The Definitive Guide To Digital Productivity | Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte is a blogger, company owner and productivity coach. We all use digital tools, and some of us spend most of our lives at their mercy. Today we are going to learn the most effective process for having a productive digital life. Tiago has created nothing short of a curriculum for maximising your digital productivity and on this episode he takes us through his entire process including all his favourite recommendations for apps and tactics. This is straight gold, do not sleep on it. Extra Stuff: Check out Tiago's Website & Courses - https://www.fortelabs.co/ The original blog post which inspired this episode - https://praxis.fortelabs.co/the-digital-productivity-pyramid/ AirPods - https://amzn.to/2Vw8zn7 Pocket - https://getpocket.com InstaPaper - https://www.instapaper.com/ Calendly - https://calendly.com/ Superhuman - https://superhuman.com/ 1Password (Code MODWISDOM for 3 Months Free) - https://1password.com/sign-up/ Things - https://culturedcode.com/things/ Alfred App - https://www.alfredapp.com/ Be Focused Timer - https://xwavesoft.com/be-focused-pro-for-iphone-ipad-mac-os-x.html One Touch To Inbox Zero article - https://praxis.fortelabs.co/one-touch-to-inbox-zero-a74cfa02e5bf/ Hours Tracker - http://www.hourstrackerapp.com/ Getting Things Done by David Allen - https://amzn.to/2LQycPF Evernote (with referral gains) - https://www.evernote.com/referral/Registration.action?sig=a51c13796a1906976e4d676cbcc756e7836bf4767d9d76e822ed017352c3df86&uid=62953055 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're not trained or educated in any way to think of ourselves as creators. And that's the term I like to use creator, you know, because you can be creating anything. It's websites, it's videos, it's interviews, it's events, right? But until you actually step out and really you're putting yourself on the line, right? Like people who are endlessly just accumulating knowledge and accumulate more and more books read. I mean, that is, that is such a, it's such a non-participatory way of living, in my view, you know? Better to read, consume one tenth as much, as much information online and actually put that to use. Rather than just like racking up the, you know, the vanity metrics.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs. We have already bonded over the fact that he too is an AirPods evangelist. And I think that gives you a bit of an idea about what we're in for today. We're going to be talking digital optimization and how we can become more efficient in our online lives. Tiago, welcome to the show.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris. It's really, really good to be here.

• 1:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm excited to go through today. So I'm going to get straight into it. The digital productivity pyramid was a blog post that you wrote about a year ago. And me and a couple of friends came across it. And it was a real frame shift for us. I was super impressed with it. And I think pretty much since then, I've been hassling you in your inbox to try and get you on. So I'm very glad that we've found some time to get the AirPods in your ears and

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  To run through this. So let's take it from the top. Can you explain to people who've never heard of yourself or Forte Labs, which is the blogging company that you run? Or the digital productivity pyramid? Can you explain what it is and your philosophy behind it to begin with?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Sure, sure. So the pyramid really is not a pyramid scheme, I promise.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Uh, it is a, it's a framework. It's a framework that I developed, um, maybe a couple of years ago. I mean, I formalized it a couple of years ago, but it's definitely been rattling around my head for some years. And it really came about when I, when I just realized, you know, as this productivity expert, productivity trainer, productivity blogger, uh, I run around every day making grand promises of revolutionizing people's work performance. And I just realized, well, you have to have some theory of what improvement even means. Right?

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  And I, I looked around at what was out there and all the available ones, you know, more tasks completed seemed completely outdated. Uh, you know, minutes of focus even kind of seemed like overly simplistic. Um, I looked at a ton of metrics. I was super involved in the quantified self movement. For some years I've given a bunch of talks and I just realized none of those did the trick. And so instead of focusing on metrics, on measuring some output, which I think with creative knowledge work is basically impossible. I chose to focus on the skills. What is the ladder, the pyramid of skills that a modern knowledge worker would need to acquire? Um, in order to execute their work successfully. Um, and a large part of it came about accidentally. I actually looked at my courses that I developed.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  You know, each course that I've done came out of the needs of the previous course. Right? I would create a course and then look and then see, you know, the people completing it, what, what are they still needing? What are they still lacking? And then I would create the next course. And I've only done three courses, but those are the first three levels of the pyramid. And now I have my eye on the fourth level, which is starting to emerge. Really it's emerging. It's, it's appearing before my eyes as the next thing that people need. Uh, we can get into what each of one of those are, but that's the basic story.

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Yes. Uh, I was reading Deep Work by Carl Newport recently. I know it's overdue and his publishers sent me very kindly, thank you Carl, has sent me Digital Minimalism as well, which is next on the list to read. Um, but going through Deep Work. Listeners at home who are knowledge workers may not quite understand what we mean when we say that the output is difficult to define. But if you were to think back to a typical job 50 to 100 years ago, cranking widgets, I think, is the term that Carl Newport uses, which is where you would have some machine shop worker, you would have a bucket of undone parts on one side, a machine that was a process in the middle, and a bucket of completed parts on the other side.

• 4:35Chris Williamson?

  It was very easy for you to see when a part was uncompleted, in process and completed. It was also easy for you to track how much was to be done and how much you had done. Whereas it's a lot more kind of nebulous and cloudy and just difficult to define. You wake up with an amount of emails in your inbox and sometimes you go to bed with more, having done loads all day. And you have these serendipitous open workspaces, which Carl's very critical of. Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there, saying that it's difficult to define when work gets done. And your solution to that, as you're suggesting, is to focus on building a lattice work of

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  effective skills and frameworks that you can work upon and hopefully allowing the outputs to kind of look after themselves on the other side. Is that right?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  It is, it is, yeah. And it's not that the outputs don't matter or something like that. It's that they're sort of outside of my purview. You know, I don't, I don't think there is a way, it's like, all the mechanical sort of widget jobs, like you said, have now been taken by machines. The only ones that are left are inherently ambiguous, inherently undefined, inherently unstructured. And by definition, you can't, you know, metrics require repeatability. A metric is only meaningful with a repeatable process. So when you're doing essentially art, and I know people hate the idea that they're artists, but basically, in a way, we are all artists now, defining the problem is like most of the work.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Right, so I guess you can make a metric, you know, problems defined, but it just gets, it just gets really weird. And actually can be, um, can be bad when you focus on a metric to the exclusion of the experience of the satisfaction of the fulfillment, which when you're doing work like we're doing that's creative, you it being motivated and satisfied fulfilled is not optional. That's not like, oh, it's great that you like your factory job. It's like you literally cannot go on. You cannot give of yourself what you have to give to do that kind of work if you're not fulfilled.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  I understand. There is an inherent degree of satisfaction that comes with crossing things off a list. We are, um, as well as being airport evangelists, we're also big lovers of the Pomodoro technique. And using the very obvious crossing off of a list or the coloring out or the ticking off of an item. There is such a, and it's so, it's such a comment, right, on modern knowledge work that we need to kind of artificially create this done, big button that we hit that identifies the fact that we've actually completed something, but it's, it's the antidote to a degree of this, I don't know when work begins and work ends. I think there was a, a statistic that

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  80% of American knowledge workers check their emails after 11 at night and before seven in the morning, like both of them. So you're like, you may be getting up at three in the morning to check your emails, like who? So I, I think you, you're totally right with what you say. So moving on to the pyramid itself. There's some core principles and then there's some layers, some levels, should I say. Where are we going to start?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  I mean, we can just start at the bottom and work our way up.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Let's go.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Okay, so the, well, first of all, let me just say what the, the five layers or levels of the pyramid are.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  The first base layer is what I call digital fluency. And I'll describe that in a minute. The second one on top of that is task management and workflow, basically to-do lists. The third one is habit formation and behavior change, which you're very familiar with. The fourth level is what I call personal knowledge management, PKM, which is essentially storing your knowledge in some sort of digital tool. You know, offloading that knowledge from your brain onto a software program.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  And the fifth level, which is the most currently ambiguous, the most mysterious, but also I think eventually kind of the culmination of all of this, is a framework I'm developing, a methodology I'm developing called just-in-time project management.

