Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The form is currently closed to allow us to address the productivity problems you shared last time.

Past Solutions

Some problems are also recurring. Here are some simple tutorials you can follow to solve your problems:

I wake up early intending to work but only end up scrolling social media

I have challenges making progress in high-pressure environments

I struggle with brain fog after using AI for only a few hours in the day

I have a problem with procrastination.

So many more solutions in our platform here. Just describe your problem and pick a tutorial. Save your progress and come back later.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at the problem of toxic utility where the tool you need for survival is the exact one that is bleeding you dry.

A subscriber wrote in:

This is quite interesting and relatable because it not only touches on social media, but also, the very environment we work in.

For our subscriber, social media is the exact tool they need for work yet it’s the same one that causes them to be addicted.

In the 1900s, Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes because of her work in radioactivity. However, exposure to the same radioactive materials led to her illness and eventual death.

How We Could Solve This

The mindset to address this problem is embodied in the 1538 principle by Paracelus:

In simple terms, this means that to survive a tool/environment that is negatively affecting you, you need to change your relationship with how you hold/interact with it.

Change your mindset in these 3 ways before touching any social media platform again.

A. Name the job

Nir Eyal famously tells us, “You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it's distracting you from.”

Our approach would be to create a to-do list of what you want to do before you open social media. For example,

• Post a few reels

• Reply to client DMs

• Check 2 other competitor accounts

Anything else that you do beyond this is a distraction and what is exactly causing you to be addicted.

B. Change your routine, not the cue

Charles Duhigg advises us that “If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine.”

This simply means that you can shift your routines to be more professional in how you approach social media.

Remember that as a professional, you train yourself to use tools only to achieve a set goal then put them down again.

However, as a non-professional, you can pick up the tool anytime and use it (live inside it).

Our approach here is to schedule the time when you will be using social media for work. For example, 9am - 11am; and 2pm - 4pm.

This way, you train your nervous system that the reward for using social media is getting done with client work rather than seeking dopamine hits by seeing more videos or getting more likes.

C. Contain the instrument

The productivity hack is to minimize using willpower as much as possible to get things done.

James Clear puts it this way;

Trying to use willpower to out-muscle the feed will be dead on arrival. Instead, adopt an effortless way where you use tools that don’t require you to open the social media platforms.

This is out-engineering the addiction problem and would be the equivalent of engineers using containment gloves when handling radioactive materials.

How We Could Leverage Tech

A. Use Suites that prevent access to the actual social media platform

For example, using Meta Business Suite, you could post on social media, reply to DMs, and see all insights without opening the platform.

You could also use site blockers on phone and web to ensure you don’t try to use social media outside your scheduled hours.

B. Leverage Automations to Make Work Easier

I will demonstrate this using ClickUp which you can sign up free here.

We will assume that you decided to post on social media between 9am-12pm.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of tasks that you execute during the specific time block.

What you want is to create recurring tasks related to these time blocks that focus only on your social media work.

• Post a few reels

• Reply to client DMs

• Check 2 other competitor accounts

• Check stats

#Step 2

Create two new statuses in the Inbox list.

• Inbox - for social media tasks you need to complete now

• Complete - for tasks you have already completed

Your to-do list will appear as follows;

#Step 3

In each of the tasks, edit the due date and set as recurring task.

Schedule the time as well. You should see the date with a cyclical icon

#Step 4

The recurring tasks will appear as follows.

Every morning, they will all recur even if you complete them.

Convert them into subtasks under one main task - “Daily social media task”

Simply drag each task under this new task to create a subtask.

#Step 5

Each morning, prepare the reels and post captions outside the social media platforms.

Once you complete all sub-tasks, set the task as complete.

To make it even more interesting, set automations that tell you to log out of the app once you complete the entire list of tasks.

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When status changes from “Inbox” to “Complete”, we want an email reminder that we can now log off.

This way, you get an email that you can now log off.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Coming Up Next Week: Balancing Daily Tasks and Growth

We look at a case study where a subscriber who has 2 side hustles and a full time job as a performance marketing manager. They struggle to switch between these tasks and grow. A second subscriber also feels that they are unable to balance daily tasks vs growth.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The form is currently closed to allow us to address the productivity problems you shared last time.

Past Solutions

Some problems are also recurring. Here are some simple tutorials you can follow to solve your problems:

I have a problem with procrastination.

I am unable to focus.

I have low motivation to begin a new task after a hard day

So many more solutions here. Just describe your problem and pick a tutorial.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at the problem of arrival fallacy. You achieve goals you were previously striving for and once you get them, the urge to be disciplined vanishes. All you want to do is scroll on social media and relax.

A subscriber wrote in:

This is an interesting problem that I have experienced before.

You spend many months working towards a goal and soon enough you achieve it.

Now what?

At that moment, the engine that kept you motivated to keep going is switched off and a vacuum takes its place.

The real problem isn’t that you lack discipline - you already proved it by getting your first job. The real issue is the assumption that hitting one goal delivers lasting momentum.

However, as you discovered, crossing the finishing line by getting your first job removed the very thing that kept you disciplined. Without a goal to strive after, distraction fills the vacuum as you can’t stop scrolling.

How We Could Solve This

A. Begin with an honest self-audit

What you discover over time is that achieving financial security is just the first rung in a long ladder.

If you take an honest audit, you might find that you want to achieve several things after securing your job. Sometimes, it might be saving towards a new car, house, or even starting a family.

I love how Vicki Robin and Joseph Dominguez talk about this in Your Life Your Money.

Think about answering this question:

“Now that I have secured a job, what else do I want out of life?”

Your answer will tell you what kind of goals you need to think about next.

B. Shift from goals to systems

James Clear famously tells us in Atomic Habits that if you want to achieve something once, set a goal. However, if you want to achieve something over and over again, create a system.

A system is just the set of processes you follow to achieve a goal.

From the self-audit step 1, you might identify that you want to create a second income stream as a writer on Substack as another goal to achieve.

Rather than adopting your previous mindset where you only worked towards achieving the goal and stopped once you achieved it, create a system instead.

Decide how you will use your time away from work.

“I always write for 1 hour on Substack after work every weekday.”

You will discover that after you achieve your goal as a writer, the system to keep writing everyday will still be there. You can now shift towards another goal and this continues over and over again.

C. Adopt tiny habits to install your system

When you start any new goal, the motivation to achieve it is high. However, you soon discover that the novelty wears off in a few weeks time.

To stop endless scrolling in your free time, introduce tiny changes to your schedule.

BJ Fogg tells us in Tiny Habits to “Make the behavior so tiny that you don't need much motivation.”

Once you identify your new goal, change your schedule gradually. For example, after getting home, you could read for a few minutes before switching on the T.V.

Anchor the new habit to the routine you already practice.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Use your mind for thinking great ideas and tech as an external system that captures your goals and long-term plans.

Suppose you decide that your new goal is to start a Newsletter on Substack to earn extra income.

I will demonstrate this using ClickUp which you can sign up free here.

You want a system that helps you store your ideas and enables you to write for only 30 minutes everyday effortlessly.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

I have 2 workspaces: 9-5 work and Personal.

