Transcript & Summary: My Complete Productivity System

[00:00] friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ali and on this channel we explore the evidence-based strategies and tools that can help us along our shared journey of living healthier happier more productive lives and this is my complete productivity system split into the six categories of coordinate communicate consume capture create and other miscellaneous stuff all right let's start with module one coordinate and i think any productivity system basically needs three things at least in the [00:22] coordinate department firstly we need some kind of calendar for managing our schedule secondly we need some kind of project management system for managing our tasks and our lists and our projects and thirdly we need some kind of file management system so firstly the app that i use for my calendar needs is fantastical i've been using that for the last five years it's absolutely sick it is mac only but it connects to google calendar and apple calendar and outlet calendar basically all the calendars [00:42] connect to fantastical and it's kind of the same as most other calendar apps it just looks really pretty and it has a few natural language processing features that make it really handy for example if i want to create a new calendar event i can just type into the box on my phone or on my mac or on my ipad 15th of april 3 to 5 pm something happening at whatever location and it will figure out based on what i've written what time it is what date it is like what the location is and it will automatically [01:04] add that to my calendar which is just super handy and the way i manage my life is that if something is not on the calendar it basically doesn't exist and so i don't have to spend any mental strain worrying or wondering about what i'm doing next because it's literally just on the calendar next when it comes to file management i use google drive for everything i'm very entrenched in the apple ecosystem but i don't use icloud drive very much i use google drive and have been using it for the last 10 plus years and for personal [01:24] stuff i use my own personal google drive account i think it has two terabytes of storage and for business stuff we use google workspace or g suite or whatever it's called these days which has unlimited storage and you can see here we've actually used 20.3 terabytes of google drive storage as a team so far which is pretty insane and it's awesome that this is all kind of included for unlimited storage with google workspace that's pretty insane thirdly when it comes to project management i actually use two different apps for this i use [01:46] todoist as my own personal task management which i use basically for myself and with my assistant dan i really like to do is i've dabbled with so many other to-do list apps over the years and the thing i like about todoist is that it's very simple it's very cheap i think the free version if you don't want to use it with a team is actually free it's completely cross-platform so it's available on windows and iphone and all of the other things as well and it's got some pretty good sharing features as [02:06] well so if i want to delegate stuff to dan i can just make a little project called dan share it with him and that's all the things that i want to down to hopefully try and sort out for me so that i don't have to sort them out myself it's also a nice way for me to track my someday maybe bucket list type thing for personal work stuff so rollerblading archery hunting glamping mountain biking wakeboarding these are all things that i want to organize group trips group holidays for at some point or other and i track them all in todoist [02:28] so that's what i use for personal task and project management but for my personal daily stuff i actually use an analog method with my own part-time productivity planner from the stationery brand that i've created called essentially and so some days if i don't really know what i'm doing for the day or i feel like my to-do list is getting overwhelming i will open up the part-time productivity planner and i will figure out what is my most important task what's the one thing i need to get done today and then what is [02:49] everything else on the my to-do list this is stuff that i might get along to if i feel like it i don't use it every day i use it some days when i need to and that's why it's called the part-time productivity planner it doesn't really have any dates on it and that's one of the things i've realized about living in this world of productivity and refining my productivity system over the last five years that a system that forces you to conform to it very rigidly at least for me is not a system that will work [03:09] out for me so a lot of these apps i don't use them every day i don't use them religiously and i find that that level of flexibility and freedom lets me use the apps and the tools when i need to but if i don't need to then the apps and tools get out of my way and i can actually do the thing that i want to do which is being intentional and effective with how i spend my time so it's todoist and the planner for personal projects and stuff but when it comes to team project management i use notion notion [03:30] is the app that we use for all of our projects across the whole team of 18 people that we have now which is pretty insane and i'm going to do a whole other video where i break down our entire notion setup because it's pretty next level but here is for example our content production engine which tracks all the videos that we're making across the youtube channel the second channel the third channel that we're working on the deep dive podcast and all the different people in our team have their own personalized views for the content [03:50] production engine so they can just hit a single page and