I Tried 137 Productivity Tools. These Are The Best.

so over the last 15 years I've tried an enormous number of productivity apps and tools and Tech but in this video I'm going to save you the time and money of having to test all of these yourself and I'm going to share what I think are the best apps and tools and Tech that I actually use every day to stay productive so the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is that I go to the bathroom I do a little Wii and then I weigh myself on my Withings smart scales these are great because they're Wi-Fi enabled and they sync with apple health kit which means I can track how my weight changes over time and this is just incredibly useful it's like what they say what gets measured gets managed then I'll have a shower and change and stuff next I make myself a cup of coffee using a particular Tech item called the clever dripper which is a very nice way to make filter coffee and then I use one of my favorite productivity tools of all time which is a physical pen and paper journal and what I do in this journal is something called morning Pages which is a technique from the book the artist's Way by Julia Cameron and essentially the idea is that you write three pages by hand I actually wrote four this morning because I was feeling like I was on a bit of a roll you write three pages by hand of stream of Consciousness whatever comes to mind and I find that this is a great way of clogging my brain of any thoughts and errant things that were in there and it also helps me come up with interesting ideas for what I can do with my business and my life and even though there's a lot of apps and Tech on this list the trusty pen and paper notebook is just like one of the things that I go back to so often and really levels up my productivity as well all right next comes a quick five minute step in my morning routine where I use the app things 3 as my to-do list to figure out what I'm doing for the rest of the day now at the moment this is what my home screen on iOS looks like you can see that basically I've got a calendar at the top and then I've got two widgets for things so I've got the inbox widget and I've got the today widget and the way I think of managing a to-do list it's basically two different lists there is a to-do list and then a today list and I find that this generally keeps things simple so what I'll do is I'll look on my today list to see what shows up on there so for example film this video is on my today list call my grandma is on this list and this is something that repeats two days after completion which means if I take it off right now then it's going to show up two days from now and remind me that I should call my grandma this also synchronizes with my calendar so if we look at the top we can see what calendar events I've got on in my life and this is a nice way for me to plan my day in the morning it just takes a couple of minutes but it just helps me realize that okay this is exactly what I'm working on now generally I've got a pretty good idea of what I need to work on but in case I need some inspiration I look at my anytime list which is just like my endless to-do list and I decide okay what is the stuff on here that I just need to get done today I don't bother with this week I don't bother with this month because I find that all of that stuff is all a bit mythical all I do is focus on what are the things I need to do today now what happens next depends on whether I want to write something in the morning or whether I want to film something in the morning because that's generally how I use my mornings and generally if I want to write then I'll take my journal and I'll stick it in my bag along with my 11 inch iPad Pro and I'll head out of the house to a local coffee shop or a local restaurant and this is another productivity tool that served me well over the years and that is changing up the location I used to do this a lot in medical school I would go to different libraries and different coffee shops to work in those different locations in each day and generally I find that it makes work feel a lot more like play which is something I talk about in the first chapter of my upcoming book feel good productivity how to do more of what matters to you that's they'll be linked down below if you want to check it out and then another tool I find really useful is something like this this is the one that I use at the moment it's the peak design 6 liter sling and it's basically a fairly simple bag but it has enough space for an 11 inch iPad Pro and also my journal and pen and then if I feel like it I'll take a camera with me as well and that plops nicely into this bag and now I have a little slingback that I can carry around with me now having two different bags is actually super helpful so essentially my journal and my iPad always live in this one but then I also have my enormous laptop bag which is the Peter McKinnon everyday camera bag that has my laptop and a bunch of accessories and an extra camera in it as well but if I'm just leaving the house to go to a coffee shop to do some writing it's really nice to just be able to grab and go with the sling rather than have to Lug around the enormous laptop bag and this might be a bit Overkill but one of the things that I swear by is reducing the friction as much as possible for the things that I want to do more of in my life I would like to do more of going out and about and going to Local Coffee shop or going to the park and working from there until whatever I can do to reduce the friction of that happening makes it way easier for me to do and makes it way easier to build that habit at this point I'm at a local coffee shop or restaurant or wherever I like to change up the location and the app that I tend to mostly write on on my iPad is called Ulysses it's a very simple minimalistic markdown based writing app and so whether I'm writing my email newsletter or working on some new book projects or even planning videos usually I'll do the first draft of writing in Ulysses and then I'll transfer it into notion if it's a video or Google Docs if it's a book thing or convert email thing but Ulysses tends to be the place where I do most of my writing and the thing I like about it is that you can also track your daily word count and so I've set a target of a thousand words a day and I can see my progress towards that Target now one productivity tool that I haven't talked about in this video is in fact therapy which I have started recently in the last few months and has been game changing for me to help understand my