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 1 tasks are things that our brain itself does best. These are things like creativity and enjoyment and relaxing and living in the present moment and all that fun stuff, connecting with other people. All of this stuff, totally cool if our brain does the thing. Then we've got Type 2 types of thing, which is stuff that like we often use our brain for, but that our productivity system or some kind of system can probably do a little bit more efficiently. For example, things like keeping on top of tasks, keeping on top of calendars, keeping on top of emails, having to use our brain to remember all of that stuff is really taxing and quite stressful, especially if you have a lot of stuff to be doing. And then thirdly, there is the Type 3 stuff, the stuff that we definitely should be using some kind of system for. This generally involves kind of remembering information that is not directly connected to the things we actually care about. So, for example, 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. Let the feast begin. 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 mom 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 holding 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 Asam and Srin at Dishoom, 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 the 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 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, our 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 chat in my calendar, and then I know that, oh, okay, cool. When it gets to the morning at 9:00, this is the thing that I'm doing. I block out times for exercise, I block out times for sports event, 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 Calendly 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 Ron 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, productivity expert, and it's called One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email. 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 your 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 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 might-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, but 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 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 my mind, it just goes straight into the to-do list app, either on my phone or on my MacBook. And then whenever I've got some time or 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, bang, bang. I'll delete the ones that are no longer relevant, like, oh, should I get all plants smoothies? Uh, 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 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 will get around to sending all these emails in one go. Something I like to do is, I've got this someday/maybe list for like, you know, work stuff, someday/maybe list for like personal stuff. These are things I'd like to do at some point. Rollerblading, archery, hunting, glamping, mountain biking, treehouse glamping 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 kitesurfing sounds pretty cool. Let me Google and figure out where I can potentially go kitesurfing. Now, at this point, the mistake that the vast majority of people seem to make with their to-do lists, 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, oh, I know my to-do list has most of the things I need to do, but it doesn't have all the things I need to do. Therefore I still need to remember my brain to do stuff, and then it just adds this sort of low low-level tension and stress to every single thing that we do in life. Anyway, final thing in our Ron 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've 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 medical stuff. Let's look at "Preclinical 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 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 ever goes, if I ever get 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 on 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 Ron 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 to 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, 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've 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. But yeah, the Kindle app is absolutely sick. I tend to read most things on e-book format rather than physical book format. But it's not just reading that I can do in 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, and I'll be like, oh, okay, cool, this one looks interesting. Improving ourselves to death. This is a bit of a critique about self-help. And I can look through that article, I can highlight stuff as well. It's all very handy. And it's just a great way of separating the reading of articles from coming across the articles. Because often I find, you know, if I'm on the toilet for like three minutes and I'm scrolling through Twitter, and I come across an interesting article. If I read it there and then, it might take 10 minutes, and then I'm on the toilet for three hours, and that's not very good. Or if I'm in the middle of something and someone recommends an article, I know I want to read it at some point, but I know I don't want to read it there and then. I'll just send it straight to Instapaper and trust that at some point I will get around to reading that article. And again, this separation from separation of things, like if I'm trying to focus on something that I genuinely care about, but then I get I get derailed by an article recommendation and go down this Wikipedia rabbit holes trying to figure out all these conspiracy theories, that ends up actually taking time away from the thing that I actually care about, and kind of stopping me from kind of being productive and being intentional with how I'm spending my time. And because time is our most valuable non-renewable resource, it's the only thing we can't make more of, it's like, it always felt a bit like, uh, I know I've carved out this time to work on this thing that's important to me, but I've just been stolen away by being distracted by this article. Instapaper or something like that completely solves that problem. Now, when it comes to actually finding articles and interesting things to read that will level up your life and like things you actually care about, people always ask me like, how do you find stuff to read? And for me, it's because I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters, and one of the main ones that I read every single day is called Morning Brew, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Now, Morning Brew is a completely free daily email newsletter that lands in your inbox every morning, or in your read-it-later app if you've set up a forwarding rule, which is what I've done. Basically, it