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all ideas you want to write about say in a month. Aim to ship one ideas per week and 4 per month as you start.

#Step 2

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• Inbox - for raw ideas you capture as you go

• Drafting - for pieces you are working on

• Editing - for complete pieces you are editing

• Published - for final published pieces

#Step 3

In your Personal workspace, create all ideas you want to write about.

The assumption is that you work in Marketing.

Here are some ideas to write about.

#Step 4

View your ideas in board view.

This way, you can see what ideas you have and their progress along the publishing pipeline.

#Step 5

Use an automation whenever a task moves from “Inbox” to “Drafting”

This automation applies a Document template that allows you to write right in Clickup.

First, we create a document template with prompts that we can be using.

For example

• Hook

• 3 core arguments

• Key takeaway

Click the docs menu and create a new document.

Add the three prompts.

Save this as a template by clicking the 3 dots at the right hand corner.

Now, click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When status changes from “Inbox” to “Drafting”, we want this template to be applied and we can continue writing.

Select the template you just saved.

This way, you will begin writing immediately in Clickup for the 30 minutes you set every day.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

To help you keep your goals in check, adopt a journaling system which helps you:

• Give yourself permission to think before decision-making.

• Embrace pausing and giving attention to matters before deciding.

• Embrace habitual reflection to understand how your emotions affect you.

In my case, I enhance emotional awareness and practice habitual time for thinking by adopting a mindful journal system.

Here’s exactly how.

#1 The first step is creating a new journal entry.

#2 I track my mood and moments that made me smile.

The second step is to highlight how I am feeling. what is my current mood? What made me smile?

#3 I note what I am grateful for, my lesson for the day, and thoughts.

The third step is listing 3 things I am grateful for and my lesson for the day, which can be anything from the breakfast table to the workplace.

I also write broad thoughts for the day. Whatever is on my mind.

It also includes weekly reflection on Sundays to really see how my week has been.

I rely on prompts so that I don’t have to stare at the blank screen for too long.

It captures so many broad aspects:

• What was the most meaningful moment of the week.

• What challenge did I face and how did I handle it?

• A lesson learned this week.

• How this week’s lesson is helping my life.

• My intentions for the next week.

The system also has 20 Think Day prompts for deeper reflection. You will be more aware of your emotions daily and reflect weekly on what you need to improve on.

The think day prompts also help you reconfigure your life to assess where you are heading.

Try it in your own life here.

Coming Up Next Week: Dilemma in Using Social Media

We look at a case study where a subscriber faces a dilemma because Social media has a negative impact on them yet they need it for work.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at getting in your own way when low-priority work becomes your new normal and you never get high-priority tasks done.

A subscriber wrote in:

Looking closely, we see that our subscriber has 2 main problems:

1. They prioritize cleaning the home before getting work done.

2. Their mood is directly influenced by the state of the house.

How We Could Solve This

A. Begin by understanding the clear desk fallacy

Oliver Burkeman tells us that there is no day we will ever have everything under control.

The implication is that you have to let some things continue while others remain stagnant.

View your daily tasks as buckets that have to be filled using your finite resource (energy).

If you try to fill all buckets (chores and work), nothing gets done as what is currently happening.

B. Reverse your priority list

Next, reverse your sequence of tasks from

House chores → Work

to

Work → house chores

In your case, prioritizing work is more important than trying to get your house chores first completed because work is what generates the income to pay for your house.

We see this repeated in the lives of high achievers such as Maya Angelou who would first go to a hotel room to write in the morning hours and later come back to clean in the afternoon.

For Angelou, her strategy was to work away from home. That way, the dirty dishes in the sink would not affect her mood as she worked.

Perhaps you could try working away from home?

C. Act before you feel

The subscriber tells us that they don’t feel like working sometimes and end up working half-heartedly.

This normally happens when you rely on your mood or willpower to get things done and in most cases, always fail.

Antony Trollope wrote 47 novels while working a full-time job at the Post Office because he had a system that required he showed up regardless of his mood.

Every morning at 5:30am he was up writing on his desk.

He would say that he didn’t wait for inspiration and just wrote.

"I believe in the cobbler's wax [on my chair] much more than the inspiration."

How you do this is by scheduling time blocks when you have to work and honoring them every day.

Try setting the first 2 hours every morning for work before thinking about house chores. Over time, this becomes the new normal whether you feel in the mood or not.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Instead of maintaining the tasks you need to complete in your mind, externalize your thinking using tech.

I will demonstrate this using ClickUp which you can sign up free here.

What we need to do is list all our tasks then categorize them into four:

• Inbox.

• Do This Now.

• Ignore Until Later.

• Done.

Then, we will set up an automation that sends a congratulatory notification each time we complete a task.

What this exercise teaches is that as we move tasks from “Inbox” to “Do This Now” to “Done,” we release dopamine that helps us keep working on our tasks.

Having some tasks as “Done” is empowering and we can keep on working on the incomplete ones until they are completed.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

I have 2 workspaces: 9-5 work and Personal.

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all personal projects you want to undertake say in a week.

#Step 2

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• This Week - what you planned for the week.

• Do Now - what you need to do now (today).

• Ignore until later - what you can do later after finishing important tasks.

• Done - what you completed today.

#Step 3

In your Personal workspace, create all tasks you want to do per week.

Include tasks that are also distracting you. E.g., doing laundry or scrolling social media.

You should have these 4 statuses but only “This Week” has tasks.

#Step 4

Select only priority tasks needed per day.

Choose only 3 that you can accomplish each day.

Simply click the task and set the status as “DO THIS NOW”

#Step 5

If you set your priority tasks, you can have laundry and social media with the “ignore till later” status.

#Step 6

Now, let’s create an automation that congratulates us and keeps the motivation going to work on completing more tasks.

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When a task is set to “done” → send a message congratulating us to keep going.

It then appears as follows.

Now, whenever I complete a task, I get the message sent to my email.

This way, I get the dopamine to keep working rather than escaping to social media or shifting to new tasks that distract me.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Cure AI Brain Fry For Good

Have you observed how your brain feels fried by mid-afternoon in AI-heavy work?

We created a a short, fast read with the solutions to help you overcome this brain fog.

We tell you about the four hidden drains and share a four-stage protocol to help you stay sharp.

AI Brain Fry is live on Kindle for less than a Starbuck’s Caffè Latte.

Grab it here.

If it helps you, an honest review on Amazon would mean a lot. Early reviews are what help the next fried knowledge worker find it. A line or two is plenty.

Coming Up Next Week: Too Much Screen Time

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels that they are unable to reduce screen time and need a real reason to get back the discipline in their life after getting their first job.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Focus, meditate, sleep, and even relax better using Brain.fm for 1 month free here.

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

   The form is currently closed to allow us to address your productivity problems.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at fire fighting that ends up taking all our time and we struggle to get important things done.

A subscriber wrote in:

Looking closely, we see that the subscriber has two fires they fight daily:

• An outside one - chaotic operations that demand their attention.

• An internal one - the emotional dread before and after performance reviews with the team members.

