#660 - Peter Akkies - 7 Hacks To Master Your Productivity & Get More Done

21:51You 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. I'm a hairdresser, I'm a barber, I'm a personal trainer. 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 structure of that. But when it comes to designing a daily schedule, what are you thinking about there or what are you talking to with your clients? 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?

22:32And 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 communication on Slack or Microsoft Teams. A lot of knowledge workers find themselves constantly communicating and that can completely wreck your focus. So I was 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?

23:02Can 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? 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 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 Again, can you actually set aside some time to do your bookkeeping?

23:32I 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 all right, 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 after Do in a month just a deal with that and you started doing that and actually worked out really well for him You know, he's like hey now 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.

24:07It's not true. We have constraints. Got to work around them. And like you're saying, you got to 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. So 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. Because I see a lot of people, they feel guilty, because they hear the cow new port does this time blocking a certain way.

24:40And 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. 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? 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?

25:18You lose the ability to focus and to do the important stuff people email you're like, hey Jack Can you do this for me today? Oh sure I'll get right on it And 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. 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 that's great for you Go to it early in the morning.

26:02It's 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 a .m. And that's the only way to like live their life. I'm like, if you want to wake up at 5 a .m. Like go for it, that's great. But you can also be perfectly productive if you wake up at 10 a .m. It really doesn't matter. All that matters is what you do with the time that you're awake.

26:28I 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 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.

27:03But one of the things that we've spoken about there is this sort of relationship between goals, tasks and schedule or routine. 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 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? I love this question because a lot of people conflate those two things.

27:45I 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've got to do for your home. Then there is things that you do that are about your relationships with other people, right?

28:17Scheduling a meeting with someone or taking someone at the lunch or whatever. And then there's work. And for a lot of people, that's a good basic division to start with. 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.

28:46And 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, you know, hobby stuff on Saturday afternoon, right? Or like Friday morning, I'm going to work on writing my book. 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.

29:20But 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. Now, always recommend that over starting with your calendar because if you're looking at your calendar is like, oh, I'm going to work on, I don't know, email from 12 to 1 and 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.

29:49A lot of people have a very negative relationship I think with that to do list. You know, you should be making life easier for you. It It should be 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 that to do list, they open it up and it's just this big black hole scary monster. What can people do? Man, I'll try to answer this in less than 30 minutes because this is one of my favorite topics.

30:25There'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 hates looking at there 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 when 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.

30:57So 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. The problem is not the list that you made. And it's actually very revealing. 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 is quarter and that's really valuable because then you can start prioritizing is that fun?

31:31No, 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 you're to do this is just a reflection of your commitments and And extremely valuable at that because it forces you to sit down and make deliberate choices about what you want to spend your time on. 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're going to do a finite amount of things.

32:01The 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 in your life in a very meaningful way. 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.

32:39They don't know what 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? 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 these things, you're just not quite sure what you should work on next. Now we have a priorities problem. So it's back to the goal setting. Like, what What are your goals?

33:09Which 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 gonna take some introspection over time. Maybe you gotta do meditation, you gotta take some drugs or something, I don't know what you wanna do, you gotta figure that out somehow. 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 gonna be revealing this problem to you. So it's like you're saying that to -do list It never causes the problem.

33:38It's just revealing the fact that you haven't set your priorities. 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 in a friggin' walk, and ask myself of all the things that I care about in life, 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.

34:11Okay, I should look at my tasks. Which one of these tasks is it going to give me the biggest ROI on increasing my business revenue? That's the one that I should work on. So you got to start earlier if that's the problem. 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 20s is burnout.

34:43So 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 it would have periods every sort of three to four months or so where I'd be in bed for three days and it would always 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.

35:19What about you? What's your burnout story and what have you learned about dealing with it and pulling people back from the brink? Yeah, burnout is such an interesting topic because I dealt with that myself. It's about six or seven years ago now. I was working as a consultant in the US and wasn't even a particularly bad firmer 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 getting like my heart rate was way too high and my blood pressure is too high. I ended up stopping work for a while and I had no clue what was going on and took me a year and a half before I started seeing a therapist.

35:55So 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 this nebulous concept that it's 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 really bad for a while.

36:26And I know it was like a kind of like a loss of resilience almost. 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 freaking 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 basically like vacuuming the house or like I would have 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 no I like I actually feel like getting a coffee and then I would change directions and go to like a place to get coffee and then halfway there I'd 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 and this lack of capability really hit me hard because because it really, my identity was as someone who's capable and can learn.

37:20And that was really painful. But 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 over committed themselves at work were pushed way too hard. They're dealing with a lot of the same stuff. And I think 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 getting the results that I wanted, started to stress out, pushed myself harder, and you enter a vicious circle where you stress yourself out more, you perform worse, you push harder, and you get more stress, etc.

37:57And so for me, the solution to a lot of that was pushing less hard and actually trying less hard, which was 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 sort of the link that it is there for me is a lot of people who experience the 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 I have a plan.

