Hello and welcome to another episode of
my Productivity Mastery series. My name
is Carl Pullein, and this week I want to
tell you about my one of my objectives
or one of my themes for 2020 and I want
to see if I can encourage you to join me
in this experiment. Well hopefully it'll
be more than an experiment. Basically,
what I'm talking about is creating a
sort of minimalist project called
"Project One". Now, what this means is
that you essentially are looking to have
only one of everything. Now this
obviously doesn't work with clothing. If
you only had one t-shirt, one set of
underwear, one pair of jeans and one
sweater I think you would become a
little bit smelly after a while. But
there are a lot of things, particularly
in the digital world, where we have
become, probably, have a few too many apps,
and a few too many apps that are
duplicating each other. One of the
classic cases is with our notes app. Now
whether you use Android or whether you
use iOS, both of these operating systems
come with its built in notes application.
you've got Google Keep on Android and
you've got Apple Notes on Apple. Now do
you need any additional note taking
application above this? I would suggest
not. These apps can do pretty much
everything you want. Essentially what you
want is a note-taker. You're taking notes.
You don't need anything beyond that
that's more complicated. Now, occasionally,
of course, some people such as myself
have been using an application called
Evernote for a very long time and over
the years, I've been using Evernote for
over ten years now,
and over those years I've built up quite
a database of notes. So if I came down to
deciding which application am I going to
use for my own personal note-taking, then
I'm much more likely to do to use
Evernote. Simply because I understand it,
I know it and I've been using it for
many many many years. And that's what I'm
going to be doing this year. Once Evernote
sorts itself out and updates and the whole
new system which is coming in the next...
hopefully three to four months... I will
then transition back to only using
Evernote. In the meantime, I have to use a
kind of a hybrid system that I'm doing
with between Apple Notes and Evernote, it
simply because on iOS, Evernote is
basically broken. But that also comes to
like things like your to-do list manager.
You know how many to-do list managers do
you need? I had allowed myself to get, to
start using two to-do list managers. One
of which was Apple Reminders and the
other one, which is my like my long-term
to-do list manager called Todoist. But I
realised that this was duplicating and
it was two to-do list managers, no matter
how much I wanted to say "well, Apple
Reminders is just a reminders app. Well
actually it is a to-do list manager.
That's what it's built for. So I've
transitioned away from using Reminders
to where possible using Todoist
and also using a habit tracker--a
specific habit tracker--to track other
things. So this is what I'm really
talking about. Is reducing things down to
having one of everything. Now maybe some
of you are like me five years ago. I had
to wear a suit pretty much every day of
the week, but now I find that I very
rarely wear suits. So once again I'm
reducing it down to just one suit. I know
that's scary.
I love suits but, anyway, I will be
reducing it down to just one suit. Which
ultimately means I only need one pair of
black dress shoes and one pair of brown
dress shoes. Now, this is how you're
looking at it. So I'm looking at doing
down to one. Project One, which is to
bring things down to just one of
everything. I only need one computer, I
only need one video camera, I only need
one phone. Anything above that I need to
be looking at removing and throwing away.
Some of these objects, now for me this is
simply comes because, although like most
people, I am attracted to the latest
shiniest toys I also understand that, you
know, the whole world of minimalism
that's the
real "minimalism" like only having items
that means something to you, not just an
aesthetic thing, but just only having
items that genuinely mean something to
you. And the rest of it can be thrown
away. And that's really what I want to do
is to encourage you guys to join me in
simplifying our whole system. Another
example of this is with things like
Microsoft Office, Google Docs, or Apple iWorks.
Now I am 100% in the Apple ecosystem.
I don't need Microsoft Office and yet I
have it on my computer. Another area that
you can look at is your email
applications. How many email applications
do you have? Now I've played around with
Outlook, I've played around with Newton
in the past. I played around with Spark. I
don't need all these email applications.
They're just... they just
cause procrastination. Having so many of
them. So now I have gone down to just one
email application and that is Apple
email because on my iPhone mail works
brilliantly and I just know Apple Mail
On my computer. The same with the
calendar. I used to have a hybrid system
of some of my calendars were in Google
Calendar, some of my calendars are in
Apple calendar. It was just a confused
mess and when something went wrong I had
to try and figure out where it or was. So
I have over the winter break, I I slimmed
everything down and I've gone all-in on
Apple calendar. I understand that all my
tools are Apple, therefore I should
really stick with the Apple ecosystem.
And that's what I've done. And what I
found is that by doing that, my whole
life is getting much much more simpler.
So this is really what I want... the
kind of the message of this video. This
week is to have a look around your whole
environment and look for where you're
duplicating things. So you have two to-do
list managers? Do you have two notes apps
or more? Do you have several word
processors? I mean do you really need
that many? I mean if you work in an
office where you actually have to use
Microsoft Office then maybe that's
to choose. But just use that one. Okay, I
think I've spoken enough. Hopefully you
get the idea of what I'm talking about.
It's really about stripping things down to
only having what you actually need so
that your life is much more simpler and
basic. What it means is you have to write
a document, you open up the one word
processor that you have. You have to
respond to an email or write an email?
You open up the email app. But more in a
sense where you don't get confusion is
you're storing documents in one cloud
application, whether it is iCloud, Google
Docs or Microsoft OneNote or Dropbox.
Onedrive or Dropbox. You pick one
because that's just going to make your life
so much simpler. Less decisions to make.
You'll find yourself feeling a lot less
stressed out, overwhelmed and life just
gets a little bit simpler. Okay, well
thank you very much for watching this
episode. It just remains for me now to
wish you all a very very productive week.
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