• 8:54Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Is that going to be tip of the spear for you?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Probably, probably. Yeah, yeah, it all comes back to the same stuff.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so the basic idea is that the levels go from more, I'd say more basic at the bottom to more advanced or more sophisticated at the top. But I wouldn't really say they go from easy to hard, right? Because what's hard is just whatever level you're currently working on, right? And in some ways, the base level, which is essentially just like how to use a computer, is the hardest, right? If you know someone, you know, I know people my parents' age, you know, if they never learn to do that, basically they're they're kind of not going to be able to take advantage of all the other levels. So, yeah, I'll just talk about that.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Actually, I'll say one more thing about that. So each level builds on the one before. And so what that means is that each level is sort of enabling or setting the ground for the level above it. It's kind of like a hierarchy of skills or a hierarchy of knowledge. It's like you have to start at the bottom, but then, once you create a layer for yourself, you have then the skills and the knowledge to start building the second layer. Um. And then the last thing I'll say about that is there is also this kind of a spiral effect. Sometimes I get people like, okay, I'm just gonna finish one level a hundred percent completely. And then do the whole second level perfectly. But that's not quite how it works. It's kind of more like a cycle. Um. I mean, the the truth is that we're all always working on all levels, right?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  You never completely master any one domain. Um. So, you know, I just took a a um, a course on Mailchimp. Learning how to use, you know, an email newsletter program. And that is at the at the base level. That's how to use a particular technology. Um. But I found that I wasn't able to work at the higher levels until I kind of put that brick in the base of the pyramid, which is how to use um, how to use Mailchimp.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  So you can't do task and management workflow of your Mailchimp system until you've got level one digital fluency with Mailchimp?

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's not always that direct, or I'd say not usually that direct. Um. Sometimes you can learn parts of higher order skills or learn them in a certain way, or learn just enough to outsource them. There's there's different things. Um. But the pyramid shape makes it sound very like, you know, monumental and very rigid. It's really not. I mean, this is human humans, so everything is quite intertwined.

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  I get you. So digital fluency, we're going to start at the bottom. What are some of the skills that people need to be developing there and how can they develop them?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so really this comes from my time working, so actually in high school. In high school, I had a little business fixing Windows computers. Um. And I would go, this was really the start of my, I didn't know it at the time or for many years, but the start of what I would ultimately do. Is I would go around mostly to my parents' friends and then their friends and the neighbors and then their neighbors. Um. Fixing their, you know, this was Windows XP, uh, in most cases. And it was really funny because I would bill by the hour. Um. And a pretty, pretty darn good rate for a high school student. Uh. But then every single time after listening very, you know, empathetically to their their problem, the unique, unique problems they were having, I would just always apply the exact same solution.

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  I imagine there's a lot of physios listening that must feel the same thing. People that do sport like strength and conditioning. I've got this very unique pain in my knee and this, that and the other. And they'll just send them away with the basics that work well.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. My solution was to wipe their hard drive and reinstall Windows XP.

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  You're just playing the game, Thiago. It's fine, man.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  It feels wonderful, but I don't know. I learned a lot in that job. And then in my, in my subsequent job in college, which was at the Apple Store. So that was a similar thing where I was a, one of those people that teach. So I would teach a morning class, you know, at this time, just, and still millions of people around the world were switching to Macs. It was kind of the golden era of switching and I would teach them how to use their Macs. So basically all the lessons from there, I distilled into, what is it? Three times four, 12, kind of specific technological skills, I'd say, or tools. I think you need to know at some point or another. And those are really just basic computer usage. So, you know, turning on your computer, how to use email.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Actually, those are other ones. So how to browse the web, how to use your email, how to send and receive emails. Then kind of getting more advanced keyboard shortcuts for the programs that you use the most, digital calendars. Scheduling apps for scheduling appointments and meetings and things like that. Read later apps. So you read, you know, you find an article online you want to read. You save it to apps like Pocket and Instapaper.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Then we proceed to Inbox Zero. So not just using email, but using it systematically in a way that you're consistently closing the loops in there. Then password management. So you're not having to remember passwords or even worse, use the same password everywhere.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Then there's three more: speed reading, time tracking and text expanders.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm looking through that list in my own mind and realising that even at the bottom level of a pyramid that I hold in very high regard, there's still massive holes in my game. So I think for the vast majority of people, they will consider basic computer usage, or most of the listeners, consider basic computer usage, web browsing, email usage, should be pretty simple, keyboard shortcuts for things like YouTube, K pauses and L and J, jump forward and back 10 seconds, and Command and V and Command and C and stuff like that, I'm gonna guess. Is there, are you familiar with Alfred, Alfred app?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I'm a big Alfred fan.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you are among friends here, Tiago. You really, this is a safe space for you to talk about your snippets and your workflow and everything.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  The listeners at home, head to alfredapp.com. You need it in your life if you're on Mac, and if you're on Windows, unlucky, because they literally do not, do not even make it for Windows.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  So, digital calendars, what do you use? I know that we did this over Google Calendar. Are you a Google Calendar man?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's really just Google Calendar, but I'm still amazed how many people don't have digital calendars. I regularly encounter even professionals with years of experience who are still using paper.

• 15:56Chris Williamson?

  My business partner has a, my business partner has a file of facts, like a one, like week per two pages file of facts thing that he likes to write down and he just likes to have it. I'm like, oh man, it's, it's, it's a curmudgeon when it comes to that. I will convert him eventually, but we don't know. Moving on to scheduling apps. By the way, Google Calendar, like you, it's, I've fully transitioned now from iCal to Google Calendar. And the way that it links in with when you get a flight, like you get an email about a flight and then your flight info's already in Google Calendar with your check-in and it links to the email, like it's, it's so good. It is, it is really good. Scheduling apps, what are we talking about there?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  So I use one called

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Shoot, what is it called? Uh, there's different ones like Calendly, uh, I mean, there's at least a dozen of them. Every, I mean, it's, it's a bit of an issue actually because there's no standard like there is with Google Calendar. So every time I schedule with someone, I have to sort of navigate a new interface. I, I wish someone would just acquire, like merge them all or, you know, acquire them.

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  Someone with a couple of billion can just take all 12 companies.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Please, if you're listening, you've got a couple billion, listen, you know, lying around, just do us a, uh, do us a solid and, and take care of that.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  I get you.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Um, but they, it's, it's a very standard function. It's nothing fancy. There's not that many ways to do it. You know, you, you designate spots on your calendar, um, however long you want to make available. And then instead of, you know, that back and forth of, oh, what time, you know, oh no, I can't do that timeout at this time, blah, blah, blah. You just send them a link and they sort of schedule themselves into your calendar.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Uh, Read Later apps. We are big fans of Pocket here. Um, I love the, uh, feature that Pocket has where it will on mobile turn text to speech. Have you seen this?

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Um, so it basically turns any article into an audiobook and it's pretty, for text to speech that's done on mobile, like it's pretty legible. Um, big fan of that. Uh, Toby as an extension for Chrome. Have you ever tried that?

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Oh no, I haven't heard of that.

• 18:05Chris Williamson?

  So Toby for Mac. Um, this, by the way, listeners, the show notes, I can already tell that the show notes for this episode are going to be absolutely humorous. Um, but Toby for Mac is similar. Every time that you open a new tab, it opens up a list of basically very well curated, uh, Read Later bookmarks. You could imagine it as a very visual favorites list or to be read list. Um, but it's every time you open a new tab, Toby comes up. So it just makes you think it pops it in your head like, oh shit, I need to read that. I need to read that. I need to do this. So it's like, it's quite a useful way to do it. Um, but it does not sync with your mobile device, which is where

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  Pocket, Pocket comes in and wins, I think. Uh, Inbox, Inbox Zero will be a concept that a lot of people, especially my business partner's wife, Colleen, who has like 10,000 unread emails, uh, will be alien with. Can you explain why it's important?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so email is interesting. I'm actually, I'm doing a walkthrough tomorrow on the Superhuman app.