The end result is that the subscriber will have most of their time being “eaten away” by these firefighting operations that they never get their important tasks done.

How we could solve this - the mindset

A. Begin by observing where your time goes

Peter Drucker famously tells us;

The first step we would take as a leader is to observe how we spend our time at the office using the time management matrix by Steve Covey.

We might find that you spend most of your time in Q1- handling daily crises.

Just log everything, including the time you spend working on your most important goals.

B. Identify the kinds of fires you have to put out daily

The subscriber tells us that they are customer complaints and internal issues.

However, sometimes, they also face new issues daily that make everything complicated.

Log them to understand their patterns. Who caused it? What broke?

Identify whether they are recurring or only one-time.

If they are recurring, you could try implement a routine that ensures they are resolved and they never get to you.

For example, customer complaints can be reported to the right sales manager to be handled before they are escalated to you.

C. Next, move to catch the problems while they are still small

Focus more on Q2 of the time management matrix.

What problems are important and not yet urgent?

This stage would be similar to what fire marshals do to prevent fires. They develop smoke detectors and conduct inspections.

The wisdom is that you can’t escape fires by fighting them faster. You have to intentionally prevent them.

You might discover that some issues could be eliminated at the planning stage by providing appropriate solutions and empowering the team through training.

D. Create a first-responder layer and protect a time block for deep work

Currently, you are overwhelmed because any escalated issue comes to you first.

For the recurring problems, find out if you can delegate them to the next management tier and only handle what only you can.

However, this one requires the discipline to avoid always being the hero and allow the team to handle the issues.

As you create this layer, you might find that most issues never required your attention.

As you create this time, intentionally allocate it to your most important tasks so that you will get done with your most important tasks. Protect it even on the bad days to ensure you also make progress.

E. Putting out your internal fire

For the anxiety and conversations you keep replaying in your mind before and after performance reviews, here, you need to separate facts from the story.

Looking at performance objectively will help you identify what the employees need to do to correct their actions.

Also, the wisdom of Suzy Welch helps.

How we could leverage tech - the practical takeaway

AI agents are the technology that helps you manage different aspects of your daily work life.

We could use hyperagent here to create a team of agents that support you. We create agents that check our inbox and slack to see what fires need to be put out.

Hyperagent assigns a daily agent that wakes up before you and scans all your emails, Slack, and tickets. It gives you a brief for what to do, delegate, or even ignore.

It also assigns a second agent that logs every issue you resolve weekly and helps you create a routine that you can implement to avoid recurring fires.

#Step 1

After I create an account, I login to HyperAgent, I see this interface.

#Step 2

I prepare the prompt for the agent I want.

“I want you to assign a daily agent that accesses my email inbox and Slack. The agent should look at all the customer and employee complaints I have to handle. Every morning, prepare a brief showing me what is best to delegate, what I should do, and what doesn’t need my attention. Second, assign another agent that also logs every issue I resolve weekly. Let this agent suggest routines the team can follow to stop these issues from occurring.”

#Step 3

The agent proceeds to work.

It uses the latest Claude Opus 4.8 model.

#Step 4

The agent will then share the new report daily in your inbox.

The technology helps you see patterns you might miss but ultimately, you make the final decision about how to manage your work.

That’s the core goal to keep in mind.

Here are $1000 free credits you can use to try HyperAgent in your work.

Firefighting and hard conversations are not your only drain…

Working all day with AI is also leaving you depleted so early in the day.

The AI Brain Fry Recovery Protocol won't fight your fires - the systems above do that.

What it does is measure the depletion you've been feeling but couldn't name (a scored 20-item diagnostic → a daily Fry Score) and walk you through a 14-day Diagnose → Protect → Recover → Rebuild plan to get your unaided thinking back.

Try it here.

Coming Up Next Week: Getting in Your Own Way

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels that they are simply getting in their own way and they struggle to get things done.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at emotional imbalance and how the various forms of emotional friction such as depression and anxiety derail us from achieving success.

One subscriber wrote in, “I face emotional imbalance.”

Another one added: “Just don’t feel like doing it.”

A third described their scenario where they were expecting their first child and emotions were everywhere.

Looking at the three cases, we see some form of emotional friction as the hinderance.

How We Could Solve This

We look for a solution from the angle of the knowledge worker who needs to manage their emotions to get work done rather than a clinical perspective which requires a different professional view.

A. Understand Emotions as Messengers not Directors

The first place we would start is by reframing emotions as messengers trying to tell us something rather than letting them control the steering wheel as psychologist Susan Davis advises in Emotional Agility.

B. Isolate What is Causing the Emotion

Next, we isolate whatever each emotion is trying to tell us through answering honest questions.

• If you feel anxious - could it be that you have too many unfinished tasks?

• If you feel angry - could it be that your boundaries were crossed?

• If you feel overwhelmed - could it be that you are over-scheduling yourself?

Here, a pen and paper does the trick.

However, you could opt for a physical journal you could carry with you whenever you want to offload your emotions and notice exactly what is causing your problem.

For the subscriber about to get their first child, they might realize that the issue causing the emotional imbalance is a financial one and can better resolve their problem.

What I use is a Notion Journal System that combines three tools in one: a daily reflection journal, a daily gratitude journal, and a think day journal.

This way, I don’t have to stare at a blank page for too long and can identify what I am grateful for, what was most meaningful, and deeper reflection prompts.

You could try it in your own life here.

The bottom line is that you need an external system to figure out what your emotions are trying to tell you.

Pen and paper, a journal, or even a walk outside will help you decompress and really isolate the main issue.

C. Take the Right Action

Once you can tell what is really causing your negative emotions, the next step is to take action.

Sometimes, communication with your colleagues/partner could be the best solution to prevent crossing boundaries and your anger outbursts.

Other times, you will realize that you need to prioritize your tasks better to avoid high anxiety when you have too many unfinished tasks to be done.

Structure your workload into distinct groups:

• What do I have to do now?

• What can I ignore till later?

The more you focus on what you can do at the present moment, the less power you give emotions to take over the steering wheel.

One way that really works is assigning a free super agent in ClickUp that tells you what you are expected to do every morning so that you don’t have to be anxious over what’s pending.

Think of how a personal assistant would brief you about your calls and meetings the moment you sat at your desk.

Create a free workspace in ClickUp

Click the AI menu in your workspace.

Select “New Super Agent”

Create a personal productivity assistant super agent.

Through a set of responses, customize your agent [try what works best for you]

Click a mix of everything for prioritization.

Set how often you want the agent to send you reminders (e.g., every morning at 8am)

A few more questions are asked such as where to put the summaries, how to email, and where to store the doc.

Answer based on preferences. E.g., I prefer a professional tone when sending summaries and meeting reminders on email.

The ClickUp agent is now live.

Now, you can run the ClickUp agent and it does the basic tasks for you such as scheduling meetings and keeping reminders of upcoming activities.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

To learn more to master your emotions

If you still need more to master your emotions, you could try this guide and this one.