gets you up to speed on what's happening in the world of tech and finance and business. And if you care about those three things like I do, then it's just a fantastic newsletter, and it's also completely free, so you might as well sign up. It takes most people around five minutes to go through it and catch up to date with the news. Usually I skim through it in about two and a half minutes flat while I'm waiting for my morning coffee to brew. And if there's any interesting articles from that, I'll send those articles directly to my read-it-later app as well, and then usually read them later on in the day on the toilet. And that means every day I'm up to date on these things that I care about like tech and finance and business. And a lot of those topics then generate interesting content ideas that I can talk about in the podcast or in YouTube videos or in anything else, or just generally keeping up to date with interesting things in the world. It's also great because it gives you interesting and in-depth coverage around weird things like Elon Musk how he's financing his Twitter buy or like the recent crypto crash, which has massively affected my own crypto portfolio. But I've gotten the information from Morning Brew because I trust them as a legit non-fake news source. And all it is is take out a few minutes out of my day to read these interesting articles rather than be keeping up to date with the whole 24 hours news cycle. So yeah, if you're interested in tech, finance, business, any of that kind of stuff, then you might as well subscribe to this newsletter. It is completely free, they don't charge a single penny for it, completely free. Check check out the link in the video description. And it'll help support the channel as well. So thank you so much Morning Brew for sponsoring this video and for making my personal life much better. All right, component three of the Hermione layer is an app called Readwise. I'll put an affiliate link down below. They're not sponsoring this video, but if you click the link, you'll get an extra two-month trial rather than just a one-month trial. And I'll get a bit of a kickback if you sign up. I've been recommending Readwise for the last like three years now. Readwise is incredible. It's like this little hub that takes in details like it takes in your Kindle highlights and your Instapaper highlights and a few other sources, and it puts them all in one place. And it means you can then export those highlights to apps like Notion or Roam, more on those in Layer 3. And it's really handy because now all of this stuff gets automated. Anytime I see a passage in Kindle or in Instapaper that resonates with me where I think, oh, I want to save this passage. All I have to do is highlight it. And I trust I just trust that Readwise will behind the scenes sort it all out. Again, before Readwise existed, before we had this this kind of thing, what we'd have to do is if you find a passage that resonated with you, you'd have to write it down, you'd have to highlight it, you'd have to store it somewhere, you'd have to figure out where you're trying to store it. It becomes a real faff. And again, coming back to our point, what is the point of a productivity system? People always ask, it's to get shit off of your own brain. Like I now don't need to remember all these things because the system is remembering it for me. And then it I trust that the system will resurface it as and when I need to access those highlights again. And then finally, the fourth component of this sort of system is some sort of capture app for notes. Now, again, I've tried a bunch of systems over the years, but actually the one that I've come back to most often is actually Apple Notes. And essentially, anytime I need to remember something, for example, if I'm taking a note while I'm on the toilet, or if I'm on the train and listening to an audiobook, and I want to take notes on something, I'll just open up Apple Notes and I'll write it down. And I'll trust that if I need to resurface that thing sometime further down the line, it will always be in my Apple Notes, and it will always be something that I could potentially search for. At this point, honestly, I've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notes in my Apple Notes, and then I just trust that they're there. Like I know I don't need to worry about doing stuff with them as soon as they come in. I don't need to worry about an elaborate system for this. What I care about is having the minimum viable level of organization, the minimum viable level of systems and structure to again, reduce my own strain, reduce my own stress. People often ask like, oh, how do you seem to not burn out? How do you manage like Honestly, like having a decent system is a massive cure for burnout because you just trust the system, you trust the system to do stuff. You don't have to again, have that low level of anxiety running in your actual brain. All right, so that was the Hermione layer of the productivity system. And now the final layer that if you want to layer on top of that, you can, if you really want to, is the Dumbledore layer, which relates to a concept called Building a Second Brain. You might have heard me talk about Building a Second Brain before. It is a book, it is a system, it's a course written and done by my friend Tiago Forte, and it's like a pretty game-changing productivity system because the idea, like Level 1, the Ron the Ron layer, level whatever you want to call it, was about just being able to organize our life and kind of get by. Level 2 was about capturing insights from all the stuff that we read and consume. And Level 3, this Dumbledore level, is all about making connections, and in a way using our productivity system for creativity rather than just for storage. And in a way, if you can actually build your own second brain, this ends up acting as a thought partner for you. I've been using this system since like mid-2019 now, it's been three years, and I've found so many ways in which, particularly for writing my book, but also for creating content, and for writing newsletters, and for doing podcasts, the information I've captured into my second brain, using an app called Roam, the one I use these days, although I might twitch to Obsidian, more on that later. But capturing all this information into an app called Roam Research means that it just sort of resurfaces. And if you want to find out more about this Dumbledore level, then check out this video over here, which is my book club episode all about breaking down the CODE component of the Building a Second Brain system, and that will give you a step-by-step guide on how to apply it in your own life. So thank you so much for watching. Check out this video over here, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.
