7 Hacks To Master Your Productivity - Peter Akkies

for the people that are watching on YouTube you may notice that I am not in my usual setup I was here in Nashville recording something in the daily wire and very thankfully their team has assisted me in creating a botched together but still very beautiful uh studio so that's why where I am at the moment uh Peter I've followed your work for a long time I'm a massive fan of the stuff that you've been doing after all of this time working on productivity and tools and processes how have you come to think about the sort of fundamental principles that people should rely on when considering productivity or designing their own productivity system when people start talking about productivity a lot of the time we start talking about apps and apps matter you know it really helps to use the right technology but what I tell people these days is productivity is really an emotional thing productivity is in the end about figuring out what you want to do in life why it matters to you and how you're going to go about doing it so a lot of times people come to me and they're like Peter which app should I use to manage my to-do's what apps should I use to take notes and stuff and I'm like those are great questions but let's back up a little bit first let's get real deep uh what do you actually care about in life like what are you trying to achieve on this planet and we'll start from there and for a lot of times for people that's a scary place to start um but you got to start there and then everything flows from those basics why is that where you have to start when I'm talking to someone who says listen I'm really overwhelmed by my job I've got my kids to take care of my family I've got some hobbies and I just don't feel like I have time for all of these things um help me out you know help me pick an app that's going to help me be more productive or more organized often what the problem is is people just haven't gotten their priorities straight and so no app is going to help you get your priorities straight what's what's going to have help is talking about what are all the things that you actually care about in life and how are you currently spending your time and a lot of times you find people are spending 80 percent of their time doing stuff that doesn't really matter to them that much and I'm like hey maybe we got to talk about that of course if you stay if you start if you lead with that a lot of people they they check out right away because that's too scary for them people don't want to go there so you got to introduce people to that topic a little bit more um in a bit of a sensitive way but I love getting into those deep conversations with people where they reveal to me listen like my lifelong dream has actually been I want to move to Sweden and the North of Sweden and built like a Hut there and live in the forest you know and once you get to that point I'm like now we're talking and we can do some goal setting and clarify that and talk about the action steps and all that kind of stuff um yeah but we got to start with what it is that you really care about and that's a conversation super important to have I had Rob Dyrdek on the show a little while ago the guy that founded DC shoes and he did uh yeah dear deck machine and uh did this show on MTV that's done like a thousand episodes and he was talking about how he builds his businesses now and it's such a obvious thing but I'd never considered it he says what is it that we want to achieve with this business are we building it to sell are we building it to be a liquidity machine we're building it to be a cash cow we're building it to try and raise investment we're building it to try and raise our reputation we need to start with the end in mind and then work back from there because if you don't do that what are the you don't know what the steps are that you're going toward Chris Sparks someone that we both might be familiar with he's a big productivity guy over here in America ex-professional poker player he says there can be no growth without goals and what he means by that is that the um Atomic habits uh James Clear advice of a just one percent better every day focus on the um what you're going to iterate on day after day after day is a great way to operate that really really is you fall to your systems you don't rise to your goals however it only works in service of something that you care about because if you don't know the direction that you're going in each of the different iterations could take you in the wrong direction 100 that's why people will come to me and to be like Peter what do you think about time blocking I'm like look I cannot just say whether time blocking is great for you because it completely depends on your goals the circumstances you're finding yourself in what you're trying to achieve in this chapter of your life so we have to figure out you know like you're saying what is the direction and once you know the direction we can try and speed you up by going in that direction right and that is where productivity becomes so powerful and productivity you know when I start talking to people about this they often think it's a bit of a boring topic you know like you mentioned the cocktail party it's not it's not something that you really start you know riffing off at a cocktail party but once I start talking to people about listen like what are your goals and like what are you actually trying to achieve this year people will often start sharing really you know personal stuff and I'm like well do you feel like you're making a lot of progress and no not really but kind of stuck at me wanting to do this for a couple years that's really great um but but it requires having some sense of direction so you know there's tons of people like you're saying uh they actually don't have that sense of direction so that's one of the things that I enjoy working with people is figuring out what is your problem do you know where you're going and you're just having trouble implementing or are you really lost and you're focused on optimizing your day-to-day but you've got no purpose in mind and um yeah actually that's where people probably should start is like do you know where you're going it's beginning to sound less and less like productivity coaching and more like counseling or therapy oh man but I try to stay away from that that's