Transcript & Summary: How to Build Your Ultimate Productivity System

[00:00] in this video we are talking about how to build a productivity system and the first question to start with is why do you in fact need a productivity system and really the main reason is so that we can do the stuff that we want to do we can do things that are meaningful to us in an efficient way without wasting our time and so that we're less stressed out doing it because then we don't have to rely on our brain to do things that it's not designed to do and we can almost think of this as like a bit of a venn [00:19] diagram where we've got the brain and we've got our system and broadly we can categorize tasks into one of three things so type one tasks are things that our brain itself does best these are things like creativity and enjoyment and relaxing and living in the present moment and all that fun stuff connecting with other people all of this stuff totally cool if our brain does the thing then we've got type 2 types of thing which is stuff that like we often use our brain for but that our productivity system or some kind of system can [00:44] probably do a little bit more efficiently for example things like keeping on top of tasks keeping on top of calendars keeping on top of emails having to use our brain to remember all of that stuff is really taxing and quite stressful especially if you have a lot of stuff to be doing and then thirdly there is the type 3 stuff the stuff that we definitely should be using some kind of system for this generally involves kind of remembering information that is not directly connected to the things we actually care about so for example [01:08] memorizing phone numbers is a bit of a waste of time in a way memorizing a lot of people's birthdays a bit of a waste of time you can just outsource that to a system like a calendar and so really the idea of a productivity system is well productivity is using our time intentionally and effectively and so the point of having a system for it is so that our brain doesn't have to do so much work so anyway in this video we're going to talk about kind of three different layers of a productivity system that you can choose to build if [01:29] you feel that it helps you with your life it certainly helps with mine and we're going to split that into layer 1 which is ron layer 2 which is hermione and layer 3 which is dumbledore so the wrong layer i.e layer one of the system is all about keeping your life in order and there are really four things four different components that you need in a productivity system in my humble opinion to kind of get to a place where your life is reasonably in order let the feast begin the first one is a calendar now it [01:55] is amazing how many people i know who don't live their lives based on a calendar and who are trying to remember in their own heads all of the information for like events that they need to attend a friend invites you for a birthday party two weeks from now oh it's cool it's fine i won't write it down i will just try and remember oh i've gotta have dinner with my mum next week it's fine i'm just gonna remember like our brain is so bad at remembering these things and one of the quotes that i always come back to is from david [02:16] allen who is one of the world's biggest productivity gurus who says that your brain is for having ideas not for storing them and one of the principles of productivity that i always come back to and i have done over the last five years is that my brain is a dumbass i want my brain to not have to remember things that it doesn't need to so feel free to use a physical calendar if you really want to but basically everyone in the world these days uses some kind of digital calendar usually some kind of app on your phone apple calendar is good [02:38] google calendar is good there are a bunch of different third party alternatives the one i personally use is fantastical this is for example what my fantastic health looks like earlier today breakfast with osama and sharina dashoom same page meeting with angus table read for this video podcast q a for the podcast video filming video filming and then i'm going to cambridge for some talks this evening i have an orthodontist appointment tomorrow i've got this whole retreat thing that i'm going to in the evening and basically [03:02] for the last several years i have been running my life based on my calendar and this is amazing this like takes an enormous amount of stress off my shoulders because if something is not in the calendar then it doesn't exist like as soon as a friend says to me hey do you want to do this thing on this date i'll look at my calendar and be like let me have a look yep and i'll just add it there there and then so that i'm not trying to remember like what was that thing that like catherine invite me to et cetera et cetera so a calendar is [03:23] really good for remembering stuff that you need to do but it's also really good for actively intentionally blocking out time for the things that you actually want to do so for example for me i know that every morning i want to block out three hours to work on my book and so there's a blockchain in my calendar and then i know that oh okay cool when i get to the morning at nine o'clock this is the thing that i'm doing i block out time for exercise i block at times for sports event for social events friday [03:43] nights i want to host a dinner therefore i'll block that timeout in my calendar and then the third and final really good reason to use a calendar is that you can then use automatic scheduling apps like calendly or tinycal or savvycal or any of these others and what that does is it generates a link and that link connects to your calendar and then if you want to arrange a meeting with someone or a zoom call with someone you met on the internet or even a hangout with friends you could if you wanted to save the [04:03] whole back and forth of scheduling especially if it's with email especially if it's a work thing by just sending them a calendar link and then they'd be able to kind of book a time in your calendar now i use this a lot for kind of booking interviews for book research and all this kind of stuff and it's just super super helpful and it saves a lot of time and again means that my own brain doesn't have to kind of do the work in arranging all these things all right the next thing every productivity system needs at the wrong level is some [04:24] kind of system for email management most of us use something like gmail that's totally fine you can use an app like apple mail i use an app called superhuman which is very good but it's expensive you have to pay for