Coming Up Next Week: Unending Firefighting

We look at a case study where a subscriber who is a leader at work spends too much time resolving issues and only manages to complete a few things from their to-do list.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Feeling stuck overcoming procrastination? Try this

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at the problem of creative paralysis where we have too many ideas but don’t know exactly where to start.

A subscriber wrote in:

In this case, our subscriber faces a mismatch between an engine of abundant creative ideas and a strained execution framework.

This sounds awfully familiar.

I came across a light-hearted post on social media where someone lamented how AI had increased their unfinished projects.

In two bullet points, the post had captured the reality most people face today.

• “Before AI: 2 unfinished projects.”

• “After AI: 23 unfinished projects.”

Zooming out, we see that the subscriber faces a creative paralysis problem where although they can generate many ideas, they never get to complete them.

Secondly, they also feel that they lack direction due to weak executive functioning skills. These are skills such as initializing a task, planning and prioritization, organization, and emotional regulation while working on your project.

How We Could Solve This

To solve these issues, we look at the genius Thomas Edison and take a cue from his approach.

Edison also previously faced a creative paralysis problem. Edmond Morris, who wrote Edison’s biography, highlighted how he had more than 3,000 pocket notebooks and although he wrote many ideas, most never materialized.

However, Edison realized this early enough and found a way to overcome the problem.

He externalized his executive functions.

Edison knew that to make progress, he had to handle the ideation and hire other machinists and project managers to execute them on his behalf in Menlo Park.

To overcome creative paralysis and restore executive functions, the answer lies in using external systems. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare tell us;

The core mindset our subscriber needs to change is that they must not leave planning, prioritization, and task initiation in their minds.

Instead, they must use external structures to handle these on their behalf.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Today, technology is the external system that handles our executive functioning tasks.

In this week’s session, we look at how we can use ClickUp, which you can sign up free here, to help the subscriber:

• Capture all their ideas,

• Prioritize them, and

• Focus only on those that are urgent.

#Step 1

Once you sign up, start by creating a free workspace by clicking this icon.

Name it Personal.

#Step 2

Create a new list in this workspace.

Name it Inbox.

It will contain lists of all ideas that you are interested in per day or week.

Consider it one of Edison’s pocket notebook where he wrote what intrigued him.

#Step 3

Add tasks to the list.

This is now a brain dump of all your ideas.

They are assigned the default status “TO DO”

Suppose our subscriber works in marketing and is interested in:

• Launching a marketing campaign for client A

• Meeting with client A during the week

• Launching a new product for client A

Create these in ClickUp without any assigned date or priority.

This is the first approach to getting a sense of direction. You have a system where you capture all your ideas rather than storing them in your mind.

#Step 4

Break down the tasks further to a granular level.

Procrastination will hit us whenever we set a large project as one task.

In each task, break it down to even smaller sub-tasks that can be done in one sitting.

E.g., launch a marketing campaign becomes:

• Open a blank Google document

• Write 3 bullet points for the main hook

• Find 2 reference images

Add these sub-tasks to the main tasks by clicking the + sign next to it. Here’s an example.

When you breakdown the tasks into smaller sub-tasks, you eliminate the risks of procrastination.

#Step 5

The next step is to prioritize the tasks we need to do on a daily basis.

Create 3 new statuses.

• Do Now - what I am to do now

• Ignore Till Later - what I am to ignore later

• Complete - what I have completed

You will have these statuses.

You will only focus on what is the “DO NOW” status

#Step 6

The final step is to setup automations to keep the motivation going.

Each time you complete a task in the “DO NOW” status, you can set up an automation that sends you an email with a custom message.

At the top-right corner, click the lightning ⚡️ symbol (automations)

Select email on status change

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When a task is set to “done” → send a message congratulating us to keep going with the most important tasks.

It then appears as follows.

This way, an email will be sent when you completes an urgent task, keeping you even more motivated.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

This Week Only

We are currently running the AI Brain Fry protocol on the launch offer price for only 1 week.

Price rises afterwards.

What you get:

• The Diagnose Audit - turn “I feel fried” into a number, then re-score on Day 14.

• The Protocol Playbook (PDF) - the monitoring caps and think-first rules, with the reasoning.

• The 14-Day Workbook (PDF) - the day-by-day plan, so it actually happens.

• The Notion Tracker - a live dashboard that runs the fourteen days and shows your before/after.

Founding price: $29 - it rises to $39 when this closes.

Get it while price lasts.

Coming Up Next Week: Emotional Imbalance

We look at a case study where a subscriber struggles with emotional imbalance which affects their work progress.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Struggling with a slow day? Try this

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we provide.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

Currently, the form is turned off to allow us to address all your issues.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at the problem of being over ambitious and setting too high standards about the work we intend to do.

However, time catches up with us and we end up creating a rushed version that doesn’t match what we intended.

A subscriber wrote in:

Interestingly, this isn’t a unique problem.

In 1482, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to create a monument, the Gran Cavallo (The Great Horse), to honor his father.

Leonardo was obsessed with the project such that didn’t just want to create a standard statue but the largest equestrian monument in human history.

In his obsession, da Vinci would spend 17 years researching and filling his notebooks with the perfect anatomical designs of horses.

“He filled notebooks with precise drawings of equine anatomy, treating the project not as a simple commission, but as an exhaustive scientific treatise on the horse.” Walter Isaacson would write in Leonardo da Vinci.

These are some sketches he made.

By his standards, Leonardo wanted to create the statue in a single pour rather than casting the monument in pieces as was the norm.

But he was taking too long so much so that the Duke grew frantic and even sought other artists to complete the work. He wrote to the ruler of Florence seeking a different artist.

When Leonardo heard that he was soon to be replaced, he panicked. He had to show something and frantically, he put together a clay model of a horse without a rider, a compromise from his initial design.

However, in 1499, the French invaded Italy and the bronze that had been gathered to create the monument was used in creating canons for the war.

The clay model was then used as target practice by French archers, destroying it completely.

Eventually, Leonardo left Milan feeling broken that in his quest for perfection he had actually achieved nothing, only mere drawings of the project.

How We Could Solve This

Sometimes, in your daily work, you might also experience a similar scenario.

You picture the kind of final product you want to create in your mind. A perfect masterpiece. Yet, time catches up with you and you end up rushing to create something that doesn’t compare.

How do we solve this?

A. Start by reducing your scope by half

Sometimes, the main problem is that you want to deliver 10 features in your first version of a perfect product.

The cure is to take that scope and reduce it by 50%. Create the first version of the product considering only half of these features.

Complete something first then improve it.

B. Lower the stakes and create the rough draft first

To overcome perfection, be willing to create the first draft without setting overly high expectations.

Lower the stakes of how it should appear.

While you won’t ship this version, it helps you overcome your perfectionism block as you have completed something.

C. Introduce an accountability structure

Commit yourself to show a draft to your stakeholder a few days before the deadline. If you work alone, then set in your calendar that the first draft will be ready by a certain date.

“I will be sending over a draft on Monday morning.”

This forces you to use your time well and get to work as you don’t want to disappoint them.