own emotions understand the limiting beliefs that I've got getting in the way of my productivity and my life so I'm delighted to say that this video is a paid partnership with better help betterhelp is the world's largest therapy service and it's 100 online with better help you can tap into a network of over 30 000 credential therapists who can help you with whatever issues you find yourself struggling with to get started you just answer a handful of questions about yourself and about your needs and that way betterhelp can match you with the right therapist from the network and then when you've got your therapist you can talk to them in whatever way feels most comfortable for you it could be a phone call it could be a video call it could be by text and you can message your therapist anytime you can schedule live sessions whenever it's convenient for you and if for whatever reason you don't get on with your therapist you can always switch to another one if any of that stands up your street and you'd like to try out therapy with better help then and you can get 10 off by going to betterhelp.com that's better help help.com forward slash or you can hit the link in the video description and that will give you 10 off your first month so thank you so much better help for sponsoring this video and then once I'm done with a few hours of writing I'll usually come back home and get on my desk and then the thing that I'm playing when I'm on my desk is YouTube videos that have focused music so this is my YouTube homepage at the moment um you know the enchanted lands immersive writing session peaceful day at Hogwarts and I'll just put on a random one of these like Lord of the Rings Rivendell and be into music and this is just like the music that I like to have on in the background usually I full screen this and have it open on my second monitor because I don't really use the second monitor for much I'm mostly a single monitor kind of guy but it's nice having the ambience and having the sound and stuff in the background as a way of helping me focus when I'm working next I normally have a quick check of my emails to see if there's anything interesting that's popped up and the app that I've been using for my emails since 2019 is called superhuman and superhuman is the fastest tool I've ever seen to help navigate email and it's got loads of keyboard shortcuts which means I can get through my email inbox about twice as fast as I could with previous apps that have tried like the Gmail app and then usually while I'm there if there's no emails that require my attention I'll have a browse through any newsletters that I'm subscribed to and see if there's anything interesting so the two that I read most often are morning Brew which is a daily newsletter for like Tech and business and finance and secondly read wise which is an email that every morning it just sends me five highlights from books or articles of stuff that I've highlighted over the last like 10 years and so it's a great way of me resurfacing the things that I've highlighted in the past then for the rest of the workday we generally have even more writing and all my writing when it comes to videos and when it comes to courses is done in notion unsurprisingly again I've been using Notions since 2019 and we basically run our entire company using a notion and a few other bits of software so for example I'm writing this video in notion it's all planned out over here I've got my 25 or so bullet points and I'm I've got this open on the screen in front of me as I'm talking to you we've also got the content calendar with titles and thumbnails that are upcoming on the YouTube channel everything is organized in notion we've got annual objectives for our company we've got our key results so we use an okr system more on that later and then we've got the different quests or projects so the team are working on for the Sprint so we operate in five week cycles and so everyone has a little Quest or two that they're doing in the five weeks now while I'm doing this work stuff oftentimes I'll be on this desk which actually happens to be a standing desk but because all the cameras and stuff are connected to it I tend not to really use it in standing desk mode but and again this is kind of Overkill I also have an extra desk next to me which is also a standing desk that has a treadmill underneath it and the treadmill is genuinely one of the most useful things that I've installed in my productivity Arsenal over the last six months I think I installed it six months ago and in that time I've used the treadmill for 65 days I have traversed a different distance distance of 235 kilometers and I've used it 144 times on average twice a day for the 65 days and it's great you can see just over time if I sit down on the computer that's a Windows PC that's that's on the standing desk so if I'm playing Diablo 4 which is the game I'm playing these days I'll often be walking on the treadmill while I'm playing it but if I'm working I will just take my keyboard which is a mechanical keyboard which is the one that we're sort of building ourselves these days I'll take them accountable keyboard I'll move it from this Mac Mini over to the Windows PC I'll often switch between Windows and Mac just because it's kind of nice kind of nice to change platforms again a bit Overkill you don't need this but if you have a standing desk and you haven't yet tried a treadmill underneath it I would really recommend it I think the one I have is the walking pad C2 no relationship with them but I put an Amazon affiliate link down in the video description if you want to check it out speaking of keyboard I generally use a mechanical keyboard um this is one that we are in the process of building out for our Tech brand uh more on that in a little while so I've been testing a bunch of mechanical keyboards over the last like 12 months or so and when I'm switching between Windows and Mac there is a really good cross-platform app that I used to track my time and that is called rice now rice is a really good time tracking app that I've actually been using since November of 2021 so I've had it installed on my Mac and then on my Windows PC since that time you can see for all of 2022 I was tracking my time as well and then for all of 2023 so far I'm filming this in August I've also been tracking my time using rise it's an automatic time tracker so it basically figures out what app you're on what app is active or what like Chrome tab or Safari window is active for example I spent a lot of time in video conferencing I spent 183 hours on