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

  What's up?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Have you seen Superhuman? It's this productivity app that sort of made waves in the past couple of years for revolutionizing the email experience. And it's most known for, it's most known for its eye-popping thirty dollars a month price. Um, and for, and for its waiting list, which has like two hundred thousand people. And they only let, you know, small numbers of people use it at a time. So it's, it's sort of like greatly in demand to even be able to use it. But, but anyway, I think people's email usage goes through phases. You know, when you first, I, I see my younger brother, you know, he's just, just starting in his career. It's like emails is like, it's like postal mail.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  It's this vaguely annoying thing. He pays minimal attention to, takes him weeks to even open it. It's like very kind of low priority, right? Um, and then most people, I think, when you, when you get your first sort of professional job, you kind of have a shock of cold water in the face when you realize, whoa, people expect me to actually keep up with these things.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. This high-pressure hose in the face of, of constant emails. You need to reply or respond, yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  It really is. And, and I think we all sort of do a mix of whatever we can. It's like, you know, survival sinking ship style. Or maybe if we're lucky, we have someone, a model around us who teaches us something about how to use email. Or maybe ideally, ideally, we read an article or take a course or do something like that.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And there's just many, many levels just within that one little thing. And Inbox Zero, to me, it's, it's not just this, you know, kind of bragging right that you have an empty inbox, although that's nice. It's the, it's just the fact that you're not using your email as a to-do list.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Right, which is what most people do. Each email in their inbox is an open loop. It's a task that they have to take care of. And I wrote this article, one of my most popular all time articles. It's called One Touch to Inbox Zero.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Is that the four, four different pathways, is there? There's four things that you can do? Yes, that has been linked by Jordan, who's a friend of the show in our private members group. He put that in as someone had complained about the fact that he couldn't manage his inbox. And he said, man, there's only four things that you ever need to do. So what are the four things? Cause I can't remember.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Let's see if I can remember.

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, here we go. The pressure's on.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  I mean, it's so ingrained at this point. Let's see. I mean, it's either archive immediately. And that's the really the most common case, you know? The amazing thing of emails, we use it for so many things, but one of those things is just notifications.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Right? Just something happened. A package was delivered, a subscription renewed, something happened out there. And you don't need really any, any more than a split second of attention on it, or if any. So it's just archive, just see it, delete it.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Or rather archive, so it's, which is different in Gmail, so you can refer to it later.

• 22:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  The second is make a task out of it. And this is the like, the like, the key feature of any task manager, any to do list app that I ask people to look for. Is the ability to create a new task with a link that goes back to the original email. Like that one little thing is unbelievably revolutionary.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you use?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  I use Things. I've always used Things.

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  Things?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's called Things.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  Never heard of it. Here we go. We're open. Oh, we're opening a portal here, Tiago. Come on, tell me about it.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, Things is just phenomenal.

• 22:44Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  It's made, it's made by a German company called Cultured Code, which I think is key to its success. It doesn't. You know, they're sometimes criticized for their lack of feature development. They release a new version every few years.

• 22:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  But I think that's amazing. Like, I hate when my core productivity apps are constantly releasing new features when I've come to depend on whatever the workflow is.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  So I don't know, Culture Code just has an absolutely incredible design sense. Every little, like, I discover things after years, little touches, little decisions they made that you know they spent hours and hours and hours talking about and thinking about. It's really my favorite productivity app. It's called Things.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is, that is big. Okay, so Things will be linked in the show notes below. I'm excited to go and get stuck into all of these once we get on. So we've got Create a Task from the email which has come in. I'm going to guess, especially for me, a lot of the time, that's if it's not urgent but important in the Eisenhower matrix, that's where I guess a fair bit of the stuff would land. And if it's not just, yeah, your Amazon order has been confirmed, that's probably where like a fair bit of inbox stuff will come to, I guess, especially directly addressed stuff. That's not just like part of a big five-person CC loop that you're not commenting in.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah, there's actually, I pulled up the article here. There's actually, so there's six apps that you can send an email to, but there's actually six actions.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Two of those actions are Archive and Reply, right? So you just delete it, or you actually keep the open loop going by replying in some way. But then the four apps.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  To interject there, Thiago, people may be thinking, I'm doing Pomodoro's, I don't want to interrupt my workflow. The way that I would format that is I would have a designated Pomodoro every four or something like that, that you would actually focus on. Right, the start of this Pomodoro is going to be email work, and then I'll get back to it. Also, David Allen's Getting Things Done, his two-minute rule, I'm a pretty big fan of that. It's like, look, if you can just do it, if it pops up, there's a notification you've left on somewhere, because do not disturbs, not on, which is a bad idea. But you just reply to it, like, crack it out. If it's there and it's in front of you and it's a three-second job, like, just, yes, tomorrow, whatever, like, get it done.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Um, but then the four apps are basically, I said, task manager already read later app is the second one you just something you want to read, but you're definitely, as you just referred to, don't want to now interrupt your email to go read something. It's even worse.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Um, the third is to add it to a reference app, a note taking app such as Evernote or Bear or OneNote or one of these. That's like if you, there's a snippet of text you need to save an attachment, you know, is going to be important. Um, and then the fourth is to add something to your calendar, which is more and more automated these days. Uh, it's usually just a, a little kind of email that you hit yes or accept and then it gets added. So those are the, those are the six, the only six things you can do with any given email.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it amazing that you can distill email down that's this crazy big monster to just six things. Like you do one of these six things and you haven't, you have zero unread emails in your inbox.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I know in one of these days I'll record this, but no one believes this, but um, I do a weekly review every, every week on Monday and it takes me just about an hour, maybe at most an hour and a half. Um, I, I more or less ignore my email the whole, the whole week. Like I'll pop in just if I know something's coming or just to see if there's something important, but I just let it accumulate, let it accumulate because actually on Monday, I want there to be as many emails as possible because then I can batch process all of them in one gigantic session, which is still only an hour. But you know, once you get going and you really get in the mindset of these six things, I mean, it's seconds, you're spending seconds per email, uh, which completely changes the equation.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Uh, password management. This is one that I am very interested to hear about what you use.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  I'm a huge fan of one password.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Uh, it's just the number one plus the word password. Uh, and it's just, I mean, it's just a game changer. Like I used to use the same email, the same password. I mean, I'm amazed I didn't, I never got hacked or had money stolen or anything. And then I, you know, at some point I developed this more sophisticated system where it was like the name of the website plus like the date, like some other variable and then, and then my standard password. And it started taking up so much cognitive bandwidth that I just thought I can't do it anymore. Um, especially now that I, I can see in my password manager, I have over 300 logins. You know, I don't think people realize how many different accounts they have online.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  But basically, one password just, when you need a password, you just hit generate password. It generates this long alphanumeric and symbol string, which is impossible to crack. And then it inserts your username and your password, saves it for you. And then if you ever come back to that website again, it recognizes the website. And you just hit the little Chrome plugin and it inserts it right there. It's just incredible.

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, totally right. I had LinkedIn recently had a data loss. And I must have used the same LinkedIn password as I did for my Deliveroo account. And someone in London ordered themselves like forty pounds worth of Nando's to their, to their address off the back of the fact that, yeah, I'm being, I'm being serious. And then I had to go through this massive rigmarole with Deliveroo. I'm like, I didn't order this thing. It happened, it was on my business partner's business card as well. So he was like, mate, what, what's this forty pounds for? Why were you in London ordering Nando's? And I was like, oh God, that wasn't me. Went back through and sure enough, it was a LinkedIn data breach. So yes.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Use, use a password management or else someone's going to sting you for forty quid's worth of, of takeaway food.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  So next, speed reading.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, speed reading is one I, I kind of have their tendency. I've never done anything with speed reading.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  I think I read, in fact, I know I've tested it. I read quickly, pretty naturally. I think that's from reading so much as a kid. I was such a, such a voracious reader as a kid. So it's not, it's not become a bottleneck for me in any way.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  But just based on what I've seen from others, I think if you don't have that naturally, that it can be a game changer. So I kind of have it there as if that's something that you feel is starting to limit you.

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  Is there a technique to that or is it just trying to read more quickly?