How We Could Leverage Tech

A system we can create in ClickUp, (free access here), is one where we automatically lower the stakes when creating a project, thereby, avoid striving for perfection.

We want a scenario where when a task is in a given status, we get a comment to avoid seeking perfection.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all personal projects you want to undertake say in a week.

#Step 2

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• This Week - what you planned for the week.

• First Draft - messy first draft you are working on

• In Progress - what you are working on.

• Complete - what is done

#Step 3

In your Personal workspace, create all tasks you want to do for the week.

These are under the status “This week”

#Step 4

Each time you want to work on a project such as a report that has a deadline, we want to set the status to “First Draft” and create an automation where ClickUp Brain comments on the task.

"Reminder: The goal of this phase is not to be good; it is to be complete. Spend maximum 45 minutes making a messy, low-fidelity skeleton of this deliverable. Perfectionism is a violation of protocol."

#Step 5

Now, let’s create an automation that automatically detects when tasks in “This Week” status changed to “FIRST DRAFT” and comments on the task.

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” from “THIS WEEK” to “FIRST DRAFT”

A comment will then be added to the task as we work on it.

This way, we will formalize this phase and allow ourselves to simply create without too high expectations.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Coming Up Next Week: I don’t know where to start

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels they do not know where to start. Too many ideas with poor execution. They lack direction and executive functioning skills.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we provide.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

Currently, the form is turned off to allow us to address all your issues.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at a scenario where we get used to being so busy but we also avoid completing the tasks we need to get done.

A subscriber wrote in:

Looking at this scenario, we see that our subscriber is overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks they have to do:

• Parenting small kids

• Admin tasks

• House chores

• High-stress job etc

I would imagine that this is a scenario where they get off from a busy day at work only to start another busy routine of taking care of the home (chores, parenting).

Interestingly, they are aware that they need to invest time to create systems to help them become calmer and more efficient, but somehow they can’t get this done.

What is Happening?

If we zoom out, we see that the main problem here is a depleted prefrontal cortex - the part of your brain that helps you switch from busy work to rest mode.

When it is depleted, then you get stuck in a “busy mode” where you embrace a busyness strategy as an avoidance mechanism.

We see this where the subscriber says, “When I do have a spare minute I just sit on my phone until I have to be somewhere / do something.”

How We Could Solve This

A. Remind yourself that you can never get everything under control

The first mindset we must adopt is to understand that we can never get everything under control as Oliver Burkeman tells us.

What Oliver is advising us is that we need to identify the most important things that need our attention and focus on only those while ignoring the rest.

This now becomes a difficult for the subscriber because everything seems important - work and family.

One way you can prioritize is using a filter from Greg McKeown in Essentialism:

"Instead of asking, 'How much do I value this opportunity?' ask, 'If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?'

If the subscriber paused and answered this question, they would see that some things are simply distractions.

For example, doom scrolling during the day.

B. Be willing to let go of some tasks to focus on what’s more important

Next, the subscriber should list all the tasks they need to do daily/weekly.

A good rule of thumb is to focus only on 3 tasks per day to avoid too much context switching.

This would be:

• A work task

• A family task

• A house chore

They would focus on first completing these three tasks before anything else.

C. Embrace unstructured time

As we were discussing a few days ago with a partner, the downside of the convenience culture is that it makes us want to turn every moment into a productive one.

As a result, you want to pick up your phone every moment you aren’t working.

Novelist Alan Lightman describes this as the loss of the inner room.

However, he also gives us a solution by encouraging us to embrace unstructured time.

This takes time and needs constant practice.

Start with taking only 10 minutes where you can spend it looking outside your window or just sitting without seeking any distraction.

Over time, you can grow this to an 30-45 minutes where you go for walks to train your nervous system to calm down.

As you learn to downshift, it will be easy to create systems that help you remain calmer during the day.

How We Could Leverage Tech

A system we can create in ClickUp, (free access here), is one where we automatically change the status of tasks that we take too long to complete.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all personal projects you want to undertake say in a week.

#Step 2

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• This Week - what you planned for the week.

• Do Now - what you need to do now (today).

• Ignore till later - what you can do later after finishing important tasks.

• Done - what you completed today.

• Someday - what is completely ignored

#Step 3

In your Personal workspace, create all tasks you want to do per week.

Include tasks that are also distracting you. E.g., doing laundry or scrolling social media.

You should have these 4 statuses but only “This Week” has tasks.

#Step 4

Select only priority tasks needed per day.

Choose only 3 that you can accomplish each day.

Simply click the task and set the status as “DO THIS NOW”

#Step 5

If you set your priority tasks, you can have laundry and social media with the “ignore till later” status.

#Step 6

Now, let’s create an automation that automatically detects when tasks in “DO NOW” status have overstayed and we need to ignore them till “SOMEDAY”

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “due date arrives” for any action.

When the due date arrives → we want the status to be set as “Ignore till later”

Now, looking at our tasks we have

The idea here is that we dump all our tasks in “THIS WEEK”.

We aim to get those tasks done.

However, if the end of the week arrives (Set as Friday the next week), the automation now moves the incomplete tasks to “SOMEDAY”

This way, you will feel less overwhelmed.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

A second alternative to embrace unstructured time is to adopt a journaling system which helps you:

• Give yourself permission to think before decision-making.

• Embrace pausing and giving attention to matters before deciding.

• Embrace habitual reflection to understand how your emotions affect you.

In my case, I enhance emotional awareness and practice habitual time for thinking by adopting a mindful journal system.

Here’s exactly how.

#1 The first step is creating a new journal entry.

#2 I track my mood and moments that made me smile.

The second step is to highlight how I am feeling. what is my current mood? What made me smile?

#3 I note what I am grateful for, my lesson for the day, and thoughts.

The third step is listing 3 things I am grateful for and my lesson for the day, which can be anything from the breakfast table to the workplace.

I also write broad thoughts for the day. Whatever is on my mind.

It also includes weekly reflection on Sundays to really see how my week has been.

I rely on prompts so that I don’t have to stare at the blank screen for too long.

It captures so many broad aspects:

• What was the most meaningful moment of the week.

• What challenge did I face and how did I handle it?

• A lesson learned this week.

• How this week’s lesson is helping my life.

• My intentions for the next week.

The system also has 20 Think Day prompts for deeper reflection. You will be more aware of your emotions daily and reflect weekly on what you need to improve on.

The think day prompts also help you reconfigure your life to assess where you are heading.

Try it in your own life here.

Coming Up Next Week: Being Overambitious

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels that they are over ambitious in what can be done in setting expectation to others and myself but assuming they will do it never do it.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Focus, meditate, sleep, and even relax better using Brain.fm here for 1 month free.

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at the lack of discipline.

A subscriber wrote in:

Another one also added:

There are two productivity problems that are often misinterpreted: procrastination and lack of discipline.

• If I am a procrastinator, do I lack discipline?

• If I lack discipline, am I a procrastinator?

However, they are different.

When you procrastinate, you perceive what you need to do as a threat and try to escape work. You may opt to play a video game rather than get to work but as you play, you will feel guilty about the work you are avoiding.

