7 Hacks To Master Your Productivity - Peter Akkies

Peter Akkies is a productivity consultant, YouTuber and a blogger known for his expertise on time management and personal productivity. Almost everyone is chronically distracted. The world fragments our attention into slivers so small it's a miracle we get anything done at all. Thankfully, there are strategies to take back control of your time and productivity and today we get to go through 7 of Peter's most impactful hacks. Expect to learn how to set up your own productivity system, what most people got wrong about setting goals, how to keep yourself accountable after creating your targets, the difference between time management and task management, how to design your ideal daily schedule, which apps you should use to be more productive, why you shouldn’t do your hardest tasks first and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% OFF with our code MODERNWISDOM at https://calderalab.com/modernwisdom to unlock your youthful glow and be ready for summer with Caldera + Lab! Get 20% discount on Bubs Naturals at https://www.bubsnaturals.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #productivity #timemanagement #hacks - 00:00 Fundamental Principles of Productivity 05:30 What People Get Wrong About Goal-Setting 11:06 How to Break a Large Project Down into Goals 19:35 Principles for Effective Time Management 24:53 Should We Do the Most Painful Task First? 29:50 Advice to People Overwhelmed by their To-Do List 34:37 How to Overcome Burnout 39:30 Entering a State of Productivity Purgatory 46:55 Managing Your Email Inbox Better 55:22 Effective Systems for Note-Taking 1:03:10 Where to Find Peter - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  For the people that are watching on YouTube, you may notice that I'm not in my usual setup. I was here in Nashville, recording something at The Daily Wire, and very thankfully, their team has assisted me in creating a bodged together, but still very beautiful studio. So that's where I am at the moment. Peter, I've followed your work for a long time. I'm a massive fan of the stuff that you've been doing. After all of this time, working on productivity and tools and processes, how have you come to think about the fundamental principles that people should rely on when considering productivity or designing their own productivity system?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  When people start talking about productivity, a lot of the time, we start talking about apps. And apps matter. It really helps to use the right technology. But what I tell people these days is productivity is really an emotional thing. Productivity is, in the end, about figuring out what you want to do in life, why it matters to you, and how you're going to go about doing it. So a lot of times, people come to me and they're like, "Peter, which apps should I use to manage my to-dos? What apps should I use to take notes and stuff?" And I'm like, "Those are great questions, but let's back up a little bit. First, let's get real deep. What do you actually care about in life? Like, what are you trying to achieve on this planet?" And we'll start from there. And for a lot of times, for people, that's a scary place to start. But you got to start there, and then everything flows from those basics.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Why is that where you have to start?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  When I'm talking to someone who says, "Listen, I'm really overwhelmed by my job. I've got my kids to take care of, my family, I've got some hobbies, and I just don't feel like I have time for all of these things. Help me out. Help me pick an app that's going to help me be more productive or more organized." Often, what the problem is, is people just haven't gotten their priorities straight. And so no app is going to help you get your priorities straight. What's going to help is talking about, "What are all the things that you actually care about in life? And how are you currently spending your time?" And a lot of the times, you find people are spending 80% of their time doing stuff that doesn't really matter to them that much. And I'm like, "Hey, maybe we got to talk about that." Of course, if you lead with that, a lot of people, they check out right away because that's too scary for them. People don't want to go there. So you got to introduce people to that topic a little bit more.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  In a bit of a sensitive way, but I love getting into those deep conversations with people where they reveal to me, listen, like my lifelong dream has actually been, I want to move to Sweden and the north of Sweden and built like a hut there and live in the forest, you know? And once you get to that point, I'm like, now we're talking and we can do some goal setting and clarify that and talk about the action steps and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but we got to start with what it is that you really care about. And that's a conversation is super important to have.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  I had Rob Dyrdek on the show a little while ago, the guy that founded DC Shoes and he did, yeah, Dyrdek Machine and did this show on MTV that's done like a thousand episodes. And he was talking about how he builds his businesses now, and it's such an obvious thing, but I'd never considered it. He says, what is it that we want to achieve with this business? Are we building it to sell? Are we building it to be a liquidity machine? Are we building it to be a cash cow? Are we building it to try and raise investment? Are we building it to try and raise our reputation? We need to start with the end in mind and then work back from there. Because if you don't do that, what are the, you don't know what the steps are that you're going toward. Chris Sparks, someone that we both might be familiar with, he's a big productivity guy over here in America, ex-professional poker player.

• 3:21Chris Williamson?

  He says, there can be no growth without goals. And what he means by that is that the Atomic Habits, James Clear advice of just 1% better every day, focus on the, what you're going to iterate on day after day after day is a great way to operate. That really, really is, you fall to your systems, you don't rise to your goals. However, it only works in service of something that you care about. Because if you don't know the direction that you're going in, each of the different iterations could take you in the wrong direction.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  100%. And that's why people will come to me and they'll be like, Peter, what do you think about time blocking? I'm like, Look, I cannot just say whether time blocking is great for you because it completely depends on your goals, the circumstances you're finding yourself in, what you're trying to achieve in this chapter of your life. So we have to figure out, like you're saying, what is the direction? And once you know the direction, we can try and speed you up by going in that direction, right? And that is where productivity becomes so powerful. And productivity, when I start talking to people about this, they often think it's a bit of a boring topic. Like you mentioned the cocktail party, it's not something that you really start riffing off at a cocktail party. But once I start talking to people about, listen, what are your goals? And what are you actually trying to achieve this year? People will often start sharing really personal stuff. And I'm like, well, do you feel like

• 4:39Speaker 01

  you're making a lot of progress? And no, not really. I've been kind of stuck. I've been wanting to do this for a couple of years. That's really great. But it requires having some sense of direction. So there's tons of people, like you're saying, they actually don't have that sense of direction. So that's one of the things that I enjoy of working with people is figuring out, what is your problem? Do you know where you're going? And you're just having trouble implementing? Or are you really lost and you're focused on optimizing your day to day, but you've got no purpose in mind? And yeah, actually, that's where people probably should start. It's like, do you know where you're going?