• 29:37Speaker 00

  I don't know the names. There's a few I've seen that seem to produce miraculous results, but I've just never gotten into it.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Tim Ferriss has a good, this is only for books or for Kindle, but Tim Ferriss has a good breakdown of how you can speed read books more easily by bringing your eyes in from the margins and by actually using a ruler below each line to track down, which is kind of, which is, which is interesting. But Tim Ferriss is super adamant. And if Tim says it, I'm, I'm going to probably presume that he's right. Time tracking is up next.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, time tracking is amazing. And it's not like, it's funny. People have really weird sort of associations with time tracking. I think they think of the punch card. They have, you know, trauma from their nine to five job where they had to, you know, be there exactly from this time to that time, or maybe they were paid by the hour. So they sort of, it feels like a ball and chain. But I think when you become more autonomous, and whether that's being a freelancer or an entrepreneur, or just as valid, just being higher up in your organization where you kind of have, you know, freedom to work how you want to work. Time tracking becomes this whole, it becomes basically a tool of self-awareness.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  You know, people, people have such bad intuition about time that, and time is, is, is the currency of life. I mean, obviously, it's, it's just the basic building block of all experience. Until you have a sense, you know, like, I think if I used to quote jobs, like I would have a project, oh yeah, build this website. Yeah, I can build a website in two hours.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  You know, and then you, and then you do the time tracking and actually track that project. And then you look at the end and you see, like, I literally had projects when I was first getting started, when, you know, when I had, could barely pay the rent, that I would make much less than minimum wage by the time all the, the time was factored in.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Like way less.

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  And then I would look at other projects that were, I had some source of leverage, or maybe I reused past knowledge or something. This is actually what got me started with knowledge management, is I realized if I can complete a project in half the time because of this existing knowledge that I've captured, then my per hour rate doubles.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  And I would have like a, like a 50, literally a 50 times differential between per hour, between my lowest paid project and my highest. Now guess which one I should take in the future.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Right? So it's pretty amazing.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  So how are you tracking your time? What are you using?

• 32:04Speaker 00

  So I don't anymore. Actually, I kind of think of it as a phase.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a phase and it, one may come again. Uh, if I need to build up that self-awareness again, but for about three years, uh, I used Hours Tracker, which is a little app, a paid app. I think there's a free version too for iOS. I'm not sure. It might have an Android version by now too. Um, but it's just very simple. You know, what I really don't recommend is automatic time tracking, things like hour, like, uh, rescue time or, um, what's the other one?

• 32:35Speaker 00

  There's another one that starts with a T.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Um, because that you can't, if you make something automatic, so therefore you don't pay attention to it, you can't build self-awareness, right? And plus that data is not useful. It's like, oh, I spent, you know, seven hours today on my web browser. Well, everything happens in the browser. It's pointless. So what Hours Tracker, uh, forces you to do is manual. It's really like a punch clock. You say, I'm gonna do this now and then you, you select that project or that activity. And then when you're done, you say, I'm finished and you clock out. And it's amazing what, what a forcing function it creates, right? Cause once you've clocked in and then you go to reach for social media or email or something else, you go, oh no, I have to protect my data integrity.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  You stay on track just, just because that's what you clocked into, you know?

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get you. So does it work out what you've had on screen versus what you should be doing? Or is that just the back of your mind, your own discipline telling you that you need to stop being and being naughty and sneaking off from the back of the class with regards to you saying not to use social media?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's completely unconnected to your computer. So nothing happens automatically. It's just, um, the way that I, uh, recommend people do it is based on projects and areas. So if you can't, so projects is better. If you can sort of assign this block of time to a specific project, do it. Um, and that requires changing the items that you track occasionally or frequently, which is a little bit of friction. Um, but what that allows you to do is that sort of post hoc analysis that I mentioned, where you can actually figure out what, what things take. And yeah, the important part of this is doing the analysis. You need to export this data to an Excel spreadsheet later. You have to look at it, break it down by, you know,

• 34:18Speaker 00

  month, by season, by client, by project, by all these things. You can do by day of the week. I came up with all these interesting insights. Like, you'll love this one. I found out that my average rate of task completion over a period of like three years was 8.1 per day.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. See, this is the sort of thing that I like to think about before I go to bed at night. Like, that's the sort of stuff. A good evening with a spreadsheet and some nice data in front of me. Fantastic. And that's ours, H-O-U-R-S?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Yep, ours tracker, one word.

• 34:57Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Text expanders. We're talking about Alfred.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Um, yes, yeah. I originally used a different one called ATex, but then they stopped supporting it. So now I use, really, that's, that's the main feature of Alfred that I use besides the search. Is this, they're called snippets. And I have them for my, all the usual stuff, my address, my phone number, my email. You know, when I'm sitting next to each other and I watch them type out their email address now, I'm just like, whoa.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  So, um, the lot of the listeners at home will know what we are talking about, but on iOS, there is an equivalent. If you go to, uh, general, uh, settings, general, keyboard, text replacement, there is exactly the same thing. So if you have a commonly written out sentence, or even a paragraph, um, I have my num, which is actually an artifact of BlackBerry days that they had set in there. They had my num and my PIN, and that would just expand out into your number or your PIN. Um, and you can have all sorts of stuff. Um, interesting. What do you use for, how are you, um, using keyboard shortcuts? What do you want for your address, for instance?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Uh, I just do hashtag A and it inputs my address.

• 36:15Chris Williamson?

  Ah, nice.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Um, I do hashtag P for my phone number. Um, let's see, what else? Um, I have all my websites, you know?

• 36:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  So I have the doll- the dollar sign is the prefix for anything business related. So, you know, dollar sign W E B is my website. Dollar sign T is Twitter, dollar sign F is Facebook. It's like when people's like send, when someone's like, send me your links. It's just like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's brutal.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  It's just like five in a row.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Um, and then actually another really cool use is, um,

• 36:48Speaker 00

  is verbs, action verbs. So when I create a to do and things, so this is something I'm gonna, you know, something I have to do in the future.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Uh, it's tempting to sort of come up with words on the spot, right? So like, let's say you need to email someone. You might word that many different ways, like email. Let's say it's Rob, email Rob, reach out to Rob, follow up with Rob, send Rob.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Get in touch with, there's like fif- like 15 different ways you might say email.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  The i- the issue with that is it's really hard to batch process, right? Those ta- those 15 tasks might be in 15 different projects. So it would take half an hour just to go find them. So what I have is if I do forward slash E and then space, it expands into email colon. And then I write just what I have to email. And I do that everywhere. So what that means, and this is really, really cool, but I can do one single search in my task manager and it will show me across dozens of different projects and different areas, every single task related to email. And then I can just do a massive batch process and send like every single email that I have to send.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. That is, that's really, really cool. Um, my shortcuts that I've gone to, instead of using the hashtag, I'm doing A D D one for my home address, A D D two for my office address, et cetera, et cetera. By adding the number in the same way as you've put the dollar sign, it's unlikely that you're going to type that. Um, Youssef, one of the co-hosts of the show, has, if he writes kind space R E, it expands out into kind regards Youssef Smith at propanfitness.com. But because he forgets that it's there, a lot of the time he gets kind regards regards, because he's continued through it, it's expanded out in all this stuff and then he's written it on the other side. So you need to be careful with your shortcuts. Um, whilst we're on this, Tiago, you should get the Twitter plugin for Alfred,

• 38:37Chris Williamson?

  which allows you to tweet from your Alfred deck. Have you seen this?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  No.

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so what's your Twitter again?

• 38:45Speaker 00

  At Forte Labs.

• 38:48Chris Williamson?