The speaker, a young man with dark hair and glasses, sits cross-legged on a rug, gesturing with both hands as he introduces the video's topic. A laptop with a colorful, abstract design on its lid is positioned on a small white table to his right. Animated app icons for Gmail, Instapaper, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Superhuman, and Apple Mail appear around him.
"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?"
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Gmail", "Instapaper", "Google Drive", "Google Calendar", "Superhuman", "Apple Mail"
The speaker continues to gesture with his hands, emphasizing his points. The app icons disappear, and the text "Why do you need a productivity system?" appears on screen, then fades.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Why do you need a productivity system?"
The speaker continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. On the right side of the screen, a split-screen view appears, showing various productivity app interfaces. The first app shows a daily notes page with dates and bullet points. The second app displays a list of ideas with statuses and destinations. The third app shows a document with highlighted text and an outline. The fourth app shows a calendar with scheduled blocks of time. The fifth app shows a list of articles with titles, authors, and dates.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen. The main screen is light blue. A blue circle appears on the left, then an orange arc, then an orange circle. A pink brain icon appears inside the blue circle, and a grey gear icon appears inside the orange circle. The blue circle overlaps the orange circle slightly.
"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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Type I" appears with an arrow pointing to the blue circle. Then, the words "Creativity," "Enjoyment," "Relaxing," and "Connecting" appear below "Type I."
"And broadly, we can categorize tasks into one of three things. So, Type 1 tasks are things that our brain itself does best. This is 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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Type I", "Creativity", "Enjoyment", "Relaxing", "Connecting"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Type II" appears with an arrow pointing to the overlapping section of the two circles. Then, the words "Tasks," "Calendars," and "Emails" appear below "Type II."
"Then we've got Type 2 types of thing, which is stuff that like we often use our brain for, but that our productivity system or some kind of system can 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 done."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Type II", "Tasks", "Calendars", "Emails"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Type III" appears with an arrow pointing to the orange circle. Then, the words "Phone numbers" and "Birthdays" appear below "Type III."
"And then thirdly, there is the Type 3 stuff, the stuff that we definitely should be using some kind of system for. This generally involves kind of remembering information that is not directly connected to the things we actually care about. So, for example, 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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Type III", "Phone numbers", "Birthdays"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. The text "Productivity is using our time intentionally and effectively." appears on a light blue background, with "intentionally" and "effectively" highlighted in purple. The text then disappears.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
Text: "Productivity is using our time intentionally and effectively."
The speaker gestures with his hands, counting on his fingers. Images of Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and Albus Dumbledore appear sequentially as he mentions each character.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of Ron Weasley at the top, and the text "Layer One" and "Ron" below it. The speaker is not visible.
Setting: digital background — bright, even
Text: "Layer One", "Ron"
The speaker returns to the screen, gesturing with his hands, counting to four on his fingers. He looks directly at the camera, explaining the first layer of the productivity system.
"So, the Ron layer, IE, 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
A scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays, showing Dumbledore speaking in the Great Hall. He gestures with his hands, looking up and then out at the students.
"Let the feast begin."