When you lack discipline, you completely avoid doing the work you need to do because you lack a structure that helps you get things done. Even if you went to play the video game, you wouldn’t even think about work and would simply enjoy the game only to realize that you never got anything done.

How We Could Solve This

A. Intentionally design your work environment

The first approach to create a structure that helps you become disciplined is the intentional design of your work environment.

What you learn from high achievers is how they design their work environments such that:

• It becomes very easy to do the thing they must do

• It becomes very hard to do something else that’s unproductive

A good example is Demosthenes, a Greek statesman and orator. He had a severe speech impediment and stammering yet had to defend himself in court.

Demosthenes knew that he needed to practice his oratory skills yet was constantly distracted by the boisterous life in Athens.

Rather than practice, he was drawn to the allure of public festivals and social activities outside his door.

However, he intentionally decided to design his environment to make it:

• Easy to practice speech

• Difficult to go to town

Demosthenes would build a mirror in his room to help him easily practice speech without any distractions while also shaving half his head to avoid going to town.

Now, he had to stay home until he mastered his craft.

Perhaps our subscriber doesn’t need to do anything ludicrous but they can introduce intentional friction to make doing what they need to do the easiest option.

An example would be playing video games instead of working.

What we would do here is to make it so difficult to start the video game such as disconnecting all cables and locking them in different drawers and locking games in separate rooms.

The mere thought of connecting everything together would always make studying the easiest option.

Other times, you may need to go and study from the library where you have to focus as that’s the only thing you have to do.

B. Stack positive habits

Discipline doesn’t operate in a vacuum.

You still need to direct your habits towards the positive things you wish to achieve.

What we would do here is to eliminate the need for willpower to begin a positive habit that we need to do by stacking it onto our daily routine.

Suppose we lacked the discipline to read a book and this was our daily schedule:

• Wake up

• Have a shower

• Scroll social media

• Go to work

We would interrupt it by stacking “reading a book” right after having a morning shower. This would then be our new daily schedule.

• Wake up

• Have a shower

• Read a book for 15 minutes

• Scroll social media

• Go to work

However, for this to work, we would need to prepare the book to be on our desk every morning to make it effortless to start the new habit.

The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels while maintaining a full-time, demanding career as a senior official in the British Post Office. How he did this was by preparing his desk the night before.

That way, it was effortless to start writing first thing in the morning.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Tech remains our greatest friend who helps us get things done.

Peter Senge tells us that

If we wanted tech to help me become disciplined, we can use recurrent tasks and automations to ensure we always have a structure we follow.

One way is to setup automations that always ask me to review my day before leaving my desk.

This way, it becomes my accountability partner.

Let’s solve this step by step in ClickUp which you can start using it free here.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all personal projects you want to undertake say in a week.

#Step 3: I create a new task called “daily audit”

I use checklist to create the list of audit items.

Using Marshall’s method, I create the following list items that I will audit at the end of each day:

• Did I do my best to create clear goals?

• Did I do my best to focus?

• Did I do my best to remain fully engaged?

• Did I do my best to take breaks during my work day?

It should appear as follows

Save it as a template “Daily Audit”

You don’t have to save this task.

#Step 4: Create a new automation by clicking the flash symbol at the top right

Set the trigger as “Every day at 6 PM” when you are about to end your day.

The trigger should create a new task “Review your day” which uses the template “Daily Audit” we created.

This is now a recurrent task.

#Step 5: Save it

Every 6 PM before you leave the office or working area, a new task will be created.

Fill in the checklist items to become accountable.

[I changed the time for demonstration]

The automatic task appears below my other tasks.

I then fill in the checklist as follows.

This way, you can check tasks off the list and you become more accountable about how you spend time.

ClickUp is free. Sign Up here.

Coming Up Next Week: I am too busy

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels like the list of things they should do has just gotten so long and they just fill their calendar with busy things to keep moving / going somewhere.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at how high-stress environments hinder creative flow and what we can do about it.

A subscriber wrote in:

While there are multiple angles to this problem, we will focus specifically on how we can deal with the pressure of high-stress environments and ensure we still get things done.

For the subscriber’s case, they would like to find out how they can continue to be creative while simultaneously handling:

• Daily life demands and

• The pressure to succeed in learning new systems

How We Could Solve This

A. Understand how stress works

The first place we always begin from is understanding how high stress conditions affect our ability to get things done.

From neuroscience, we know that stress is associated with high levels of cortisol as the amygdala (flight or fight center) takes over the prefrontal cortex (logic and rationality center).

The high stress drains the mental bandwidth required to facilitate non-linear thinking associated with creative tasks.

Thus, the solution we would consider is one that helps us transition the brain’s control from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex.

B. Identify why you are stressed

Next, the subscriber would need to reflect on why they feel stressed.

• Are there too many life demands they need to address?

• Are there others already using the new system and they are under pressure to keep pace with them?

We learn from David Rock that when we name our emotions, we reduce their power in hijacking our brains.

C. Identify your open loops

In most cases, stress comes from the overwhelm of unfinished tasks - you feel that you have too much to do and very little time.

In this case the subscriber would then examine their personal life and identify the different unfinished tasks (open loops) that their brain might be still thinking about.

It might be that the laundry is not yet folded or they are yet to buy groceries.

It might be that you are yet to begin using the new platform.

Write these unfinished tasks.

D. Prioritize and lower the stakes in closing your open loops

One of the misconceptions we might have is that all tasks are created equal. Far from it, some tasks are weightier and need more time than others.

Prioritize the tasks based on urgency - what needs to be done first.

Afterwards, focus on finishing the tasks, one at a time, rather than seeking perfection as you complete them. This is why lowering the stakes is good advice.

The first version doesn’t need to be perfect; only complete. This way, you get control back to the prefrontal cortex as you complete more tasks and reduce stress from the amygdala.

E. Separate learning from creating time

As the subscriber seeks to maintain their creativity, they also need to block time when they can focus on creative thinking tasks.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Let’s solve this step by step in ClickUp which you can start using it free here.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - Personal.

Create a new list - Inbox.

It will contain lists of all personal projects you want to undertake say in a week.

#Step 2

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• This Week - what you planned for the week.

• Do Now - what you need to do now (today).

• Ignore until later - what you can do later after finishing important tasks.

• Done - what you completed today.

#Step 3

In your Personal workspace, create all tasks you want to do per week.

Include tasks that are also distracting you. E.g., doing laundry or scrolling social media.

You should have these 4 statuses but only “This Week” has tasks.

#Step 4

Select only priority tasks needed per day.

Choose only 3 that you can accomplish each day.

Simply click the task and set the status as “DO THIS NOW”

#Step 5

If you set your priority tasks, you can have laundry and social media with the “ignore till later” status.

#Step 6

Now, let’s create an automation that congratulates us and keeps the motivation going to work on completing more tasks.

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When a task is set to “done” → send a message congratulating us to keep going.

It then appears as follows.

Now, whenever you complete a task, a message is sent to your email.

This way, you can compound your daily actions and reduce stress while also allocating time to engage in your creative endeavors.