  Forte Labs to show him how awesome Alfred Twitter is. And that's just sent from my, uh,

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  That's sent from my desktop. So you need that as well. So we're moving on to the second level now. Is that correct? Task management and workflow.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. We've kind of touched on this already, but basically, you know, once you have all or some of the computer usage, you know, you're comfortable with a core set of productivity apps, I'd say. You can level that up to really what is GTD? Like this was the layer that was really addressed by GTD, which said, you know, the way that you manage tasks is not, or it doesn't have to be haphazard, random, just reactive to whatever is coming across your plate. It can be systematic. And I'm sure you're familiar with GTD. Many of your listeners will be. That's really how I got my start in the business is I had a GTD course that I created.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  And there's just the five stages, you know, you capture your open loops, you clarify them, organize them, you reflect on your project list, and then you engage with whatever's most appropriate. And this is just a massive level upper. I mean, I think something like a little over 20,000 people have taken that course. And it was created almost six years ago and hasn't been changed since then. And I still get emails every week of people at every age, every stage of life, just discovering GTD for the first time, which is amazing. It's been around for almost 20 years and realizing that there's just a much more sensible, logical way of managing their to-do list.

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  Still relevant.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really is.

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  Can you just lay out so capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage? Can you clarify how you would instantiate those things? Or a little bit of an expansion on each of them and then we'll get on to level three?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Sure, sure. So each one is really just a principle that can be instantiated many different ways. If we're using, let's say, a task manager, which is really just a digital to-do list program. It's quite simple. So capture is really just get it from out there or in your mind somewhere into a centralized place. And that can be done very quickly. It should be done actually quickly, frictionlessly. You asked before how Things does this. It's control space and this little tiny window in the center of your screen pops up. And then you just type the task and hit enter and it just disappears. So you don't even have to so much as switch what program you're looking at.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  So yeah, that's capture.

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  And clarify, so because capture has to be so frictionless, right? You might be in the middle of writing something. You might be in the middle of a meeting. You might be in the middle of a podcast interview.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Because capture has to be so frictionless, you want to separate the actual thinking about what that thing actually is into the second step, which is clarify. So what you're going to do is as you start capturing things, you know, every day or two or three, you're going to come to an inbox, arrive at an inbox full of these things you've written down. And sometimes you're like, what was I even thinking? What does that even refer to? Like you have to really do some clarifying, right? And clarifying can include making it more specific. It can include adding details like who you're supposed to call or why or what the agenda is. It can include what project it belongs to, what the goal of that task is, all sorts of things.

• 42:24Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  And that's step two.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Um. Step three is organize. So, you know, at this point, you still just have this this formless sea of different tasks that you've that you've created. Organize is really just to put those into projects, right? Projects and areas, which are his two distinctions. So what, you know, this, what is this group of tasks over here trying to accomplish? That's a project. This group over here is a different project. This over here is an area. So just kind of grouping them. Uh, and because once you have those groups, you can actually see at a glance, what is the set of commitments? The set of projects that you currently have going, uh, which you can't do if you just have, you know, three hundred random tasks on a giant list.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yeah, you're you are very right. To go back to just the capture thing, a quote that I've been trying to remember that Johnny told me about is, I think it's David Allen, uh, the mind is built for having thoughts, not holding thoughts. Is that David Allen?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  That is.

• 43:19Chris Williamson?

  And that's that's so central, I think, to what we have here. The Zygonic Effect, which is the open loop, closed loop that everyone suffers with. It's the reason that Inbox Zero is a good idea. It's the reason that the two-minute rule is a good idea. That getting things out of your head and into some sort of capture process that is then clarified because the capture was probably pretty quick and rough hewn. Then we've organized it. We've put it into something which is a little bit more, uh, well-formatted and underneath headings of topics or dates or whatever it might be. And then we're going to reflect next.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So up till now, you've sort of been building and accumulating and and defining your your to-do list. But then, you know, all of that goes out of date. Uh, tasks are perishable. It's like fruit. What was relevant yesterday suddenly, in the light of new information, is not relevant. Or especially once days, weeks have passed, you have to actually refresh this list of projects and tasks. Um, and he, uh, David Allen recommends doing this in a weekly review or a monthly review. It's taking some time. And the reason he uses reflect is this is actually not a mechanical analytical process. It's you have to step back and think, okay, why am I doing all this? What is it? Is all this still relevant?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  You know, you don't want to keep the heads down chugging along for too long. Uh, you want to actually think about the big picture.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  So that's the reflect stage and then engage is really just, you know, you, you, you've sort of been preparing all this so that when you arrive at work in the morning. Right. So it's that you have that fresh mind, you have a fresh cup of coffee, you're ready to go instead of, oh, let me start way at the beginning. Thinking of my open loops, checking my email, clarifying, organizing, you actually are ready to just look at your task manager, pick a subset of, in my case, eight point one tasks. For the day and then just actually produce value and get things done like the name says, instead of, you know, doing your work, instead of planning your work because you've. Pre-planned and pre-organized all these things.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  I get you. So with the fact that you're capturing quite quickly and then reflecting on a weekly basis. Where do you draw the line between something comes into your sphere of attention or sphere of awareness? Someone texts you, there's something that needs to be done, someone asks you a question, you realize there's something that you need to get from the store later on, or whatever it might be. When or where do you draw the line between doing the, the action now or scheduling it for later?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  I mean, for things, so, so David Allen uses a two-minute rule. If you just can do it, immediately do it. Right. He, he kind of chose two minutes as the threshold under which it's not worth all this time. Of doing all these things. The thing is that people, and we even talked about this when I was on his podcast, people seriously underestimate. How much or overestimate how much two minutes is, right? I mean, two minutes is like nothing. It's like, it goes by in a second. Right. So you, you sort of have to, in a weird way, there, there's something else that happens too, which is usually when you have one open loop, one thing you're trying to remember to do, you're like, oh, that's fine. One thing I can remember.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Two things, three things, four things. And then you get around like five or seven and it's only then that you realize, oh my gosh, I, I, it's falling out.

• 46:47Chris Williamson?

  I've got crushed under the weight of my tasks here. Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. So, so in a way you have to sort of. Like underestimate yourself. You could keep five to seven tasks in your head, but you have to like it. And it's really, you'd have to train yourself when one open loop arrives or two to think, okay, I could remember these, but let me just capture them. Right. It's, it's sort of, it's, it's a habit. It's self-discipline because over time, you know, you really do have like thousands of tasks every year.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Inbox zero for your brain.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Basically, yeah.

• 47:21Chris Williamson?

  Nice. I like it. So we're moving on to level three. If we, we finished level two there, right? There's nothing else that we need to touch on there?

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, pretty much.

• 47:31Chris Williamson?

  So habit formation and behavior change. James Clear has been on recently, so everyone will be primed and prepped, ready for this one.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yes. So this actually emerged. Um, I had a, my course called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss, which was on that one on GTD. But then, you know, I, I finished the course saying, you know, now you're, now you know it. Now you have it. The only thing you must do from now on is your weekly review. Okay. Put it on your calendar, schedule it and just do it. I was like, oh yeah, this, this will be easy. And then of course, as I follow up with people, as I hear back, that's the thing that they don't do. Right? It's the linchpin, the, the keystone habits. Right? The, the one habit upon which all others rely. And it's hard to do. You know, if you're not used to sitting aside an hour or two a week to actually reflect on everything you're committed to, it feels like this just tremendous burden.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  And I, I guess as well with the, with the increased velocity of capture of to-do lists, if you don't have the reflect, what you've actually done is just pile weight on top of yourself. And you then eventually do a, a, a undisciplined manner, look at this and you just get like, get everything in the face, get hit in the face by these old artifacts of a, a time gone by when you were noting them all down. Um, and it probably even would make some people shy away from being so efficient with their capture because they're, they're giving themselves this future curse that they're going to have to come up against.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  It's true. It's really true. Yeah, it's confronting. It's very confronting.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  You're right.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Um, so, so what the, so I created a, my next course was called Design Your Habits. Um, and it was really at the time, uh, and actually up until just this past December, I was living in Silicon Valley. So I was just immersed in the, the power of habit stuff. I'd go to habit meetups, Quantified Self. Um, you know, I was really into BJ Fogg and all his stuff. I went to the Habit Summit, which is near Ialls, the, the author of Hooked. Um, his kind of behavior change, habit design stuff.

• 49:41Chris Williamson?

  What are those, what are those conventions like?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Oh, they're wild. They're so much fun. It's so much fun because they're just uber nerds in this particular domain. Just completely amping each other up to be even more nerdy.