38:35That's very important in that I see in a lot of people today. But I certainly wouldn't want to give medical advice to anyone with burnout. But I love sharing my own experience because it was really transformative in my life. Bringing order to chaos is I think what most people are trying to achieve. Just generally at least 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 I need to bring order to it. Some people brought order to it by being overbearingly protective of themselves and their loved ones.

39:10Some 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 But it kind of relates to burnout 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, I don't 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.

39:59So, 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. 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.

40:37Like all of these different things that basically even your leisure activities become a productivity activity, right? And that's why 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 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.

41:18And one of my friends, George, who's a fantastic writer, talked to me about this and said, and 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. That the only button that you have to push is more productivity, more productivity. More, yeah. Yeah, whereas in reality, a lot of the highest leverage things that you can do are creative pursuits. The idea that you have that 10Xs or 100Xs, 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.

41:59Or it happens when you're trying to fall asleep on a night time. Or it happens when you're finally on a walk in your phone's died. Or it happens when you're on a plane and the Wi -Fi'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. But an outside of both of those things is life. And life is not necessarily something that feeds into either of them and yet it can.

42:27Right? I think the best way to avoid the productivity perghtry, 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. Why don't 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 gonna get jacked I'm not doing it because Andrew Cuban told me that it's gonna improve my focus I'm doing it because I fundamentally enjoy what it consists of and for other people it might be Birdwatching or watercolors or Whatever sex parties.

43:06I don't know 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, to be 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 unerned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self -hatred and dread.

43:41Sometimes 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 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 I absolutely love this because 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 Cuberman because he's fantastic and he's got a great podcast and he shares so much wisdom.

44:20But 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 or natural optimizers as well. And that's really what you were talking about, right? I am going to 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 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?

44:54Because 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's not that 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 and somehow unless there is a very good reason.

45:24So if you're biggest passion in life is like I want the world to lower its carbon emissions as fast as possible. This is the thing I care the most about That's my mission in life. That drives me. This 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 in 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 the sky?

45:59I wrote this this book called bullshit jobs. I think that's fantastic concept But 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 say that it's always bad to like go on your walk or do what Cuban Remind recommends or whatever, right? But there's got to be a purpose to it. And if your purpose for doing that is I want to, you know, be able to spend more time on the thing that I don't really care about, then you're doing it wrong.

46:30Yeah, yeah. 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 going to 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.

47:10A 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, It's 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 within 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 what I did when I worked in a corporate environment, is I just, you know, refused to answer emails that quickly a lot of the time and people at some point start to respect that.

47:43So that's before we get to any tactical stuff like what app should you use or how often and shoot you, check your email. It's just like try to stem the flow and try to change people's expectations that you're not gonna do this. Now beyond that, I'm a real big fan of batch processing. So yeah, I check my email, I'll fair them out 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 wanna make sure that this thing came in that I'm waiting for, et cetera. But I have some time where I sit down, I'm like tomorrow, I'm just gonna batch process like these 40 emails that need dealing with or something like that.

48:16And 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 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 it's worse when people are working in Microsoft Teams or Slack right in their own these chat apps all the time while they're trying to work. And it's like, now it's not even like a couple 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 gonna reply all the time.

48:45And if you're in a corporate environment where people don't respect that. I mean, you got to have a conversation with people who are managing you or your boss and be like, what does it that you want me to do here? Like, what is my job description? And what is the value that I'm meant to add? Have a real frank conversation about that? Yeah, am I employed as an email replyer? I'm employed to actually do some task outside of this. Is it France that's just brought in that law that says businesses can't expect their employees to answer emails outside of... I think that's right. I've heard that as well.

49:18Yeah, I'm on something. Yeah. I don't even think they have access. I think it's something like, like unless workers are in the office, they can't even take their phones home with them or something. They've even structurally integrated or implemented this. Yeah, I think that's quite an extreme way of doing this. But I think people need to take responsibility for this themselves. I think you need to go talk to the people that you're working with and just have a conversation and be like, listen, and 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.

49:54And 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 where 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 doing? You're just answering email all day and barely getting anything done. Yeah, it's like zero -per -year -in -a -missory. Right, okay, so let's say that we've set expectations. People don't expect us to reply within 30 minutes.

50:18We also understand that batching is good so that we're not distracted. As Carl 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? I am always telling people triage. So what happens is you got a bunch of new emails on red emails, triage them. 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.

50:51So 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 that takes you two minutes or less time, just flag it, right? And then when you're doing your batch processing, go through all your flag emails, handle them on flag don't you can do this in Gmail you can do this in whatever mail app you're using right any mail app supports flag on Gmail is that the star it's the star is the star on Gmail for sure yeah okay yep emails that take a little bit more time to deal with now I recommend creating it to do for them in your to do list hey everyone should be using it 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 um created to do for those emails so a lot of times what people will do is sort of people who have just discovered the magic of to do lists, right?

