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 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 two 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 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 three 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, 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 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 Ron layer, i.e., Layer 1 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.

The first one is a calendar. Now, it 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 got to have dinner with my mum next week.

It's fine, I'm just going to 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 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, 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 Fantastical 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, 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 invited me to?

" et cetera, et cetera. So a calendar is 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 block in my calendar and then I know that, oh, okay, cool, when I get to the morning at 9:00, this is the thing that I'm doing.

I block out time for exercise, I block out time for sports events, for social events. Friday nights, I want to host a dinner, therefore I'll block that time out 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 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 raw level is some 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 Tiago Forte, who is again, a 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 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 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 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 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 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?

That's my daily highlight, and every every day I try and fill that in 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 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 going to happen until I write it down." And I just open up Todoist 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 will get to it at some point.

Similarly, I use this for shopping lists. 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 Todoist 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 going to batch go through my to-do list because I've got half an hour and nothing better to do," then I'll just go through and just bang, bang.

I'll delete the ones that are no longer relevant, like, "Oh, should I get oat plant smoothies?

Probably maybe not. Screw it. 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 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 camping 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 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 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 in my brain to do stuff, and then it just adds this sort of low-level tension and stress to every single thing that we do in life.

Anyway, final thing in our 'wrong' 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 I 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, 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 year. 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 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 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, 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 too 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 audiobooks or podcasts 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 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 in ebook format rather than 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 app 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.

All right, so that was the Kindle app. Next 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 Instapaper, usually on my phone, and I'll just flick through some of the articles in Instapaper.

How to Build Your Ultimate Productivity System

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