hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel it is francesco
here in today's video i'm going to be doing my productivity workflow with you folks i'm going
to share the apps the systems and the tools that i'm currently using to get things done
hopefully it shares a bit of inspiration around how to do stuff i'm getting questions all the time
reviewing so many productivity apps about what i actually use and i actually haven't done one of
these for a fair while now so hopefully today this gives you a good uh sort of spring clean
fresh update on what's new before we begin it'd be great to have you as a subscriber here on keep
productive we do plenty of videos top tens reviews and lots more and we're also launching a few more
channels to dive into different topics so feel free to subscribe below so i want to start firstly
with methodology now methodologies are really core to how you work and one methodology that
stuck with me for a fair amount of time is getting things done by david allen now gtd the concept is
very helpful for organizing your thoughts and but one of the things that really drives gtd is
the capture process and that's something that i do quite often especially with tasks and things that
come into my brain i tend to work in that sort of methodology with a few arrangements and a few
adjustments so in terms of the things that inspire the tools that i go for i traditionally go for a
to-do list application a note-taker and a calendar application to try and keep things as minimal
as possible over the last year i've definitely experimented with whether i need different tools
for different things but i've really in the last say two to three months slimmed my applications
down and i want to go through what those are with you so when it comes to tools my task management
application of choice is things three now that's most recently changed a lot of you guys will know
that i have been using todoist for about eight to nine years and whilst i love to do is i think
it's a fantastic application i've definitely transitioned in the last couple of months
and been doing a lot of sort of um adjusting to the way that i work and i think the majority of
problems that i had around notion and to do this used at the same time was around the project side
of stuff personal project management and work project management and i think i found a really
nice balanced solution in things three so inside of things three i am using it to manage three
projects per month and also using the areas to manage a few things like for example to read
auto and routine stuff so i'm able to balance a list of my own work with a list of my work work
so as you can imagine um it's changed the way that i do sort of task management um i really like the
features inside of it that for example break tasks into this evening this is something that
um sort of definitely defines my day a lot more now um because i've got work and then i've got
um sort of evening um where i do some sort of routine stuff with becca and things like that
um so being able to have like that separation is really nice i also like the way that it breaks up
projects and activities and i'll talk later to a few of the ways that i'm channeling the tasks
i've been doing most recently so things three is now my task management application of choice
so moving on to the more controversial one it's evernote now i i wasn't really able to explain
uh some from a tangible aspect why i moved from notion to evernote now the main reason is
because i one didn't really think i was utilizing the resource to its maximum ability really um
it's because i have a base on avedo already i haven't not been using evernote i've just been
not been using it for the same way i've been using notion and i've realized that i'm not using notion
to for example the capacity that pushes past evernote's abilities so i thought you know why
am i necessarily using two tools why don't i go to something that i've already created a base in
the stability on evernote has gotten better not all the way there yet however it's a lot more than
it was say four or five months ago so i thought let's streamline things down into evernote once
again i really don't take that many advanced notes or even much notes across the day it's
normally things like receipts health information um house wiki things like that business receipts
um not really stuff that you'd expect and most recently i've been trying to import my journal
into evernote which i'll talk about a little later in the assisting tools section so avenue
is my go-to personal note-taking application of choice so moving on to how i use notion because
i still do use notion have a lot of respect for the application i use it as on keep productive
hub and base so we use it as a way to script plan and organize videos we also use it as a
way to use it as a team wiki so that people know the information about things like sponsorships um
what's coming up on the podcast what articles are coming out as well so it's a good planner
tool and there's nothing wrong with it for that so we're intending to very much stay with it
as time goes on so it's nice to know that i've got sort of like a wiki planner base in notion
um that is separate from my own sort of evernote uh use so i guess i've really defined more about
how i'm using them which has definitely helped me to move forward with work so notion is my chosen
project manager of choice that i use for work so moving on to calendar applications and whilst
i'm using woven as my go-to calendar i really do like woven um it definitely brings the design in
very nicely i still also use apple calendar and here and there because of things like for example
the ios 14 widgets don't have i don't think there's a woven update yet for that so there's
areas where i'm using it however i don't think as long as you've got your calendar set up
i don't think it's necessarily important i almost think it's like a calendar app is like a window
into your calendar for example it's a similar way that you'd be using gmail through a client it's
more of a client it's more of a layer than it is necessarily say like evernote where it's actually
hosting all of your information versus actually it doesn't necessarily host it it ports it sort
of like shows it views it um so that's why i'm not as worried about what calendar application i use
but at the moment it's woven and i use apple calendar here and there so that's my calendar
application of choice phew so uh i have a few assisting applications whereas those sort of four
um i spend the majority of my time in things and now and i don't really have many calendar events
i don't take too many notes apart from like reference information and i plan videos like once
a day so i really spend the majority of my time capturing things in the inbox in things three um
so that's pretty helpful and also being able to sort of sort and organize stuff for the week