they can see exactly what they're supposed to be working on in terms of research or thumbnails or whatever and i can put all the ideas i have for upcoming videos or stuff for the book or stuff for podcast episodes and it's all very full featured but really the key to using notion well is to start off with a very simple system and then build it up over time if you need to let's move on now to module two of the productivity system and that is [04:10] communicate now obviously communication with our friends and family and relatives and team all of this is an important part of living a good life and also a important part of being productive and so there's a few different apps that i use to make this process as seamless as possible one of my new favorite additions to the productivity system is something called texts.com now text.com is amazing because it's a web interface that combines multiple different messaging apps so i have it combining my whatsapp [04:32] my imessage my twitter dms and my telegram and it's got a bunch of features that really help with getting to inbox zero when it comes to messages i almost never get to input zero when it comes to messages i'm so bad at replying to messages i have kind of dozens if not potentially 100 unread messages from the last like two weeks that i need to reply to at some point but when i get time to reply to things then text makes it super easy to do and i can bash through a large amount of things on my computer so [04:53] mostly i use text for personal communication but we use slack for team communication slack is great we have a channel for announcements for general for idea suggestions the water cooler the book courses email podcast the part-time brand social media website youtube hiring leadership team etc etc etc there's so much stuff that we have going on in slack so slack is for internal team communication and then we also use discord as a community platform for students of our part-time youtuber academy and also we are in the process [05:17] of setting up a new discord for just anyone who wants to join the alia bell community or whatever we're going to call it at the moment we're calling it the friend zone because it's like hey friends that's like the friend zone uh this is a free discord server we're like literally in the process of building it up i think it's ready so if you hit the link in the video description you can join the discord server if you're interested in something like that yeah we've got a general chat channel a book club channel a playlist rating your [05:37] setup when we where i'm going to be doing these sort of everyday co-working sessions on discord where i share my music and then i can use those focus sessions to make progress on my book so if you want to join the friendzone community hit the link down in the video description it's completely free it's always going to be free just a fun little thing that we're trying out and we're gonna we're gonna see what it's like and then the app that i use for email is in fact superhuman and i've been using superhuman since i think 2018 [05:59] or 2019. honestly it's pretty expensive it's 30 a month uh it's useful if you get large amounts of email and need to blitz through it at like rapid speed because it does help me get through my inbox a lot faster than i used to before but it's probably a little bit excessive for most people and you can absolutely get free email apps that do exactly the same thing and so i have my multiple gmail and google workspace accounts connected to superhuman so that i can use it on my laptop i can use it on my [06:20] phone i can use it on my ipad and get through email faster if i decide that that's what i need to do in a given moment and then the final app in the communication category is in fact loom now lumi is a really great way of screen recording your screen and like sharing camera and audio and stuff and me and the team will use loom to for example send messages to one another if someone is doing a presentation rather than doing it on a meeting on zoom where everyone has to waste time and do the meeting they'll just record a loom of [06:44] the meeting and then we can all watch it at 2x speed so that we can be up to speed on what's going on in a very efficient fashion some weeks at the end of the week i also do like a little weekly update for the team internally and i record that on loom because it's so much easier for me to just speak to a camera or speak to my phone or speak to whatever than it is for me to write out a what kind of word for word update okay so that was coordinate and communicate let's now move on to module 3 of the [07:04] productivity system and that is consume for a lot of us consumption is probably not going to be part of productivity although to be honest my personal definition of productivity is that productivity is about using our time intentionally and effectively and if we want to consume things like books or podcasts or audiobooks or even scrolling through social media there are more productive i.e intentional and effective ways of doing that than others so let's just take these one at a time the app that i use for podcasts these days is [07:26] castro i've experimented with so many different podcast apps over the years aerodyno spotify apple podcasts overcast but the one that i landed on was castro and that's the one that i use every day the app that i use for reading pdfs is pdf expert again dabbled with so many of them over the years that's the best app i found for reading pdfs on my mac obviously i spend a lot of time watching videos and obviously i watch those videos on youtube but i tend to watch them at 2x speed on my phone or if i'm [07:48] watching on my mac i will often watch videos at two times speed potentially even sometimes higher instead because often youtubers take ages to get to the point and