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  It's beginning to sound less and less like productivity coaching and more like counseling or therapy.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Oh, man. But I try to stay away from that. That's actually an interesting point. People will come to me and be like, what productivity advice do you have for people with ADHD? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Go talk to like a professional therapist. Hey, that's not me.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  A remnant of competence. Yeah. Okay. So it seems like goal setting is the fundamental foundation. Where is it that you want to go? From there, we can then work back and we can talk about time management and to do lists and all of this sort of stuff. What do you think most people get wrong when thinking about goal setting and creating a framework for that?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  People are much too vague. That's the number one thing that I see. People are saying, I want to lose weight. That's great, but we got to get a little bit more specific. Like, why is it that you want to lose weight? And a lot of times, you start getting into interesting things. People are like, I don't feel attractive. You know, start getting into really deep things. Or, for example, people are like, okay, I want to get promoted. That's one of my goals. Okay, but why do you want to get promoted? Like, how is that going to enrich your life? How is that going to make you any happier? And if you dig into that motivation, you often find that the things that you need to do, the actual action steps reveal themselves. And that's something that I find so interesting because people are like, I want to do this because I want to make more money so that I can do my hobby more often. It's like, now we've got a really strong motivation and we can make it happen.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And so a lot of the times people, they just have vague goals. They're like, yeah, I want to, I want to grow in my career. Okay, man, that's great. But can we get like a little bit more specific on what that means and why that matters to you? So the first thing I always do with people is I say, let's write down your list of goals and then we're going to do a couple passes. See if we can make them really, really specific. I mean, can you say instead of, I want to lose weight? Can you say, I want to be able to fit in this specific dress that I wore, you know, at my graduation or something like that? Right? Something that makes it more meaningful, more salient. But also, the more specific you get, what you want, the easier it is to figure out what are the action steps that you're going to do. And that's the next thing I talk to people about is like, great, now we know what you want.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  How are we going to get there? And that's, a lot of people just completely forget about that. They have their list of goals. They put it up on a post-it on their desk or something like that. And they just sort of think that by having that list of goals there, things are magically going to happen. And I'm always like, no, let's get really specific. What are you going to do today? What are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do next week, next month, next quarter? To get to that point. And it's going to be small steps. That's where you mentioned the atomic habits framework. Hey, now we can get into tactical stuff, like a lot of ways to make it happen. But first, let's figure out where we're going, break it down into small steps and then we'll get going.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it seems like not only what do you want in terms of specifics? You also mentioned there, or why do you want it is a good motivator? Is that, is that what people are relying on when things get hard? Is that just to clarify that what they want is actually what they want to want?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  There's a couple of things there. A lot of the times when someone says that they want something and I start asking the why question a couple of times. Okay, you want this, why do you want this? Well, it's important to be, okay, now be more specific. Like, what values do you have as a person that you care about? A lot of times, people can't answer those questions. And then you get into interesting things because people might think that they want to achieve a certain goal, but really, it's actually something that they've sort of thought since childhood that they wanted, but in reality, it doesn't matter to them anymore. Their set of values as an adult, or maybe as a 30-year-old, or as a 40-year-old, is a lot different than it was as a 20-year-old. Those are the kind of things that you uncover. I would, you know, it happens so often that people are telling me, "I really feel like I should do this." And there was a "ah, should," that's the magic word in productive, "I should do this," right?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Why do you feel like you should do this? "Well, you know, I kind of think that blah, blah, my spouse..." No, no, no. What do you want? And by asking people why and what are your values, people start to think about this. A lot of people, they can't, if I ask them, like, "What are your top five values in life?" A lot of people can't answer that question. I think that's terrible. I think it is so important that you know this. For myself, for example, I really value autonomy, competency, right? Freedom, those are things I care about a lot. But if you can't answer for yourself what matters to you, it's going to be really difficult to figure out how you should be spending your time.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I love the fact that it's a firmer place to stand. You know, there's a five whys exercise, which you'll probably be familiar with. Have you heard the five whys to do with, I think it's the Lincoln Memorial, or the monument, or whatever?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this is really, really funny, so I'm going to read it out to you. So, the five whys. Why is the monument disintegrating? Because of the use of harsh chemicals. Why is the harsh chemicals being used to clean pigeon poop? Why are there so many pigeons? They eat spiders, and there are a lot of spiders at the monument. Why are there so many spiders at the monument? Because the lights are turned on early. Solution: Turn the lights on later at night.

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  So you go five layers down of why's to actually get to a much simpler solution. So, you know, for instance, the person that wants to lose weight, why is it that you want to lose weight? Well, because I don't feel very attractive. Why is it that you don't feel attractive? Well, because my partner doesn't seem to be paying much attention to me. Why is your partner not paying much attention to you? Well, they spend a lot of time at work. Why do you think they're spending a lot of time at work? Well, it's because we don't have enough money. And you go, okay, well, actually, your desire to lose weight is a financial problem. It's a problem around the fact that you don't get to spend enough time together, or you're not sufficiently open. So I think that's really, really great. One of the problems that I, I would totally agree, and the number of people who want to achieve things and don't, and when you ask them, have you written down very, very specific goals? They will say no. They'll just

• 10:46Chris Williamson?

  have this sort of amorphous idea of a rough destination. Yep, yep, it's over there. I'm going over there. No, no, no. What exactly is it? And I'm speaking to myself, right? Like, you know, this is, this is me from every year of my life for the last 35 years. But when it comes to taking a large project, I want to fit into a size eight dress. I want to 2X my net worth within the next two years. I want to buy a house by the age of 40. I want to do whatever. Where do you suggest that people go from having large project to intermediate milestones, goals, daily actions? How do you think about breaking that down?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Amazing question. And people should distinguish between what it is that they want and how they're going to do it. Because you started talking about goals that you have, but also about having large projects and kind of using those interchangeably. And I think a lot of people colloquially, colloquially use that language. But I find it very helpful to get really specific on what the difference is between those things. So I might say, right now, I'm trying to build a bunch of muscle. Hey, we can, we can do a whole sequence of series on why that is, but in the end, it's because I want to look more attractive, you know, and feel better as I walk through the city and meet people and get smiles, all that kind of stuff, right? So I want to build a bunch of muscle, right? I could say that's a goal, but I have a bunch of projects, a bunch of action steps

• 12:14Speaker 01

  related to that goal. So one might be find a personal trainer to work with, right? Another might be come up with a good routine of lifting to do at the gym. Another might be improve my diet in the sense of upping the protein intake that I have, making sure I hit all my macros and stuff like that. So by getting really clear on what is it that we're trying to achieve, which is the goal, and what are the action steps that we're taking, which often are new habits to build, right? Healthy habits to build. Could be like getting more sleep, you know, going to bed earlier, like putting away your phone at night, but also projects like, hey, I gotta set up like a lifting routine for myself that's going to involve a little bit of research, some trial and error, all that kind of stuff. This is really helpful because now you can have on the one hand a list of your goals and on the other hand, a list of the things that you're going to

• 12:57Speaker 01

  do about it. And then you can just start working through the list. Whereas a lot of the times I see people that are writing down their to do list, you know, they're like, get buff. It's like, okay, great. Like, that's not something that you can do. You know what I'm saying? You need to break that down into a bunch of steps. So it comes down to being really clear on what is the destination and what are the steps and defining those steps very clearly as well. And then we can talk all about, you know, when are you going to do that stuff? What are you going to work on first, second, and third? How do you make sure that you have a manageable workload? But the key thing is not just to write down what it is that you want, but also for each thing that you want, what are the key action steps? What are the key things that you're going to do to make that happen?

• 13:36Chris Williamson?