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man, I love it. I love it. I'd love to be a fly on the wall there.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  It's like Comic Con for productivity.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get it. Everyone's tracking everything. There's people walking around with those laptop holsters that kind of attach around your shoulder.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, um. Uh, the, so this course, it really teaches a sort of a systematic process for forming any habits. Um, and in the pyramid, the, I chose specific habits. Um, because essentially, so weekly review is kind of the key stone habit of task management of GTD, but there's other ones as well. Right? For capture, there's something called the collection habit, which is that thing I mentioned of just, just it occurring to you in the moment. Right? It's not a habit that you do like at nine AM every morning, but it's like, the trigger is, oh, I'm trying to remember more than one thing at once. And then the habit is to actually write that down.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  For the clarify stage, then the the habit is next physical action. So it's basically just to always, when you do write down that task, to write it specifically. Instead of like, oh, figure out new computer. No, it's like, OK, like install operating system and then, you know, like very precise.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  By next physical action, there's there's two things that are coming into my mind here. One of them, I think, is a Pomodoro technique, which is the advice that they have for writing down to do list tasks is a description of the state that your life will be in upon completion of that task. But it sounds like your point here is closer to what James Clear touches on, which is, what is the first step which I need to take, which puts me on the path of this particular process? Where do we lie in between those two?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think you're right. They are very different things. And how you describe like describing end states, I think that's more for goals or outcomes for me. That's the the long, relatively long distance thing. So next physical action is really a great insight from David Allen. It's just the it's the insight that often we define our tasks as essentially mental operations, you know, like ponder, reflect, you know.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  Ruminate about this particular thing.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yes. Spend 32 minutes ruminating about topic X. And and it's tempting to do that, especially with with modern knowledge work, which is so cognitively demanding. But it's it's an issue too, because mental operations, they tend to just sort of like, they're not concrete, not tangible, they don't really have a clear beginning and end. It's not clear when you've done them. Right? Um. So it's much better, uh, according to this methodology to just say, what is the thing you'll have to do? In order to do that thinking, right? Like he gives the example, decide, like decide seems very clear cut. Oh, you just like go into your brain and you make a decision, but almost always, if you can't make that decision instantly,

• 53:04Speaker 00

  there's something you have to do. You have to talk to someone. You have to make a list of pros and cons. You have to do some brainstorming, something, right? Uh, and it's better to write down that task because then it's something you can achieve, you can accomplish, rather than just some ethereal, you know, idea.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So what is the literal next action that you need to take? That progresses you along whatever path has been laid down through the collection?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So organize that project list.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the project list probably doesn't sound like a habit, um, but it's essentially the habit of maintaining it. Um, this is something I teach in, in the, in actually two of these courses, but, um, your project list is an absolutely fundamental piece of your productivity. It's really, it's really, um, something that's unavoidable. Uh, you know, people tend to think of their, of their work in terms of tasks, which is too low level. You know, they're too, especially if you follow this method, they're too specific for you to really see the big picture. Uh, whereas goals are too, are too big picture, right? It doesn't help you to know in three years, you want to have your, your villa in the south of Italy. Okay. Well, I just need to know what I'm supposed to do now.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Um, and project, projects are really that medium resolution, right? It's like the medium elevation where they're tangible and concrete enough that you could see the path more or less to get there. Um, but also big enough that they could actually have a huge impact. You know, if you successfully complete a major project, that is a huge win. Um, and David Allen has this quote that he, you know, he, he has the same, uh, kind of preoccupation. He's like the, but the biggest thing that I'm mystified by is the number of high performing people that just do not have a project list. Like they just don't maintain it. So that's the habit.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  You are right. So how do you actually instantiate that? Is it just once you have your rough hewn bunch of things that you've put down, you're lumping them into a clearly defined set of categories?

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's just it's it's assigning your next actions, your tasks to their appropriate projects. But also, it's a way of thinking too, right? It's just thinking in terms of projects instead of like, hey, learn Spanish. That's a classic one. I see. Oh, yeah, that's a goldmine. Learn Spanish. Okay. But that's not a project, you know, it has no end. You don't reach a day where, you know, you just like have learned Spanish. It's an it's an infinite game. It's a never ending thing. And so much better than that is to pick a at first small achievable thing, like complete Rosetta Stone or complete the Babel modules for Spanish. Beginner, just beginner ones, right? Then you can achieve that project and then like think about what you learned,

• 55:55Speaker 00

  formulate a new project, really on the way to any goal, especially any, you know, major goal. There should be a step, a long series of stepping stones. And those stepping stones are whole projects, you know? I do this case study in my other course, Building a Second Brain of redesigning my website. If you really break down redesigning website, it's like a dozen different projects, right? Because you have to like create things, you have to create, you know, I had to create my brochure because I wanted to put it on there. I had to get headshots. Oh, my gosh. Getting headshots is a whole project by itself. And then only when I'd completed most of those dozen projects, did it even make sense to touch the web design itself.

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I'm going to guess that as we move down, we're going to touch on this. But have you got a way whereby people take goals or overall the overall ephemeral stuff and go top down and turn them from goals and objectives into projects and into actions? Because we're kind of going bottom up here, right? Like something appears in your sphere of awareness. It then gets instantiated in and lumped into one of the projects. But if you don't have your projects there, you can't do this.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is very funny. I get this question a lot because. Essentially, no, I don't really do that.

• 57:11Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  And the reason, I think, so a couple of reasons. First is that that's what most others do. And there's definitely huge value in it. But every productivity book I've read, goal-setting methodology course I've done is that. You know, is what is your, what is your 10-year vision, your long-term thing, the life you want to have? What are your goals, all these things? And then they sort of cascade those goals down into specific outcomes and then projects and then tasks. And that has value. It's super, it's super good to do. I do it from time to time. But the, my general philosophy that you'll see in this whole pyramid, actually, is something that I haven't seen, which is sort of like emergent productivity. Right? In an environment where you don't know what the final goal is, right?

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Where you're doing ambiguous creative work, where you're, as we said before, discovering what the goals are as you make progress on them. You have to let things emerge. Right? You have to, you have to sort of do a fundamental series of activities that produce a value. And then as you see the value you're producing, you sort of take a step back and you go, oh, there seems to be a lot of value being produced in this part of my life. Let me now retroactively think of a goal that makes use of that value.

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

  So the listeners who tuned into the James Clear episode from a few weeks ago will know that James talked a lot about this. He talked about our genes do not predetermine, but they do predispose. And he suggests the fact that someone who has both a talent or capacity in a particular area and a passion is a very dangerous individual for whatever that domain of competence is. And obviously, what you're allowing to happen there is, I'm just going to start doing stuff. Just do some stuff and see where I appear to be effective. And the places that you are most effective in, probably quite likely, will be where your

• 59:10Chris Williamson?

  competence is highest and also your motivation or feeling of fun. The metric that James uses is what do you do that to you feels like fun, but to everyone else feels like work?

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  And wherever that lies is, you know, okay, we'll start to exploit that a little bit. We'll have a look at, we'll have a look at what happens over on that side. Oh, maybe I'm getting a little bit bored of that. But, you know, you've, you've started to gear yourself towards that in a very bizarre way. It's a very philosophical solution to what is an incredibly modern problem, isn't it?

• 59:48Speaker 00

  It, it can get pretty philosophical. It, it is fundamentally a different approach. I'd say not only to productivity, but kind of to life. You know, it's like, it's like you're, the point of your life is not to conform to a set of a priori objectives that you imagined at some very early immature stage. The point of life is to experience life, right? And to experience it in a not always controlled way, right? Like to, to fully, I was just writing about this in a blog post, like, you know, it is the lack of control of life that allows life to be exciting and invigorating and just,

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  just from time to time, absolutely terrifying. But, I mean, life is worth living because it's unpredictable. And I think I'm sort of like putting that into my productivity philosophy by saying, allow your goals to be discovered or even in a, in a way to discover you. Allow your, your goals to set you instead of you setting your goals.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  I love that. That's really, that's a really nice way to put it. And I doubt that many people would have presumed that a digital productivity pyramid would have encapsulated something that was quite so fluffy and philosophical and conceptual. But here we are. So we're moving on to reflect the weekly review, which is the linchpin, as you said, of this particular, this particular habit set.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So it's it's really a habit. This is the only one of these habits, actually, that is sort of fixed in time. You know, you can say, I think David Allen recommends Wednesday afternoon. Everyone has their theory of, oh, the one time you must do it.

