Expand your mind with Heyday

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While I use the native browser bookmarking tools a little bit, for years I’ve used various external tools to help keep sites organized. Right now I’m using Raindrop.io (which I first talked about a few years ago), and it does a pretty good job. It has a browser plugin to make it easy to add bookmarks to it, and has some nice features for organizing them.

However, there are a lot of new tools coming out lately to help with this, and one that caught my eye recently is heyday.xyz. The big thing that Heyday does is that it essentially saves your entire browsing history, along with other apps that you choose to connect to it (such as Slack and Email) and it will pull together what you need automatically.

Here is a good example from their site on how it augments a Google search result:

Privacy

I know what you’re thinking, and I agree — “they’re saving my full browsing history”? Yep. Here is their statement on that:

Unless we want to get sued, we will honor our privacy policy. It says that we will never sell your data or let someone use it to target you with ads. We make money by selling subscriptions. If we do something shady with your data, you will stop paying us. That would be bad. We also encrypt all your data in-transit and at rest so that you’re the only person who gets to see it.

That helps, but the entire concept is still a bit worrisome for me. I might be ok with it if it brings me enough value (most of our browsing is being tracked in one way or another already), but we’ll see if that turns out to be the case.

For now, I’m seeing two main things:

For surfacing old notes and sites, it’s great!

When I’m on a website, it’ll often have an icon “wave” at me and tell me about past visits and where I’ve made other notes about the site. If you click the little waving hand, it pulls in relevant content like this:

For finding specific bookmarks, it’s not so great.

You can pull up the site (or the app on Windows, Mac or iOS) and search through everything, but it’s messy. The messiness seems to be by design and may work, but I also usually like to have tidy folders for specific areas of interest. They have a “star” feature which is similar to a proper bookmark, but not quite the same.

I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but so far it’s been quite interesting. They have a free trial and then it’s $10/mo after that, so give it a try if you’re interested.

Uber everywhere you go

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I talked a few months ago about how we don’t all really have the same amount of time in the day, and I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips (albeit one I’ve not used lately due to COVID) — take an Uber or Lyft to your next meeting.

When I’m out and about during the day at lunch or business meetings, the drive back and the step back into the chaos of the office can be tough. I’ll know I missed a dozen emails while I was out, and I have more people needing my attention right away and it makes me feel disheveled. Having that 20 minute ride in an Uber to catch up on email/Slack/etc for a bit to set priorities for the rest of the day can be gold. After that ride, when I get back to the office I know exactly where my priorities need to be.

David Allen says it’s essential to have a “mind like water” (which I cover a bit here), and be able to respond appropriately to things that come your way. You can only do that if you’re on top of your inputs, and that quick break in the day can be nice.

Truth be told, on a 20 minute Uber ride I usually only process email for perhaps half of it. I don’t like to respond from my phone if I can help it, so once I know what’s waiting for me and what’s important, I can take the other 10 minutes to just relax and catch my breath. It’s wonderful.

To see how helpful this has been (or not), I periodically track the effectiveness of it. Here is a snippet of my tracking from last year:

Most of it is self-explanatory with the exception of “Value”. That column is something that applies directly to me — how helpful to my day was taking this particular Uber/Lyft? The busier the day, the more valuable it was and that’s been an interesting metric to track. Also of note, the “cost” column includes both trips for the meeting (to/from the office).

You’ll also notice that despite the title of this post including the words “everywhere you go”, I usually only do this about once a week for now (again, COVID aside). I think a day is coming when many of us won’t own a car and will using some combination of ride services and self-driving cars for everything, but we’re still some years from that.

I encourage you to try it sometime. If you’re in the midst of a crazy busy day and have to head out somewhere, let someone else drive so that you can relax and stay ahead of things.

Which is the right tool?

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I talk a good bit about various digital tools on here, like my recent post about Pipedrive. At times I probably play with tools more than I should (testing tools instead of doing work), but in a lot of cases it can really pay off.

For example, I posted 12 years ago about Gmail’s “Send & Archive” feature, which I estimated saved me around four minutes per day. If that’s accurate, it’s saved me nearly 300 hours at this point. 300 hours for a silly little email feature? Sign me up!

Seth Godin had a recent post about finding the right digital tools for your job. He summed it up with this:

There’s probably a better digital tool for the thing you’re trying to do next online. It might be worth a few cycles to ask and discover and learn.

