access to your data.

The takeaway here is that a knife cannot replace a hammer, and a hammer cannot replace a screwdriver— but they do their job well enough.

Know your tools well and use them wisely.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-18]

17/05/2025

The ‘Solopreneur burnout’ is real.

I used to work as much as 17 hours a day during my early days with INTxK.

I got things done on a day-to-day basis, delivering from a Point A to B basis. That’s working linearly. Great for aggressively pushing towards goals.

Yet something happens with that style of work. You get better at work, but you also get tired of it.

That’s how I got burnt out at one point.

In such a burnt-out phase, I rediscovered a technique called iterations.

Iterations are cycles of work. It’s where you bend the linear process into a circular flow. This is especially helpful for developing a system for work. With each new iteration, you build upon your existing progress.

Moving focus from linear to iterative work mode made a world of difference in how I operate.

For example, the Polymod Framework was built in many iterations (so many actually that I’ve lost count).

Initially it took a long time for me to get the system into shape.

But then I noticed something interesting.

My system got better with each iteration, and the number of manual tasks started shrinking. Now, I could focus more on linear/manual processes when they were needed. The rest — my system took care of it.

These days, 4-5 hours of focused work on an average day helps me get done more.

Here’s today’s takeaway— iterate on your systems.

Take note of your existing workflows and think about how you can reduce the steps or automate certain repetitive tasks.

Do what you do best and don’t let yourself get burnt out.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-17]

16/05/2025

Why is being consistent so hard?

It might be less about having motivation and more about protecting it.

Yes. You should protect your motivation from distracting advice and demotivating comments.

When we ask for feedback, we sometimes get motivational advice that leads us away from our goal.

Other times, demotivating remarks will come disguised as feedback.

That's because most of us are not skilled in providing constructive feedback.

Check if the person you're asking for feedback:

- holds good intention towards you
- is competent to offer you good feedback

Don't forget that you have to communicate your goals well too.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-16]

15/05/2025

Is thinking work?

From a neurobiological point of view, it is. But it’s half the work.

When you’re thinking, you’re spending energy to process information; you’re solving a problem.

But the output of thinking is often ephemeral. It cannot make a mark until it’s recorded.

That is why writing is the other half that’s also important.

When you’re thinking+writing, you are working, but you are also saving the precious ideas.

This helps you to revisit, examine and refine those ideas later on.

Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman would tell you that writing is thinking, and writing is where work happens.

Here’s a quick challenge.

Grab a pen and open up a notebook. Write down something that you’ve been thinking about a lot lately and would want to work on someday.

Once you’re done, post 🧠 💪 ⬆️ in the comments so that we know you levelled up.

14/05/2025

A lot of us struggle with focus.

That’s because we are trying to accomplish too many things at the same time.

What is the number of too many things?

Think of your daily working capacity.

Let’s say you can work 4 hours a day with extreme focus. If you work 5 hours on any given day, the next day you might end up working 2 hours. This is your brain punishing you for hurting it.

So say you can work 4 hours a day and you’re working on 4 different projects. Each of your project gets 1 hour. What happens?

Obviously your progress would be slow. Worse yet, there’s a hidden cost. Each time you switch from one project to another, you lose contextual information for the previous project and then have to reconstruct contextual information in your brain for the next project.

It’s not obvious, but it adds friction to your brain. You might think you’re working 4 hours a day. But you’ve actually worked for 4.5 hours. That’s because your brain processed extra information when you were switching context.

Now let’s say you’ve worked on, say, 6 projects in 4 hours. But from the perspective of your brain, you have also spent worrying about the other projects for 0.5 hours in the background. And you’ve worked for 0.5 hours switching context.

So your brain has worked for 5 hours even though you think you’ve worked for 4 hours.

The next day— your brain punishes you with fatigue.

Of course these numbers are for illustration purposes only. Different people have different working capacities. But it’s proven that after waking up refreshed from sleep, we start with limited cognitive capacity to spend on brain work on a given day.

You can use coffee/energy drinks to artificially boost that capacity. But your body keeps the score. It’s basically borrowing capacity from your future self.

So how do we get more done without putting our brain under pressure?

Reduce the work-in-progress items. Instead of working on 4 different projects in one day, we focus on 1 project.

We still work 4 hours. But there is no need to switch additional context. We give our full capacity, and no additional energy is spent.

Focused work done within your capacity is more than enough. Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’, Tim Ferriss’s ‘ The 4-Hour Workweek’, the Kanban approach to project management, and ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown— they will tell you the same thing. Do one thing, and do it well. And then keep doing it every day.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, it will get much more done than chronic overwork and burnout sequences.