• 1:01:27Chris Williamson?

  When do you do yours?

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  I don't. So I actually don't have.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God. Thiago, we're rumbling you on a minute basis here.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  I know. Everything. It's clear that I don't follow my own advice. But um. Uh, so my, so, okay, I always do it around the same time. Actually, that's not even true. The way that I do my weekly review is based on the level of perspective that I need.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Um, and this is, this is actually the thing. Looking at this whole pyramid, every time there's like a fixed recommendation, you have to do it this way. Really, that's a spectrum, right? It can be adjusted up and down depending on your needs. And I think that's a higher level of sophistication. You know, you, at first, you you slavishly follow the two-minute rule, and that's useful. You want to discipline yourself according to that standard. But then you realize, oh, actually, you know, an example is when you come back from vacation. And you have, you know, two thousand emails or something to read. If you follow the two-minute rule, you're going to be doing nothing but answering emails for three and a half days.

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Right? So in that case, you have to adjust that threshold down to, say, thirty seconds. And only actually respond to something that is like really, really fast.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Um, and the same thing is true of your weekly review. So, you know, sometimes I'm working, it's clear, it's clear to me what I need to be working on for a few weeks at a time. Right? If I'm working on, say, a manuscript of my book, right? I don't need, in fact, it's actually bad. It throws me off course for me to grind that to a halt. You know, all that mental momentum of like the manuscript to stop. Oh, no, no, no. It's it's Wednesday at three thirty P M. I have to do my weekly review.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  You want to actually just just maximize that forward momentum.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Um, but when I know I need to do my weekly review is when I wake up in the morning and I just had this feeling. I'm not sure what I should be doing today. To me, that's the trigger of, oh, it's time to take a step back, re redo reconnaissance on all my projects. Redo my calendar. It's like get everything back into shape. So that I can have that clarity again.

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  I get it. Also, I totally understand what you mean about the fact that upon instantiating a lot of the strategies that we're going through today, these rigid rules are a good way to do them. It's the same reason that when anyone who's ever taken a martial arts class, they will learn how to jab and the process for a jab or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the, you know, taking whatever the fundamentals are, are quite rigidly defined because it is a useful framework for a beginner to layer their non-existent understanding over. But this conversation between myself and you is like a blue belt talking to like a

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  seventh degree like black belt. And you're now in this place where you are able to feel with a lot more fidelity and play around with the parameters of what the emergence of these strategies actually means. And it's that the weekly review is there every single week at the same time to create this framework and it makes you accountable and it gives you this, this repetition so that you learn to instantiate it. But you are right, like you would, the reason it's there at weekly is presumably a week is around about the iteration like length that's, that's about right for you to need to do it, but completely

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  correct. Sometimes it might be a month, sometimes it might be twice a week. So yeah, I think you're, you're allowed to, when you, when you're Thiago Forte, you're allowed to, to play around with the rules and break them sometimes.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's, it's the same thing in any domain. I think you're right. You know, in writing, you can only, you can break the rules and produce incredible innovative pieces of writing, but only after you've mastered them. Right? If you're a beginner trying to just break rules, it's just going to be, you know, nonsensical, you know, whatever.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because it's not emergent from an understanding of the rules themselves, right?

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. So engage context slash priorities. I don't know what this means.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the, so Alan has this idea of context, which is the, the, the way you should decide what to do at any given time is based on the context in which you find yourself. Right. It's not based on strict priority. It's not based on, it's just based on, so for example, you know, if you are on the train and you only have your mobile device, let's say, you should only do tasks that are unminable. That makes sense to do on your mobile device in that situation, right? You shouldn't sit down and try to like, uh, do some big, heavy lift if you know that you're going to be getting off in 10 minutes. If you are, you know, walking through the city and you have your phone, you should make phone calls. You shouldn't try to like, I mean, you could walk and like be typing on your phone or something.

• 1:06:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  But that doesn't make sense while, while walking through a city. You should make phone calls.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Right? So, and that's different from priority. It's like, it's basically saying that the, the top priority in any given moment depends on, in his case, he said, the, the energy you have, how much energy is, is available to you, the tools you have, how much time you have. And then finally, last is the actual urgency, the, the priority of it.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I guess there's probably quite a lot of devils in the details with regards to that, this final one, this engage context and priorities. I imagine like creating a formalized framework for this and instantiating it's probably a bit more, a bit more difficult to define. It's probably an experience game a little bit.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  So once again, you can take his four contexts. As a starting point, I don't find them all that useful anymore. I, I have some, some writing I've done about this where, you know, in the past, your tool largely determined your context, whether you had your computer, your phone, you were at the office, not at the office, but now with the phone, with a smartphone, you know, GTD was formulated before smartphones, you could in theory do anything, anywhere at any time.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're totally right.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  So, so I have a, a post on this called productivity for precious snowflakes.

• 1:07:30Chris Williamson?

  That's a great, such a great title.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  It's one of my all time most popular and most favorite posts, still comes around on Twitter once in a while, but basically it's it's that I'm proposing a theory that the new sort of constraint on what you can do is your mood. That how you what you feel like doing basically is the best basis on which to choose what to do, which requires, you know, a 5,000 word post to fully explain, but I'll let your readers find that if they're interested.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  They'll track it down. So we're moving on to level four. We're high up on the pyramid now. We've got a nosebleed. We're terrified of heights and we're looking at personal knowledge management. And I know that some of the co-hosts will be very excited for this because this is part of your building a second brain course.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  That's right. So this is my my current area of focus. Essentially, after the two previous courses, I noticed that, you know, people would have incredible testimonials from GTD. I have my whole to do list, my tasks completely organized. My habits are great. That's all wonderful. But it always came back to knowledge, right? Like, I seem to know things, to have subject matter expertise, to have work experience, to have professional, you know, wisdom, speaking of wisdom. And I'm not sure where that goes. It doesn't seem to go into all these productivity apps at the very bottom. There's no place for it there. It doesn't seem to go into the five stages of GTD, which is all about action.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  There's no place for it in habit formation. It's just kind of there. And I started noticing in my own work. So usually what happens is my I'm at the at a frontier of knowledge and then my audience is just behind me, right? So it's like I'm encountering the wilds of whatever is next. And then I can I can hear them in the back, just a few steps behind in many cases, just like clamoring for the solution. And that's what's kind of propels me forward. But I read the actually the updated edition of GTD, which which was in 2015 and came out. And he says all these times, you know, there's actionable information tasks and then there's reference information, which is everything else, right? And he keeps saying, I think seven or eight times, he says, you know, reference information

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  is one of the most powerful, high potential ways of completely, you know, revolutionizing your productivity. But then he just doesn't say anything. It's like, essentially, that's amazing. Yeah, it's outside the purview of GTD. And I just thought, oh, my gosh, like, this is the next frontier. This is what's next.

• 1:10:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Right? Like, GTD, in my opinion, solved tasks. It's gonna be around 100 years from now. But there's this whole other thing, which is everything else, right? And I just started, you know, trying things for my own. This is how it usually happens. I experiment for my own, I start reading books, I do interviews, I do consulting projects, and then through all this activity, which I have to do to pay the bills, fortunately, something emerges, which is this thing that I now call building a second brain, which is the, kind of the brand. That's my particular take on a field, which is actually, I discovered a pre-existing academic discipline called personal knowledge management.

• 1:10:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I didn't know that. Interesting.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's young. It started in the 90s. I've interviewed the guy who sort of coined the term, actually, in a paper. But it's a thing, you know, it's related to what's called personal information management, but I think different, and that it's focused more on like, your tacit knowledge, your personal experience, your subject matter expertise. And there's starting to be conferences on it, there's, you know, academic journals specifically dedicated to it. And now, as far as I know, I'm one of the first sort of brands or products that is there to teach people how to do it for themselves.