Finally, allocate time when you can engage in creative thinking tasks.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Why AI Agents Aren’t a Trend

Today, if we strip away AI agents to their first principles, we find that they are tools we delegate tasks to in order to regain our cognition.

Initially, I experimented with AI Super Agents in ClickUp which would summarize my work schedules, important meetings and tasks every morning. They indeed work in helping me migrate upwards in my daily strategy.

For example, in ClickUp I chat the agent and it helps me in scheduling or adjusting meetings.

A more advanced AI agent I have also been experimenting with is the HyperAgent.

Unlike simpler agents that summarize your schedule, HyperAgents allow you to build rich outputs including podcast-style audio, webpages, and slides, including chaining together multiple tools.

Let’s consider an example.

I want to build an SaaS (Software as a Service) product. However, rather than doing the manual hard work of comparing competitors, I create an agent that does this for me.

I become a “watcher of threads” and no longer have to keep beginning from zero with the particular project.

#Step 1

I login to HyperAgent, I see this interface.

#Step 2

I prepare the prompt for the agent I want.

Research the competitive landscape for the SaaS productivity market. Find every key player, pull their pricing pages, feature lists, funding history, and what real users are saying on Twitter and Reddit. Build me an interactive comparison webpage with a feature matrix, pricing chart, radar chart of each player’s strengths, and a detailed breakdown page per competitor with pros, cons, and real user quotes.

#Step 3

The agent proceeds to work.

It details the plan that it is following.

#Step 4

The beauty is that it will put the results all together in a publishable webpage.

The website gives me all details I need to improve decision-making without necessarily doing the difficult menial work of scrapping hundreds of websites.

You can also export the results to excel or create a slide deck if meeting investors.

As a loyal subscriber, we are rewarding you with $1000 credits you can use to get started with HyperAgents in your work.

Try to see where hyperagents can help you break your cognitive ceiling so that you can focus on strategy.

Try them before publishing your book.

Experiment with them before creating a new product.

Coming Up Next Week: Lack of Discipline

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels that they lack discipline.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Your productivity starts with inbox sanity. Try SaneBox for 14 30 days free here.

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at operational friction where managing different tasks across multiple apps hinders a subscriber’s progress in what really matters.

A subscriber wrote in:

Looking closely at this problem, we see that the main problem is operational friction leading to fragmentation and context switching as the subscriber essentially runs two businesses on different platforms.

• Patient care

• Consultation

With the patient care business, the subscriber books and handles client problems on Zanda while consulting is done in Xero, Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

Each time the subscriber switches between Xero, Zanda, Teams, and Outlook, they pay a cognitive tax and eventually, have little energy left to do the actual work that matters - helping their clients and developing the business.

Cal Newport in Deep Work, reveals that when we spend time switching between network tools such as email and social media, what we end up doing is shallow work that makes us feel busy while producing low-value work.

How We Could Solve This

The easiest way to solve operational friction is using platform-agnostic tools (multi-platform) that make it easy to sync functions from different apps.

The easiest one you could use is ClickUp as you can start using it free here.

#Step 1

Once you sign up to ClickUp, start by creating a workspace (where your work lives) by clicking this icon.

#Step 2

Create two new lists - Consultation Clients and Clinical Patients.

They will contain lists of tasks related to consulting work and clinical patients.

You will have these lists

#Step 3

In each of the lists, add related activities that you handle on a daily basis.

We assume meetings, updating products, and regular contact with the client.

You would have these tasks for consultation clients as an example.

#Step 4

Allocate each activity to its respective status - To-Do, In progress, Done.

You would also have this for the consultation clients.

#Step 5

In your Calendar view (third) sync your Google (personal) and Outlook calendars.

This way, you can see all meetings from Outlook and Google you scheduled in Zanda.

Zanda allows you to sync to Google Calendar. This way, you can view everything in ClickUp calendar.

• Outlook → ClickUp

• Zanda → Google Calendar → ClickUp

Any change you make in the ClickUp calendar is reflected in each of the other apps.

You only need to have one view without switching contexts.

The calendar view appears as follows:

When you click “sync with calendar”, you also access these options.

The unified calendar view ensures you can see all scheduled meetings for clients and patients in one view, eliminating context switching.

#Step 6

Make the access to meetings even more seamless in ClickUp.

Click the apps menu.

Sync Microsoft Teams for meetings as well.

The beauty is that you can create ClickUp tasks from Teams for each of the clients.

#Step 7

Use ClickUp AI note taker to generate a summary of all your meetings without leaving the app.

Once you schedule a meeting in ClickUp, activate AI notetaker and a transcript will be generated.

This way, you will reduce your apps to only 2.

• ClickUp to handle clients, patients, and recording any meetings.

• Xero for payments

As you reduce the context switching, you will have more energy to work on your business and help more clients.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Coming Up Next Week: Dealing with high-stress environments

We look at a case study where a subscriber’s creativity is affected by the pressure to succeed while learning new systems, coupled with daily life demands.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Focus, meditate, sleep, and even relax better using Brain.fm here for 1 month free.

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at creative friction that emerges when we try to make progress in unrelated projects simultaneously.

A subscriber wrote in:

If we zoom out, the scenario points to the problem of friction, which is the resistance between intention and execution.

The subscriber experiences creative friction as they try to juggle multiple brands (real estate and a passion project).

The problem here is treating the two as separate mental siloes and paying a cognitive tax each time they switch between them.

This is the reason they feel that daily tasks are a chore and struggle with momentum and consistency.

The Mindset to Solve Creative Friction

The first place we start is by changing our mindset related to how we can overcome friction and make good habits automatic.

In his book, Field Theory in Social Science, Kurt Lewin introduces the idea that behavior is the result of the balance between two opposing forces.

• Driving force - motivation, incentives, willpower to undertake the behavior

• Restraining force (friction) - fears, psychological barriers, environmental obstacles preventing movement

What Lewin observed was that we were more likely to engage in a desired behavior when we reduced the friction rather than when we increased the driving forces.

For example, if you wanted to keep fit, say by going to the gym daily, you would have these two opposing forces:

• Driving forces - the desire to have a fit body “I love how my friend’s body looks like”, your willpower “I can do this.”

• Restraining forces (friction) - fear, you can’t find your gym shoes, you forgot to prepare your gym clothes.

Kurt’s argument was that you could easily engage in keeping fit if you focused on reducing friction such as preparing your gym clothes the night before rather than adding to your driving forces such as desiring a fit body.

This is the strategy we consider if we want to reduce creative friction.

Our subscriber needs to reduce context switching through the rule of one.

What’s that?

Treating the two brands as one when creating content and using overlapping themes between them. Rather than create different content for real estate and your passion project, reduce the friction by using overarching themes and creating variations from it for the different projects.

If you study any big creators across multiple platforms, you will observe that most have the same content cross-posted.

What you found on X (Twitter) is what you see on Substack and LinkedIn.

However, as the two brands are separate, have one theme e.g., “Lifestyle” and create variations for the two projects.

This way, you won’t feel as if you are paying a high switching tax and losing your momentum in the process.