writing I've spent 87 hours documenting 76 hours as a meeting 183 hours spent in Google Docs this year that's quite a lot of time most of that was just doing edits in my book for example and I've Loved rice so much that I actually reached out to the guys who created ryze and I offered to invest in them and so we are now invested in rice as an angel investor which is kind of interesting but if you want to check it out then it'll be doing me a favor because then it'll show that my you know the amount I've invested in the company is like companies can grow fingers crossed um but that'll be linked down in the video description if you want to check it out so then usually when I've done a bunch of writing throughout the day in these various different apps that we've already talked about I then go on to filming a video so for example right now I'm filming a video and there's been a bunch of productivity tips and tricks and tools that I've used over the last six plus years to get the process of filming videos to be as efficient and low friction as possible because again it's a thing that I enjoy doing the thing I want to do and if I can just reduce the friction as much as possible to doing the thing it means I'm way more likely to do the thing and so on this desk for example everything is a bit of a mess right now but we've got this main angle that films camera angle a we've got camera angle B which is an overhead angle up here we've got camera angle C which is a shorts angle over there it's a third camera that I used to film short film content and all these cameras are hooked up with HDMI to the atem mini pro which is a camera switcher now this is really fun because if for example I'm doing a live session for my part-time YouTuber Academy which is my course I can switch between this camera angle and this overhead camera angle and then I can show my phone or I can do some writing or whatever the thing is and people's minds are absolutely blown when this is what a zoom call looks like then connect it up to the main camera we have the Sennheiser mk416 which is connected to a little kind of microphone stand up over there and this is nice because it means like this this microphone is just out of shot but hopefully the audio from this microphone is very good and then I also have this microphone which is the Elgato Wave 3 which is connected straight to my Mac and this is what I use if I'm on a podcast or sometimes if I'm doing videos or if I'm a zoom call for example this is the microphone that'll just sort of swing around and bring back in and this is connected to the Elgato microphone blow low low profile arm that we also use in our podcast setup now there's a few other tools that I have on my desk that are quite nice this thing I've got in front of me which is what the monitor is on this is a set from Ugg monk called The Gather 2.0 and it's like a stand for the Monitor and then a few other things it's got a phone charging dock thing over here which is quite nice and this little book that I put Post-it notes in because I enjoy Post-it notes and this other little box that I put Post-it notes in because I enjoy Post-it notes and it's like magnetized so it magnetizes to the to the laptop stand and this is nice because it frees up space on the desk which means the Mac Mini can go underneath the laptop stand which is kind of cool and then all of these gizmos the Mac Mini is connected to the cow digit TS3 Thunderbolt dock which is then what's the thing that powers these two displays and again there's going to be links to all of this stuff done in the video if you want to check it out and then after filming all the footage gets uploaded to Google Drive where we've used 75 terabytes out of the shared 115 terabytes that we have on Google Drive and we use Google workspace for all of our kind of teams email addresses and for this Google drive storage capacity as well now at various points in the day especially after having a coffee I might take a trip or two to the bathroom and when I'm on the toilet if I'm being unintentional with how I'm spending my time I'm scrolling Twitter or Instagram like most of us do but if I'm being intentional about how I'm spending my time then the app that I use which is amazing is called reader now reader is the very first app that I have on my iPhone on my screen number two and essentially it's an RSS feed aggregator that's built by the people who build readwise and so anytime I want to read an article it just gets saved into reader and then I can read those articles all in one go when I'm on the toilet so for example this is an article from Jack Reigns five career related things have recently changed my mind on and I can just read the whole article on reader and then if I want to highlight anything I can double click the thing it gets highlighted and then those highlights also synchronize with readwise which then also synchronize with notion which means I basically automatically save and resurface the stuff that I've read that I found interesting now usually after writing and filming which are the two big things that I need to do I will consult my calendar and the app that I use for my calendar is fantastic hell which again I've been using for absolutely years now so for example I've got a filming block right now and then at 11 30 we've got a Content meeting with content Squad and if nothing imminent is happening then usually once I've done the writing and filming thing I would just go for a walk and walking is another one of those absolutely underrated tools when it comes to productivity because it's really fun and it recharges energy and you can reconnect with the nature depending on where you're walking and I usually also find that some of the best ideas that I have are the ideas that I have while I'm walking now while I'm walking if I come across any ideas I will always have my phone with me and I'll just jot those ideas down in Apple notes and again I've tried dozens of different note-taking apps over the years but the one that I just default to if I need to write down something quickly is Apple notes and on my home screen on my iPhone I have my Apple notes inbox folder which is where stuff goes by default and then over time at some point when I feel like it I process what's in the Inbox and convert it into notion or into Ulysses documents or into tasks some things or whatever thing might be so for example the other day when I went for a walk I was listening to the audiobook the greatness mindset by my friend Louis hose and then as I was listening to that audiobook and coming across