Welcome to another edition
of Bedtime Stories with Grandpa Jubball.
In today's episode,
we're gonna be talking about productivity apps.
(soft upbeat music)
Now, a lot of people have asked me about the specific apps
that I use to be productive.
I'm gonna show you the apps I use,
I'm gonna show you how I use them,
but I also want to emphasize up front
that the actual apps you use are less important
than the way you use the apps
but I'm gonna show you both.
So first, let's start with my task list manager.
I use Things 3.
Things 3 is, I think it's only for iOS and Mac OS.
And I've been using this since medical school.
The thing I like about it, it's an up front fee.
I mean, it's kind of expensive,
it's like $50 for just the Mac app,
but you pay once and you're done.
And it's super clean, it works seamlessly.
It really just makes sense.
So this is my today page,
and things that are on my calendar automatically show up
on the top.
I'm actually in Salt Lake City right now,
I'm gonna be riding 100 miles on a bike
for the first time, my first ever century.
The way it's organized, it's like a today view.
So this is the default view
and you see what you're supposed to do today.
So I'm already falling behind, I didn't do my newsletter,
which was to go out yesterday,
I have some other things that I need to be doing,
and this is much more effective
than I think just having a list
of all these items you need to do
without any sort of hierarchy or due date sort of thing.
So you can actually use the inbox
when you just wanna dump ideas, I really like that.
You can quickly open up the app just dump random things.
I mean, it's at 33 right now,
you're supposed to clear it out
and organize it, which I need to do,
but right now it's a lot of books I need to download
or documentaries I wanna download or things like that.
And then you can actually categorize tasks.
Sometimes you don't wanna have a due date,
you may just have some tasks that, like these ones,
if I go to self-development,
you'll see this two year journaling exercise,
but you can also just have tasks that don't have a due date
and they will just always live there
until you want to go take care of that little project.
So under personal I have my daily habits,
I have groceries, this is my grocery list,
self-development things like this, journaling exercise,
and then Med School Insiders,
obviously, there's a lot 'cause it's not just the YouTube,
but also the courses that we're doing,
the merch, the services, the website, all that stuff.
And then video topics.
So when you guys send me video suggestions,
and if I like them, and I wanna do a video on that
in the future, I don't wanna forget
so I write it all down here under video topics
and as that list grows, I have a...
Anytime I wanna create a new video, I'll just go there
and see what inspires me in that moment.
Memm, of course, we don't actually use, we use a sauna
for Memm because Things 3 is only for an individual,
not for a team.
So there isn't that much under Memm.
And then I was gonna do a podcast which is on hold
and then Blue LINC was just the first,
like entrepreneurial projects,
first series entrepreneur project that I pursued.
So that's my to do list manager.
I don't think the actual app you use is as important
as how you use it
and for most people, I think it's beneficial
to review your to do list manager
and kind of clean it up once a week.
So every Sunday evening for me,
so my today list will be overrun with more
than just four items
and I'll clean it up, I'll either delegate tasks
to other people, or I'll reschedule it
for some point in the future, or I'll just delete it
and reassess whether or not that task needs
to actually get done.
All right, next, let's talk about the ways
that I actually take notes.
So I take notes across several different apps.
It seems very confusing and very much not ideal,
but this really does work for me.
So the first app, the default app is Notes, the Notes app
that comes with your iPhone and your Mac,
and it syncs seamlessly.
The reason I use this as my default kind of like dump is
because it's super quick.
So these other apps I'm gonna show you afterwards,
they're great, but they usually take five seconds to load up
and then they're not as quick and snappy
as just using Notes.
So for example, if I am listening to a podcast,
some podcast, I do take notes on others I don't,
I will open up this Notes app
and have a podcast note here
for all the notes I wanna take,
and it's just way quicker than going directly
into Evernote or into Notion
to actually put the notes there.
These are notes
that are not really needing a specific place
that needs to be referenced,
these are kind of like my working my working lists.
So the other day I was cycling
around Red Rock here in Las Vegas
and I came across a group of cyclists
and I was asking them about good trails
and other recommendations for bike shops,
so I took notes on that, right then and there quickly
on my phone.
Same with restaurants I wanna try
or my car, I'm gonna go track it
so I was doing some research on what parts I need to buy.
So these are not things that I'd really need to reference
in the future, I just wanna know at once,
get it taken care of and I can just delete the note
or things like podcast notes,
I can then reorganize them someplace else
and that someplace else is of course Notion.
So I used to use Evernote for all of my podcast notes
and when we get to Evernote, I'll explain to you
why I no longer use it that much,
but Notion I've been very happy with
and I use it both for personal and also for my business.
So this is my personal Notion.
I haven't used it that extensively,
but right now I'm using it primarily for my podcast notes.
I've actually listened
to every single Tim Ferriss podcast episode
from one to the current one, which is like 431,
for a lot of them, not all of them, but for most of them
or maybe like half of them, I take notes
and some of the notes are gonna be more extensive.
I feel like this one is a little more detailed
and there's normal formula here,
it kind of just depends on what is it we are doing.
So for some podcast episodes, I will take more notes,
like this one, for example, this is longer notes
than normal.
And then other ones are gonna be pretty short,
like this one with Brian Koppelman.
Now for how we use Notion with Med School Insiders,
Notion is like the brain of Med School Insiders.
Everything that we do in some way
or another is connected here, whether it's the blog,
and how we keep track of what blog posts
that we're working on, or whether it's the YouTube videos
like over here these are all the videos I've done.
Under any given one of these
will actually have a script.
So for example, like the discipline video,
I will actually have research or notes,
I guess this video, I didn't need to do any research
but have a script.
I actually have the script that I read off of verbatim
for my videos, and I work with my editor,
we both have shared access here
and there's a checklist, I actually got the inspiration
for creating this template through Thomas Frank's videos
on Notion, so that was super helpful.
In fact, his is much more thorough than what I have.
Mine's kind of simple 'cause I don't have B-roll and stuff,
at least not on the Med School Insider channel.
So definitely check out his video if you want more details
on how you can make the most of this
for a video production standpoint.
We use Notion for a lot of other things,
the instructions for how to handle various things,
all of our SOPs so when we have this situation
in the business or that situation or an unhappy customer,
what do we actually do to resolve the situation.
Everything is in Notion and we can quickly reference that
just to standardize things make it again systems, right?
Next up Evernote.
I no longer use Evernote all that much.
It was my go to app
for just about everything I took notes on back
when I was in medical school.
Started using Evernote back in 2012
and I still have literally all my med school notes in here.
Yeah, so like pulmonology,
I remember I would have the actual slides
that I would take notes on briefly
and then save the PDF here,
but I would create these summary sheets
which I talked about on the Med School Insider channel,
how I would take notes, and I would scan them
because I wanted everything to be digital
and I still very much try to make everything digital
so I don't have to organize files,
I can just search for them.
And the cool thing about Evernote is it has OCR
so I can actually search for total ventilation
and assuming my handwriting didn't suck too bad
that it would be able to search for that
and show me this note that says total ventilation,
for example, but I use it for a lot of other things,
for example, my car,
this is probably one of the nerdiest things about me,
I mean, there's many nerdy things about me,
I keep a list of all the cars
that I've ever driven, I mean even the boring
like Toyota Camrys
and the automatic list isn't that exciting,
the manual list is more exciting.
I used Evernote for just about everything
and I've even used it recently,
like I drove a Lotus Evora 400 back in February of 2020,
but over the years, I started having more
and more frustrations with Evernote
because it felt kind of clunky and there was issues
with formatting that, I thought they would fix with time,
they never really did.
The other thing is I put all my recipes here
so when I'm cooking, I'll have my phone
on the kitchen counter and if the phone goes to sleep,
and I unlock it, it won't go back to the actual recipe,
it'll go back to the Evernote homepage, I've to search
for the recipe again.
And then like all these small things,
would just make it less pleasant to use Evernote
and it's clunky on the computer,
and I got an iPad in residency and I'm taking notes,
but the writing wouldn't be in line
with the actual notes I was typing.
So for a lot of reasons, I just got less enamored
with Evernote as an app.
So I still kind of use it from time to time,
I still use it for recipes, I still put occasional things
in here, but for the most part,
I'm actually trying to transition most of these things
toward Notion because I think that's a better fit
for my use case.
And last let's talk about Bear.
This is a writing app that I use exclusively
to write Med School Insider scripts.
I don't use it for anything else.
All my Kevin Duvall M.D. I don't really script these videos,
but I do sometimes take notes
and I kind of plan them out
that all goes into Notion.
I use Bear exclusively
for writing Med School Inside scripts,
but I don't really save them here
or I don't really try to organize them too much
because again, I wanna have everything
in just one spot which would be Notion,
but just writing in there is a joy.
I love that late at night,
or if I'm on a plane, I can have this theme,
which is black background, and then white and yellow text,
which to me is a lot easier to view in the dark.
I'm definitely not using Bear to its full potential,
but for this use case, I'm pretty happy with it.
All right, the last app is this email client called Front.
It's an email software that's designed for teams.
So essentially, having shared inboxes, things like that.
So what it allows me to do with my team is
for example, my assistant can view incoming emails
and triage them and she can handle some of them on her own
and then some of them she'll send to me.
It's really not necessary unless you guys have a team.
It's a monthly subscription that...
Before this, I was using Gmail and I was very happy with it,
but as we get more and more messages every day
as time goes on, then I needed some help.
So Front has been very useful for that.
Anyways, those are the apps that I use.
I hope you guys found that helpful, much love
and I'll see you guys in the next one.
(soft upbeat music) (bell chimes)