actually an interesting point people will come to me and be like uh what what productivity advice do you have for people with ADHD and I'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa go go talk to like a professional therapist hey that's not me it's a domain of competence yeah okay so it seems like goal setting is the fundamental Foundation where is it that you want to go from there we can then work back and you know we can talk about time management and to-do lists and all of this sort of stuff what do you think most people get wrong when thinking about goal setting and creating a framework for that people are much too vague that's the number one thing that I see people are saying I want to lose weight that's great but we got to get a little bit more specific like why is it that you want to lose weight and a lot of times you start getting into interesting things people are like I don't feel attractive you know it's like into into really deep things or um for example people are like okay um I want to get promoted that's one of my goals okay but why do you want to get promoted like how is that gonna enrich your life how is that going to make you any happier and if you dig into that motivation you often find that the things that you need to do the actual action steps reveal themselves and that's something that I find so interesting because people are like I want to do this because um I want to make more money so that I can do my hobby more often is like now we've got a really strong motivation and we can make it happen um and so a lot of the times people they just have vague goals they're like yeah I wanna I wanna grow in my career okay man that's great but can we can we get like a little bit more specific on what that means and why that matters to you um so the first thing I always do with people is I say let's write down your list of goals and then we're going to do a couple passes see if we can make them really really specific I mean can you say instead of I want to lose weight can you say I want to be able to fit in this specific dress that I wore you know at my graduation or something like that right something that makes it more meaningful more Salient um but also the more specific you get what you want the easier it is to figure out what are the action steps that you're going to do and that's the next thing I talk to people about is like great now we know what you want how are we gonna get there and that's a lot of people just completely forget about that they have their list of goals they put it up on a Post-It on their desk or something like that and they just sort of think that by having that list of goals there things are magically going to happen I'm always like no let's get really specific what are you going to do today what are you going to do tomorrow what are you going to do next week next month next quarter to get to that point and it's going to be small steps that's where you mentioned the atomic habits framework hey now we can get into tactical stuff like a lot of ways to make it happen but um first let's figure out where we're going break it down into small steps and and then we'll get going okay so it seems like not only what do you want in terms of specifics you also mentioned there or why do you want it is a good motivator is that is that what people are relying on when things get hard is that just to clarify that what they want is actually what they want to want there's a couple of things there a lot of the times when someone says that they want something and I start asking the why question a couple times okay you want this why do you want this well it's important to be okay now be more specific like what what values do you have as a person that you care about um a lot of times people can't answer those questions and then you get into interesting things because people might think that they want to achieve a certain goal but really it's actually something that they've sort of thought since childhood that they wanted but in reality it doesn't matter to them anymore their set of values as an adult or maybe as a 30 year old there's a 40 year old is a lot different than it was as a 20 year old those are the kind of things that you uncover um I I would you know it happens so often that people are telling me I really feel like I should do this and there's ah I should that's the magic word in productivity I should do this right why do you feel like you should do this well you know I kind of think that blah blah my spouse no no no what do you want and by asking people why and what are your values people start to think about this a lot of people they can't lit if I if I ask them like what are top five values in life a lot of people can't answer that question I think that's terrible I think this is so important that you know this for myself for example I really value autonomy competency right Freedom those are things I care about a lot but if you can't answer for yourself what matters to you um it's going to be really difficult to figure out how you should be spending your time I love that I love the fact that it's a a firmer place to stand you know there's a five wise exercise which you'll probably be familiar with have you have you heard the uh five wise to do with I think it's the uh Lincoln Memorial or the monument or whatever no okay so this is this is really really funny so I'm gonna read it out to you um so the five wise why is the monument disintegrating because of the use of harsh chemicals why is the harsh chemicals being used to clean pigeon poop why are there so many pigeons they eat spiders and there are a lot of spiders at the monument why there's so many spiders at the monument because the lights are turned on early solution turn the lights on later at night so you go five layers down of wise to actually get to a much simpler solution so you know for instance the person that wants to lose weight why is it that you want to lose weight well because I don't feel very attractive why is it that you don't feel attractive well because my partner doesn't seem to be paying much attention to me why is your partner not paying much attention to you well they spend a lot of time at work why do you think they're spending a lot of time well it's because we don't have enough money and you go okay well actually your desire to lose weight is a financial problem it's a problem around the fact that you