Setting: Hogwarts Great Hall — dim, warm, magical
People (1):
• standing behind a podium, wearing dark, patterned robes and long robes, long, white beard and hair hair — speaking with a slight smile
The speaker returns to the screen, gesturing with his hands. The text "Calendar" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. He continues to speak about the importance of calendars.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, expressive
Text: "Calendar"
The speaker continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. He emphasizes the difficulty of remembering things. He then references David Allen and a quote, which appears on screen.
"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 mom 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 holding them."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, expressive
The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of David Allen at the top, and a quote below it. The text "Your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them." appears, with "having ideas" and "holding them" highlighted in purple. The speaker is not visible.
"who says that your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
Text: ""Your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them."", "David Allen"
The speaker returns to the screen, gesturing emphatically with his hands. He looks directly at the camera, conveying his strong opinion.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, expressive
The speaker gestures with his hands. Icons for Apple Calendar and Google Calendar appear on screen as he mentions them. He then mentions Fantastical.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "CALENDAR", "GOOGLE CALENDAR"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the left side of the screen. The main screen displays a detailed digital calendar (Fantastical) with numerous green, blue, and red blocks representing appointments and tasks across several days. The speaker points to different parts of the calendar as he describes his schedule.
"This is, for example, what my Fantastical looks like. Earlier today, breakfast with Asam and Srin at Dishoom, 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 the 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, engaged
Text: "May 2022"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He explains how his calendar system reduces stress.
"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 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands, emphasizing the proactive use of a calendar for scheduling personal goals and activities.
"So, our 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 chat in my calendar, and then I know that, oh, okay, cool. When it gets to the morning at 9:00, this is the thing that I'm doing. I block out times for exercise, I block out times for sports event, for social events. Friday nights, I want to host a dinner, therefore I'll block that time out in my calendar."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands. Icons for Calendly and SavvyCal appear on screen as he mentions them. He explains how these apps simplify scheduling by generating a link that connects to his 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 Calendly 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Calendly", "SavvyCal"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Email" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. Icons for Gmail, Apple Mail, and Superhuman appear on screen as he mentions them.
"All right, the next thing every productivity system needs at the Ron 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Email", "Gmail", "Apple Mail", "Superhuman"
The screen briefly shows the speaker with Tiago Forte, then transitions to a webpage titled "One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email." The speaker is in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands.
"Now there's an approach to email that I really like from my friend Tiago Forte, who is, again, productivity expert, and it's called One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email."
Setting: office — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The main screen shows a Gmail icon at the top, with arrows branching down to icons for Calendar, Task Manager, Note App (Evernote), and Read-it-later App (Instapaper).
"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 your 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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Calendar", "Task Manager", "Note App", "Read-it-later App"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He explains the importance of unsubscribing from unnecessary emails. A screen recording of an email client shows the "Unsubscribe" button being clicked, then a pop-up asking to confirm unsubscribing and trashing all existing messages.
"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 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Unsubscribe", "Unsubscribe & Trash", "Would you like to unsubscribe and Trash all existing messages from hillarys@e.hillarys.co.uk?", "CANCEL", "CONFIRM"
The speaker gestures with his hands. A screen recording of Gmail's filter creation interface is shown. He demonstrates how to set up a filter to automatically skip emails containing the word "unsubscribe" from the inbox. He then talks about consolidating email accounts.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Search mail", "Unsubscribe", "Create filter", "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)", "Delete it"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "To-do List" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. He reiterates David Allen's quote about the brain's purpose.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "To-do List"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The main screen shows a close-up of hands writing on a paper to-do list, circling "FRI" for Friday. The list includes "MY MOST IMPORTANT TASK" and "MIGHT-DO LIST." The hand then checks off an item and crosses out others with a red pen.
"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 might-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."
Setting: desk — bright, even
People (2):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
• writing, wearing unknown and unknown, unknown hair — not visible
Text: "MY MOST IMPORTANT TASK", "MIGHT-DO LIST", "Grab one for yourself or a loved one using the link in the description."
The speaker gestures with his hands. The Todoist app icon appears on screen as he mentions it. He then picks up his iPhone and demonstrates how he adds tasks to Todoist.