Beyond just finding great tools to help with your work (and here is my current list), there are things you can do to pick up little bits of time here and there.

Learning to type faster is a big one that would help a lot of folks, as would the related skill of learning keyboard shortcuts. If you see someone just flying through their work (like we often see with Ashlea), it’s not because their mouse is moving quickly, but usually that their mouse isn’t being used at all.

It really ties back to knowing that you don’t know everything, and being actively open-minded to trying new tools. Chasing shiny new tools can be a time-wasting rabbit trail at times, for sure, but often can pay nice dividends.

The Weekly Sweep

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One of my favorite productivity habits is the “weekly preview”. I started doing it when I used the Full Focus Planner a couple of years ago, and I’ve done it every week since then. Some weeks are deeper than others, depending on how busy I am that day, but I never miss it.

The timing of these reviews can vary a lot among different people. Folks like Michael Hyatt love to do them on Sunday, some wait until Monday morning, but I prefer to do mine on Friday afternoon. The idea for that came from Laura Vanderkam’s “Before Breakfast” podcast, and I broke down my thoughts a bit here. Really, though, the timing is irrelevant and whatever works best for you is the one to choose.

In looking back at past posts of mine, I noticed that the “weekly sweep” isn’t a big factor in my overview of my weekly preview. I mention it a bit in the “Last week” part of that post, but I largely glossed over it. Since that time, the sweep has become more important and it’s a key part of my week. In short, I go through all of my input buckets and make sure things are clean. Specifically:

Disposable Notes
I make sure my disposable notes system (currently Google Keep for me) is empty. It tends to stay pretty clean, but I take this chance to deal with any notes that have been hanging out in there too long.

To-Do Items
I check to make sure all to-do items from the past week are either done or properly dated for the coming days.

Check “Read Later” items in Feedly
I use Feedly quite a lot, and frequently mark items as “read later”. I take this time to go through and put them where they need to go. Some end up in my #blogideas area of Roam Research, and many simply become items in Pocket to be read later.

Unsorted items in Raindrop
I use raindrop.io for my main bookmarks, and by default it puts new bookmarks in an “unsorted” folder. I go through that and clean those up; most get sorted properly, but some may be deleted or moved to other systems.

reMarkable
I’ll take notes during the day in my reMarkable planner during some meetings. Those usually are moved out the same day, but I like to flip through the past week and be sure I didn’t miss anything.

Email inboxes
This isn’t usually a problem, as my inboxes tend to stay pretty clean, but this is a time to make sure they’re in good shape.

I know it looks like a lot to do, but this part of the preview only takes me about 10 minutes/week, since there’s usually only a few items in each area, but I find it incredibly valuable. It helps give me trust that items won’t get lost if I put them in those systems, and that trust is essential for solid productivity.

There is more to the weekly preview than that, but this “sweep” section is becoming very helpful. Do you do anything similar?

Back to Pipedrive

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When it comes to business, having a proper CRM and pipeline is crucial. Knowing who your current leads are, what stage they’re in, and when to respond is vitally important.

Many people track that kind of info in something like an Excel spreadsheet, and that’s really not bad. Simply having a place for that data puts you ahead of those that just wing it, but there are better ways to handle it.

I used Pipedrive years ago and it was great, but just didn’t quote offer enough data for me. To solve that, I built my own solution in Notion and we’ve been using it for quite a while now. You can read about that (and grab a free copy of the template I built) here.

While that Notion setup has worked well, I’ve been feeling the need for more power. I could potentially build out even more in Notion, but I recently took another look at Pipedrive and I’m very impressed with the improvements they’ve made over the years.

The main pipeline

At its core, Pipedrive is very similar to what I built in Notion — a kanban-style board of opportunities, like this:

As leads move through your sales process, you slowly drag them toward columns to the right. Nothing too magical there.

Reporting

I can run reports that data, too, similar to what I had in Notion but with the ability to go quite a bit deeper. I have all of our current leads in Pipedrive now, but I’m slowly moving past leads (both won and lost) to help generate more data.

Leads Inbox

A relatively new feature they’ve added is a “Leads Inbox”. Previously, you had to have a column in your pipeline for “New Leads”, which could get messy. Now they have a separate place for new leads to live, and you can move them into the pipeline if things progress well.