there's various extensions for chrome and safari i use safari mostly so i use this video speed controller extension for safari that helps me speed up videos in terms of reading i do most of my reading on kindle although if i have like a random pdf or an epub that doesn't play nicely with kindle i'll read it in ibooks and the nice thing [08:08] about kindle and ibooks is that it syncs across all the platforms i have two kindles like physical kindle devices one that's always on my bedside table and one that's always in my travel bag so i'm never without a kindle wherever i'm going or if i'm feeling particularly productive if i'm in an uber or in public transport or anything i will use the kindle app on my iphone and i can read books on the kindle that way and the kindle app on mac itself is also surprisingly good and that's what i do if i need to blitz through a book for [08:30] research for the book that i'm writing the app that i use to read articles is insta paper and insta paper is nice because i can save articles to my read it later list from whatever device i am again insta paper is cross-platform it's got a mac app it's got an iphone app and that means if i come across an article on the internet and i don't have time to read it there and then or if i'm doing something else i can just chuck it into insta paper and then when i've got a moment if i'm on the toilet or if i'm [08:50] sitting on a bus or whatever i can just open up my instapaper and read through the articles that i've saved on there instant paper also has a really good highlight feature which i'll talk more about in the capture section so stay tuned for that and finally the app that i use for all my audio books is in fact audible no they're not sponsoring this video i wish they were but you can go to audible.com to get like a free trial or something anyway it's just amazing i discovered audible in like 2017 and i [09:11] use audible for lots and lots and lots of time each week uh for a lot of nonfiction but also for a lot of fantasy fiction as well brandon sanderson books are a personal favorite of mine and if you want to build your own productivity system i think consume is like a useful part of that if you're a content creator consuming is really important because it's important to be able to save ideas more on that in the capture section but if for example you read a lot of books or a lot of articles or follow a lot of blogs or for example [09:33] listen a lot of podcasts or audiobooks it is it's always useful to experiment with a few different apps in those genres because you might find an app like castro for podcasts or audible for audiobooks that just makes the consumption experience a lot more effective a lot more intentional and that is ties nicely into our definition of productivity and the final app i use fairly regularly in the consume section is short form and i use short form for reading book summaries my short form have a web app like a website that i use [09:56] on my mac but they also have an ios app that i use on my iphone and like it's genuinely good they're not even sponsoring this video by the second affiliate link in the video description if you want to check it out there's a free trial bloody blah and the short form is great it's like by far the best book summary feature like app i have ever found found i tried using blinkist for like a year but i always found that their book summaries were very surface level whereas the really cool thing about short form is that the summaries [10:18] are very in depth you get a one pager summary which is blinkist style of the book that you you want to read but then you get detailed chapter summaries and the even cooler thing about short form is that when they give you a summary of a book they won't just give you the summary of the book they also have these little short form snippets or whatever they call it where they bring in insights from other books and they say this is an idea that someone this person talked about in that book and then you [10:38] can see a summary of that book or they'll say hey this is controversial because that evidence has actually been disproven in this book that you're reading a summary of and you can read more about that here and the link to some kind of blog or some kind of book or some kind of book summary so yeah the really cool thing about short form is that it's a more in-depth version of book summaries and i feel like i get so much more value out of reading a short film summary than any other service i've ever found but if you want to check it [10:57] out link in the video description not sponsored but it is an affiliate link so shortform.com ali if you want to help support the channel etc alright so we've talked about consume let's now move on to module 4 which is capture now the point of capture is how do we capture quick thoughts on the fly how do we capture things from the stuff that we have consumed this is important if you are a content creator it's also really important if you're a writer because if you can build your own note taking system your own personal knowledge [11:20] management system it makes it so much easier to then create works of you know creative works whether you're a writer or a youtuber or a blogger or a podcaster or an artist of any kind of sort we all need various systems for capture in our lives now broadly within capture i've got two separate ways of capturing things i have manual systems for things that need capturing manually and i've got automated systems for things that can be captured automatically so let's start with the automatic variety and the key [11:43] app that i use here is an app again i've been using for several years now and it's called read wise now read wise is amazing because it synchronizes with kindle with insta paper with a few different podcast apps it synchronizes with ibooks