"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, but 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "TODOIST"
The speaker holds his iPhone, which displays the Todoist app. He demonstrates adding a task by typing "Find bow tie from Cambridge flat" into the app. The task is added to his inbox.
"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 I will get to it at some point."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Today", "Overdue", "Task Name", "Find bow tie from Cambridge flat", "Task added to inbox"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the left side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The main screen displays the Todoist app on a MacBook, showing various tasks in the inbox. He demonstrates checking off and deleting tasks, and scrolling through different lists like "Someday / Maybe - Work" and "Someday / Maybe - Personal."
"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 my mind, it just goes straight into the to-do list app, either on my phone or on my MacBook. And then whenever I've got some time or 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, bang, bang. I'll delete the ones that are no longer relevant, like, oh, should I get all plants smoothies? Uh, 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 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 will get around to sending all these emails in one go."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Inbox", "All@plants smoothies", "Consider Julia PA application", "Cycling jacket", "Someday / Maybe - Work", "Someday / Maybe - Personal"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He explains his "someday/maybe" list for both work and personal items, highlighting how it helps him organize future aspirations without immediate pressure.
"Something I like to do is, I've got this someday/maybe list for like, you know, work stuff, someday/maybe list for like personal stuff. These are things I'd like to do at some point. Rollerblading, archery, hunting, glamping, mountain biking, treehouse glamping 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 kitesurfing sounds pretty cool. Let me Google and figure out where I can potentially go kitesurfing."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands, emphasizing the common mistake of incomplete to-do lists. He looks directly at the camera with a serious expression.
"Now, at this point, the mistake that the vast majority of people seem to make with their to-do lists, 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, serious expression
A scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays, showing Neville Longbottom holding a Remembrall. He looks confused and frustrated as he says, "I can't remember what I've forgotten."
"I can't remember what I've forgotten."
Setting: Hogwarts Great Hall — dim, warm
People (2):
• sitting at a table, wearing grey sweater with yellow and red stripes, white shirt, black tie and grey trousers, short, dark hair — confused, frustrated
• sitting at a table, wearing grey sweater, white shirt, black tie and unknown, short, dark, curly hair — serious
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands, emphasizing the stress caused by incomplete to-do lists. He looks directly at the camera, conveying the emotional impact of this problem.
"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, oh, I know my to-do list has most of the things I need to do, but it doesn't have all the things I need to do. Therefore I still need to remember my brain to do stuff, and then it just adds this sort of low low-level tension and stress to every single thing that we do in life."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, expressive, showing stress
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "File Management" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. He talks about the importance of cloud storage.
"Anyway, final thing in our Ron 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've literally coached in productivity who don't have a decent file management system. Generally, what you want is some kind of cloud storage."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "File Management"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The Google Drive app icon appears on screen. He then shows a screen recording of his Google Drive folders on his Mac, clicking through various folders like "My Drive," "Preclinical Medicine," and "First Year," displaying numerous documents and files.
"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 medical stuff. Let's look at "Preclinical 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 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 ever goes, if I ever get 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 on 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "GOOGLE DRIVE", "My Drive", "Preclinical Medicine", "First Year", "Home"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of Ron Weasley at the top. Below it, the text "Ron" is displayed, and four blue rectangular buttons appear with labels: "Calendar," "E-mail," "To-do List," and "File Management."
"All right, so that was the Ron 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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Ron", "Calendar", "E-mail", "To-do List", "File Management"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He introduces the next layer of the productivity system.
"The next layer up of the productivity system is an optional extra, and this is for people that consume a lot of books."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
A scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays, showing Hermione Granger speaking to another character (off-screen) with a slightly exasperated expression.
"Honestly, don't you to read?"
Setting: Hogwarts library — dim, natural light
People (1):
• standing, slightly leaning forward, wearing black robes, white shirt, striped tie and grey skirt, long, curly, brown hair — speaking, slightly exasperated
The speaker gestures with his hands. The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of Hermione Granger at the top, and the text "Layer Two" and "Hermione" below it. The speaker is in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The words "Audiobooks," "Videos," and "Podcasts" appear on the main screen.
