Hello and welcome to another episode of
my Productivity Mastery series. My name
is Carl Pullein and this week I want to
introduce you to a project that I am
running in 2020 called Project One. Now,
what is Project One? well Project One
is part of a theme that I have going
this year ,2020, and that is to minimise a
lot of my stuff. Now I'm sure you're all
aware of the trend, or the fashion, to go
all minimalism and minimalism really
essentially means only having stuff that
has meaning to you. It doesn't actually
mean get rid of all your stuff and live
on a bare floor with no furniture.
It just means getting rid of all the
stuff that has no meaning to you and no
value. But it also got me thinking about
something that we can do in the digital
world because over time we start
collecting apps and we end up having a
lot of apps on our phones and our iPads
on our computer that we never use. So
they're just taking up digital space. Now
if you're like me, you probably have no
idea how many megabytes or even
gigabytes these apps are holding, but we
don't we just ignore them. We leave them
on our phone. We leave them on our
computer. We never use them. Over time
these things are going to start slowing
down your devices. When your devices
start slowing down so of course does
your productivity. So I decided that this
year I'm going to really focus in on having
one of everything. Now of course I can't
just survive on one t-shirt, one shirt,
one pair of underwear. Of course there
are certain limitations to this and
there are going to be quite a few
exceptions. But in the digital world and
in the productivity world there are
really very few excuses where you would
need two email applications, or even two
notes apps, or two word processors. Like if
you're using Google Docs and you're
using Microsoft Office, you know pick one.
you don't need two and this is something
that I got thinking about over the
Christmas break, over the winter break
And I did write about it in a recent
learning note for all my students in my
online Center. And really the goal is
to try and minimise all your digital
applications down to just one. So in my
case, for example, I decided I'm just
going to stick with Apple Mail .I've used it
for years. I know how it works, it's not
buggy and it just works. It's not
necessarily the most powerful email app
but I don't need a lot of features in
email. Email to me is just a
communication tool. Likewise with my word
processor. When I was looking
through my system I had Microsoft Office,
the whole suite, on my iPad as well as
Apple's iWorks and Google Docs. And I was
thinking why do I need three of these
things? So in the end after a bit of
analysis, I decided I would stick with
Apple's iWork system because I know how
that works. I've been using it pretty
much ever since it came out in the early
2000s so why would I need to use
PowerPoint now or Google Sheets? I
understand
Keynote. I've used it for years. I don't
need all the other apps. So I removed
them. Another one that you might find is
the notes apps. Now notes apps is really
difficult because Evernote is having a
few issues at the moment, they're being
incredibly slow to roll out these new
features that they're promising, and it
just feels like I'm actually paying
a subscription for Evernote just to
learn how to be patient because it's
delay delay delay delay. Now, ok I'm
patient enough to wait. I'm going to see
what Evernote does. But in the meantime
what I'm doing is I'm using Apple Notes.
And as I'm learning more and more on how
to use Apple Notes, I'm beginning to
think Evernote is going to have to come out
with something rather special for me to
switch back. But that said, I will wait
and see what Evernote has to offer. If
it's as good as they're promising it's
going to be, then I will stop using Apple
Notes and just put all my effort back
into Evernote. But I've seen some people
who have Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes
Google keep and Notion! Do you really
need five different notes apps? I mean in
that situation, not only is it going to
start slowing your systems down but it's
also going to cause a
lot of indecision. Where do you put
something? You know I've always talked
about having hard edges between your
apps. But you know, most of us, we have a
lot of notes apps. You only need one
notes app. Figure out which is the best
one. Which is the one that closest
matches all your criteria and work with
that one. You will find your life is a
lot easier when you do that. But you'll
find there's all sorts of other things
in your system. There was a time,
about a year ago, where I had a desktop
computer and a laptop computer and
really at the end of the day I thought
why do I need these two computers? Now I
just have a laptop
with an external monitor. Job done. It
really does help me to work. Another area
that you might find you've got a lot of
duplication is in cloud storage. You know
we've got Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft
OneNote, Apple iCloud. You know do you
need all these places? Maybe you do maybe
your work requires you to use OneNote
but you have a personal storage in
Google Drive. Perfectly okay. This isn't a
matter of saying you must get down to
one. But what it does mean is you looking
for areas where you can just slim
everything down to one. One application,
one coat, one sweater if that's what you
want to go. So this really comes back to
my theme for 2020 which is "minimalism"
But it's just keeping the things that
really have value to me so that I can
actually get on and spend more time
doing the work and less time shuffling
papers, as we would say in the old days,
But shuffling apps and trying to decide
which apps going to do this, and which
apps going to do that. It slows you down.
It wastes a lot of cognitive space in
your mind trying to remember all this
stuff. Just do a digital detox. There's
some great books out there there's Cal
Newports Digital Minimalism, there's an
awful lot of videos out there about
streamlining your whole system. You go
out there have a look and see if you can
join this whole programme what I like to
call Project One because it focuses me
in on that one application for one
specific task. Let's see if we can all do
this. I hope you're going to join me in this
because it's going to be a lot of fun.
It's also going to really streamline
your productivity systems. So ultimately
you're going to win because you're gonna
have a lot less to think about. You're
going to have it a lot easier to find stuff
that you've stored, and your life is just
going to get that little bit easier. Well
thank you very much for watching this
video.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Thank you very much for watching this
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