interesting things I was taking notes in Apple notes and then at some point I'm going to turn this into a video on the channel a book club episode about the book The Greatest mindset not usually when I'm walking I'm not listening to things but if I do feel like I want to listen to things then I'm either listening to a podcast on YouTube or Spotify or I'm listening to an audiobook on Audible and very excitingly my book is also going to be available on Audible I am narrating it in the in the penguin Studios next month so that's gonna be super fun I've got a whole three days where I'm spending all three days just narrating the audiobook and trying not to talk too fast and trying to bring the Vibes into reading my own book which should be fun but you can check it out on Audible I'll again I'll link the website down below for the book feel good productivity if you want to check it out you might like to pre-order because there's gonna be loads of bonuses if you pre-order all the details on the website there's another cool app that I found really helpful sometimes when I'm walking or when I'm driving and that is Otto that's auto.ai which is a sort of AI enabled um voice recording and transcription app and I've got the widget on page three of my phone and so if I ever need to just record something if I've got my airpods in or if I'm in a meeting or having a conversation where I feel like actually recording and transcribing this would be really helpful I just hit the record button on auto and then usually what that does is it starts recording immediately and I can just have my phone on in the background or whatever and it will do a almost perfect transcription of the meeting or whatever the conversation is and it will also use AI to summarize what's being said and what's been talked about and this is super helpful if I'm walking and I have an idea for a video but I don't want to sort of type it on my phone like this while I'm walking I'll just dictate it into Otto and then the rest of the day when it comes to productivity is broadly spent on General work stuff so we've talked about how we use notion for a lot of things we also use slack quite a lot for day-to-day communication and I've got a video up there that's a more detailed look of how I use 12 specific apps to run every aspect of my business we also use Loom which is a great screen recording software again amazing for saving time and not having meetings because if someone needs to update the team on anything they'll just record a loom and then we can just watch that Loom back at Double speed so for example this morning anger sent me this Loom kind of with an update on our business financials and I just watched this Loom at like 2.5 x speed and that saved loads of time and it meant that we didn't need Angus to have a meeting with me to update me as to what's going on with the finances of the business so it's really good for productivity in terms of saving time but also in terms of communication with the rest of the team now if it happens to be a workout day then at some point during the day I'll spend about an hour or so in the gym and the app that I use to track my workouts these days is called a fitness app which is a thing I think it's a company called trainerize but this is an app that lets you kind of do workouts and stuff and you can also submit photos like progress picks I'm not going to show you those maybe one day when the body is transformed I'll show you the progress picks but I'm working with a chap called Dango who is my fitness coach who sort of remotely programs my workouts so for example this is body recomp workout a we've got body Recon workout B which is leg day which is what I did yesterday and we've got body recomp workout C which is I guess chest and stuff so that's if you're working with a remote personal trainer but actually the app that I would recommend if you are working on your own is strong now strong was how I was tracking my workouts since way before I started work with Dan and strong is really nice because you can program your own workouts into it or you can just add exercises during your session and it'll show you what you did previously and so you can apply the principles of progressive overload because you can see what you did previously and then you can try and either increase the weight or increase the Reps in a very simple way of getting Progressive overload into your routine then there's just a random work stuff and then usually we'll get to the end of the day and usually at the end of the day I'll go out for a meal with friends or with business associates or something like that now either I'll walk if I want to get my steps in or I'll take an Uber or I'll take the train and I've sort of made it a bit of a rule for myself that whenever I'm in a cab or on public transport in any capacity I will just bust out my iPad and do some journaling and I do that in the app day one which again I've been using for absolutely years now I think I've been using day one since 2016 and so it's really nice because I can see seven years worth of journal entries into day one and so I just type you know that's where I Journal thoughts feelings ideas about the business ideas about my life it's super nice and then we get to bedtime and so I've got an Amazon Echo in my room where I played relaxing yoga and meditation music as a way of helping me kind of wind down for the evening sometimes I'll do some stretches before bed I have very tight hip flexors very tight hips and very tight hamstrings and very tight neck as well apparently according to a physio I recently saw and so I've got my Lululemon yoga mat that's just there in the bedroom and it's out at all times because again it's all about reducing the friction for these things that I want to do and then the last thing I usually do before bed is I set my alarm on my phone and then I will read on my Kindle so that was a Whistle Stop tour through all of the productivity Tech and tools that I have in my Arsenal but if you're interested in a deeper dive into how specifically I use these different apps then you can check out this video over here which is all about the 12 different apps that help me run a multi-million dollar business and in that I've got lots of screen shares and I'll show you specifically how to use each one so that hopefully you can get some ideas of ways that you can incorporate them into your life so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

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Id: LXYjFsuVOoc

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023