"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."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Layer Two", "Hermione", "Audiobooks", "Videos", "Podcasts"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands, emphasizing the importance of capturing insights from consumed media.
"And again, this is for people who, you know, if you've had that feeling where you read all these things, 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, expressive
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Kindle" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. The Kindle app icon appears on screen as he mentions it.
"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've 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Kindle"
The screen shows a close-up of hands holding a Kindle e-reader, scrolling through text. The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, looking at the camera and smiling, then looking down at the e-reader. The scene then shifts to the speaker lying on a couch, reading the Kindle, and smiling at the camera.
"You don't even need to have a physical Kindle, although that's one of the most life-changing products I do recommend."
Setting: office, then living room — bright, even
People (2):
• sitting cross-legged, then lying on couch, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — smiling, engaged
• reading, wearing unknown and unknown, unknown hair — not visible
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He explains the highlighting feature of the Kindle app. A screen recording of a Kindle book shows text being highlighted in yellow. The speaker then shows himself holding an iPad, demonstrating how he accesses highlights.
"But yeah, the Kindle app is absolutely sick. I tend to read most things on e-book format rather than physical book format. But it's not just reading that I can do in 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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Read-it-later" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. The Instapaper app icon appears on screen as he mentions it.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Read-it-later", "INSTAPAPER"
The speaker gestures with his hands. A screen recording of an iPhone shows a web page being shared into Instapaper, then scrolling through the Instapaper list of articles.
"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."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands. A screen recording of Instapaper on a MacBook shows him scrolling through articles, clicking on one titled "Improving Ourselves to Death," and highlighting text within the article.
"And I'll just flick through some of the articles in Instapaper, and I'll be like, oh, okay, cool, this one looks interesting. Improving ourselves to death. This is a bit of a critique about self-help. And I can look through that article, I can highlight stuff as well. It's all very handy. And it's just a great way of separating the reading of articles from coming across the articles. Because often I find, you know, if I'm on the toilet for like three minutes and I'm scrolling through Twitter, and I come across an interesting article. If I read it there and then, it might take 10 minutes, and then I'm on the toilet for three hours, and that's not very good."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Improving Ourselves to Death"
The speaker gestures with his hands, emphasizing the benefits of using Instapaper to avoid distractions and manage time effectively. He looks directly at the camera, conveying the importance of intentional time management.
"Or if I'm in the middle of something and someone recommends an article, I know I want to read it at some point, but I know I don't want to read it there and then. I'll just send it straight to Instapaper and trust that at some point I will get around to reading that article. And again, this separation from separation of things, like if I'm trying to focus on something that I genuinely care about, but then I get I get derailed by an article recommendation and go down this Wikipedia rabbit holes trying to figure out all these conspiracy theories, that ends up actually taking time away from the thing that I actually care about, and kind of stopping me from kind of being productive and being intentional with how I'm spending my time. And because time is our most valuable non-renewable resource, it's the only thing we can't make more of, it's like, it always felt a bit like, uh, I know I've carved out this time to work on this thing that's important to me, but I've just been stolen away by being distracted by this article. Instapaper or something like that completely solves that problem."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, expressive, showing passion
The speaker gestures with his hands. The Morning Brew logo appears on screen as he mentions it. He introduces Morning Brew as a daily email newsletter that helps him find interesting articles.
"Now when it comes to actually finding articles and interesting things to read that will level up your life and like things you actually care about, people always ask me like, how do you find stuff to read? And for me, it's because I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters, and one of the main ones that I read every single day is called Morning Brew, who are very kindly sponsoring this video."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "MORNING BREW"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The main screen shows a close-up of hands scrolling through the Morning Brew newsletter on an iPhone. The newsletter displays headlines and short summaries about tech, finance, and business.
"Now, Morning Brew is a completely free daily email newsletter that lands in your inbox every morning, or in your read-it-later app if you've set up a forwarding rule, which is what I've done. Basically, it gets you up to speed on what's happening in the world of tech and finance and business. And if you care about those three things like I do, then it's just a fantastic newsletter, and it's also completely free, so you might as well sign up."