Even better is that you can automate adding leads to this inbox. In our case, we have the contact form on our website drop them in here for us. From there, we can respond and work with them without having to manually create that record. It’s pretty handy!

Syncing

Pipedrive also now includes ways to sync your contacts, email, and calendars.

The calendar sync is my least favorite. It’s not a bad feature, and I can see some benefit to it, but it’s not one I’ll likely use.

The email sync is pretty nice. You can choose to BCC a private address to send certain emails to Pipedrive, or you can just have Pipedrive sync all of your email and pull that info into the appropriate “deal” automatically. For example, when I pull up the details for this lead, you can see the email pulled in at the bottom right:

The contact sync is also pretty nice. I keep a large and fairly tidy contact list, so having the two-way sync to Pipedrive is nice, so any info I add in there will sync to my contacts (and by extension, my phone).

Price

The price is the only downside. It’s not bad, but our approach in Notion was essentially free. Pipedrive charges a per-user fee of $18 / $33 / $59 / $119 per month. We’ll likely use the $33/mo plan, with two of us, so it’ll cost us $66/mo. That’s a very fair price, for sure, but certainly higher than $0.

If you’re not sure what to use for this piece of your business, I encourage you to check out Pipedrive. If you use and love something else, please share in the comments so that we can all check it out.

Put your digital stuff in the right places

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Just like the key to a clean house is making sure that all of your stuff has a proper place to go, the same is true for your digital life. Once you’ve trained yourself to put your various digital items in their respective places, keeping things organized becomes much easier.

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I would argue that this is a core reason why people struggle with keeping a clean inbox; so much of what comes in there doesn’t have a proper place to live, so it just languishes. Or, people treat their inbox as a place for something else (often a to-do list), which leads to the same kind of problem.

My places

I laid out all of my systems in my Digital Efficiency Framework post from last year, but here is a quick look at where all of my “proper places” are. No matter where something comes in (often through my inbox, but it could be a phone call, a Facebook message, or just an idea that popped into my head), they all can go into one of these:

  1. Events – They just go on your calendar. For me that’s Google Calendar
  2. Useful reference sites – I currently use Raindrop.io for my bookmarks, but there are a lot of great options.
  3. Things to read/watch – These are essentially bookmarks, but for things that you specifically want to go back and read soon. For me, I use Pocket to store and process those.
  4. Things to remember to do – This is just your task list, and it should be separate from your email. I use Roam Research for that, though there are other task-focused solutions like Todoist that can really help.
  5. Things to just remember – This is for things like quotes, stats, names, etc, that you want to remember. I store that kind of info in Roam Research, and then use Anki to help memorize the ones that really matter to me.

That covers most everything, but you’ll still be left with a bucket of “other” stuff to sort out. This might be a list of the books you want to read, or the paint color of your kitchen, or a code snippet to save for later, or anything else. These items need to go in some system that is easy to search through later and can help keep them organized. I use Roam Research for those as well, but tools like Notion or Evernote can do a great job too.

It can be some work to get things set up, but it’s beautiful once it’s up and running. If I see a great article I want to read, I can just throw it in Pocket and move on with my day. On a nice Saturday afternoon, I might open Pocket to see everything I’ve added recently and start going through it. Keeping those separate, and out of your brain in the meantime, is incredibly freeing and can work well.

What are your systems?

I’ll point you again to my longer (10 minute read) Digital Efficiency Framework post, and I’d love to hear what you do differently. Did I miss something in that list? Do you have a great tool that you use? Let me know!

All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan

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There are times when most everyone has needed to pull an all-nighter at one point or another. However, if you have to do it regularly it’s a sign of poor planning.

In a recent post, Ryan Holiday summed it up nicely:

Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute.

Getting a solid amount of sleep, every night, is one of the best things you can do for your productivity. Getting the right amount of sleep requires a wildly different approach for different people, but it’s something you can work into your schedule.

His post goes a bit deeper, and the main focus is that “the perfect day begins with a good evening”. If you can create a solid evening routine, including a consistent bedtime, your mornings will almost always be better.

On the other hand, if you find yourself having to pull an all-nighter, it’s either a very rare circumstance or a lack of planning to blame for it.

Your attention is the product

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It’s long been said that “if you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product” when it comes to things like Facebook or Twitter. While that’s essentially true, it’s not really you that is the product — it’s your attention.

In an increasingly chaotic world, your attention is likely your post important resource. If you give too much in one place, you have less to give to others. As I’ve said before, unwelcome attention-grabbing is why we all hate robocalls.