51:39Over like a certain app, they'll start forwarding every single email that they ever need to do something with to there 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, though. However, if it's something that is gonna 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 to do list app. a lot of apps will let you forward your email to the app and that creates it to do that attaches the email text or whatever given an appropriate title.

52:13And 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 tree -arging system that's super important. And that's how I would work with that in your email app. A 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 To Do Us and has a very nice Gmail integration. So if you're looking at an email, you can 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.

52:44That actually also, I know I keep going back to the messaging apps, but that works also for Slack and Teams. So if you're using Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate, you can turn a message into it 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 got to find that nice balance of creating Getting to do's for the things that you need to do, but not going crazy with all the little stuff because then you won't see the forest or the trees and everything. 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.

53:20And I know that there are the solutions too. Is there anything tactically when it comes to email integration or email apps themselves that you like? 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 abs. He stays the ones that I have to laugh at the most is the ones that promise that AI is gonna answer all your emails for you Which I'm always like fuck you. I'm down for that. Maybe 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 That would you know, I thought you were gonna say like sit on the beach or something but That took a turn.

53:53No, but you know, here's the thing like 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, couple doesn't 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.

54:24you 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 CCed on, like automatically chuck it in a folder that they never look at, cause those things are never relevant, you know? Unless it's directed at me. Exactly. If that's the environment you're working, you gotta do that, that works. 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 their 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.

54:57I have best process later. It's a long task I created 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. If you're getting wild amounts of email, hey, you probably just need to pay someone to manage your inbox for you, right? Now I have an EA or PA or VA or something. I do appreciate that 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 Apple notes for everything. And it's so funny that after an entire lifetime of, is it ever note?

55:38Is it notian? 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 the ultimate note taking app was embedded in all of your Apple devices all along. And with that, like the simplest way that I found, I know that I could be smarter. 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.

56:17I 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. Yep. And it's so funny that you mentioned this. Have you seen the meme about Apple Notes where like the dumb guy. It's the midwit meme, isn't it? It's the what? It's called a midwit meme where you've got like the dumb guy and the sage, both eating apple notes and the guy in the middle who's got like obsidian and notion and I have a video.

56:55Obsidian. Yeah, yeah. I love that meme. It's one of my favorite memes. Because it's so good. It's so true. I get a lot of people asking me, Peter, what do you think about these link note taking apps? Like have obsidian and then I could create like my own wiki and I can connect concepts to each other and I can build my second brain and like, No, by the way, I mentioned building a second brain, no offense to Thiago for today. I think he is a big 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.

57:27Thiago's stuff is, it's built for a very specific type of person with a very specific type of problem. And he's 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 or an unoptimized optimizer, but like 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.

58:09It's not that there are morally better or superior ways to do productivity. You know, I used to think that another people may feel this too, that it was almost like a personal failing of mine. It's not. 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 an inbox zero or my external brain isn't sufficiently organized. Oh, I didn't do my weekly review. And after a little bit of time, you know, you need to give it a crack and see if it's going to work for you.

58:50And there are times where you need to push through discomfort, 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 wanna 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 less shit. Or bearable. Yeah, it 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.

59:25So I write this newsletter every single week. This newsletter requires a very specific first headspace and second 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 using that to almost move me into different modes of thinking.

1:00:12So 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 into the memes and the interesting studies that I've found. And I'm like, right, well, what am I going to write about today? And I'll have Peru's through Peru's through oh that's cool I'm gonna write about that that resonates with me this morning on a Saturday or whatever when I'm writing my news I'll 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 two 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 Pots you into a state of mind and also gives you the information that you need to move forward So you found a minimum viable system to do this for you.

1:00:54And it didn't require a really elaborate method or the most sophisticated note taking app. And that's all right. And I so appreciate that you emphasize that point that, hey, this is working for you and that people shouldn't feel guilty about it because just to get back to a second, to Thiago 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 gonna refer to them in your newest publication.

1:01:33And you know, you have lots of ideas, spin -offs that 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, you know, going back to the, to the, my favorite student who like 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 like sell coffee in this town on Saturday, you know, 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.

1:02:09Yeah, 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 you know if they're gonna take one thing away It's this thing that you and I are both harb down which is hey It's not you you know 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 needed 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.

1:02:41If 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 bang -and -podcast, right? And so if it helps you produce great podcasts, that it's great. And even if the system is a little bit messy, it doesn't matter if the podcasts Yes, they're good, right? So you got to optimize for the right thing. I guess is what I'm saying here.

1:03:08Palia, 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? Would they want to learn from you? They want to see the content that you've got? Where should they head? Yeah, for sure. Two places. One of them is YouTube. Just search Peter Ockie'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 Nuts, for example. But also introduce you to some other apps that you could use to get more organized.

1:03:36I also prepared a little guide. It's called how to organize your to -do's 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 -do's, but I don't want to take hours to do it. I can dents it down to the shortest format that I could. So people can just go ahead and find that it's over at organizedyourto -do's .com. So that's a simple one. Organizeyourto -do's .com and it'll just take you 30 minutes. Amazing. Peter, I appreciate you. Thank you.