don't get to spend enough time together are you not sufficiently open so I think that's really really great one of the problems that I I I would totally agree and the number of people who want to achieve things and don't and when you ask them have you written down very very specific goals they will say no they'll just have this sort of amorphous idea of a destination yep yep it's over there I'm going over there no no what exactly is it and I'm speaking to myself right like you know this is this is me from every year of my life for the last 35 years but when it comes to taking a large project I want to fit into a size 8 dress I want to 2x my net worth within the next two years I want to buy a house by the age of 40. I want to do whatever where do you suggest that people go from having large project to intermediate Milestones goals daily actions how do you think about breaking that down amazing question and people should distinguish between what it is that they want and how they're going to do it because you started talking about goals that you have but also about living large projects and kind of using those interchangeably and I think a lot of people colloquially colloquially use that language um but I find it very helpful to get really specific on what the difference is between those things so I might say right now I'm trying to build a bunch of muscle hey we can we can do a whole sequence of series on why that is but in the end it's because I want to look more attractive you know and and feel better as I walk through the city and meet people and get Smiles all that kind of stuff right so I want to build a bunch of muscle right um I could say that's that's a goal but um I have a bunch of projects a bunch of action steps related to that goal so one might be find a personal trainer to work with right another might be come up with a good routine of lifting to do at the gym another might be improved by diet in the sense of upping the protein intake that I have making sure I hit all my macros and stuff like that so by getting really clear on what is it that we're trying to achieve which is the goal and what are the action steps that we're taking which often are new habits to build right healthy habits to build um could be like getting more sleep you know going to bed earlier like putting it with your phone at night but also projects like uh oh hey I gotta set up like a lifting routine for myself that's going to involve a little bit of research some trial and error all that kind of stuff um this is really helpful because now you can have on the one hand a list of your goals and on the other hand a list of the things that you're going to do about it and then you can just start working through the list whereas a lot of the times I see people that are writing down their to-do list you know they're like get buff it's like okay great like that's not something that you can do you know what I'm saying you need to break that down into a bunch of steps so it comes down to being really clear on what is the destination what are the steps and defining those steps very clearly as well and then we can talk all about you know when are you going to do that stuff what are you going to work on first second and third how do you make sure that you have a manageable workload um but the key thing is not just to write down what it is that you want but also for each thing that you want what are the key actions steps what are the key things that you're going to do to make that happen what about um Milestone Cadence check-in review Etc um one of the things that I found when trying to follow a GTD framework which involves usually a weekly review of where you're at and so on and so forth the review process was so arduous and so frequent that I ended up having a very negative relationship with it and I ended up not doing my review but if you don't have check-ins sufficiently frequently you can end up wandering off track toward your goal of doubling your net worth or losing you know four dress sizes or whatever so what is the minimum viable product when it comes to thinking about milestones and check-ins and Cadence and stuff like that right so this partially depends on your personality and that's that's what I think it's a great question I find that some people that I work with have a ton of intrinsic motivation and if you have a lot of intrinsic motivation and you know what it is that you want to achieve and you have your action steps pretty much mapped out you might not need so many check-ins because you're just going to do stuff by yourself but I also have a friend of mine who he's quite an accomplished person he's he's a very well-known speaker at this point he's amazing at speaking in public he gives workshops at big companies he's written a book um but to write that book that he got published and has done quite well that he really needed other people to just you know get on his ass basically and be like hey like did you do your writing this morning like how many chapters have you put out in the past month and and so he really needs extrinsic motivation that's fine too but this is a case of knowing yourself um I personally find that I don't need other people to you know shove me along I I have a lot of you know discipline in terms of making my own stuff happen but if you're not like that that's totally okay that's just something that you need to know about yourself so get a friend get a co-worker get someone else to do those check-ins for you now for me because I like to do this thing myself I have a like you're saying some systems in place a weekly review which is something that I recommend anybody do this really but particularly if if your motivation comes from yourself hey that's a great time to check in with yourself every week how did things go in the past week what have I done what what have I yet to do make sure you know not not just as a motivational thing but also just make sure that you're on top of everything that's a big plan of that and I combine that with doing some quarterly planning so I take every three months and hey it's we're recording this at the end of June so in a couple days the new quarter is starting I'm going to sit down and just update my list of goals I do it once every three months and the reason I do have that frequency is I don't you know freak myself out in the middle um of a quarter where I'm like oh I should