Facebook continues to cost $0 to use, which means your attention is what you’re selling every time you log on. That’s not necessarily an unfair trade, but just remember that you’re making the trade next time you visit.

A brilliant “paper” calendar on a digital device

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Over the years I’ve tried various ways to handle my daily scheduling. While my official calendar lives in Google Calendar (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), I’ve tried various ways of really processing and following my schedule throughout the day.

A few years ago I picked up the Full Focus Planner, and it was excellent. In terms of daily work, you essentially copied your digital appointments over to the paper planner, which seems kind of silly but really offers some great advantages. I touched a bit on that in a post later that same year when I was doing my manual planning in Notion instead, how making weekly previews intentionally inefficient can be a good thing.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve essentially been using Roam Research to handle that side of things. Roam is an amazing tool (and another that’s not likely to change anytime soon), but this week I discovered a little wrinkle with another device that might change my direction again.

reMarkable

I picked up a reMarkable tablet about a year ago, and have been using it more and more lately. This week, though, I discovered something that might increase my usage of it a lot more, and it’s ultimately just a PDF.

Voja Dimitrijevic is a popular YouTuber and runs the “My Deep Guide” channel, mostly digging into products like the reMarkable. He released a product called “My Daily Organizer” that is, well, remarkable!

As I mentioned above, it’s really just a PDF, but it’s a very creative one! Each year is a separate PDF of around 1700 pages — various daily pages, weekly views, quarterly views, etc. What makes it magic is the linking between pages so you can just tap around to get exactly where you need to go in the document. A recent update to reMarkable allows it to support internal links in a PDF, and Voja has made fantastic use of that with this product. It’s kind of hard to explain, but he’s created a very in-depth video to show it off. I don’t expect you to watch the entire thing (it’s nearly 50 minutes long), but I encourage you to scrub through it a bit to see what he’s put together:

I’ve given it a good test for the past week or so, and it’s bringing me back to my Full Focus Planner days. Being able to use a device like this more often, with it’s intentional lack of apps and notifications, is a great way to focus.

This “My Deep Guide” PDF not only works on reMarkable, but works on some Boox tablets and Supernote products as well, so it’s available for most people.

Whether I use Voja’s product long-term remains to be seen, but it’s a very creative use of the old PDF and I appreciate him bringing it to market.

Balance in any given day is overrated

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Balance in life is always important.

Balance between exercise and rest.

Balance between work and play.

Balance in eating and sleeping.

However, none of that means that every single day should balance out perfectly. Consistency is worth a lot, but looking at balance across your life in terms of weeks or months is often more important (and easier to achieve) than perfect balance every day.

Ben Wilson dug into this related to Thomas Edison in his fantastic “How to take over the world” podcast. Edison frequently took things too far, but was famous for being a workaholic and then relaxing for weeks at a time on vacation to recharge.

A similar example is Yuval Noah Harari, author of the excellent book “Sapiens” (as well as a few others), who finds time to dig in and write incredible and detailed books while also taking a 60-day silent retreat each year.

Daily can help

On the flip side, some daily habits can be helpful. Take this blog, for example. Until about a year ago, I tried to blog “a few times a week”. The archives don’t lie, and in the four months before I started publishing daily (mid-June to mid-October of 2020), I published a total of two posts. That’s not anywhere near “a few times a week”, but I’ve kept up the daily habit for over 300 days in a row now.

I had a recent conversation with a friend about exercise that covered a similar concept. During the conversation, we discussed a mutual friend that exercised 3x weekly, very consistently. We were impressed by that, as neither of us could do that consistently (a “few times per week” turned out closer to zero) — we’ve both moved to exercising daily in order to stay consistent and it works for us.

Plan for extended balance

I think the best example I see of this is with Ali, my business partner at GreenMellen. With her young children she’s currently part-time right now, working Tuesday-Thursday, which quickly lends itself to some degree of weekly balance. Even within that, though, she does a great job of doing intentional things such as working late hours some days so she can help out at her daughter’s school the next day. She doesn’t let it happen by chance, but through what she calls “scheduled variety”. She looks at her entire week at a glance, and plans for the week to include a great deal of balance, even if individual days don’t.

Balance is something to always be working on, but taking a wider look at it can make it much less intimidating, particularly in certain phases of your life.