Setting: office — bright, even
People (2):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
• reading, wearing dark blue shirt and unknown, unknown hair — not visible
Text: "MORNING BREW"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He explains his routine for reading Morning Brew and how it keeps him updated on tech, finance, and business.
"It takes most people around five minutes to go through it and catch up to date with the news. Usually I skim through it in about two and a half minutes flat while I'm waiting for my morning coffee to brew. And if there's any interesting articles from that, I'll send those articles directly to my read-it-later app as well, and then usually read them later on in the day on the toilet. And that means every day I'm up to date on these things that I care about like tech and finance and business."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "MORNING BREW"
The speaker is shown in a small, rounded rectangular inset on the right side of the screen, gesturing with his hands. The main screen displays various sections of the Morning Brew newsletter, including market updates, travel news (with a flight departures board image), and a story about the Supreme Court.
"And a lot of those topics then generate interesting content ideas that I can talk about in the podcast or in YouTube videos or in anything else, or just generally keeping up to date with interesting things in the world. It's also great because it gives you interesting and in-depth coverage around weird things like Elon Musk how he's financing his Twitter buy or like the recent crypto crash, which is massively affected my own crypto portfolio. But I've gotten the information from Morning Brew because I trust them as a legit non-fake news source."
Setting: office — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "MORNING BREW", "Markets", "TRAVEL", "SCOTUS goes on summer break after hugely consequential term"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. He encourages viewers to subscribe to Morning Brew, emphasizing its free nature and benefits.
"And all it is is take out a few minutes out of my day to read these interesting articles rather than be keeping up to date with the whole 24 hours news cycle. So yeah, if you're interested in tech, finance, business, any of that kind of stuff, then you might as well subscribe to this newsletter. It is completely free, they don't charge a single penny for it, completely free. Check check out the link in the video description. And it'll help support the channel as well. So thank you so much Morning Brew for sponsoring this video and for making my personal life much better."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "MORNING BREW"
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Readwise" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. He introduces Readwise and offers an affiliate link.
"All right, component three of the Hermione layer is an app called Readwise. I'll put an affiliate link down below. They're not sponsoring this video, but if you click the link, you'll get an extra two-month trial rather than just a one-month trial. And I'll get a bit of a kickback if you sign up. I've been recommending Readwise for the last like three years now."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Readwise"
The speaker gestures with his hands. A screen recording of the Readwise app on a MacBook shows a library of highlights from various sources like books, articles, and tweets. He explains how Readwise aggregates highlights and allows exporting them to other apps.
"Readwise is incredible. It's like this little hub that takes in details like it takes in your Kindle highlights and your Instapaper highlights and a few other sources, and it puts them all in one place. And it means you can then export those highlights to apps like Notion or Roam, more on those in Layer 3. And it's really handy because now all of this stuff gets automated. Anytime I see a passage in Kindle or in Instapaper that resonates with me where I think, oh, I want to save this passage. All I have to do is highlight it. And I trust I just trust that Readwise will behind the scenes sort it all out."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Library", "Everything", "Books", "Articles"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands, emphasizing how Readwise automates the process of saving and resurfacing highlights, reducing mental burden.
"Again, before Readwise existed, before we had this this kind of thing, what we'd have to do is if you find a passage that resonated with you, you'd have to write it down, you'd have to highlight it, you'd have to store it somewhere, you'd have to figure out where you're trying to store it. It becomes a real faff. And again, coming back to our point, what is the point of a productivity system? People always ask, it's to get shit off of your own brain. Like I now don't need to remember all these things because the system is remembering it for me. And then it I trust that the system will resurface it as and when I need to access those highlights again."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
The speaker gestures with his hands. The text "Capture App" appears briefly on a light blue background, then fades. The Apple Notes app icon appears on screen. He then shows a screen recording of his Apple Notes on a MacBook, displaying various notes and folders.