  What about milestone cadence, check in, review, et cetera? One of the things that I found when trying to follow a GTD framework, which involves usually a weekly review of where you're at and so on and so forth. The review process was so arduous and so frequent that I ended up having a very negative relationship with it and I ended up not doing my review. But if you don't have check ins sufficiently frequently, you can end up wandering off track toward your goal of doubling your net worth or losing, you know, four dress sizes or whatever. So what is the minimum viable product when

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  it comes to thinking about milestones and check ins and cadence and stuff like that?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Right, so this partially depends on your personality. And that's, that's why I think it's a great question. I find that some people that I work with have a ton of intrinsic motivation. And if you have a lot of intrinsic motivation, and you know what it is that you want to achieve, and you have your action steps pretty much mapped out, you might not need so many check-ins because you're just going to do stuff by yourself. But I also have a friend of mine who, he's quite an accomplished person. He's, he's a very well-known speaker at this point. He's amazing at, at speaking in public. He gives workshops at big companies. He's written a book. But to write that book that he got published and has done quite well, that he really needed

• 15:05Speaker 01

  other people to just, you know, get on his ass basically and be like, hey, like, did you do your writing this morning? Like, how many chapters have you, have you put out in the past month? And, and so he really needs extrinsic motivation. That's fine too, but this is a case of knowing yourself. I personally find that I don't need other people to, you know, shove me along. I, I have a lot of, you know, discipline in terms of making my own stuff happen. But if you're not like that, that's totally okay. That's just something that you need to know about yourself. So get a friend, get a coworker, get someone else to do those check-ins for you. Now, for me, because I like to do this thing myself, I have a, like you're saying, some systems in place, a weekly review, which is something that I recommend anybody do this really, but particularly if, if your motivation comes from yourself, hey, that's

• 15:49Speaker 01

  a great time to check in with yourself every week. How did things go in the past week? What have I done? What, what have I yet to do? Make sure, you know, not, not just as a motivational thing, but also just make sure that you're on top of everything. That's a big plan of that. And I combine that with doing some quarterly planning. So I take every three months and hey, it's, we're recording this at the end of June, so in a couple of days, the new quarter is starting, I'm going to sit down and just update my list of goals. I do it once every three months. And the reason I do it at that frequency is I don't, you know, freak myself out in the middle of, of a quarter where I'm like, oh, I should, I should take a look at my goals. No, I have like, I know there's a moment coming when I can sit down and update my list of goals, check in with my action steps, see if I'm on track for stuff. I find it really helpful to have a cadence for that.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And to be honest, like, if you're doing that once every couple of months, I think for most people, that is going to be perfectly fine as a check-in of where you're going. But if, if you don't want to do some kind of weekly review GTD style, like you were saying, Get someone to check in with you, you know, just sit down, you could make it like a mini mastermind, or just a weekly meeting with a friend or something like that. Hey, what have you been working on? What have I been working on? Just so that there's a little bit of accountability. And hey, if you need to make that more social, then go for it. But once a week and then once a quarter for the planning, that's great.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  What do you do when it comes to conceptualizing your goals? Do you do health, wealth, relationships, and other, or have you got a framework that people can follow when it comes to splitting up their life?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yep, I try to think of purpose goals in life, impact goals is one way to say that. So that's really broad. It's like, what is the meaning of my life on this planet? You know, that's something that some people feel really strongly that they know, like there's like a social justice cause that I need to go after, for example, right? Other people don't have that so much. I think of relationship goals, right? So social life, but also intimate relationships. I think of, you know, travel goals, fun goals. So I do break that down into a bunch of categories. Financial goals is another one, right? For a lot of people, that's really important. I tend to think of home goals as well, just like my home environment, like one of them could be like, build a nice home office to work from. So I do like to

• 18:00Speaker 01

  break that down into a bunch of categories because it helps me have a more rounded set of goals. You're not, you know, at any given point in time, you can't be working on 15 of your goals. It doesn't work that way, right? You know, you don't want to spread your attention that much because you won't get anything done. But it's really helpful to have some kind of at least trigger list of all the different things that you could care about in your life. And one of them could be like, physical health, another one could be mental health, right? And like I said, home, relationships, finances, all that kind of stuff, just to make sure that you're thinking of everything, even if you're not actively working on all the goals and all of those different parts of your life at the same time. At least you know they're there and you could choose to work on them.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  Do you have a goal-setting process or have you got a course that you've done that people can go and take if this sounds like it's good to them?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I do, I do. I call this big-picture productivity, actually, is what I call this because a lot of people are focused on like the day-to-day stuff like how, you know, how do I manage my to-do list for today or this week? But that's really helpful, very important. A lot of people need help with that. But what I do is I say, "Let's take a step back and let's think about if we were to define productivity at a high level for you." Like, how would you define productivity for yourself? This is an exercise I do with people and people like this because at first they start thinking, "Oh, how many tasks I get done every week?" And then when you ask them a couple more questions, when you ask the "why" question a little bit more, people start saying, "Hey, actually, it's about, am I making progress on my goals?" You know, and then we start talking about their goals. So, yeah, I take people through that system and a lot of people find that really valuable.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  It does take a little bit more vulnerability than just the, "Let's set up an app for you," you know?

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Okay, so, next thing, time management, something that everybody struggles with. What are your principles for that?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  This is tough to say because it does depend on the context a lot. I used to recommend one system of time management for everybody. Then I got some people that told me, "Hey, listen, I'm a doctor. Like, I see patients all day and I can't do this. I have to get my to-dos, like on my to-do list, done whenever I have five or 10 minutes here, right?" So, when it comes to time management, there's not one technique that I would recommend for everyone. Some people, for example, really love to do time blocking. This can be great if, let's say, you're like a software developer. You can take your week and you have some meetings and then in between your meetings, you're blocking off time for so-called "deep work." I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of "deep work" by Cal Newport. Yeah, it's like the work that you do that takes the most focus, that's the most valuable, right?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  And so it's great to make time for that. And for a lot of knowledge workers, it's really helpful to set aside time in their schedule to work on that. You know, maybe even block off time on your calendar so people can't schedule meetings with you at that point. But the context is so different. One of my favorite students owns a coffee roastery. And so he's constantly, you know, roasting coffee, shipping it out to consumers, going to like state fairs or whatever, and showing up with, I don't know, whatever he has, a truck or something, I guess, and he's like selling his coffee. And this guy also, like, he has a bunch of employees to manage. He can't sit down and work on something for three hours because people are always bothering him. So for someone like that, you have to come up with a different system. So I'm always telling people... I'm not going to tell you one system for time management because it doesn't make any sense.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  However, I will help you discover for yourself what matters. So this is where we do the exercise. What are the types of work that you have every week? And what level of focus do each of these types of work require? Are there times of the day that you find yourself more focused? Are there times of the day that you find yourself, you're able to blast through your email the best? And we construct a kind of schedule based on that rather than saying, this is the one thing that works for everybody. Because in reality, there's no, there's no one system that works for everybody.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you're talking there about almost trying to design a daily schedule, thinking about energy level and task requirements, thinking about focus availability, and what it is that you're trying to achieve. I'm going to guess that's probably a good conception that you would have two broad buckets of people. One, everything's chaotic. I get my to do list done in between the other things that I have to do. The, I'm a hairdresser, I'm a barber, I'm a personal trainer. You know, I have like required time and then I have spare time during which I can fit other things in. And then there will be broadly a knowledge worker who has a little bit more autonomy over how they work and the, the structure of that. When it comes to designing a daily schedule, what are you thinking about there?

• 22:21Chris Williamson?

  Or what are you talking to with your clients?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  So for the people who are the knowledge workers, one of the things I say is, let's start by looking at your meetings. Because a lot of people, if I look at their calendar, it's just completely full of meetings, right? And I'm like, can we squeeze, can we batch those a little bit? Can we create times in the week where, hey, Wednesday afternoons, you know, completely full of meetings or the opposite, right? Wednesday afternoons, I don't take any meetings whatsoever. So for a lot of knowledge workers, that's a great place to start. We can also talk about email and, and communication on Slack or Microsoft Teams. A lot of knowledge workers find themselves constantly communicating, and that can completely wreck your focus. So also saying, can we batch that as well? Can we have you checking your email X times a day? Two, three, four times a day, depending on how important it is. Can we set up systems so that you've got focused time where you're not on Teams? You're not on Slack, you're not available, right?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  For knowledge workers, that tends to work really well. And yeah, then you're talking about time blocking on your calendar, where you're blocking off chunks of time when you're like, I am coding, I am programming. Don't bother me, you know what I'm saying? And it doesn't have to be programming, it could be something else as well. Whereas for the other kind of people that you mentioned, the personal trainers, for example, who are walking around with clients all day.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Again, Can you actually set aside some time to do your bookkeeping? I remember when I started working with a personal trainer, one of the hardest things that, you know, he was struggling with is he barely got around to filing his tax returns. And he knew he had to do it, but he was so focused on helping clients. And at some point, I was like, alright, man, let's just take one afternoon a month, like block it off on your calendar, put a repeating event on your calendar for like, one afternoon a month, just to deal with that. And he started doing that and it actually worked out really well for him, you know? He's like, hey, now I'm on top of all this stuff. Didn't take that much time, but it feels a lot better. And so you just have to work with the constraints that you have. I think we all wish that we could, you know, determine our schedule to the fullest degree possible. It's not true, we have constraints, gotta work around them.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And like you're saying, you gotta ask yourself, when do you have the most energy? Right? When do you have a little bit of time to do this stuff? What are the different requirements for the tasks that you have? And build a schedule around that. And experiment is another thing I always tell people. Just try something for a few weeks, see if it works for you. If it doesn't, it's not you, don't blame yourself, just try something else. Cause I see a lot of people, they feel guilty because they heard that Cal Newport does his time blocking a certain way. And they try the time blocking and it doesn't work for them. And I'm like, don't worry, it's not you. It's just the fit between the technique and you is not great, that's okay. Go try something else, eventually you find something that works.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  What's your opinion on eating frogs first? Having the biggest, scariest tasks earliest first in the day? And then kind of cascading down from there?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Lots of people will tell you, that's the thing that you have to do. Personally, I don't do that and I find myself being quite productive. So I understand why some people want to do this because, especially if you're in the kind of environment where throughout the day, people start bothering you, right? You lose the ability to focus and to do the important stuff. People emailing you are like, hey, Jack, can you do this for me today? Oh, sure, I'll get right on, you know what I'm saying? And then you lose the ability to spend the time on this really important thing. And, you know, you lose the focus and maybe throughout the day, you become a bit, you know, yeah, just more chaotic, less available to do these really hard things. For myself, I find that very late at night, I can often focus the best. That's just something that I've discovered for myself.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  So a lot of the time, I will do those things late at night. And when I'm working with someone, I'm always asking them, you know? When do you feel like you're most focused? Most people will say in the mornings, for sure. Most people will say in the mornings, early on in the day. And so I'm like, that's great for you. Go do it early in the mornings. Like, don't accept meetings before noon or something like that, right? But it's not that way for everybody. And, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't want everybody to try that. Like, if you know that you love working at night, go, go work at night. Like, you know, I always laugh at people who tell me that they, you know, they get up at 5:00 AM and that's the only way to like, live their life. I'm like, if you want to wake up at 5:00 AM, like, go for it. That's great, but you can also be perfectly productive if you wake up at 10:00 AM. It really doesn't matter. All that matters is what you do with the time that you're awake.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  I have friends at both ends of the scale. I've actually noticed with myself, so in a previous life, I was a club promoter and I used to finish all of my assignments for university. They would be done until, you know, midnight and then I would hand it in first thing in the morning. And now, later in life, I'd heard that there was a genetic predisposition to being a night owl or an early bird. And I don't know whether, I don't know whether I had some epigenetic shift at age 31 or something. But honestly, man, I changed. I really, really did change from being someone that worked best late at night to being someone who works best earlier in the morning. But one of the things that we've spoken about there is this sort of relationship between goals, tasks and schedule or routine.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about the relationship between task management slash to-do lists and time blocking slash calendar insertion of those actions? It seems like you could almost use a calendar as a to-do list to, to give you the things that you need to do, but that's probably not quite going to be sufficient because you're not going to have your projects managed. So how should people think about that conceptualization between time management and task management?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I love this question because a lot of people conflate those two things. I always recommend that everyone has a to-do list that is a little bit of a sophisticated to-do list. So not just one list with like 12 items on it, but let's break down your life into various areas. And so the ones that I usually tell people to start with is like admin and finance tasks. That's one bucket, yeah? Another bucket is trips that you go on and let's say fun stuff. So hobbies and trips, let's call it that. Another one is stuff you've got to do for your health. Another one is stuff you gotta do for your home. Then there is things that you do that are about your relationships with other people. Right? Scheduling a meeting with someone or taking someone out to lunch or whatever. And then there's work and for a lot of people, that's a good, basic division to start with.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Now, for each of those big buckets of your life, I like to call them areas, whatever, categories. Think about all the tasks that you have and put them under that bucket. And think about the projects that you have. A project is just a collection of tasks contributes to an outcome. Right? The project is like, hey, I'm writing a book or something. That's a project because it has a start and a finish and you're working on it for some definite period of time. And once you have that list, right? Now you know, what are all the things that you could work on? The next question is, when are you going to work on those things? And that's where the calendar comes in. That's where you start setting aside time for like, I'm going to work on hobby stuff on Saturday afternoon. Right? Or like Friday morning, I'm going to work on writing my book.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  And how you make that jump, there's a bunch of different tactical ways to do it. Like I said, you could do time blocking or you could just not do time blocking, but just make sure that nobody's interrupting you. And you sit down at your task list and prioritize it somehow and work through it from top priority to low priority.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  But starting with that list of all the things that you want to do, so sort of an advanced sophisticated to do list. That's the starting point and I always recommend that over starting with your calendar. Because if you're looking at your calendar as like, oh, I'm going to work on, I don't know, email from 12 to 1 on Wednesday or something like that. Then you're not sure whether that's the most important thing that you should be working on. If you make that task list first, you can look at it and then you can say, what are actually the most important things? And then you can start filling in your time really intentionally.

• 29:49Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people have a very negative relationship, I think, with their to do list. You know, your to do list should be making life easier for you. It should be, you know, the orchestration of the things that are most important to you in life. And yet I know that I go through periods like this and a lot of my friends do too, that it feels like an adversary. So what is your advice to people who feel like they're overwhelmed? When they look at their to do list, they open it up and it's just this big, black hole, scary monster. What can people do?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Man, I'll try to answer this in less than 30 minutes because this is one of my favorite topics. There's, there's two things that I'll say. The first one is put fun stuff on your to-do list. Put your fun shit on your to-do list as well because if you're the kind of person who like hates looking at their to-do list, it's like you probably put all the stuff that you don't want to do on there and you didn't put all the stuff that actually excites you, which is a big problem. But another reason where you say a lot of people feel overwhelmed when they're looking at their to-do list. This happens a lot. This happens to me too, is if you did it right, your to-do list is just a reflection of reality. And so the problem is not with the list, the problem is with reality. So if you're like in a year to-do list and you're like, "Oh my God, I have so many things to do. I've way over committed myself," right? The problem is that you over committed yourself.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  The problem is not the list that you made. And it's actually very revealing. It's, it's one of the reasons why I do love this GTD, Getting Things Done, technique of doing a weekly review. Because what people often find when they're doing this weekly review is like, "Holy crap, I actually committed myself to doing so many things. This is not a reasonable amount of things to do this week, this month, this quarter." And that's really valuable because then you can start prioritizing. Is that fun? No, you're gonna have to say no to some stuff, right? You're gonna have to actually tell people, "Hey, actually, I'm sorry. I committed myself to this, but I over committed myself. I can't do this." You're gonna have to choose. That's painful. But if you did it right, your to-do list is just a reflection of your commitments and extremely valuable at

• 31:47Speaker 01

  that because it forces you to sit down and make deliberate choices about what you want to spend your time on. And we all have a limited amount of time in our lives. We don't know how much time there is left, but it's a limited amount of time and you can only do a finite amount of things. The to-do list serves to tell you what are all the things that I could spend my time on, and it helps you choose between them, which is, I think, one of the most important things you can do if you care about spending your life in, in a very meaningful way.

• 32:16Chris Williamson?

  Right. So when people deal with a to do list, which has way too much stuff on it, and they think it's the fault of the to do list, what it actually is, is the fault of their commitment to a lot of things and perhaps a lack of discipline to keep this organized. There's sometimes, I guess, people just open it up and they don't know where to start. They don't know what they should begin with. Perhaps they don't have too much on their plate, but there's just this ambient sense of dread when they do go toward it. What else is there? What else have we missed when it comes to dealing with overwhelm generally with workload?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Here's the thing. What you said, I think, is actually a little bit different because what it sounds like now, in this case, if you're looking at your to do list and maybe you do have enough time to work on all of these things, you're just not quite sure what you should work on next. Now we have a priorities problem. So it's back, it's back to the goal setting. Like, what are your goals? Which ones are more important than the other ones? What do you actually value? What are you trying to achieve with your life? And those are, you know, difficult questions that you probably can't just sit down one day and figure out. This is going to take some introspection over time. Maybe you gotta, you gotta do meditation. You gotta take some drugs or something. I don't know what you want to do. You gotta figure that out somehow.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  But if you haven't figured that stuff out and you're looking at your to do list, like your to do list is just going to be, it's going to be revealing this problem to you. So, so it's like you're saying, the to do list never causes the problem. It's just revealing the fact that you haven't set your priorities, right? If I'm, if I'm looking and I have got like 300 tasks that I could work on today, and I have absolutely zero clue which ones I should be working on. I can stare at my computer screen all I want. That's not going to give me the answer. What I need to do is go on a frigging walk, right? And ask myself, of all the things that, you know, I care about in life, like which are the things that I care about the most right now? Then we can say, you know what? Right now, the most important thing for me is, let's say, building muscle. Okay, I should probably work on that stuff then, you know? Or it could be like, most important thing is doubling my business revenue.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I should look at my tasks. Which one of these tasks is going to give me the biggest ROI on increasing my business revenue? That's the one that I should work on. So you gotta start earlier if that's the problem.

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I really do believe that almost everything comes back to getting very, very clear on what it is that you want and ruthlessly calling everything else. Like, the ultimate productivity system is just knowing what you want. And pretty much everything else comes out of that. One of the things that I know that you're intimately familiar with, and I have been too throughout my twenties, is burnout. So... What one of the things I've noticed now is because I did it so much and pushed myself through it and then would end up having a miniature breakdown where I'd just be in bed for three days and I wouldn't be able to get out of it. And I thought I was depressed. I thought I was chronically on like sporadically acutely depressed. So I'd have periods every sort of three to four months or so where I'd be in bed for three days and it would always

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  be after a really intense period of work and it would make me feel sad. But I don't think it was because of depression. I think it was a combination of low mood with burnout and the low mood was due to the burnout. What about you? What's your burnout story? And what have you learned about dealing with it and pulling people back from the brink?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, burnout is such an interesting topic because I dealt with that myself. It's about six or seven years ago now. And I was working in as a consultant in the US and wasn't even a particularly bad firm or anything like that. I just pushed myself too hard. And at some point, I found myself getting cranky with everyone and having no patience and, you know, getting like my heart rate was way too high and my blood pressure is too high. And, you know, I ended up stopping work for a while and I had no clue what was going on. And it took me a year and a half before I started seeing a therapist. So everybody, if you're feeling like that, see a therapist faster. Don't wait a year and a half until people start telling you. That's the that's the first thing. But when I did a little bit of reading about burnout, it turns out that there's not really a great definition of what burnout is. It's kind of

• 36:09Speaker 01

  this nebulous concept that is very real and many people experience it. And like you're saying, you've experienced it. I've experienced it myself. For me, it was like I couldn't vacuum the house. If I started vacuuming the house after five minutes, I would just drive myself crazy. And I would just like, yeah, I just need to sit down. And it was it was really bad for a while. And I never had that-

• 36:27Chris Williamson?

  It was like a kind of like a loss of resilience almost?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Oh, that's I've never actually thought of it that way. But that's a fantastic way of saying it. It's like you feel like you can't handle anything whatsoever. Like, basic daily interactions are so frigging hard. And I found that really rough because I'd always thought of myself as a very capable person. Like, I can do anything. I can learn anything that I want to learn. And then when you're hit with this point where like you can't do something really basic like vacuuming the house or like- I would have do this crazy thing where I would go into the city to go to like a bookshop. And then I was like, no, actually, why am I going to the bookshop? No, no, I like, I actually feel it more like getting a coffee. And then I would change directions and go to like a place to get coffee. And then halfway there I change back. No, actually, I want to go to, and so I was super indecisive. It was bizarre. I couldn't make, take any decisions anymore.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And this lack of capability really hit me hard because it really, my identity was as someone who's capable and can learn. And that was really painful. But I, I found that as I recovered from that, I started seeing it in a lot of other people. A lot of people who have way overcommitted themselves at work were pushed way too hard. And they're dealing with a lot of the same stuff. And, and, and I think it's, it's very common these days. For me, the cause was very much that I was pushing too hard. I was pushing really hard, felt that I wasn't, wasn't getting the results that I wanted. Started to stress out, pushed myself harder and you end, you know, entered a vicious circle where you stress yourself out more. You perform worse, you push harder and you get more stress, et cetera.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And so for me, the, the solution to a lot of that was pushing less hard and actually trying less hard, which was a whole, a whole different challenge. But I've come to see that there's a lot of different types of burnout that people go through. And for a lot of people, productivity techniques are really appealing, actually. That's, that's, that's sort of the, the link that it is there for me is a lot of people who experience this sense of burnout of I'm less capable than I used to be. They really want to grasp something solid. They want to grasp a system that gives them an idea of this is the tasks that I'm going to work on today. And I'm going to work through them and, and then I have a plan. That's something that, that I found very important and that I see in a lot of people today. But I, I certainly wouldn't want to give medical advice to anyone with burnout.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  But I love, I love sharing my own experience because it was, it was really transformative in my life.

• 38:48Chris Williamson?