take a look at my goals again no I have like I know there's a moment coming when I can sit down and update my list of goals check in with my action steps see if I'm on track for Stuff um I find it really helpful to have a Cadence for that and to be honest like if you're doing that once every couple months I think for most people that is going to be perfectly fine as a check-in of where you're going but um if you don't want to do some kind of weekly review GTD style like you were saying um get someone to check in with you you know just sit down you could make it like a mini Mastermind or just a weekly meeting with a friend or something like that hey what have you been working on what have I been working on um just so that there's a little bit of accountability and hey if you need to make that more social then then go for it but once a week and then once a quarter for the planning that's great what do you do when it comes to conceptualizing your goals do you do health wealth relationships and other role have you have you got a framework that people can follow when it comes to splitting up their life yep I try to think of uh purpose goals in life impact goals is one way to say that so that's really broad it's like what what is the meaning of my life on this planet you know that's something that some people feel really strongly that they know like there's like a social justice cause that I need to go after for example right other people don't have that so much um I think of relationship goals right so social life but also Intimate Relationships um I think of you know travel goals fun goals so I do break that down into a bunch of categories financial goals is another one right for a lot of people that's really important um I tend to think of Home goals as well just like my home environment like one one of them could be like build a nice home office to work from um so I do like to break that down into a bunch of categories because it helps me have a more rounded set of goals you're not you know at any given point in time you can't be working on 15 of your goals it doesn't work that way right you know you don't want to spread your attention that much because you won't get anything done but it's really helpful to have some kind of at least trigger list um of all the different things that you could care about in your life and one of them could be like physical health another one could be mental health right and like I said home uh relationships finances all that kind of stuff just to make sure that you're thinking of everything even if you're not actively working on all the goals in all of those different parts of your life at the same time um at least you know they're there and you could choose to work on them do you have a goal setting process or have you got a course that you've done that people can go and take if if this sounds like it's good to them I do I do I I call this big picture productivity actually is what I call this because a lot of people are focused on like the day-to-day stuff like how you know how do I manage my to-do list for today or this week but that's really helpful very important a lot of people need help with that but what I do is I I say let's take a step back and and let's think about if we were to Define productivity at a high level for you like how how would you define productivity for yourself um this is an exercise I do with people and and people like this because at first they start thinking oh how many tasks I get done every week and then and then when you ask them a couple more questions when you ask the why question a little bit more people start saying hey actually it's about am I making progress on my goals you know and then we start talking about their goals so so yeah I take people through that system and um a lot of people find that really valuable it does take a little bit more vulnerability than just the let's set up an app for you you know yes okay so next thing time management something that everybody struggles with what are your principles for that this is tough to say because it does depend on the context a lot I used to recommend one system of time management for everybody then I got some people that told me Hey listen I'm a doctor like I see patients all day um and I I can't do this I I have to get my to-do's like on my to-do list done whenever I have five or ten minutes here right so when it comes to time management there's not one technique that I would recommend for everyone some people for example really love to do time blocking this can be great if let's say you're like a software developer you can take your week and you have some meetings and then in between your meetings you're blocking off time for so-called deep work I'm I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of deep work by Cal Newport yeah it's like the work that you do that's the mo that takes the most Focus that's the most valuable right and so it's great to make time for that um and for a lot of knowledge workers it's really helpful to set aside time in their schedule to work on that you know maybe even block off time on your calendar so people can't schedule meetings with you at that point um but the context is so different one of my favorite students owns a Coffee Roastery and so he's constantly you know roasting coffee be shipping it out to Consumers going to like state fairs or whatever and showing up with I don't know whatever he has a truck or something I guess and he's like selling his coffee um and this guy also like he has a bunch of employees to manage he can't sit down and work on something for three hours because people are always bothering him so for someone like that you have to come up with a different system so I'm always telling people I'm not going to tell you one system for time management because it doesn't make any sense however I will help you discover for yourself uh what matters so this is where we do the exercise what are the types of work that you have every week and what level of focus do each of these types of work require are there times of the day that you find yourself more focused are there times of the day that you find yourself you're able to blast through your email the best and we construct a kind of schedule based on that rather than saying this is the one thing that works for everybody because in reality there's no there's no one system that works for everybody