ahead so assisting tools um i for my email use an application called missive so i really like
missive because it has a really clean design um i also like the gestures the keyboard shortcuts
and also just the way that it functions on ios and android well not android it's actually just like
really nice cross-platform ability but i've never had a problem with the syncing the reliability is
being number one for the application so that's the reason i use missive used it for about two
and a half years now uh maybe um but i'm definitely looking to applications like tempo i've
reviewed it here on the channel but tempo is like this app that basically they basically pump email
through in like batches and i really want that to be more of the way that i use email because
and i'll talk to that sort of a bit later on um but i've been trying to reduce the amount of like
unnecessary use of uh sort of applications for example in the night like when otto wakes feeds
to wake and it's my duty to do it i will come back and i'll quickly check my emails and that's like
really bad habit it's probably because i'm very tired but at the same time tempo would stop me
from doing that because um it would like actually force sort of won't allow me to force match it
without actually having to do it which is quite nice so i'm looking at applications like that
and i don't really use i guess email quite aggressively so that might be a good solution
for me so moving on we use twist as our go-to team communication tool we don't use slack but twist is
actually a great one for alice and steve who both work with keep productive it's really helpful we
haven't had a problem with it and it's nice for starting threads about specific videos or articles
that we're working on we also use whereby most recently we used zoom for a fair while but i
think whereby just i don't know it looks nicer um i like the way that the the panels um sort of work
and that you can do all the stuff you did in zoom really just an aesthetic appeal to it
but that's our go-to option for video calls now and we moved uh fairly recently about two
months ago to it one month ago something like this um so it's actually been pretty good so in
terms of like my impersonal use um i use i've recently got a kindle for christmas from my
parents-in-law and my wife um and it was a really good um it's something i've wanted for a while
and i've really been enjoying reading it at the moment i'm reading essentialism finally
um i sort of briefly read it but didn't really in terms of like read the blinkist book on it
but i didn't actually go into detail on it so read wise is now an app that i'm using with it um so it
helps me to highlight stuff and then it's the terminology i'm getting used to highlight stuff
and then be able to actually save it and use a daily review to keep continuing to learn it
so you can check out read wise below um i think you get 30 day free trial with them
it gives me 30 days as well but if you want 30 days free there's there are available below
remarkable is something that i'm reviewing at the moment but i'm coming increasingly to enjoy it
um and i've most recently started using it as my journal um to help reduce sort of physical paper
being around but obviously i like having a barren fake note but there's nothing wrong with it it's
just an experiment at the moment so i'm using it to write my journal and then after every session
i'm sending it to evernote through a pdf email and then it arrives in my evernote and i can actually
look at it i can scan it using the handwriting tag in evernote which is great um and that's actually
been a recent experiment that i've been doing so that's been quite nice and i guess it would sort
of solve a little bit of use because i quite like i don't like necessarily to write my journal on
digital formats like typing away quite like the handwritten thing and that sort of combines the
two quite nicely so in terms of like uh personal development i've been trying to do balance
meditations as much as i can i really like the way that it does the sort of auto learning technology
so sort of learns about you as you go and i've been trying to use skillshare to learn some
lessons on courses um and i try to do that in the morning so i've been doing these sort of like mini
hacks whereas in the morning uh when like um i'm feeding otto or like he's doing stuff i've got
like that on the tv in the background so i'm sort of like learning but also taking care of our team
but at least it's like sort of like hacking a few lessons for me as i start the day and
i will watch it before he wakes up as well which is quite nice there's been a lot of
looking into like essentialism and things like this obviously focusing more on doing less and
putting more attention into the tasks that are at hand so this last two weeks i've been trying to
narrow down my tasks to three main ones a day and everything else is just something i called other
and if i can do a few others that's great but the main things it's sort of like eat that frog and
brian tracy sort of stuff um but doing the most important thing when you start the day i would
say the quality has been a lot better i think so one of the things when i do my work is that the
quality isn't up to scratch i'd say it's not it's like i'd say i normally try and ship things at
like 60 because i want to get them out whereas um hopefully this new methodology can bring me up to
80 um and help me feel like i've achieved more in my day so i will keep you updated into how
i'm sort of embracing that at the moment it's sort of a blend between essentialism of doing
the things that matter not everything blended with make times concept of highlights where
you set a highlight for the day um in this case i'm setting three highlights for the day
and then working on them in specific stints morning midday afternoon um and uh it's actually
been very helpful so far at least keeping me a bit more sort of focused and on task so guys that was
all of my applications and workflows hopefully it was helpful you can use the timestamps to go back
to any specific section of course but naturally i hope it was valuable to you and i'd really love to
hear what applications you're using so feel free to like use the paste and copy and paste thing
in the youtube description to find sort of what apps you're using and i'd love to hear them in the
comments below um i don't i read all the comments that don't necessarily reply to them all but i
will definitely check out a few that um of the methodologies and of the tools that you're using
on a daily basis so guys it'd be amazing to have you as a subscriber so make sure you hit subscribe
but i will talk to you all very very soon anyway and we're doing some exciting videos as the weeks
of january enter this year lots of top tens but a big thank you for coming to join us here
if you enjoyed today's video hit like and i look forward to bringing comments anyway guys cheerio
you