it but it's it's pretty solid now there's an approach to email that i really like from my friend thiago forte who is again productivity expert and it's called one touch to inbox zero and basically the idea behind this method is that every email touches your inbox only once if it's something that requires a calendar [04:47] event then it goes into your calendar and then you archive the email if it's a to-do if it's something that needs action it goes into your task manager more on that in a minute and then you archive the email if it's information that you need to reference at some point you put it into a note-taking app and if it's an article or something that you might want to read it goes into your read it later app and we'll talk much more about those further in the video there's a few general tips that apply to [05:05] emails as well which again are completely game-changing for productivity if you haven't done them already the first one is to just unsubscribe from all these random emails like amazon or like sales or like shops and like all of this stuff is pretty unnecessary we don't want to treat our inbox like kind of this place where any kind of marketer from any kind of company can just spam stuff into it one thing that you can actually do and this is what i do is that i've created a smart filter in gmail which searches the [05:27] content of every email for the word unsubscribe now if the word unsubscribe is in an email it is probably not an important email because no one no real person is going to email you with the word unsubscribe in their thing whereas if you're getting like a marketing communication or a newsletter or whatever and it has the word unsubscribe in it you can just automatically make it skip your inbox so it doesn't kind of clog up the inbox the other thing you should do is that ideally only have one place to deal with [05:49] all your email so for example when i was at university i forwarded all my university email to my personal gmail and also all my personal gmail to my personal gmail because gmail has just way better features than whatever hermes app that cambridge university was using but really the main point is that we want to avoid using our inbox our email inbox as a place to find articles to read or even worse using our email inbox as a to-do list which brings us on to component number three of a decent productivity system and that is to have [06:13] some kind of to-do list now again david allen's advice from getting things done comes in here your brain is for having ideas not for holding them and if you don't write something down in a to-do list your brain is very unlikely to remember the thing you could do this on pen and paper if you really want to i sometimes do like my daily planner i use my essentially productivity part-time productivity notebook and in that i ask myself one question which is what is the most important thing i need to do today [06:34] that's my daily highlight and every every day i try and fill the end to be like okay today the single most important thing i want to do is x and then i have a my to-do list this is just stuff that i might do later in the day and i like calling it a might do list because it just takes a little bit of the pressure off me and it means i don't have to stress too much if i don't get all those things done so that tends to be what i do on a kind of day-by-day basis when i figure out what am i doing for the day but the actual app that i [06:55] use to track all of the other stuff is todoist i've tried a bunch of different apps over the years so essentially what i do is that if i need to add a task to my to-do list then usually i'll input it on my phone or on my macbook if i happen to be on my macbook and you'll see on my iphone that i've literally got todoist as like one of the primary things in my dock so if i do think of anything at all anytime a task pops into my mind i think okay this is not gonna happen until i write it down and i just open up to-do [07:19] list and i write down whatever the task is so for example i know right now i need to find bow tie from cambridge flat cool now that's written down now i i will get to it at some point similarly i use this for shopping list i use it for any thank you emails i need to send as soon as anything pops into mind it just goes straight into the to-do list app either on my phone or on my macbook and then whenever i've got some time where i feel like you know what i'm gonna batch go through my to-do list because i've got [07:42] half an hour and nothing better to do then i'll just go through and just bang my bang i'll delete the ones that are no longer relevant like oh should i get all plant smoothies probably maybe not screw it doesn't need to go i'll just take that off or delete it but for something i actually need to do it's great because then i can batch and do these things like i need to send a bunch of thank you emails and so i've just batched them all into todoist knowing that at some point i'll get around to sending all these [08:03] emails in one go something i like to do is sort of got this someday maybe list for like you know work stuff someday maybe it's like personal stuff these are things i'd like to do at some point rollerblading archery hunting glamping mountain biking treehouse clamping retreat all these different things like when i have an idea for something cool i just chuck it into the someday maybe list this is again a tip from david allen and that means that i know at some point when it comes to planning my next [08:23] holiday i'll just be able to look at that and think you know what the idea of kite surfing sounds pretty cool let me google and figure out where i can potentially go kite surfing now at this point the mistake that the vast majority of people seem to make with their to-do list at least from all the people that i've coached in productivity is actually not having 100 coverage so for example if you have a to-do list and it only covers 90 of your things rather than 100 you're going to get into one of these [08:44] problems i can't remember what i've forgotten so like the point of the to-do list is so that you don't forget things but if 10 of things are in your brain you won't know what that 10 is and so you're always going to be stressed thinking i know my to-do list has most of the things i need to do but it doesn't have all the things i need to do therefore i still need to remember my brain to do stuff and then it just adds this sort of low low level tension and stress to every single thing that we do in life anyway final thing in our wrong [09:08] level of productivity system is some kind of file management system again