  Bringing order to chaos is, I think, what most people are trying to achieve, just generally. You can see it in the way that people converse online. You know, the fear that a lot of people had around COVID, I think, was largely due to there is chaos out there and I need to bring order to it. Some people brought order to it by being overbearingly protective of themselves and their loved ones. Some people brought order to it by saying it was the grand plan of some malign scientist. All of these things were a way of, it can't just be random chance. I must get some sort of control back from the world. And yeah, this is what people are working with. So I came up with an idea that kind of relates to burnout.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  And it was something that I reflected on when thinking about rejuvenative practices and the ways that people try and mitigate working too hard. And I called it productivity purgatory. And what it is- God, I want to know what this is. Yeah, so it's when your rejuvenative practices fundamentally are built for improving your productivity as opposed to the pure enjoyment of them. So- Yep, yep. You go on a walk during the middle of the day, not so that you can spend time in nature and enjoy it, but because you once heard Andrew Huberman say that 15 minutes walk per day improves the dopamine release, which can help you with your focus.

• 40:14Chris Williamson?

  You're not going and playing ultimate frisbee on an afternoon because it's actually something that you fundamentally enjoy, even if you do enjoy it. But the reason that you tell yourself that you're going to do it is because people in blue zones that live to be super centarians expose themselves to a minimum of 115 minutes per day of vitamin D through direct sunlight. Like, all of these different things that basically even your leisure activities become a productivity activity, right? And that's where the productivity purgatory comes from, that you can basically never leave it. It's permanently on, this ambient sense that everything that I do should be in service of me-

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  Being more productive, of me being more focused, of me being more attentive. And I think it's a fundamental challenge, because there are many people out there who want to improve, who want to commit themselves and give everything that they can to improving. But I think that it mistakenly looks at what improving consists of. And one of my friends, George, who's a fantastic writer, talked to me about this and said, "Very rarely do people look at a problem and think anything, except for, 'I wasn't focused enough. I wasn't sufficiently attentive. I was too distracted. I need to be more productive.'" Right? That the only button that you have to push is more productivity, more productivity. More.

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  Whereas, yeah, whereas in reality, a lot of the highest leverage things that you can do are creative pursuits. You know, the idea that you have that 10x's or 100x's, whatever the issue is that you're coming up against, sometimes comes out from putting your nose against the grindstone. But a lot of the time, it happens in the shower, or it happens when you're trying to fall asleep on a nighttime. It happens when you're finally on a walk and your phone's died. It happens when you're on a plane and the wifi's out. So I think if we were to remind ourselves that there are productivity problems and there are creativity problems, and the environment and the mindset that you need to be in for productivity is one, and the environment and the mindset that you need to be in for creativity is another. And outside of both of those things is life.

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  And life is not necessarily something that feeds into either of them, and yet it can, right? I think the best way to avoid the productivity purgatory, at least that I've found, is to do things that are so enjoyable that they make you forget that you're supposed to be being productive. So for me, pickleball is a perfect example of this. When I'm playing pickleball, an atomic bomb could go off, or I could find out that Russia's invaded. I'm finishing this point before we stop and go and do something, because I'm so intensely focused on it. I'm not doing it because I think I'm going to get jacked. I'm not doing it because Andrew Huberman told me that it's going to improve my focus. I'm doing it because I fundamentally enjoy what it consists of. And for other people, it might be bird watching, or watercolors, or whatever, sex parties, I don't know.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  All of these things contribute to you living a life outside of your productivity. And then when you come back to it, you tend to have more energy. But yeah, productivity, purgatory, and this is the opposite of something called the dark playground, which is a Tim Urban concept. Have you heard of this? I have not. This is awesome. So, the dark playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It's a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the dark playground isn't actually fun because it's completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred and dread. Sometimes the rational decision maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal leisure things. And since the instant gratification monkey sure as

• 43:49Chris Williamson?

  hell isn't gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses. So, dark playground is doing leisure when you shouldn't be and productivity purgatory is doing productivity when you shouldn't be. So, we have two ends of the same spectrum.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I absolutely love this. These are so, I thank so much for introducing these concepts to me anyway, because I think they're fabulous. And I love that you mentioned Huberman, because he's fantastic and he's got a great podcast and he shares so much wisdom. But that resonated with me so much, because I am a natural optimizer. And a lot of people who are into productivity, who want to be more productive are natural optimizers as well. And that's really what you were talking about, right? I am gonna go on my walk to optimize my productivity. I am going to build a meditation habit so that I will be so friggin focused and optimize my productivity. And I think a lot of the times, that there's many problems with that. But one problem with that is the definition of productivity, because I think, you know,

• 44:49Speaker 01

  this is, this is why in some of my courses, I ask people to do this exercise, what does it mean to you to be productive? Because people are like, well, I want to make sure that I get all my tasks done, you know, inbox zero and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, those are not the things that make you happy. Okay? My definition of productivity is, are you reaching your goals in life? Are you achieving your goals? So, what is it that you actually give a shit about? And how quickly are you getting there? How, not quickly, but how consistently are you making progress towards those goals? Okay? And so, when you think of it that way, you're not gonna go on a walk to, you know, be more productive in somehow, unless there is a very good reason. So, if your biggest passion in life is like, I want the world to lower its carbon emissions as fast as possible.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It's the thing I care the most about. That's my mission in life. That's what drives me. That's what makes me happy. You know, that's how I want to add value to the world. If that's all you do all day and you make yourself go on a walk so that you can sustain that work longer, now I think actually that wouldn't be what you call the productivity purgatory, right? It's just like it's in service of the mission that you have. But if you are doing a shitty corporate job that you really don't care about, what was this guy who wrote this book called Bullshit Jobs, I think, fantastic concept. If you have a bullshit job, you don't care about it and you're close to burnout and you're starting to make yourself go on walks just to calm down so you don't burn out and like now you're doing the thing that you're describing, which I think is really, really bad. So I wouldn't

• 46:16Speaker 01

  say that it's always bad to like go on your walk or do what Huberman recommends or whatever, right? But there's gotta be a purpose to it. And if your, you know, purpose for doing that is I want to, you know, spend, be able to spend more time on the thing that I don't really care about, then you're doing it wrong.

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's, um, it really all just does come back to goals. Like, everything just comes back to, everything comes back to what is it that you want to do? Why do you want to do it? And how are you gonna do it? Like, that's just everything all the way down. I mean, one of the other, one of the other horsemen of the productivity apocalypse, I think, is email. And this is something that I've really, really been struggling with this year particularly. Not that I haven't before, but this is like even more. Give me, give me some words of wisdom around email and dealing with it and either apps or tactics or whatever.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Lot of people deal with email. The thing that I always start with is expectations management and teaching people that you are not going to reply to emails within whatever, 10 minutes, half an hour. This might sound ridiculous, but a lot of people that I talk to that work in corporate environments, they are literally expected to answer their email like within like half an hour. And if they don't, it's weird. You've just got to teach people that you're not going to do it. This was I did, this was what I did when I worked in a corporate environment is I just, you know, refuse to answer emails that quickly a lot of the time and people at some point start to respect that. So that's before we get to any tactical stuff like what app should you use or how often should you check your email? It's just like, try to stem the flow and try to change people's expectations that