okay so you're talking there about almost trying to design a daily schedule uh thinking about energy level and task requirements thinking about Focus availability and what it is that you're trying to achieve um I'm gonna guess that's probably a good conception that you 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 the uh I'm a hairdresser or I'm a barber I'm a personal trainer you know 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 the structure of that um 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 now but 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 we're 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 can we set up systems so that you've got Focus 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 uh the personal trainers for example who are walking around with clients all day um again can you actually set aside some time to do your bookkeeping I 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 afternoon a month just to deal with that and he started doing that and actually worked out really well for him you know he's like hey now I'm on top of all this stuff didn't take that much time um 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 to the fullest degree possible it's not true we have constraints um gotta 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 what are the different requirements for the tasks that you have um and and build a schedule around that and experiment is another thing I always tell people 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 hurt the Cal Newport does his time blocking a certain way and they try that 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 um 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 you lose the ability to focus and to do the important stuff people emailing you are like hey Jack can you do this for me today oh sure I'll get right on 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 um 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 um go do it early in the mornings like don't accept meetings before noon or something like that right um 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 5am and that's the only way to like live their life and like if you want to wake up at 5am 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 I 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 a night owl or an early bird and uh I don't know whether I don't know whether I had some epigenetic shift at age 31 or something but honestly man I I 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 but one of the things that we've spoken about there is this sort of relationship between goals tasks and uh 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 I it seems like you could almost use a calendar as a to-do list to 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 I 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 uh 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 got to do for your home then there is things that you do that are about your relationships with other people right scheduling 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 um division to start with now for each of those big buckets of your life I like to call them areas whatever categories um think about all the tasks that you have and put them under that bucket and think about the projects that you have a project it's just a collection of tasks contributes to an outcome right the project is like hey I'm you know 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 you know definite period of time and 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 why 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 low priority um but 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 I 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 on Wednesday or something like that um 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 a lot of people have a very negative relationship I think with their to-do list you know your to-do list should be making life easier for you it should be you know 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 their 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 there's there's two things that I'll say the first one is put fun stuff on your to-do list put your fun [ __ ] on your to-do list as well because if you're the kind of person who like hates looking at their 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 um 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 so if you're looking at your 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 it's one of the reasons why I do love this uh 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 no 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 um that's painful but if you did it right your to-do list is just a reflection of your commitments 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 and 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 can only do a finite amount of things the 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 your life in 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 they don't know what they should begin with um perhaps they don't have too much 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 bad it's back to the goal setting like what are your goals which ones are more important than the other ones um 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 going to take some introspection over time maybe you gotta you gotta do meditation you got to take some drugs or something I don't know what you want to do you got to figure that out somehow um 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 uh it's going to be revealing this problem to you so so it's like you're saying the to-do list never causes the problem it's just revealing the fact that you haven't set your priorities right if I'm if I'm looking and I've 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 on a friggin walk right and ask myself of all the things that you know I care about in life like 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 okay I should look at my tasks which one of these tasks is 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 I really do believe that almost everything comes back to getting very very clear on what it is that you want and ruthlessly killing 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 to throughout my 20s is burnout so 