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So I'm looking at progressive summarization, P A R A, and workflow strategies. Can we run through those?

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So my methodology that's emerged over the years has three sort of legs to the stool. And they correspond to the three, I have stages of my own, just like GTD, which is the stages are remember, connect, and create.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's essentially the three things that you do with knowledge. What do you do with knowledge? You first of all have to remember it. You have to know it's there, be able to recall it. That's the first stage. The second is you have to connect it. You know, you, you, you, you want to do more than just stockpile, you know, bricks of knowledge in a warehouse. You want to actually mix and match it. You want to see, oh, this is like this. This is different from that. This sheds light on this other thing. It's like, that's what, that's what creativity is, is making connections between things. Um, and I have a second. So progressive summarization is my, the method I've developed for the first stage, which is remember. Para is the organizational system I've developed for the second stage, which is connect. And workflow strategies is, is the third one for the third stage, which is create.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  And basically, um, what this has to do with is, um, my, my belief, which is that you only know what you make.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  And that's actually a quote, um, in Latin, it's vedum ipsum factum. Um, from this 18th century, I think, Italian philosopher. And it's, it actually very succinctly describes a philosophy of knowledge, which is that, you know, until you actually know it through experience, right? Embodied experience, you've actually taken action on it. You've made something out of it. You have tested it in some way. It's not actually your knowledge. It's just information, right? If I read a book on, you know, horticulture and I have 10,000 words of notes on horticulture, that's not knowledge for me. It's knowledge for them, but to me, that's just information. But if I go out and, you know, plant an orchard and try all these things, make mistakes,

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  trial and error, then I can slowly convert that information into my own personal knowledge.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  You've transcended the ability to remember as well. The listeners who are familiar with the Feynman technique, I guess, leverages something which is quite similar to this. Which is that it's your job not only to read something, remember it, latch it on to the existing pieces of information that you have in associated and non-associated fields, but also finally to then be able to re-explain it to someone who has no understanding of whatever the field is that you're talking about. And that's like the icing on the top of the cake, that the final keystone in the bridge, so to speak, that locks everything together, right? Like, if you can do that, the rest, all of the other stages really kind of are just allowing you to do that.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Yes, that's exactly my belief, is this this entire pyramid, the whole reason it's worth doing is to create new things, right? It's to actually produce something of novel value in the world that would not be there if it was not for you. Without that, this is all just like, really like, kind of like navel gazing. It's just like, what's the word? It's just like widget making for, it's not even widget making, it's just like-

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  You're not making anything. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're not making anything. At least widgets are useful, you know, you can install them places.

• 1:14:59Chris Williamson?

  You, you touched on it at the very beginning, Youssef, that all of the listeners will know, one of the co-hosts, he describes himself as a furious indexer of information. Like, his, his evernote, I want to say is like up to between five and 10,000 notes on there now, and it's, the meta tags are unbelie, I mean, it would be like, it's like heaven for you, Tiago, you would, you'd love it. It's all very, very beautifully designed. But his point is that it is just ruthless indexing. And when you don't actually then bring that forward into something, and as a perfect example for me, and some of the listeners might think as well, like, oh, well, I enjoy reading, I enjoy personal development,

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  maybe I enjoy sci-fi, and maybe I enjoy every, like, you know, whatever form of media it is, but I currently don't have an outlet that gives me a creative medium in which to put this on display. And that was one of the main reasons for me- I started this podcast that I didn't have a um a platform in which I could talk about things that I was interested in. And then begin to layer on top of each other, all of the different things that I was learning about as I went on. And then I'd speak to you or James Clear or Rory Sutherland or, you know, whoever it might be.

• 1:16:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:16:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I've now augmented my existing understanding with that. And not only have I had my understanding and their understanding, but when we've discussed them and brought them together, the sum has been greater than the whole of the parts. And I now have leveled up and I know all of this extra stuff that I didn't even know existed before.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's, that's absolutely key. And it goes back to that thing of being artists. We're just, we're not trained or educated in any way to think of ourselves as creators. And that's the term I like to use creator, you know, because you can be creating anything. It's websites, it's videos, it's interviews, it's events, right? But until you actually step out and you really, you're, you're putting yourself on the line, right? Like people who are endlessly just accumulating knowledge and accumulate more and more books read. I mean, that is, that is such a, it's such a um non participatory way of living, in my view, you know? Better to read, consume one tenth as much, as much information online and actually put that to use,

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  rather than just like racking up the, you know, the vanity metrics. I, I think that's, that's what it is.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

  I, I agree. Um, just briefly, before we move on to the pinnacle at level five, I wondered if you could just give us a brief explanation of your progressive summarization strategy. I know for many people that, and me included, it's selfishly for myself. I like to read on a Kindle Paperwhite because it's low distraction. My phone is fettered with work stuff that I can't really get away from. So for me, exporting notes and I don't want to interrupt my read flow to. Create notes and for listeners at home, they may also have the problem of I read something.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  I can maybe do a little review in my head at the end of each chapter. But four or five or six chapters deep, I can't remember what was in chapter one. And then what is your, your process for you're reading a book or you're reading a very long article, a big chunk of information? How are you? How are you noting that down?

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. The thing is though, Chris, I have a call in three minutes.

• 1:18:37Chris Williamson?

  Shit, right. We're going to go to the top of the pyramid, just in time project, project management. What's happening up there?

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  So really coming back to that idea that projects are like the best unit of measurement for modern work. Just in time, project management is basically a new, just a new way of thinking about projects where instead of planning far in advance and having very detailed timelines and Gantt charts and all these things, just as the name implies, you do it just in time. You do, you do it at the last minute.

• 1:19:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  And I know it's so, so for the very same reason that just in time manufacturing, which is where I borrowed that from, completely revolutionized manufacturing, which is that when you, so if you think about it, everything else being equal, the best time to do something is at the last minute, right? When you do something right before it's actually needed, you have as much information as possible, right? You have as much wisdom as you can gather. The, the solution you're creating is actually close in time to the problem that it's trying to solve. So you're not going to be creating something and then weeks or months pass and it's no longer valid. Coordination is easier. You can bring, bring together everyone that needs to be there for that solution just when it's actually needed.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Instead of like, oh, can you send me that thing that's happening in three months? The only reason that we can't, that that sounds totally irresponsible and it sounds impossible is we've lived in a world full of friction. Right, you had to mail things around, you had to schedule meetings, you had to go find knowledge in a library somewhere. But what I've found, and this has emerged almost to my surprise, is that when you have your knowledge externalized in a central tool, like in building a second brain, you can, instead of starting from scratch with each new project, "Oh, let me go research this thing, let me go read a book." You have all these little packets, these atoms of knowledge, already at your disposal. And what a project becomes, really, is just looking at what's available, snapping together

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  these modules, like Lego pieces, right? And doing it just in time, so you have as much information as possible about the problem you're solving. And then just snapping it together, and there's your project.

• 1:20:46Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  And this results in these... I have a 21-part series on this on my blog, where I really get into some insanely minute things, that I'm sure your audience will... some of your audience will love, but it's behind my paywall. So some of my blog articles cost $10 a month to read. I want to give that disclaimer. But if someone's interested in that, that's, you know, 21, 22,000 words, just on just-in-time project management.

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Thiago, I don't want to take up any more of your time. Today has been exactly what I wanted it to be. It's been fantastic. Before you leave, can you tell the listeners where they can find you online, where they can head to get more of this information if they want it?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Yes, really, my website is the portal to everything else. It's Forte Labs, F-O-R-T-E-L-A-B-S dot C-O, not dot com, dot C-O. And that has links to my blog, my courses, my social media, my email newsletter, really, everything.

• 1:21:45Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Thiago, it's been an absolute blast. I hope you've revolutionized a lot of people's workflows. And speaking of just-in-time, you have about 30 seconds before your next call. So we've nailed this on the head. Thank you so much for your time, man.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Perfect, Chris. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. I'm really happy to talk about this, and let's do a part two of that.