and essentially anytime you highlight something on any of these different things it all syncs it to your read-wise database now the basic feature of read-wise is that read-wise will send you an email every day with five random highlights so this is a great way of [12:04] revisiting stuff that you might have highlighted from books a few years ago and now oh that's kind of interesting i like seeing my read-wise email every now and then but the other cool feature of read-wise is that it can actually export automatically to apps like notion and rome and various others along the way and so if you're like me and you're a content creator or you're trying to build like a automated note-taking system for you know taking in insights from the stuff that you've consumed you can just chuck them directly into your [12:26] note-taking app of choice back in the day i used to use rome research i'm still kind of trying to figure out my perfect note-taking app because as i've realized over the last few months of trying to write my book actually though the workflow you need for a note-taking app for writing a book has more requirements than the workflow for making youtube videos for example and so i've actually started using apple notes mostly on that front but i'll tell you more about that in the create section and so for example you can see here the [12:49] read wise to notion integration and this shows all of my highlights from various books and 372 of them so far and it does books it does podcasts it does articles it does tweets even so this is really good if you want to check out read wise i'll stick an affiliate link down in the video description and that will actually give you a two-month free trial where it's normally a one month free trial so you get some value out of it and you can see if the app adds any value to your life all right so we talked about [13:10] automated capture let's now talk about manual capture and there is still a requirement for manual capture annoyingly for example it's really hard to take notes from audiobooks so if i need to take notes from audiobooks i will just open up apple notes that is my app of choice when capturing stuff so for example i have this book notes folder where generally if i'm listening to an audio book i will take notes on this as we go along you know coaching habit really good book recently what money can't buy it's for an individual [13:32] 12 and a half by gary vaynerchuk et cetera et cetera and if i'm listening to an audiobook if i'm at the gym or if i'm walking around and i find an interesting point i will literally just pause the audio book i'll often screenshot the timestamp so i can come back to it really quickly i never come back to it but then i'll just write a few notes on apple notes of what i'm thinking at the time and this is just i wish someone had an automated way of capturing actual notes from audiobooks that would be game [13:53] changing i also use manual capture when it comes to capturing ideas from podcasts now there is an automated way of doing this and that's based on an app called air dot io and air.io links nicely into read wise and i used that for a few months i think about a year or two ago actually for about six months but any time i use air i just find it's a bit too buggy and like i think the app still in beta but similarly with podcasts if i come across a podcast and i want to take some notes on it i'll just open up the podcast notes folder on [14:19] my apple notes and i'll take notes from it there unless it's going directly into the book in which case it goes directly into my google doc there's a few other apps that i use for manual capture as part of the productivity system uh the journaling app that i use and i have been using since 2016 is called day one and day one is amazing it's a beautifully designed app i use it on my mac use it on the ipad use it on the iphone and it is also available on android as far as i know and that's great because that's what i use for my [14:40] daily ish journaling although like i said i don't do this stuff daily i do it like every every few days when i remember but i think that's way better than nothing and i don't like rigidly sticking to like a daily a daily routine basically and then the app that i use to track my workouts at the gym which i'm including in the capture section because it's like capturing data is strong strong is really good it basically lets you create custom workouts and then it tells you what weight you lifted last time and how [15:02] many reps and so if you're like me and you make up when you go to the gym uh which is going to change because i'm doing a fitness journey at some point soon um but when i make stuff up it at least means that i know what i lifted last time and so i can just lift a little bit heavier than that you know incorporating progressive overload into this thing of trying to live a healthier life and being a little bit more hench all right let's move on to module five of the productivity system and that is the create module now broadly there's [15:24] two forms of thing that i create there is the text based stuff and then there is the media based stuff so in terms of text-based stuff it's a simple combination of google docs uh for book related things notion for any video related things because that's what we use for project management within the team and apple notes for most other like quick note taking here and there i've even been using apple notes a lot for book notes and for book research and it's just so easy using apple notes i have dabbled with all of the other [15:49] note-taking apps under the sun i've dabbled with notion in rome and evernote and obsidian and rem note and simple nodes and all this stuff and i've just found over time that simple is just better for me maybe your your mileage may vary maybe i don't have the perfect system