this is like super basic stuff but again there are so many people who have literally coached in productivity who don't have a decent file management system generally what you want is some kind of cloud storage now the one that i use even though i'm an apple fanboy for absolutely everything i still use google drive as my cloud storage system of choice i've got my personal google drive and i've got the business google drive and i've got the folders on my mac so [09:31] for example i can look in my drive i can look at all of my business stuff all of my med school stuff let's look at pre-clinical medicine let's look at first here these are all the notes that i had in first year across all my different subjects let's look at home that's physiology essays examples documents all of this stuff it is all in my google drive and i you know my my whole life is basically on google drive photos memories files all of the things on google drive so that if i ever lose my computer if my hard disk discover [09:57] goes if it ever gets stolen if i want to upgrade computers it's so easy i know every single thing is on google drive and these days like searching functions and these things are so good that if i know that i need to find a certain file i'll just search my google drive for it because i know it's probably in there somewhere all right so that was the wrong layer of the productivity system for essential life management the four components that in my humble opinion every single person needs to survive in this world that we live in so [10:21] that your brain is not super super stressed out trying to remember all these random details the next layer up of the productivity system is an optional extra and this is for people that consume a lot of books honestly don't you two read and this is where the hermione level of the productivity system comes in and basically the idea here is that it's a layer above it's like additional modules that you can add to your basic productivity system if you want if you consume a lot of media media meaning books or audio books or podcasts [10:46] or videos or anything like that that you might want to remember later this layer of the productivity system is about taking notes it's about capturing information that resonates with us from the stuff that we consume and again this is for people who you know if you've had that feeling where you read all these things or you listen to all these things and you have all these insights but you don't write them down and then like two months later you've forgotten what you read in that book that potentially [11:06] changed your life that's the point of this level of the productivity system and here we have another four modules of the system so the first one is the kindle app yes there are other ways to read there's apple books and stuff but like to be honest i've tested them all and i found the kindle app to be by far the best one you don't even need to have a physical kindle although that's one of the most life-changing products i do recommend yeah the kindle app is absolutely sick i tend to read most things on ebook format rather than [11:28] physical book format but it's not just reading that i can do on the kindle app it is also highlighting and highlighting on the kindle lab just is an absolute breeze and what i can do is that once i've read a book i can always look at my highlights in the kindle notebook and then if i need to revisit things that i learned from a book or a quote from a paranormal romance book that i particularly enjoyed i can just open up my highlights and i can see everything that's previously resonated with me alright so that was the kindle app next [11:48] we have a read it later app now the one that i've been using for the last several years is called instapaper it's free and essentially the point of instapaper is that anytime you're reading something or you want to read an article on the internet if you don't want to read it there and then on your phone or on your browser you can just share it into something like instapaper and then it will just show up on your list and now again when i have a spare moment if i'm commuting if i'm on a tube or whatever i'll just open up insta [12:12] paper usually on my phone and i'll just flick through some of the articles and instant paper and i'll be like oh okay cool this one looks interesting i'm improving ourselves to death this is a bit of a critique about self-help and i can look through that article i can highlight stuff as well it's all very handy and it's just a great way of separating the reading of articles from coming across the articles because often i find that you know if i'm on the toilet for like three minutes and i'm scrolling through twitter and i come [12:33] across an interesting article if i read it there and then it might take 10 minutes and then i'm on the toilet for three hours and that's not very good or if i'm in the middle of something and someone recommends an article i know i want to read it at some point but i know i don't want to read it there and then i'll just send it straight to insta paper and trust that at some point i will get around to reading that article and again this separation from separation of things like if i'm trying to focus on something that i genuinely [12:53] care about but then i get i get derailed by an article recommendation and go down this wikipedia rabbit holes trying to figure out all these conspiracy theories that ends up actually taking time away from the thing that i actually care about and kind of stopping me from kind of being productive and being intentional with how i'm spending my time and because time is our most valuable non-renewable resource it's the only thing we can't make more of it's like it always felt a bit like oh i know i've carved out this time to work on [13:15] this thing that's important to me but i've just been stolen away by being distracted by this article insta paper or something like that completely solves that problem now when it comes to actually finding articles and interesting things to read that will level up your life and like things you actually care about people always ask me like how do you find stuff to read and for me it's because i subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and one of the main ones that i read every single day is called morningbrew who are very [13:36] kindly sponsoring this video now morningbrew is a completely free daily email newsletter that lands in your inbox every morning or in your read it later app if you've set up a forwarding rule which is what i've done basically it gets you up to speed on what's happening in the world of tech and finance and business and if you care about those three things like i do then it's just a fantastic newsletter and it's also completely free so you might as well sign up it takes most people around five minutes to go through it and [13:56] catch up to date with the news usually i skim through in about two and a half minutes flat while i'm waiting for my morning coffee to brew and if there's any interesting articles from that i'll send those articles directly to my read it later app as well and then usually read them later on in the day on the toilet and that means every day i'm up to date on these things that i care about like tech and finance and business and a lot of those topics then generate interesting content ideas that i can [14:14] talk about in the podcast or in youtube videos or anything else or just generally keeping up to date with interesting things in the world it's also great because it gives you interesting and in-depth coverage around weird things like elon musk how he's financing his twitter buy or like the recent crypto crash which is massively affected by encrypted portfolio but i've got the information from morning brew because i trust them as a legit non-fake news source and all it is is take out a few minutes out of my day to read these [14:36] interesting articles rather than be keeping up to date with the whole 24 hours news cycle so yeah if you're interested in tech finance business any of that kind of stuff then you might as well subscribe to this newsletter it is completely free they don't charge a single penny for it completely free check check out the link in the video description and it'll help support the channel as well so thank you so much morning brew for sponsoring this video and for making my personal life much better alright component 3 of the [14:54] hermione layer is an app called read wise i'll put an affiliate link down below they're not sponsoring this video but if you click the link you'll get an extra two-month trial rather than just a one-month trial and i'll get a bit of a kickback if you sign up i've been recommending read-wise for the last like three years now read wise is incredible it's like this little hub that takes in details like it takes in your kindle highlights and your insta paper highlights and a few other sources and it puts them all in one place and it [15:16] means you can then export those highlights to apps like notion or rom more on those in layer three and it's really handy because now all of this stuff gets automated anytime i see a passage in kindle or an instant paper that resonates with me where i think oh i want to save this passage all i have to do is highlight it and i trust i just trust that read-wise will behind the scenes sort it all out again before read was existed before we had this kind of thing what we'd have to do is if you found a passage that resonated with you [15:39] you'd have to write it down you have to highlight it you'd have to store it somewhere you have to figure out where you're trying to store it it becomes a real faff and again coming back to a point what is the point of a productivity system people always ask it's to get [ __ ] off of your own brain like i now don't need to remember all these things because the system is remembering it for me and then i trust that the system will resurface it as and when i need to access those highlights again and then finally the fourth [16:00] component of this sort of system is some sort of capture app for notes now again i've tried a bunch of systems over the years but actually the one that i've come back to most often is actually apple notes and essentially anytime i need to remember something for example if i'm taking a note while i'm on the toilet or if i'm on the train and listening to an audiobook and i want to take notes on something i'll just open up apple notes and i'll write it down and i'll trust that if i need to resurface that thing sometime further [16:20] down the line it will always be in my apple notes and it will always be something that i could potentially search for at this point honestly i've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notes in my apple notes and then i just trust that they're there like i know i don't need to worry about doing stuff with them as soon as they come in i don't need to worry about an elaborate system for this what i care about is having the minimum viable level of organization the minimum viable level of systems and structure to again reduce my [16:42] own strain reduce my own stress even often ask like oh how do you seem to not burn out how do you manage like honestly like having a decent system is a massive cure for burnout because you just trust the system you trust the system to do stuff you don't have to again have that low level of anxiety running in your actual brain all right so that was the hermione layer of the productivity system and now the final layer that if you want to layer on top of that you can if you really want to is the dumbledore [17:04] layer which relates to a concept called building a second brain you might have heard me talk about building a second brain before it is a book it is a system it's a course written and done by my friend thiago forte and it's like a pretty game changing productivity system because the idea like level one the run the wrong layer level whatever you want to call it was about just being able to organize our life and kind of get by level two was about capturing insights from all the stuff that we read and [17:25] consume and level three this dumbledore level is all about making connections and in a way using our productivity system for creativity rather than just for storage and in a way if you can actually build your own second brain this ends up acting as a thought partner for you i've been using this system since like mid 2019 now it's been three years and i've found so many ways in which particularly for writing my book but also for creating content and for writing newsletters and for doing podcasts the information i've captured [17:49] into my second brain using an app called rome the one i use these days although i might switch to obsidian more on that later but capturing all this information into an app called rome research means that it just sort of resurfaces and if you want to find out more about this dumbledore level then check out this video over here which is my book club episode all about breaking down the c-o-d-e component of the building a second brain system and that will give you a step-by-step guide on how to apply [18:08] it in your own life so thank you so much for watching check out this video over here and i'll see in the next one