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 uh like um sporadically acutely depressed so I'd 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 um what 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 it's about six or seven years ago now and I was working in as a consultant in the US and um wasn't even at a particularly bad firm 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 you know getting like my heart rate was way too high and my blood pressure's too high and you know I 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 so 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 that's the first thing um 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 is 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 it was really bad for a while and I 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 um 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 basic like vacuuming the house or like I would have do 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 I like I actually feel it more 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 and so I was super indecisive it was bizarre I couldn't make take any decisions anymore um and this lack of capability really hit me hard because it really my identity was as someone who's capable and can learn and um that was really painful but I I found that um 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 and um they're dealing with a lot of the same stuff and and and I think it's 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 push myself harder and you end you know entered a vicious circle where you stress yourself out more you perform worse you push harder and you get more stress Etc and so for me the the solution to a lot of that was pushing less hard I'm actually trying less hard which was a whole a whole different challenge but I've come to see that there's a lot of different types of burnout that people go through um and for a lot of people um productivity techniques are really appealing actually that's that's that's sort of the 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 and then I have a plan um that's something that that I found very important that I see in a lot of people today but um I I certainly would have want to give medical advice to anyone with burnout but um I love sharing my own experience because it was it was really transformative in my life bringing order to chaos is I think what most people are trying to achieve just generally yeah 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 and I need to bring order to it some people brought order to it by being overbearingly protective of themselves and their loved ones some 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 um yeah this is what people are working with so I came up with uh an idea that 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 want to know what this is yeah so um it's when your rejuvenative practices fundamentally are built for improving your productivity as opposed to the pure enjoyment of them so 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 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 sanitarians uh expose themselves to a minimum of 115 minutes per day of vitamin D through direct sunlight like all of these different things that basically even your leisure activities become a productivity activity right and that's where 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 um uh 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 it mistakenly looks at what improving consists of and one of my friends George who's a fantastic writer talked to me about this and said 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 right that the only button that you have to push is more productivity more productivity more whereas yeah whereas in reality a lot of the highest leverage things that you can do are creative Pursuits you know that the idea that you have that 10x is or 100x is 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 or it happens when you're trying to fall asleep on the night time it happens when you're finally on a walk and your phone's died 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 and outside of both of those things is life and life is not necessarily something that feeds into either of them and yet it can right I think the the best way to avoid the productivity Purgatory 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 when I'm 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 cubeman told me that it's going to improve my focus I'm doing it because I fundamentally enjoy what it consists of and for other people it might be bird watching or watercolors or whatever sex parties I 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 have you 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 unearned and the air is filled with guilt anxiety self-hatred and Dread sometimes the rational decision maker puts is foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal Leisure things and since the instant gratification monkey sure as hell isn't going to 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 absolutely love this these are so I thanks so much for introducing these Concepts to me anyway because I think they're fabulous and I love that you mentioned huberman because he he's fantastic and he's got a great podcast and he shares so much wisdom but 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 gonna go on my walk to optimize my productivity I am going to build a meditation habit so that I will be so freaking 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 uh you know this is this is why in in some of my courses I ask people to do this exercise what does it mean to you to be productive because 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 [ __ ] about and how quickly are you getting there how's not quickly but how consistently are you making progress towards those goals okay and so when you think of it that way you're not going to go on a walk to you know be more productive and somehow unless there is a very good reason so if you're um biggest passion in life is like I want the world to lower its carbon emissions as fast as possible it's the thing I care the most about um that's my mission in life that's what drives me this what 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 on 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 um