The second mindset that is also commonly adopted by content creators is batch processing where they plan all their content once such as on a Sunday evening.

Throughout the week, they only tweak what they have for the day and post it. We see this with founders such as Jack Dorsey who used themed days when at Twitter.

Finally, the subscriber mentions that they feel that their passion project “needs direction.” The cure for this is to bridge your real estate expertise to your personal identity.

This way, you will stop looking for the direction in a vacuum and align the two in a category of One as Dan Sullivan tells us.

Are You Missing Out on the Power of Agents?

AI is transforming the world of work and how we actually get things done today.

In 2022-2023, prompting was how you got the best from AI. As an architect, you told AI exactly what to do to give you your desired outcome.

In 2024-2025, automation became central stage as AI could be handed the tools and could search for answers on Google and give them back to us.

Today, this has changed to AI agents. You only need to give an agent a high level objective (e.g., "Research the UK construction industry's shift to electric plants and write a 2,000-word summary") and it will create its own "to-do list," executes it, fact-checks itself, and only returns when the job is done.

Why I love AI agents is that they do not replace my cognitive abilities such as critical thinking which I need to preserve.

Instead, they handle the heavy lifting of cross-searching 10 browser tabs, refine the solution and self-correct before giving me the final output I need to work on.

AI agents reduce procedural friction as the handle tasks that took me hours to complete before.

For example, if you wanted to write a new Kindle book to earn extra income on the side, you could ask an AI agent to research on the latest books and identify the gaps you could fill.

I use HyperAgent which is giving you $1000 free credits to try it out. Just fill the form about how you will use it and your account is setup.

#Step 1

This is the first screen you see once you are setup.

#Step 2

Type the objective that you would like the AI agent to accomplish for you.

I asked it:

“Research the competitive landscape for amazon kindle books relating to adopting AI and navigating changes from layoffs. Find every what real users are saying on Twitter and Reddit. Look at Amazon and see views from users. Build me an interactive comparison webpage of best performing books and a detailed breakdown page with pros, cons, and real user quotes. find the gap I should fill with a new kindle book”

#Step 3

The AI agent went to work and gave me a webpage with real results.

There are so many use cases you can also try out in your own work including designing websites, launching podcasts etc.

Here’s $1000 free credits you can use to leverage AI as a tool that enhances your work practices.

Coming Up Next Week: Operational Friction

We look at a case study where a subscriber uses multiple tools, including Zanda, Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Google calendar but keep falling behind.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Access free credits worth $1000 you can use to create your own agents for work.

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

This Week’s Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at finding clarity to work on what matters most.

A subscriber wrote in:

If we look closely, we see that our subscriber is showing up and getting things done by the end of the day.

However, the progress achieved is in other things that do not take them close to their dream.

How We Could Solve This

The first place we would need to adjust is the mindset.

In Essentialism, Greg McKeown introduces us to the straddling concept which describes how an organization or individual tries to adopt a new strategy without abandoning existing ones.

It is the equivalent of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) where we add more tasks to our current workload.

The problem with straddling is that it causes us to stretch too thin as we attempt to achieve many goals simultaneously.

"In theory, this 'straddling' is a way to have it both ways. You maintain your existing strategy while simultaneously trying to adopt the strategy of a competitor." McKeown advises us.

The cure to straddling is learning how to make trade-offs.

One has to be comfortable with only doing some things rather than attempting everything. This is what clarity is all about - being in a position to say yes to what matters most while ignoring the many other things we could do.

The rule of thumb we apply when making trade-offs is the focusing question as Gary Keller tells us in The One Thing.

What is the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Without a clear ONE thing, we risk spinning our wheels and failing to achieve our dream by the end of the day.

Therefore, our subscriber needs to first reflect on these two aspects to change their mindset:

1. They can only do a few things well.

2. They can identify their “ONE Thing” which refers to the tasks they consider most important.

How We Could Leverage Tech to Find Clarity

We consider an example of an individual who works a day job (9-5) on the weekdays and they desire to add an extra income source over the weekends by taking on gig work (freelance).

Our assumption is that they spend their weekdays fully engrossed at work and in the evenings, have little energy to create their second income stream.

Therefore, they can allocate this second income stream to the weekends when they are off work.

Consider this a guide to help you think.

#Step 1

After reflection, the individual determines that their “ONE Thing” is getting a few gig projects to create a second income stream.

Therefore, they will strive to create more time in the evenings or early morning to find gig work which they can complete over the weekend.

• 9-5 Client work (maintenance tasks) - to pay bills

• Gig work (ONE Thing) - to grow

#Step 2

We demonstrate how dashboards and automations can energize us to keep working on the goals that matter.

We use ClickUp which you can sign up free here.

Start by creating a free workspace by clicking this icon.

#Step 3

Create a new list.

It will contain lists of tasks related to 9-5 work and personal projects.

#Step 4

Create 9-5 projects currently working on.

We assume the individual is handling client A and client B work. We create a list for each.

Next, we add personal gigs as a new list.

#Step 5

In each of the Client projects, add related activities that you handle on a daily basis.

We assume meetings, updating products, and regular contact with the client.

You would have these tasks.

#Step 6

Allocate each activity to its respective status - To-Do, In progress, Done.

Also, assign client work to have a normal priority.

#Step 7

For the personal gigs, assign activities to have an Urgent priority.

#Step 8

Here’s where we now get clarity using dashboards.

Navigate to the dashboards menu icon.

Create a new dashboard and add several cards (widgets) by clicking +card at the top right.

You should see this when you click the button.

Add the following cards:

• Tasks list

• Priority breakdown

• Workload by status

• AI Brain

Our dashboard will now appear as follows.

The “My Dream” card exists by default as a quotes widget. Rename it to “My Dream.”

Now, when you click your dashboard, you can see what tasks are in progress, what is urgent, and you can query AI Brain to give you any update on your projects.

#Step 8

The final step is to create automations that send an email whenever you complete the Urgent Gigs projects.

Each time you complete a task you consider as “ONE Thing”, you can set up an automation that sends you an email with a custom message.

At the top-right corner, click the lightning ⚡️ symbol (automations)

Select email on status change

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When a task is set to “done” → send a message congratulating us to keep going with the most important tasks.

It then appears as follows.

This way, an email will be sent when you completes an urgent task, keeping you even more motivated.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Access our Productivity Eco-system

We are evolving and would like to bring you on board with us.

We now have a second platform, Pathwise, dedicated mainly to productivity implementation tutorials.

We realized that we also needed a home for productivity tutorials you can complete at your own pace.

As a subscriber, you have a 1-month free trial to test Pathwise. No credit card details asked.

Just Sign up and start learning.

Type the productivity problem you are facing. E.g., procrastination.

We match you to the right tutorial. Complete it at your own pace.

Save your progress and continue even 1 week later.

What’s more, we have an amazing referral program.

Try it for 1 month free.

New tutorials added weekly.

Unlock your full potential with our ecosystem.

All paid subscribers access Pathwise Pro free for life. One payment gives you access to both systems.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Struggling with motivation? Try this free method to restore it.

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We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome …

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