for room research just yet but i just find myself using apple notes for most of my note-taking needs in fact a lot of the book chapters i've been working on i've actually written the first draft in apple notes because there's something about writing [16:13] in apple notes that just feels less high pressure than writing a notion or writing in google docs and then when it comes to the media apps for presentations i tend to use keynote although i'll occasionally use google slides as well in terms of photos and graphics and thumbnails and stuff i tend to use three apps i use apple photos to manage my photo library i use lightroom adobe lightroom if i need to make kind of tweaks to photos because it's more powerful than apple photos is and i use photoshop if i need to do anything fancy [16:36] when it comes to image manipulation to create thumbnails for example then when it comes to web design and that kind of thing i use figma and figma was how i designed my personal website and it's how i mock up thumbnails and it's how i do mockups for like logos and web designs and instagram carousels and the other kind of stuff that i do on a sort of designy side and then on the video side so i use an app called screenflow which i'm currently using to record my screen that's a mac app that lets you [16:58] record a screen i use a nice little utility called recut which helps get rid of pauses from things like videos and podcasts i use an app called descript when it comes to editing things like a word document so for example when editing a podcast we'll import it into dscript and we'll be able to just edit it as if it were a word document there which is quite handy and for video editing since 2017 i've been using final cut pro on the mac to do video editing and this is probably a good time to tell you that i have my very own online class [17:20] about how to edit videos from beginner to pro youtuber using final cut and it's all available completely for free on skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video i'm sure you must have heard by now i talk about skillshare all the time i have like 10 11 12 classes on skillshare so if you hit the link in the video description you sign up for a one month free trial of skillshare for that month you can watch all of my classes including my four hour long class on how to edit videos in final cut pro i've also got [17:43] three whole classes around productivity so if you're watching this video about the productivity system you might like to check those out one of them is about productivity for creators and it's about the specific productivity tools and hacks and stuff that i use to be able to kind of be a content creator in a productive fashion and then the other two are more about the general principles and strategies in the world of productivity so this video that you're watching right now is very much based on the tools and the apps but the [18:05] classes on skillshare are very much based on the principles and strategies that you can apply to your life no matter what stage of life you're at so if any of that sun's up your street then do hit the link in the video description and the first thousand people to click that link will get a free one month trial of skillshare skillshare is incredible they sponsor the videos i've been teaching on skillshare for the last since 2019. i use skillshare all the time if i want to learn something it's just absolutely sick so thank you so [18:26] much skillshare for sponsoring this video and finally let's move on to module 6 which is miscellaneous utilities other things that didn't fit neatly into the other 5cs and one of the main apps i use for this is an app called alfred and alpha is the first app i ever install when i get a new mac and when i'm using a friend's mac and they don't have alfred i feel the pain of not having alfred alfred is basically like the mac spotlight search on steroids so you can search for you can search the web you can search amazon you can search [18:49] for files and folders and basically anything and it just sort of makes my speed at doing stuff on a computer about three times faster than clicking on finder clicking on things clicking on a folder or clicking on the dock clicking on safari and going on a url i can just put it into alfred and it's so quick secondly i use an app called rise dot io which i've been using since november 2021 i believe um and rise to i o is great because it's an automatic time tracker and so for example it can tell me on a weekly or a daily or a monthly [19:17] basis what proportion of time i'm spending on various things so for example last week allegedly i worked for 36 hours of which eight hours was on zoom four hours was documenting four hours in person meeting three hours writing it takes a few seconds to for it to figure out like what category different apps are in but it's actually been genuinely useful for me to figure out where the hell my time is going and then there's a few other mac utilities that i use so for example there's an app called moom that lets me kind of move [19:41] windows from one bit of the screen to the other bit of the screen which is kind of helpful and i also use a combination of dashlane and one password for password management along with a little bit of icloud keychain uh we use one password for team stuff and dashlane for personal stuff right so those were the six different modules of the system and one thing that i didn't talk about in depth was the capture and the automated capture module that is explored in much much much more detail in this video over here which is about [20:02] this combination of five apps that's generally changed the way that i approach content creation and therefore has changed my life so click that video over there if you want to check it out thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye