5 Productivity Hacks - Fall 2024

So over the past couple years I’ve become kind of obsessed with productivity.

And I’ve realized that nowadays I’m probably about 3-5x more productive than I was a year ago for my business. I used to outsource tasks to contractors, or simply spend a week on tasks that now take me more like a day.

Competence is surely part of this formula, but there’s no doubt that learning to be more productive has also had a huge impact. So today I wanted to cover 5 of the tools and tactics I’d recommend most for actually getting sh*t done.

1. No Meeting Days

This is probably my favorite productivity tactic I’ve implemented in the past year, and it’s simple: pick a day or two per week and do NOT let anyone schedule any meetings with you on those days; these are are your monk-mode days to get sh*t done 100% uninterrupted. For me, the days that have worked best are Mondays and Fridays.

I’ve learned meetings are some of the worst productivity killers, not only the time you spend IN them, but the way they break your flow throughout the rest of the day. Paul Graham writes about this in his essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. By doing this you also are naturally forced to limit your total meetings each week, and thereby say NO to more non-essential meetings. It’s crazy how many meetings could have actually been a text, email, or impromptu phone call — likely 90% of them.

2. ChatGPT Desktop + Shortcut

This is another recent development for me: downloading the ChatGPT Desktop App (rather than using it in the browser) and enabling the keyboard shortcut (on Mac: Option + Space) to open the chat window. Bonus points if you use the Voice to Text option instead of typing.

Ultimately this is just about minimizing your absolute distance to a language model like ChatGPT (I actually prefer Claude and Perplexity to ChatGPT but they don’t quite have the shortcut + voice options yet). By going Desktop App + Keyboard Shortcut + Voice-to-Text you maximize your access to language models, and it’s crazy how this changes the way you think and process information. You can really offload a lot of the mundane, stuffy, mental load and focus more on executive operations. Also a great way to look things up or draft things as your in the middle of other tasks

3. Granola for Meeting Notes

AI meeting-notes apps have become an interesting fad over the past year (I swear I can’t get into a meeting these days without 3 or 4 Otter note-taking apps in the meeting room with us). I’ve never really bought the hype, have always preferred having my good-ole Apple Notes tab open on a separate screen while im in calls to write things down as I go. But recently I’ve realized nether is perfect — Otter is helpful but it’s kind of off-putting to invite to a meeting, and there’s not enough flexibility. Apple Notes is flexible, but I end up missing important tidbits when I get too busy typing.

Then a few weeks ago I discovered Granola.ai, which is truly the best of both worlds, and probably the ONLY AI meeting-notes app I’d ever pay to use. It’s essentially an Apple Notes window where you can type notes throughout the meeting, and in the background it transcribes (without even needing to be ‘invited’ to the meeting). At the end of calls it takes both your notes + the transcript and can enhance your notes into different summarized templates (biz dev calls, interviews, etc.) — then it can even draft follow up emails and such for you. Overall has made my meetings 10x more productive and my post-meeting recall 100x more useful, so I spend less time having to re-hash or re-find things later.

4. Clearspace to Block Phone Distractions

This one is also a recent discovery, I actually met the founder and he sold me on it first-hand. Now I can’t operate without it. Clearspace is an Iphone App that helps you spend less time on your phone (especially distracting apps like TikTok or Twitter). It’s like the iPhone ScreenTime Limits on Steroids.

Go in, set the apps you want to be less distracted by, then you can set challenges to require yourself to do push-ups or other exercises to ‘earn’ minutes of screen-time. You can invite friends or join groups to build more external accountability. And perhaps the simplest, most elegant feature: requiring you to simply take 5 seconds of breathing before you open an app, which does a surprisingly good job of helping you reconsider if doom-scrolling is a good idea. Overall my screentime has dropped in half by using this App, and meanwhile I am able to spend my cognitive load on more productive things.

5. Track Time Daily

Maybe my most cracked habit, for the past 2 years I have been meticulously keeping track of how I spend my time each day, broken down into 5 main categories: working hours, exercise hours, fun hours, sleep hours, and mundane hours. I also keep track on a scale from -2 to +2 my mood, and a scale from 0 to 3 how much money I spend. It’s been interesting to look back and see the relationship between mood and the main buckets I spend my time in.

I find that I’m generally happiest when I work 6-9 hours, exercise for an hour, get 7 hours of sleep, and spend at least an hour having fun with friends/family. Obviously for each person this is different. Ultimately my goal here is to track progress towards spending 10,000 hours on entrepreneurship — the old “10K Hours” rule. The past 2 years I’ve averaged 2,500 hours of work per year, so with 2 more years I should get there. There’s a great Harvard Business Review article about how Jim Collins has used time tracking to stay productive and keep himself accountable towards his biggest goals.

Overall, the important thing about being productive is simply maximizing your time in flow state. This means distraction-less, highly focused effort doing creative or important work. I’ve simply used these 5 things to help me spend less time on mundane, repetitive, non-flow, or non-creative tasks (like refining notes, sitting in meeting, doomscrolling, or ‘looking up’ information).

I won’t go deeper into what flow means. IFYKYK. There’s a great book called “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” which goes into what it means to get into flow state, a beautiful resource. Remember — productivity is NOT busy-ness, it’s about OUTPUT. Getting sh*t done.

Hopefully at least one of these might be helpful for helping you do more flow and less busy work. If you have productivity hacks that have changed your flow, send them to me and let me know!

Peace,
Ramsey