what was this guy who wrote this this book called [ __ ] jobs I think that's which is a fantastic concept if you have a [ __ ] 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 like now you're doing the thing that you're describing which I think is really really bad um so so I I wouldn't say that it's always bad to like go on your walk or do what huberman recommends or whatever right um but there's got to be a purpose to it and and if you're you know purpose for doing that is I want to you know spend be able to spend more time on the thing that I don't really care about then you're doing it wrong ah yes yes it's um it really all just does come back to goals like everything just comes back to if 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 uh 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 um 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 a 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 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 like within like half an hour and if they don't it's weird um you've just got to teach people that you're not going to do it this was I did this is 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 so that's before we get to any tactical stuff like what app should you use or how often should you check your email it's just like try to stem the flow and try to change people's expectations that you're not going to do this now beyond that I'm a real big fan of batch processing so yeah I check my email a fair amount 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 want to make sure that you know this thing came in that I'm waiting for ETC but I I have some time where I sit down I'm like tomorrow I'm just going to batch process like these 40 emails that need dealing with or something like that and 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 you know 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 there it's worse when people are working in Microsoft teams or slack right and they're on these like chat apps all the time while they're trying to work 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 going to reply all the time and if you're in a corporate environment where people don't respect that I mean you got to have a conversation with with people who are managing you or your boss and be like what what is it that you want me to do here like what is my job description and what are the what is the value that I'm meant to add I have a real Frank conversation am I employed as an email replier I'm employed to actually do some tasks outside of this is it um is it France that's just brought in that law that says uh businesses can't expect their employees to answer emails outside of I think that's right I've heard that as well or 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 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 you know I think people need to take responsibility for this themselves right I think you need to go talk to the people that you're working with and just have a conversation and be like listen 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 and 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 what 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 what are you doing you're just answering email all day and barely getting anything done right it's like surgery and misery right okay so let's say that we've set expectations people don't expect us to reply within 30 minutes we also understand that batching is good so that we're not distracted um as Cal 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 um what about uh tactical stuff uh apps or Integrations that you like I am always telling people triage so what happens is you got a bunch of new emails unread emails triage them and 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 so you don't get more of those emails next time um or there's an email that you do need to do something with now it could be quick or fast quick let's say two minutes or less right so if some if there's an email it 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 unflag done you can do this in Gmail you can do this in whatever mail app you're using right any mail app support flag on Gmail is that the star it's the star it's the star on Gmail for sure yeah okay yep um 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 a 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 create a to do for those emails so a lot of the times what people will do is sort of people who've just discovered the magic of to-do list right of like a certain app they'll start forwarding every single email that they ever need to do some something with to their 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 those however if it's something that is going to take a little bit of time you know if you need to like write a report or whatever if you need to do something um 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 um given an appropriate title and you know 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 that's the triaging 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 todoist and has a very nice Gmail integration so if you're looking at an email you can just be like Boop create a task for this inside my to-do list that links back to the email I love that super handy um so there's a lot of tactical stuff that you can do right there that that actually also I know I keep going back to the messaging apps but that works also for slack and team so if you're using slack or Microsoft teams to communicate you can turn a message into it to do really handy just 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 gotta find that nice balance of um creating to-do's for the things that you need to do but not going crazy with all the little stuff because then you know you won't see the the force 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 and I know that there are other 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 apps these days that the ones that I have to laugh at the most is the ones that promise that AI is going to answer all your emails for you which I'm always like maybe dude I'm down for that maybe I I want to be I want to be made redundant and then eventually AI can record the podcast and I'm I can just like throw myself off a cliff that would yeah I thought you were gonna say like sit on the beach or something but um that took a turn no