Weekly Wisdom #284 - How to maximize your productivity

The Great CEO Within, Gmail Shortcuts, Calendar as To-Do List & A New Podcast App

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Happy Monday!

The last couple weeks have turned into a revamp of my own personal productivity.

Trips and vacations are good for that: time for some fresh perspectives and time away to come back extra motivated.

Re-reading The 4-Hour Workweek always helps too.

Whatever the reason, this newsletter has turned out productivity-themed, with some of the best resources I know about how to be more efficient, effective, and maximize the tools we use every day.

Enjoy!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book I'm Re-Reading: The Great CEO Within - Matt Mochary - This book is available for free as a Google Doc (which is the link I've shared), though I've read the published version as well.

It's a how-to manual for founders becoming CEOs, and covers everything from personal productivity to running meetings to maintaining your health long-term.

It's one of the most densely-packed with useful knowledge I've ever read, and I return to it frequently.

📖 How to use Gmail more efficiently - Andreas Klinger - I share this frequently, whenever I find out someone isn't using shortcuts for their email.

Sam Corcos also mentioned this as one of the best ROI habits you can build: 10-15 minutes to learn the keyboard shortcuts for key tools in your life (email for many of us) can instantly save you hours every week.

📖 An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent His First Two Years of Company-Building - Sam Corcos - Speaking of Sam Corcos, this is an article follow-up to the podcast I shared last week,

In particular, this focuses on how he uses his calendar as his to-do list, something I've tried in the past and something I'm returning to as we speak.

The biggest problem it solves? Planning when something will actually get done. By forcing you to schedule when it's going to happen, you slowly figure out how realistic your to-do lists are (not very), and get better at prioritizing.

🔧 Snipd - This new podcast player has replaced my previous favourite, Airr, which is being sunsetted this month.

What's so great about it? Well, it creates all kinds of AI-based summaries for you, and does lots of other cool things, but the best thing is the same thing I loved about Airr: you hit the "back" button and it saves a highlight of the past X seconds.

This let's me listen to a podcast while running/working out/driving, and take notes for later without having to worry about actually writing something down.

Tweet of the Week

I love seeing real-world problems like this turned into small "micro-SaaS" (micro-software-as-a-service) businesses.

24-hour projects like this are also a reminder that it doesn't have to take a long time to build and test an idea (though previous experience obviously helps in this regard).

Norah Sakal-->

@norahsakal

💥 Watch me build a micro-SaaS from scratch live in this thread this weekend 💥

⏰ 24 hours

🎯 1 feature

📝 Step-by-step instructions

Tech stack:

🐍 Python

🧩 APIs:

- 📝 Notion API

- 💰 Gumroad API

☁️ AWS:
- 🤖 Lambda (serverless)

The problem ⬇️

6:41 PM • Sep 24, 2023

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