• 47:54Speaker 01

  you're not going to do this. Now, beyond that, I'm a real big fan of batch processing. So yeah, I check my email a fair amount throughout the day, but I don't really reply to email all that often. You know what I'm saying? So I'll check it because I want to make sure that this thing came in that I'm waiting for, etc. But I have some time where I sit down and I'm like, tomorrow, I'm just going to batch process like these 40 emails that need dealing with or something like that. And maybe that doesn't take that much time. Maybe it takes a little bit more time. That's okay. But I try to bag it out that way, rather than, you know, 10 times throughout the day, answering this email, answering that email, because that completely destroys my focus. And I find that that, a lot of people are doing that. And they're, it's worse when people are working in Microsoft Teams or Slack, right? And they're on these like chat apps all the time while they're trying to work. And it's like, now, it's not even like a

• 48:38Speaker 01

  couple of times a day. It's just like, the entire time, you're getting interrupted. And there also, you just have to teach people like, you are not going to reply all the time. And if you're in a corporate environment where people don't respect that, I mean, you got to have a conversation with, with people who are managing you or your boss and be like, what, what, what is it that you want me to do here? Like, what is my job description? And what are the, what is the value that I'm meant to add? Have a real frank conversation

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  about that. Am I employed as an email replier? Or am I employed to actually do some task outside of this? Is it, um, is it France that's just brought in that law that says, uh, businesses can't expect their employees to answer emails outside of 6:00 PM to 8:00 AM or something?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't even think they have access. I think it's something like, like, unless workers are in the office, they can't, they can't even take their phones home with them or something. They've even structurally integrated or implemented this.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's quite an extreme way of doing this. But I think, you know, I think people need to take responsibility for this themselves, right? I think you need to go talk to the people that you're working with and just have a conversation and be like, listen, I cannot be on top of my inbox all day because I need to focus on this stuff. Like, this is, you know, the real things that add value in our company, the way that we serve people in our company, require me to focus on stuff. And I can't do that if I'm on top of my email inbox all day. And if the people that you're working with don't respect this, you just need to go work somewhere else. That's what I tell people, like, at some point, if changing the culture is too hard, just go somewhere else where you can do that. Because otherwise, you're just signing up to a life of, you know, what are you, what are you doing? You're just answering email all day and barely getting anything done, right?

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  Tragedy and misery. Right, okay. So let's say that we've set expectations. People don't expect us to reply within 30 minutes. We also understand that batching is good, so that we're not distracted. As Cal Newport says, fracturing the world into slivers so thin that nothing meaningful could get done. We're not doing that. We've got it into these nice little blocks of maybe an hour or 30 minutes or whatever during periods. What about tactical stuff, apps, or integrations that you like?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  I'm always telling people triage. So what happens is you've got a bunch of new emails, unread emails, triage them. And so there's a couple of things, right? It's either this email, you don't need to do anything with it. Okay, great. You know, if you can unsubscribe, good. So you don't get more of those emails next time. Or there's an email that you do need to do something with. Now, it can be quick or fast. Quick, let's say two minutes or less, right? So if there's an email, it takes you two minutes or less time, just flag it, right? And then when you're doing your batch processing, go through all your flagged emails, handle them, unflag, done. You can do this in Gmail, you can do this in whatever mail app you're using, right? Any mail app supports flagging.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  Flag on Gmail, is that the star?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  It's the star. It's the star on Gmail, for sure. Yeah.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Emails that take a little bit more time to deal with, now I recommend creating a to-do for them in your to-do list. Hey, everyone should be using a to-do list. If you're not, then that's where you want to start. Make sure that you set up an app to work on your to-do list. Create a to-do for those emails. So a lot of the times, what people will do is sort of, people have just discovered the magic of to-do lists, right? Of like, a certain app. They'll start forwarding every single email that they ever need to do something with to their to-do app. And now what happens is now their to-do app has like, you know, 60 tasks in it. They're all emails that will take one minute to reply to. And I'm like, that's not a good use of your time, man. Just like, batch process those. However, if it's something that is going to take a little bit of time, you know, if you need to like, write a report or whatever, if you need to do something, forward that email to your

• 52:04Speaker 01

  to-do list app. A lot of apps will let you forward your email to the app, and that creates a to-do, that attaches the email text or whatever, give it an appropriate title, and at some point, you get around to doing the thing, go back to the email, reply, and handle it, and so on. So that's the triaging system that's super important. And that's how I would work with that in your email app. Lot of to-do list apps will have like, let's say, a Gmail integration. For example, one app that I've been using recently is called Todoist and has a very nice Gmail integration. So if you're looking at an email, you can just be like, boop, create a task for this inside my to-do list that links back to the email. I love that, super handy. So there's a lot of tactical stuff that you can do right there. That actually also, I know I keep going back to the messaging apps, but that works also for Slack and Teams.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  So if you're using Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate, you can turn a message into a to-do, really handy. So I want to make sure you don't overdo it, so you don't have, like I said, like 60 really little tasks in there. You gotta find that nice balance of creating to-dos for the things that you need to do, but not going crazy with all the little stuff, because then, you know, you won't see the forest or the trees and everything.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  What about email apps like Superhuman and other stuff? I haven't used it, but everyone that I speak to that's part of some very expensive company seems to use that. And I know that there are other solutions too. Is there anything tactically when it comes to email integration or email apps themselves that you like?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I really don't think that you need to be paying a lot of money to use a fancy email app. I mean, I know that there's a lot of apps these days that the ones that I have to laugh at the most is the ones that promise that AI is going to answer all your emails for you, which I'm always like, maybe.

• 53:39Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, yeah, dude, I'm down for that. I want to be, I want to be made redundant, and then eventually AI can record the podcast and I can just like throw myself off a cliff.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  That would, yeah, I thought you were going to say like, sit on the beach or something, but that took a turn. No, but you know, here's the thing, like, some people get really wild amounts of email, you know what I'm saying? So personally, I get a day, I don't know, a couple dozen emails or something like that, but some people get like hundreds and hundreds of emails. So I understand that if that's the case, then you might need to have a more advanced way of like dealing with stuff. But I don't think that these expensive apps are really going to help you with that. What you really need to do is, like I said, just have a triaging system, sit down at set times, triage your email, unsubscribe from as much stuff as possible that you don't need, set up some filters if you need to, just so you're mostly seeing the relevant stuff. Like, I know people who at work, if it's an email that they're sort of CC'd on, like

• 54:32Speaker 01

  automatically chuck it in a folder that they never look at, because those things are never relevant, you know?

• 54:35Chris Williamson?

  Unless it's directed at me.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. If that's the environment you work in, you gotta do that, that works.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's really not about the app. It's more about having the system around it where you have a way of making sure nothing slips through the cracks. So each email that comes in, I decide what to do with it. Either I need to do nothing, it's a short task, I batch process it later. It's a long task, I create it to do for it, boom. If you do that consistently, unless you're getting absolutely wild amounts of email, that should work pretty well for you. And if you're getting wild, wild amounts of email, hey, you probably just need to pay someone to like manage your inbox for you, right?

• 55:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, now I have an EA or a PA or a VA or something. Yeah, dude, I, I do appreciate that with the, with the email approach that it's the same with note taking for me. So I'm looking at my Apple Notes now, 2,659 notes and I use them for prep for guests. I use them for, I use Apple Notes for everything. And it's so funny that after, you know, an entire lifetime of is it Evernote? Is it Notion? Is it going to be some fancy if this, then that link in with SMS and all the rest of it? And it was staring us in the face the whole time. The ultimate note taking app was embedded in all of your Apple devices all along. And with that, like the simplest way that I've found, I know that I could be smarter.

