#14 – The wonderful world of productivity – our own habits, tools and hacks – and… how to best get in touch with us

In this episode, we will deep dive into the world of productivity tools, processes, habits and hacks. We will share our principles of productivity, calendaring, favorite communication, hardware and broader productivity tools (e.g. CRM). Finally, we will share what tools we are still missing and wish we had. As an “easter egg”, we will also share how to best get in touch with us, so do listen in. Navigation: Introduction (01:24) Section 1 - Principles of Productivity (02:20) Section 2 - Calendaring & Tasks (13:35) Section 3 - Communication Tools (28:30) Section 4 - Broader Productivity Tools (Note taking, CRM, LinkedIn, etc) (43:51) Section 5 - Hardware (51:54) Section 6 - Tools We Wish We Had (59:03) Conclusion (1:03:10) Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Tech Entrepreneur, co-founder and Chairman at App Annie, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, co-Founder and Managing Partner of Strive Capital, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news. Subscribe To Our Podcast Full transcription: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors Intro (01:24) Nuno: Episode 14. In this episode, we will deep dive into the world of productivity tools, processes, habits, and hacks. We will share our principles of productivity, calendaring, favorite communication, and broader productivity tools like CRM. Finally, we will share what tools we're still missing and wish we had. We will also share some hardware and some gadgets. As an Easter egg, we will also share how to best get in touch with us. So do listen in  Bertrand: Hi Nuno, I think that's so very interesting topic for today. Definitely more tactical than usual coming out of a trilogy of the next decade but I think we got a lot of interest on this topic as well, and ultimately that's one topic that can make us better hopefully near immediately. I hope at least you will find some interesting habits and ideas.  Section 1 - Principles of Productivity (02:20) Nuno: And the first section today is going to be around some principles of productivity. So just sharing the high level, how do we think through productivity for ourselves? How do we organize ourselves? What do we optimize for, you know, how do we think through things? And so maybe I'll start and we'll go from there. The first thing for me is, productivity is everything, you know, the ability to optimize my time. To make the most out of my time, so that I have time for myself on a personal level, but I also have time to interact with people, have meetings, calls, time to work, time to actually do some works, do some thinking, write a memo, do a power point presentation, review actual work. All of that's really, really important. So I spend  a ton of time, literally, normally, actually on my Sundays planning my week, thinking through what are the flows of my week. We'll get to calendaring in a second, but really thinking through what sort of things am I trying to get out of this? And it's very easy to get sort of stuck into tactical stuff, the day to day, do I do 30 minutes conversations or do I do one hour conversations? Do I do a coffee for this? And then I need to go for that. Under COVID, life is a bit easier because we're just back to back in zoom calls, but actually during normal life, we actually have to travel. So, you know, thinking through, do I want to go to that place that day to San Francisco, do you want to go to Menlo park? Do I want to fly to somewhere else? And how many days would I stay there? So all of that, I spent an actual amount of time just around planning.  Once in a while I have moments, I can't say they're very well established, but I have moments maybe a couple of times a year where I go back to the drawing board. And I recall my objectives for the year  and my objectives for the year are normally pretty high level objectives. And then I attach some relatively detailed bullet points of things I do want to get done, and I do want to achieve that year, but certainly I have level objectives. And I revisit those objectives a couple of times a year. I go back to them. I don't do like a retreat. I don't go off and read books for two or three days. I know there's a bunch of people that do that. Like bill Gates. I actually just spent some time looking to the more strategic elements of my year and how it's panning out and how that aligns with my tactical stuff. And those are the times where I start pulling back. So for example, if I feel I'm spending too much time doing, for example, first calls with entrepreneurs. I'll step back at that moment in time. I'll stop doing as many calls at that moment in time. And I'll step back from, you know, doing maybe one hour calls and one hour first calls to 30 minutes. So I adapt my world around this decision on tactical stuff and operational stuff, but also on the more strategic objectives I want to achieve from the year. And I'm always trying to optimize based on that.  How about you? Bertrand? Bertrand: First for me there is a question of where are you, which stage are you in your personal and/or professional life because that will have .a big impact in  framing what you can do, can not do, how you can physically organize yourself as well as what's truly needed for the job. So depending on if you are VC constantly doing first time meetings with entrepreneurs, if you're a sales person, or or if you are an exec, or if you are an engineer, then  definitely your calendar needs are going to differ widely. So I think you want to get that, and obviously are you still single, are you married or you married with family, definitely will have an impact on your time available, your responsibilities.   Myself when I was  CEO for instance, I had a very different calendar but also even when I was running the business for App Annie for eight years, every 18 months to two years I had to re-adjust how I was thinking about the business, but also how I was organizing my calendar. My responsibilities were different, my reports were different,  the scale at which we were operating was different, the quantity of travel I had to do was different so I had to regularly re-assess, how I was working and doing my business and part of how you're working is obviously managing you're calendar.   Nuno: I  think that's a good point. I used to travel a lot more in my previous life. When I lived in Asia Pacific, you know, 150 flights a year, which is a lot more. And so I always organized also my work around my flights and going to the airport and having to go through security. And that was always an input into how I did things. I never liked rushing to planes. I still have this, I've never missed a plane in my life, you know, knock on wood. Bertrand: It happened to me once Nuno: Knock on wood.  Which means I arrive to the airport earlier and I would work from the airport and do calls from the airport from lounges,  from wherever I could, but I would organize my life around that. I think the elements you're talking about around having family, not having family is also pretty essential. The type of work you do, does it require a lot of concentration at specific times of the day? Are you a morning person or an evening person? We know from Pink's "When" book that obviously different people react to different things and some people are more morning person, morning people. Some people are definitely more evening people. I'm more of a morning person right now, but it's very funny. Because I used to be definitely a very late evening person when I was in college as an engineer, even through great parts of my career at the beginning of my career. And somehow I don't know how I guess, because I'm in the West coast now. I'm now definitely a morning person. And I wake up earlier and I get a lot of my really creative work done in the morning. When I need to do a presentation from scratch, a public speech from scratch. Work on a product, work on a difficult spreadsheet, et cetera. I would do that in the morning. And it's interesting. Cause as you say, there's a lot of variables here. People change through life. But in any case, you know, I would say I've become a morning person. Definitely I am a hardcore calendaring person. We'll talk about that in a second. I plan my life as much as I can.  I think COVID in some ways has been the worst thing that could ever happen. Cause I plan it even more than I used to.  I love people, so I make time for people. Obviously right now it's a little bit more difficult under, you  know, shelter in place and under all the constraints we're in. But I do definitely like to meet people and go and meet them sometimes in their surroundings.  Being in venture capital, as you said, I'm switching all the time between meetings and calls. So that's part of my life. And in some ways I need to adapt to that and be part of that. In normal circumstances also need to travel quite a bit, but normally it's by car. Some domestic traveling a little bit of international, but certainly not the 150 flights a year I used to do when I was based in Asia Pacific. So for me, those are sort of some of the core principles, spending time with people. And then the final piece is I need time for myself. I need time for myself  and for my loved ones, for meditation, for my spirituality, to think through things, we sometimes spend so much time doing things that we forget to actually think through things. Bertrand: So Nuno, you are not a robot, that's what you are telling us, you are not just an AI on a screen.    Nuno: I'm trying to become one, but I'm still failing. Bertrand you know me very well now. I'm a bit of an extreme person in both senses....