"And then finally, the fourth component of this sort of system is some sort of capture app for notes. Now, again, I've tried a bunch of systems over the years, but actually the one that I've come back to most often is actually Apple Notes. And essentially, anytime I need to remember something, for example, if I'm taking a note while I'm on the toilet, or if I'm on the train and listening to an audiobook, and I want to take notes on something, I'll just open up Apple Notes and I'll write it down. And I'll trust that if I need to resurface that thing sometime further down the line, it will always be in my Apple Notes, and it will always be something that I could potentially search for."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Capture App", "NOTES", "Shot List for Productivity Video", "7 things I wish I knew at 20", "Videos"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands, emphasizing how a simple capture app like Apple Notes helps reduce stress and prevent burnout by offloading information from his brain.
"At this point, honestly, I've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notes in my Apple Notes, and then I just trust that they're there. Like I know I don't need to worry about doing stuff with them as soon as they come in. I don't need to worry about an elaborate system for this. What I care about is having the minimum viable level of organization, the minimum viable level of systems and structure to again, reduce my own strain, reduce my own stress. People often ask like, oh, how do you seem to not burn out? How do you manage like Honestly, like having a decent system is a massive cure for burnout because you just trust the system, you trust the system to do stuff. You don't have to again, have that low level of anxiety running in your actual brain."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling, expressive
The speaker gestures with his hands. The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of Hermione Granger at the top. Below it, the text "Hermione" is displayed, and four blue rectangular buttons appear with labels: "Kindle," "Read-it-later," "Readwise," and "Capture."
"All right, so that was the Hermione layer of the productivity system. And now the final layer that if you want to layer on top of that, you can, if you really want to, is the Dumbledore layer, which relates to a concept called Building a Second Brain."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Hermione", "Kindle", "Read-it-later", "Readwise", "Capture"
The screen transitions to a light blue background with a circular image of Albus Dumbledore at the top, and the text "Layer Three" and "Dumbledore" below it. The speaker is not visible.
"is the Dumbledore layer, which relates to a concept called Building a Second Brain."
Setting: digital background — bright, even
Text: "Layer Three", "Dumbledore"
The speaker returns to the full screen, gesturing with his hands. A mind map appears on screen, showing a brain icon connected to various apps and sources like Kindle, Text, Web Pages, Screenshots, Files, Handwritten Notes, Paper Documents, Voice Memos, and Photos. Tiago Forte's image then appears in the center of the mind map. The speaker explains the concept of Building a Second Brain and its three layers.
"You might have heard me talk about Building a Second Brain before. It is a book, it is a system, it's a course written and done by my friend Tiago Forte, and it's like a pretty game-changing productivity system because the idea, like Level 1, the Ron the Ron layer, level whatever you want to call it, was about just being able to organize our life and kind of get by. Level 2 was about capturing insights from all the stuff that we read and consume. And Level 3, this Dumbledore level, is all about making connections, and in a way using our productivity system for creativity rather than just for storage."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Book Notes", "Web Pages", "Text", "Photos"
The speaker gestures with his hands. A screen recording of the Roam Research app is shown, displaying daily notes with linked ideas and references. The Roam Research app icon appears on screen as he mentions it.
"And in a way, if you can actually build your own second brain, this ends up acting as a thought partner for you. I've been using this system since like mid-2019 now, it's been three years, and I've found so many ways in which, particularly for writing my book, but also for creating content, and for writing newsletters, and for doing podcasts, the information I've captured into my second brain, using an app called Roam, the one I use these days, although I might twitch to Obsidian, more on that later. But capturing all this information into an app called Roam Research means that it just sort of resurfaces."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling
Text: "Daily Notes", "May 18th, 2022", "ROAM RESEARCH"
The speaker gestures with his hands, pointing to the right side of the screen where a thumbnail for a related video appears. He encourages viewers to watch it and thanks them for watching.
"And if you want to find out more about this Dumbledore level, then check out this video over here, which is my book club episode all about breaking down the CODE component of the Building a Second Brain system, and that will give you a step-by-step guide on how to apply it in your own life. So thank you so much for watching. Check out this video over here, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye."
Setting: indoor — bright, natural light from a large window
People (1):
• sitting cross-legged, wearing light grey speckled hoodie and dark blue jeans, short, dark hair — speaking, smiling