• 55:55Chris Williamson?

  I know that I could use smart tags. I know that I could nest things within the correct folders and all of the rest of it. But I have an awful lot of information. I rely on my notes for work, for the thing that I'm the most passionate about. And I find it absolutely fine with basically no system because anything that I'm trying to find, because it has a very strong global search, I just type the thing that I'm trying to find in and by design, it's got it written in it because it's a written note taking app. Anything that I want to find from any guest over 650 episodes of this podcast is available in that. And all that I need to do is think of two key words that are unique to that one particular episode and it'll come up.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yep. And it's so funny that you mentioned this. Have you seen the meme about Apple Notes? Where like the dumbest guy-

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  It's the Midwit meme, isn't it?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  It's the what?

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  It's called a Midwit meme, where you've got like the dumb guy and the sage, both using Apple Notes. And the guy in the middle, he's got like Obsidian and Notion and-

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Obsidian, yeah. I love that meme. It's one of my favorite memes because it's so true. I get a lot of people asking me, Peter, what do you think about these link note-taking apps? Like I have Obsidian and then I could create like my own wiki and I could connect concepts to each other. I can build my second brain. And like, no, by the way, I mentioned building a second brain. No offense to Tiago Forte. I think he teaches people a lot of excellent stuff. Fantastic. I just personally find that my first brain is pretty solid and my first brain plus a really simple note-taking app is like perfectly sufficient for me.

• 57:26Chris Williamson?

  Tiago's stuff, Tiago's stuff is, it's built for a very specific type of person with a very specific type of problem. And he is the best in the world. He's the best in the world at what he does for those sorts of people. But I tried and I'm an optimizer, maybe an unorganized optimizer, an optimized optimizer. But like I, I've tried to do it. It just, it doesn't work for me. I can't. It's the same reason why my weekly review for GTD didn't work. It's the same reason why I'm not an intrinsically motivated when it comes to task management sort of person. And what I really like about generally the format that you've gone through today is that it's not a one size fits all.

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  It's not that there are morally better or superior ways to do productivity. You know, I used to think that, and other people may feel this too, that it was almost like a personal failing of mine. That I couldn't, no, I felt like I should be better, whatever better meant. I should be like more or more virtuous, disciplined, moral, motivated, whatever, right? And I would feel bad. I'd be like, oh, I'm not at inbox zero or, oh, my external brain isn't sufficiently organized. Oh, I didn't do my weekly review. And after a little bit- Time, you know, you need to give it a crack and see if it's going to work for you. And there are times where you need to push through discomfort.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  But there are multiple ways to achieve the same outcome. And for me now, working with a team that at least can help to be on calls with me. Can be like, look, I want to go through my emails, jump on a call and we can go through them together. Like that makes it, that makes doing emails fun, almost not fun, but it makes it, it makes it less shit. Bearable. Yeah, makes it bearable. Yeah, precisely. And the same thing goes for the tasks too. Like I could have fought and fought and fought and fought and fought. Here's one thing, I don't even know if I've heard you talk about this, but here's one thing that I love to use Apple Notes for. Which I think is really cool. So I write this newsletter every single week. This newsletter requires a very specific first headspace and second.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  Arrangement of information for me to create the newsletter. So the newsletter is derived from things that I've found throughout the week. And what I use in Apple Notes is I just have a folder that has all of the different elements of each newsletter that I need to do. Plus every past edition of the newsletter. And when I click on that and I full screen my notes out, I'm in a workspace. That has everything that I need and nothing that I don't need and nothing else. And I love, I love using that to almost move me into different modes of thinking. So I'm like, right, I'm in newsletter writing mode. So I press the newsletter thing and I have all of the notes I've taken down and the memes and the interesting studies that I've found.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like, right, well, what am I going to write about today? And I'll peruse through, peruse through, oh, that's cool. I'm going to write about that. That resonates with me this morning on a Saturday or whatever, when I'm writing my newsletter. Throw it in, there's the format. What did I write about last week? I don't want to write about two things that are too similar two weeks in a row. Boom, there it's, and it's done and I just keep on building it. So I love the idea of using a note taking app and then the folders within it as a workspace designers. That you puts you into a state of mind and also gives you the information that you need to move forward.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  You found a minimum viable system to do this for you and it didn't require a really elaborate method or the most sophisticated note-taking app and that's alright and I so appreciate that you emphasized that point that hey, this is working for you and that people shouldn't feel guilty about it because, just to get back to Tiago Forte's Build a Second Brain, right, which is sort of the premier note-taking method out there. Like you said, it works for very specific people and I sometimes work with people like that. I always say, if you're a researcher, right, if your job is like you're an academic researcher, you're reading tons of papers all the time, you need to take notes on them, you're going to refer to them in your newest publication and you have lots of ideas, spinoffs that

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  you need to keep track of and stuff, a system like that probably makes a ton of sense because you just have so much information that you need to organize in a specific way. But going back to my favorite student who runs a company where he roasts coffee beans, like, he doesn't need a system like that. He's not working with that much information, right? He's working with like, hey, which permit do I still have to apply for so I can go sell coffee in this town on Saturday? You know what I'm saying? It's a very different kind of thing and it requires a different kind of system. And it requires experimentation, as you said, try something out. There might be some discomfort. I'm on board with everything that you said, completely true. But it's going to look different than the really elaborate knowledge management system, something like that. And so, I really want people to, if they're going to take

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  one thing away, it's this thing that you and I both harped on, which is, hey, it's not you. Figure out a system that works for you and I would add to that, keep it as simple as you can for it to do the job that you need it to do. So that might be Apple Notes, that works really well, works really well for me as well. It has just enough features for a lot of people. If you're not using Apple devices, maybe it's going to be a different app for you. That doesn't matter. Keep it as simple as you possibly can while keeping it functional because you got to keep the end goal in mind. In the end, the goal is not to have your notes be as organized as possible. The goal for you, Chris, is like, I want to have a banging podcast, right? And so, if it helps you produce great podcasts, then it's great. And even if the system is a little bit messy, doesn't matter if the

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  podcasts are good, right? So you got to optimize for the right thing, I guess is what I'm saying here.

• 1:03:08Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. I love it. Let's bring this one home, Peter. I really appreciate you. I'm a massive fan of your work. I'm really, really glad that you came today. Where should people go? They want to learn from you. They want to see the content that you've got. Where should they head?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Two places. One of them is YouTube. Just search Peter Ruckey's, my name on YouTube, and people can check that stuff out. It's a great introduction to my work. I have a lot of tutorials on there, tech tutorials, like how to get the most out of Apple Notes, for example, but also introduce you to some other apps that you could use to get more organized. I also prepared a little guide. It's called "How to Organize Your To-Dos in 30 Minutes." So if you're someone who's thinking, "You know what? I feel really inspired right now. I want to get on top of my to-dos, but I don't want to take hours to do it." I condensed it down to the shortest format that I could, so people can just go ahead and find that. It's over at organizeyourto-dos.com. So it's a simple one, organizeyourto-dos.com, and it'll just take you 30 minutes.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Peter, I appreciate you. Thank you.