It may be hard to get to that point of focus, but if you can get there, it suddenly gives you a lot of ex*****on capacity and freedom of time.

It feels unreal that you can experience these two side by side. But this can be achieved, and its productivity is at its finest.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-14]

13/05/2025

Yesterday, I had a debate with my sister about the Polymod FOS.

The Polymod FOS stands for The Polymodular Framework and Operating System. It’s the technical name for a powerful and versatile system that automates reporting and insight mining based on your logs.

What can you do with it?

✨ Get live insights on your performance and activities via a dashboard.

✨ Get instant report on what you did this month— excellent for reviewing when you’re juggling multiple errands.

✨ Instantly generate a project report with a history of every update, change and minute detail of your project.

It doesn’t end there…

✨You can use AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM and Claude to get custom insights on demand. All you have to do is share your logs and ask away.

I did a small demo, and she was impressed with what she saw. I told her I want to help people grow. I see a lot of young people feeling lost when they start with a project, an initiative or a potential business venture.

I was there not too long ago, so I understand what it feels like to be running around without focus, consistency and structure. All that is needed is a little self-discipline, to log their journey and to learn from mistakes.

That process can be very messy and hard to set up. I created the Polymod FOS for myself to deal with those challenges. It’s been serving me well for quite some time now, and I wish for it to serve others who are like me.

Interestingly, here’s where we differed.

The PolymodOS is fine; it’s affordable, and it does the heavy lifting using just a few Google Sheets in the background without the users even being aware of it.

But my sister had a concern with the Polymod Framework, which encourages users to take logs both by hand and clean their data before putting it in the PolymodOS. It’s not a weakness; it’s an intentional feature because that’s how users get accurate reports on their data. Without that cleanliness, it's only garbage in, garbage out.

Pragmatically seen, my sister believes not many people are willing to write what they do and enter it into a system. It’s too much work.

Yet I argue that we do it all the time. We log our activities on Facebook, Instagram and X every day. We hoard notes in digital notebooks but rarely go back to review them. Most of the time we don’t even have decent ownership of our data.

Sam Altman from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, takes notes in a small pocket notebook. This is not without a reason. Our brain processes information much better when we write things using pen and paper. But we also need digital systems which scale and offer more freedom of analysis and flexibility of use— without hoarding information, of course.

The Polymod FOS was created with love. We wish to be a part of your journey towards growth. Help you make sense of what you want to accomplish. All it requires is a little discipline— write often and reflect.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-13]

12/05/2025

: Do I need to track my work if I’m starting out with my business idea?
: Yes. Not tracking work is a rookie mistake.

: But what do I track?
: Anything that might be important/relevant to your future self/team-members.

: I haven’t done this before…
: Start with what your goals are, what you’re doing right now, how you are doing it, and how far you’ve progressed toward your goal.

: Thanks! I’ll try it.
: It sounds easy btw, but it can actually feel very tedious if you’re already busy doing your work.

: Oh!
: How were you planning to track your work?

: I was thinking of creating a large word document where I write down my goals for this project I’m working on right now. I was thinking of including the scope and plan for ex*****on as well.
: But what if your scope and plan changes?

: Ummm…then I update the document and create a new version?
: Technically that works, but you’ll be creating more documents than doing your actual work that way.

: Shoot! What’s a better alternative then?
: Keep logs. When you’re done with the work, review the logs and then generate a document using those logs.

: Hey!! That’s not a bad idea!

[Mustafa, 2025-05-12]

10/05/2025

One of the classic debates that still rages on in the productivity community is, “Should I choose Notion or Excel for work?”

In 2025, we have access to a crazy number of tools out there, many of which we can try and use for free. But then we also tend to get stuck between the ‘always jumping to the shiny new things’ and the ‘doing everything with a single tool’ mindsets.

Considering these two as the extreme ends, here’s an approach I would suggest. Build your toolset over time rather than relying only on one tool for everything. The goal is to jump ship less. See each tool as a part of your larger collection of tools. Explore, curate and incorporate these tools into your collection.

This requires some time and effort. You have to try different tools from time to time, testing their features and figuring out where they shine and where they fall short. With this intuition developing, start assigning the right tool for the right job.

To do this, you need to gather intel. Use app stores and Product Hunt reviews for this. You can also study the comments section under YouTube videos or subreddit posts on Reddit. See what other users are talking about and how they are using it. Hopefully, it won't take much longer to figure out what you are looking for.

So…Notion or Excel?
I say, “Why not both?!"

[Mustafa, 2025-05-10]

Address

Dhaka
1209

Opening Hours

Saturday 10:00 - 23:45
Sunday 10:00 - 19:00

Telephone

+8801792495115

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when INTxK posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to INTxK:

Shortcuts

Share

Category