but you know here's the thing 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 a couple dozen 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 advanced way of like dealing with stuff um 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 um set up some filters if you need to just so you're mostly seeing the relevant stuff like I know people who at work um if it's an email that they're sort of cc'd on like automatically Chuck it in a folder that they never look at because those things are never relevant you know unless it's directed at me exactly where you go if that's the environment you're working you got to do that that works um but yeah uh 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 the 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 batch 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 and if you're getting wild wild amounts of email hey you probably just need to pay someone to like manage your inbox for you right yeah no I have an EA or a PA or a VA or something yeah dude I I I do appreciate that with the with the email approach that it's the same with note taking for me so I'm looking at my Apple notes now 2659 notes and um I use them for prep for guests I use them for I I use Apple notes for everything and it's so funny that after you know an entire lifetime of is it Evernote is it notion 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 ultimate note-taking app was embedded in all of your Apple devices all along uh and with that like the simplest way that I've 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 I just typed 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 keywords 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 Midway meme isn't it it's the what it's called a midwit meme where you've got like the the dumb guy and the sage uh both using Apple notes and the guy in the middle who's got like obsidian and notion I love that Meme it's one of my favorite memes because so good it's it's so true um I get a lot of people asking me Peter what do you think about these link note-taking apps like I have obsidian and then I could create like my own Wiki and I could connect Concepts to each other I can build my second brain and like no by the way I mentioned building a second brain no offense to Thiago Forte I think he's a baseball 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 stuff tiago's stuff is is um it's built for a very specific type of person with a very specific type of problem and he is the best in the world he's the best in the world at what he does for those sorts of people but I I tried and I'm an Optimizer maybe an unorganized Optimizer an optimized Optimizer but like I I've tried to do it it just it's it doesn't work for me I I I can't it's the same reason why my weekly review for GTD didn't work uh 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 um format that you've gone through today is that it's not a one-size-fits-all it's not that there are um morally better or Superior ways to do productivity you know I used to think that and other people may feel this too that it was almost like a personal failing of mine that I I I couldn't no I I felt like I should be better whatever better meant I should be like more or or more virtuous disciplined moral motivated whatever right and I would feel bad I'd be like Oh I'm not at inbox zero oh 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 and 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 I can be like look I want to 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 enough right but it makes it makes it less [ __ ] um yeah it makes it bearable yeah precisely and um 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 um which I think is really cool so I write this newsletter every single week this newsletter requires a very um specific first headspace and second um 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 I love using that to almost move me into different uh modes of thinking so 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 and the memes and the interesting studies that I've found and I'm like right what am I going to write about today and I'll peruse through peruse 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 newsletter 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 uh workspace designers that you puts you into a state of mind and also gives you the information that you need to move forward yeah you found a minimum viable system to do this for you and 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 that you emphasize that point that hey that this is working for you and that people shouldn't feel guilty about it because just to get back to a second to to Thiago Forte's build the 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 going to refer to them in your newest publication and 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 what 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 I'm on board with everything that you said completely true um 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 both harped on which is hey uh 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 um 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 for me as well um it has just enough features for a lot of people you know if 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 banging podcast right and so if it helps you produce great podcasts then it's great and even if the system is a little bit messy it doesn't matter if the podcasts are good right so um you gotta optimize for the right thing like this is what I'm saying here oh yeah 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 they want to learn from you they want to see the content that you've got why should they head yeah for sure two places one of them is YouTube just search Peter Rockies 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 you know Tech tutorials like how to get the most out of Apple notes for example um but also introduce you to some other apps that you can use to get more organized I 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 condense it down to the shortest format that I could so people can just go ahead and find that it's over at organizeyourtodus.com so it's a simple one organize your to-do's.com and it'll just take you 30 minutes amazing Peter I appreciate you thank you if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe