Episode Highlights

• Where to start when going paperless and how to come up with a system
• Using Evernote for scanning papers right into your phone and collecting it in one place
• My personal story of where I started with going paperless and how I got started
• How my assistant and I manage daily paperwork via Google Drive
• How I use Trello to manage all of my notes from directors and producers
• Why you shouldn’t completely shun paper like I have
• How to manage projects in a collaborative environment with Trello and why e-mail is the worst task manager on the planet
• Managing project conversations with Slack
• How to stay focused on a specific project by using ‘Mindsets’ to filter information you don’t need at a given time
• How to manage notifications to minimize distractions during work
• How all of these productivity secrets fit into the big picture of optimizing yourself for maximum creativity

Useful Links

• Fujitsu ScanSnap at Amazon
• Trello
• OmniFocus Task Manager
• Slack
• The Productivity Show on iTunes

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with returning guest and productivity expert, and my brother from another mother. When it comes to productivity, mr. Zack Sexton, how are you, sir?

Zack Sexton: Hey, I’m doing great. Thank you for having me on. A threepeat. I don’t think I’ve been on any other podcast three times.

Zack Arnold: Well, I am happy to have you on for three times, and I know that it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, but I feel like you and I speak all the time. Actually, because I’ve been going through a couple more of the programs that you guys offer. I was doing the morning ritual starter kit, so I know everything that you do the first hour of your day. I’ve been looking at the the habits and rituals starter kit, so I really I feel like you know you’re just somebody that’s like had become a regular part of my life and has made a huge difference in my productivity. And for anybody that wants to listen to the first couple of shows that we did, which are really, really super helpful for just helping you kind of get your day organized and learn how to manage tasks better, I’ll put links in the show notes to those previous two episodes. But the thing that I really want to dig deep into today and focus on, as you would say. Do a deep dive. I want to talk about making your life paperless because this is something that I kind of discovered from you guys. So there’s this product that you guys have that’s called the AE Primer or the Asian Efficiency Primer, and that just kind of gives you just little tidbits, little nuggets of all these little different things you can do, like managing your email and managing your schedule a little bit better, how to use calendars. But one of the things that was in there was going paperless. And I thought to myself when I read that a year or two ago, yeah, right. Like I’m never going to be able to go paperless being a film editor. Like I’ve got scripts and I’ve got notes, and there’s no way I can do it. But I really made a concerted effort over the holiday, over the Christmas holiday, to just say you know what I don’t have any distractions. I have no jobs. I have nothing I need to deliver. I’m going to reorganize my life. And the two things I focused on were number one, learning OmniFocus, which is a total game changer and changes the way I do everything, including showing up for late for appointments, like I did for this one this morning. But the other thing that I really focused on is how do I declutter my life and go paperless, and I’ve done that. And when I have other editors that talk to me about it, they’re like, “How is it even remotely possible that as a film editor you are paperless? So what I want to do is walk people through the basic process of getting started because it’s really that hurdle and it’s that first amount of momentum you need to get, as you guys would say, you kind of need to solar flare to get yourself started. But I want to walk people through the basic idea of why you would go paperless, where you can start, and then what I’ll do is kind of go through some of my advanced tactics that I use specifically as a film editor, so I can have my entire day paperless. Where I literally, I don’t even have pen and paper on my desk. I have nothing, and it makes a huge difference in my productivity. So if I’m somebody that is just completely buried in papers, and I print out my notes and I check them off, and I have you know everything around me that’s paper, where in the world do I start?

Zack Sexton: I think the one place you’d want to start, and actually you probably have more of an experience with this too, because I’ve never had that much paper in my life. The little bit of paper I had is just taxes and all that stuff, and I, when I finally decided to buckle down and get a little bit of a file organization system, I realized it’s like, oh, I’ve got five folders, and that’s not that big a deal. So you might have a better idea, but I think one place to start would be to know where you’re going to put your resources. So there’s a lot of great tools out there. There’s Evernote, there’s Drive, there’s Dropbox. I tend to like Evernote and Drive a little bit more than Dropbox for things that you’re going to be referencing often. The reason it being that you can quickly search those as well as hyperlink things certain pages to other pages. So that’s just kind of a personal preference there, but Dropbox is very popular. Has redundant backups for those things that you don’t need to necessarily reference as often. So deciding basically what you need to get off your plate, and then deciding some sort of organizational hierarchy. A early episode, I think it was episode five on the productivity show that we had was on organization of both your physical and your your computer. And what my guest Darren Boss said is that the best way to to organize anything is just to put everything in one big pile, and put like with like. So you know, if it’s a garage, you’re putting your rakes with your rakes and your lawn care equipment with your lawn care equipment and your your your car and auto equipment with your auto equipment. Same thing goes for your your hard drive. So if you have maybe your audio equipment, all all of the recording devices that you have all go together. Every all the scripts that you might have all go together, and the same can be done for your paper. Just put like with like, organize everything, and then figure out some sort of system for for scanning that in. One of our friends, Brooks Duncan, he is is more of an expert in this area, and I would highly encourage you to. To connect with him, and he’s got a lot to say about it. I had him on our podcast as well, and when it comes to that, it’s you. You put like with like, and then you create sort of a a system, a hierarchy of where you’re going to put your documents. Then we could talk about how you actually get those documents in there. For me, you know, I was talking about how I had very little paper. I always find just using an Apple application on my iPhone. Scannable was the one I tended to use because it goes straight to Evernote and takes pretty decent pictures of a paper, and it turns it into you know what looks like a image. Another nice part about Evernote is that it’s got what’s called OCR scanning. So even if it’s if you take a picture of something, you can scan the text in that picture of the of the PDF that’s created. So that’s that’s one idea. So you you put you collect all of your stuff, put like with like, figure out how you’re going to import it for somebody like you, I don’t know if you ended up getting a scanner. I know one of the hotter ones on the market is the Fujitsu scanner, and unlike printers, they tend to last a little bit longer. They actually work for for more than a year before breaking down. I’ve moved to a new place now, and my printer, of course, is broken down, so I’m going to have to get a new one of those, but they tend to work a little bit better than other ones on the market.

Zack Sexton: I think Fujitsu and Evernote had a little bit of a collaboration, and they had a specific Evernote planner. I went and toured the Evernote mothership in Redwood, California, when I was on a trip this summer, and I saw that there, so that’s that’s kind of the the long and short of it. But honestly, I’d I’d love to hear your story a little bit more, how you actually went through this process because it’s it’s more fresh for you.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s a really brutal process for me for from both a personal and professional perspective because personally I was just buried in paperwork. The thought of having just five file folders and a few papers here and there, like that’s the polar opposite for me. As far as the amount of paperwork that I would have over the course of a year, that’s just personal. That’s just bills, invoices, stuff for the kids, whatever it is. I would fill a minimum of one, if not two, bankers’ boxes with the paperwork literally crunched together in a nice, neat pile-not just like casually strewn together and thrown in there, but really packed neatly. I would fill two bankers’ boxes in a year, so that’s a lot of papers. So a few years ago, before I really went paperless, but kind of the idea was in my head. I got a Neat scanner, and I cannot recommend enough getting the Fujitsu ScanSnap because the Neat Scanner is not even remotely as good as that one. But that was the one that I decided to invest my money in, and I’m still using it until it breaks down. It hasn’t broke down. You’re right; they are much more reliable than printers. I think inkjet printers were just designed and sold by Satan himself. They’re just the worst things ever made on the planet. But the the Neat Scanner is it’s okay. I don’t really like the Neat Scanner application itself, the desktop application. I don’t really like the way it organizes. And I live in Evernote, so Evernote to me is kind of the the cornerstone application. That if you want to go paperless, you really have to have Evernote. And even if you’re not going to go paperless, Evernote is an incredibly useful application for personal use, for professional use, for organizing bookmarks and things you want to reference in your browser, whether it’s Chrome or Safari. Doesn’t really matter what it is. But I’ve basically turned Evernote just into my absolute life central. Like that’s where all anything, anything I’m ever going to reference. It doesn’t matter what it is. If I say to myself, whether it’s an email, whether it’s a bill, whether it’s a piece of paperwork, am I ever going to need this in the future? Will I ever need to search for this? Will I ever need to look for this? That means that it belongs in Evernote. So the reason to me that’s so important is that if I go back to my old system and I know that the system is very very common for people in my industry because I stole it from other people. I had a notebook that I had next to my desk. I actually had two notebooks: one at home, one at my desk at work. And anytime anything came up that I needed to know, didn’t matter what category it was, whether it was notes from a producer, whether it was a phone call, whether it was an idea, it all was written into a random notebook, which is the worst system ever. Imagine trying to search for something that you thought of or wrote down a month ago in this notebook, and I still have the notebooks that I have from when I was 1015, You know, it was like 1015, years ago when I first started, and this was my system. I’m like, oh, where’s that one phone number? Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Oh man, where’s that producer wanted me to do this one thing to that scene? What am I supposed to do? Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. It was ridiculous. So I realized that that wasn’t working, and Evernote is kind of the place that I started to just start organizing. My bookmarks on my browser and my notes and my ideas, but then all of a sudden, as an editor, I say, how is it possible that in my job I can go paperless? Because I probably have per episode, and I do about an episode of television per month. I probably in the past would have about 400 sheets of paper that were associated with that episode, so that would mean a script would go with the episode.

Zack Arnold: I would get 15 to 20 pages per day of shooting that come in for all of the shooting notes, whether it’s the line script, whether it’s the daily’s log, whether it’s the editor’s log, whether it’s script notes, whether it’s director’s notes. Like, just get an endless amount of information to make sure that you can track all of your footage because you’ll get upwards, at least on the show I’m working on, 40 hours of footage for a 40-minute episode. So you have to be able to track that. Everything is trackable and has notes and timecode and everything else. And I said, there’s just no way that I can do this. But what they’ve started doing on most shows is they’ve started delivering the paperwork electronically. And even if they don’t do that, I remember a few years ago they were scanning their paperwork and they were emailing it. So I thought, all right, well, if I’m starting to receive it in digital format, they’re doing the work for me. I need a way to organize it, and I need a way to be able to access it quickly. But the great thing about having everything digital is that you can search for it, and it’s funny because I’ve now gotten to the point where if I’m looking for something that’s in real life, my first thought is, “What’s the search function? Oh wait, it’s real life. I can’t use the search function, right? Like I can’t open my refrigerator and type in search. At least not yet. Maybe I will be able to in 20 years. But my brain has gotten to the point where everything is digital, so I’m always thinking, “Oh, search function. Oh wait, no, I can’t do that. I’m looking for my clothes in my drawer, right? So it’s kind of crazy. The tools that I now have around me to make all this happen are, like I said, number one, Evernote is the biggest one. The second one, as you said as well, is Drive. So what I do is I have my assistant and I as well. We will everything that comes in via email. We get probably 1015, emails a day with all the various forms of paperwork, whether it’s different versions of scripts or all the script notes that I mentioned. We break all of that down. They’re all PDFs. We break all of them down into very specific folders in Google Drive. So now I have everything in front of me at the touch of a button. And if we need to change the names of something to be able to search for it or put it in a specific folder. We have it all very well organized. So what I do is I just have, as editors know, we all have two monitors in front of us as a two computer monitor system. So my first monitor, my main monitor in front of me, is my main editing application. It has my timeline. It has my main project folder, and then on my left monitor, about a third of it or a half of it is going to be the bins that have my raw footage. But I now just have a tab open in Chrome that is my paperwork. So if I have a script, I just have the script digitally in front of me in a tab. If I need to have a different piece of paperwork, if it’s an editor’s log, if it’s line script, whatever it is, I have a separate tab open, so I can just tab back and forth. But I now have an empty desk, and I remember when I used to not be able to find a place to put my phone to put a drink because I had binders everywhere with all this information, and it drove me crazy. So now I just have these neat, clean little tabs open in Chrome, and I can search for everything. So rather than having to leaf through a book and say, “Oh man, where’s the editor’s log for day three? I’m looking for this piece of footage that’s missing, I just search something in Google Drive. Like you said, this is why I use Drive for this purpose because it’s much easier to find something that it is in Dropbox. I can just find it.

Zack Arnold: So that’s how I keep everything organized as far as being an editor, and it really isn’t that terribly complicated? But the big hitch that I always hit when I was trying to do this because the the Google Drive thing is not that hard. You’re basically curating the PDFs and the information you’re getting from other people. You’re putting it in folders. You’re creating a bit of a system as far as naming to find it. That’s all great. The thing that I could never figure out was what do I do when people give me notes? That’s what drove me crazy, because there’s never a uniform system for how people give you notes. When you’re working with a script supervisor, they have the same system every single day. All of their paperwork is uniform all the time. They’re very, very well organized. I don’t even think you’re allowed to be a script supervisor unless you’re OCD. And if you’re not OCD, then people are not going to like you, and you’re not going to get hired back. So I love OCD script supervisors. However, when you work with directors and producers, they might call you with oral notes, they might email you their notes, they might send you notes in an Excel spreadsheet, which is like the most disorganized, annoying way to get notes. Where they’ll we have this thing that’s called a continuity. It’s a an Excel spreadsheet that has all of the scenes broken down in the episode that you’re working on, so you can see the order they are. You can see a brief description of each scene. You can see the duration of the scene, so you have a quick reference for what does the episode look like on paper. And I have producers that will write their notes in an Excel spreadsheet. Which is just the worst thing ever, but then you’ll have them walk into your office and hand you a paper version of their notes, like they printed out an email or something. And this is the one that makes my skin crawl the most. Now I’m like, no, don’t give me paper. But what I’ve done is I’ve developed a system in a program called Trello. So with Trello, and this is a free program online, this is what I use for managing my entire life. Whether it’s my personal habits and rituals, whether it’s lists, whether it’s working with other people and doing project management, I do it all in Trello. So what I’ve done is I’ve created a system where I can put all of the information into Trello in a form of a checklist, and then I always have it in front of me in another tab, so I just always have this Chrome browser open on my left monitor, and it’s going to have four tabs. It’s going to have one tab for Trello. It’s going to have one tab for my main drive directory, my Google Drive directory. It’s going to have one tab for the specific paperwork I need in front of me at the time, and then I have a fourth tab which is email, so that way if I get any work email, and as we mentioned in one of our previous shows, I have a bunch of email addresses, and my assistant always makes fun of me because I have like 40 email addresses, and she never knows how to how to contact me. But I have one specifically just for working on Empire, so I’m not getting other emails that aren’t distracting. I’m only getting the ones that pertain to my job, so now I know that in those four tabs are all the things that are I’m going to need to be focused on. So I have all of my notes broken down in specific cards and checklists and Trello, and I have everything in front of me. And now I never, for any reason, need to worry about paper.

Zack Sexton: Wow, I love it. That sounds like go ahead. I

Zack Arnold: Was going to say that the other thing that I didn’t think about that you had mentioned briefly was using an app on your phone for scanning, and the one that I had for a while that I still kind of use, but I don’t really use anymore is the one I think it’s called Jot Not Pro. That was one that you guys had in your AE Primer document, and I used that until I realized that if you take a photo directly in Evernote with their photo application, it does the OCR automatically. So what I was doing was using JotNot Pro to do the scan and then just click a button and it’ll send it to Evernote. But now I can just do it directly in Evernote. So basically, if somebody hands me a piece of paper, like a perfect example would be if you need to sign something. That’s something you’re never going to be able to get around where you have to physically print out a piece of paper and you have to sign it because most people still will not accept digital signatures, which now drives me a little crazy because I’m trying to get away from all paper. So I’ll just print it out, I’ll sign it, I’ll scan it with Evernote right on my phone. I don’t have to find a scanner or hook up something or go to a different computer. I just have it right on my phone. It’s in Evernote, and I just email it right there. And I’m now at the point where I’m really the only area that I have left that I’m still having a little bit of trouble with that I actually wanted to talk to you about because I know you guys have addressed this before. Is my physical inbox of stuff, which is usually just mail and you know tasks that are given to me that are paper form. I still am having an issue keeping that curated and organizing and going paperless with that because it’s just such a pain.

Zack Sexton: I love that you’re using Trello. I adore Trello. I’ve been actually working with a lot of people on different projects using Trello and just setting up those checklists, attaching documents to it, so it’s all in one place as opposed to over email, which is what many people do. is is so much easier. is is such less of a headache. You can move things around on different lists, whether you’re you know doing something or about to do it, or it’s free and it’s got so much functionality that it’s amazing. I I recommend the tool all the time. I actually went back to it. It was my original task manager instead of OmniFocus, and I’ll have to admit here on the show I’ve gone back to it. I I like the big visual nature of Trello, and so I just have my getting things done system right on Trello and and have each list there of all the tasks that I need to do, and I think what you’re saying too with email, you could just forward it to Trello. You could forward tasks to to OmniFocus. One thing that I generally like to do if I have any any task that needs some paperwork with it. So let’s say you get something in the mail, just like that example that you struggle with. Do you need every single bit of that paper? For example, I recently got a bike stolen, and so I made a little project on how to follow up with the renter’s insurance and what were all the numbers that I needed. What was the case number? Just in case I tend to mix numbers up in case I got it wrong, I took a little picture and made a Trello card, just a checklist. Okay, call this person, fill in this police report. You know, file this, do all that, and then I just toss the paper that way. And I just was made sure that everything was in that note card. And you could do the same in OmniFocus if you make sure all the pertinent information is in the notes section of that project, or if it’s getting a little long. Or redundant, you can have a link from Evernote or Drive or Dropbox wherever you want. But I think you and I both prefer Evernote a little bit more. Have a link in the notes section to the resources that you need to complete that project. So the more you can tie the resources you needed for getting things done and the the next actions, the steps for getting things done. The easier it is to just do, rather than think about, oh, what needs to happen next, and then, and then go do. I want to fight back though a little bit on your complete shunning of paper. I actually will admit another thing that I’ve started using a paper weekly and monthly planner because I like to see things in physical paper form. There’s not much paper on my desk, but I do have my little planner, and I have a little note card beside me. When you were talking, I wrote down little notes of maybe what I could what I could say. One of the things I wrote down was Richard Branson. He’s been using journals for for years. I’m listening to his audio book, The Virgin Way, and he espouses just writing things down. It helps you pay attention. It helps you focus. He’s pretty heavily ADD, ADHD, and you know I think you and I maybe not diagnosed or whatever it may be, but it helps you focus when you write things down. And when you know Richard was younger, there was no such thing as Evernote, so he obviously had to use journals, and he’s still using journals to this day. My thought, though, as long as you have a system for taking your your analog and moving it into the digital realm, that’s fine. So for me, it sometimes is easier to write down a quick note, and I just have one little notepad beside me. And if I think of a task that I need to do, or somebody I need to follow up with, or somebody asks me a quick question and I write it down, then at the end of the day, I just make sure I process that.

Zack Sexton: So I make sure it gets into my to-do list manager if it needs to go in there. I need. I make sure it gets into Evernote if it needs to be in there, and that’s just my habit at the end of the day to clear my inboxes. So that includes email, that includes my note card, that also includes my whiteboard. Sometimes just write random things down there or brainstorm on the whiteboard. And at the end of the day, I take all of those thoughts, and if they need to be captured, I’ll capture them. You could take a picture and put it in Evernote. I find to just type it up sometimes too. That that’s a helpful way of doing things. So, you don’t have to completely shun paper to go almost paperless. You can still use it as a medium to get to where you want to be because you know the the benefits of having things in a searchable format. And it’s kind of funny when you were saying, you know, I wish there was a Control F or a search function. We recently had a giveaway on Asian efficiency, and there was something that I really wanted. I was like, I wish I could participate in this giveaway, but it was a tile tracker, so you can just slap it on anything, likely a cell phone or your keys, and it was Bluetooth. So if you ever lose that item, you can just Control F, open up the app on your phone, and it’ll automatically start binging at you and tell you where it is. There are there are some things. So, man, next next 20 years, we’ll see what the refrigerator has to offer.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, we’re we’re definitely starting to get there for sure. But I would need to buy about 500 tiles for all of my kids’ toys, because you can have the best system on the planet for having a morning ritual for being paperless. But when your daughter comes up to you in tears before you’re supposed to be leaving for school and says, “Where’s my bell doll? and you’re like, “Oh man! Right? Then there’s 20 minutes looking under beds and looking under couches and looking through toy piles and like now, if I just had her toys in Evernote, I could find this, right? But I will. All kidding aside, I will go back to what you just said. I want to make it very clear. I’m not shunning paper for everybody else. I have shunned paper and I don’t like it partly because I like having the search function. I liked having everything digital and organized, but I don’t think that everybody just needs to get rid of paper. I just what I really wanted to bring to people’s attention is that it is possible working in our industry to go paperless, even though we are buried in mountains and mountains and binders and binders of paperwork every single day. Because I didn’t think it was possible, and I took it upon myself to say, can I actually go paperless working in this industry, and I have, and I literally don’t write anything down over the course of a 12 or 14-hour day working on my show. What I want to do now is go more into this conversation that we started about project management, and this isn’t something that I’d really thought we’d go into too deeply, but we just we kind of seem to knock out the the paperless part relatively fast, and now that we’ve figured out that we both love Trello so much, I think this is going to end up being about an eight part series. My my if my assistant’s listening right now, she’s shaking her head, saying, “Oh boy, this is going to be a long one, because she knows how in love I am with Trello, and I think that it’s it. Interesting that you’re telling me that you’re doing all of your task management in Trello because that’s the one system that I haven’t quite figured out is how do I translate the way that I organize everything in OmniFocus? How would I do that in Trello? So that’s that’s something we may have to talk about offline a little bit more. But what I do want to talk about, which is immensely helpful for people that work in a collaborative team environment, which if you work in post production would pretty much be just about everybody, unless you’re somebody that has like a one stop shop. But even for those that have a one stop shop, I think the Trello is something that could be really useful. But this is a program again, like I said before, is 100% free unless you want cat stickers on your cards, and then I think it’s like $5 a month, and that’s not a joke. They literally offer cat stickers that you can put on your cards. But the idea behind Trello is, I always give the analogy of imagine a giant whiteboard in your office, and you have a bunch of individual index cards, and everybody is walking up to those individual index cards and taping a document to it, or writing a note to somebody else, or whatever it is, but it’s in digital format. So it’s kind of like a digital whiteboard meets Twitter in a way, right? Where you can Twitter and you know use people’s handles back and forth and start conversations on individual cards. But you can also have checklists on those cards. You can have document attachments on those cards. You can do all kinds of different things. You can link between different cards, and it’s an amazing way to be able to manage projects.

Zack Arnold: And the number one way that most people are managing their day to day when it comes to project management documents, what needs to get done, who’s doing what, is email, which is the worst task management program on the planet, and that’s why when you’re in a really busy collaborative environment, and the fire’s on, and everybody’s running around saying, “Oh my God, we have to deliver the show tomorrow. How do we deliver it? Oh my God, there’s just one shot missing. How did this shot go missing? Why don’t we have this finished? Oh wait, let me go. Let me go rifle through my 100 emails from the visual effects house to see if I can figure out what’s going on? That drives me crazy. Where people will use email as their task manager and their project manager, and it’s the worst way to keep things organized because we get so much information coming at us. And this is something that I learned partly from you guys and partly from other studying that I did in productivity. Is that you cannot make email your task manager. You can’t say to yourself, “Oh, well, I’m going to leave this in my inbox until I do it. Right? That’s a really, really common thing that I’m sure that you hear all the time, and I hear it from people as well. And guess what happens? You say, “Oh, I’m going to leave this in my inbox until I finish it. Oh, then you get another four emails. Then you get eight more emails. Then here’s another 14 emails, and that one that you thought that you were going to do, you’re now like, oh my god, I have 1,700 emails in my inbox. I have no idea which one is the task I’m supposed to do today, and that’s where things start to get really, really messy. So the mode that my assistant and I are always in is get it out of the inbox as quickly as possible and get it somewhere where we have it as a reference. So, perfect example would be I’m using the example of visual effects for a show because that’s just where my mind is right now. Because we’re finishing up one of our episodes and we’re in visual effects mode. So, we have this workflow where as soon as we get an email, it says, “Hey, and this would be an email that we would get from our visual effects house. It would say, “Here is a list of 20 shots that need to be approved, right? So they’ll send you an email with a list of here all the shots, and all the shots have numbers, and it’ll usually have an Excel document attached that has a spreadsheet breakdown of the shot and what was done to it, what the version is, all this technical stuff. And in the past, we would just go into our email, and then we would send them an email back that had all the notes, but then once you get 456, versions in, and you’ve gotten seven deliveries of a grand total of 100 shots, you have no idea where your notes are, and all of a sudden you’re looking at the final version of the show, and you’re like, “Well, wait, they didn’t do that one thing to that shot. Oh yeah, we didn’t we didn’t see that email just because it all gets lost. So our first step is we get an email from a visual effects house and we forward it to Trello, and literally all you do is you just find out what is the address of your Trello whiteboard, so to speak. You just copy paste that address into your address book. You give it a name which says Trello, and then the name of your board, and you just type that in automatically, whether you’re an Apple or Google Mail or whatever your email program is of choice, it’ll autofill it. So I’ve just gotten to the point where it’s like three keys where I just say T R E. It’s going to go to Trello. I send it, and now all of a sudden that email magically shows up on a card in our whiteboard, and now we can have discussions about that card. So we’re no longer emailing back and forth.

Zack Arnold: So rather than there being all these internal emails with notes and changes and whatever it is, we’re just going to have our Trello card where I have all the information. I have a checklist of all of the shots that I’m going to be giving notes to, and then we have it all in one place, and then we just send one email back to the visual effects house. Because the one thing to keep in mind is with Trello is that that’s pretty much an internal thing. It’s something that you’re going to teach your team or your group that’s working together. The odds of you getting an outside place to adopt your Trello system, it’s not going to happen because they have their own systems in place and their own project management. So that was something that I had a hard time wrapping my head around at first was once I discovered Trello, I said, “Oh my God! It just everybody’s got to be in Trello. So when we have a visual effects house or a composer, we got to get them all in our Trello system. And I thought, “Well, that’s just never going to happen. You can’t expect people to adopt your system. So you have to be able to adapt and realize that you’re still going to communicate with these outside places via email, but once the information comes into you, you have control over how it is filtered and how it is portioned out to all the other people in your team, and that’s now why I use Trello. But I’d be very curious to hear how you use Trello as well.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, I very similar to you. Just if something needs to get done, we’ll create a card for it, and the I’d say the feature I use most often is the checklist, just because that just makes sense to me. Just buy this, read this, do this. It just start with a verb and decide what needs to happen next, and then you just go through the checklist. I’ve got a board right now with one of my coaching clients on it, and we’ve got a few different lists on it. One of the list, basically, it’s a list is where you put all those imaginary note cards or that you describe very well, and one’s backlog. So it’s all the things that we want to get to over the next couple months. The next is agenda. So we usually make it agenda for each of our sessions to do, doing, and done. And this makes it very clear, you know, what what he’s working on, what he needs to work on, and what he’s done too. And that’s kind of a nice feature that you can see all the progress that you’ve made in various areas. If you have a project where, like, oh man, I really did all this stuff, and it’s not necessary. You could just archive it, and you could search the archives very easily. But I find a lot of times that seeing your past accomplishments is kind of motivating. Kind of, it’s something that you can look back on and realize what you’ve done. Or maybe if you’re learning something new, you could review it after a little while. One thought, though, for you is, I kind of agree. I don’t think everyone would get on the Trello train. If you could, it’s awesome. I would, I would hope that they would want to, but for your visual effects and other outside teams, you might be able to convince them to get on another tool, which is becoming more and more popular these days. It’s called Slack, and the benefit of Slack is that rather than the messages and the notes being lost in the flood of other emails, is you can silo off certain discussions. So if you have one project, you can just have a Slack group or Slack room that only talks about that project, and you can add PDFs and pictures and links and anything you want in there, and just the same reason why we like Evernote is very searchable. So that might be a tool that you could be like, hey, you know, if you’re tired of of email, there’s this great tool. It’s free for teams of up to five. So a lot of times, if you’re just working with a few one-off people that would rather be on on a better messaging system than email, you might be able to connect with with certain people that way. We at Asian Efficiency we use something called HipChat. It’s basically the same. You have rooms. You can message certain people on it. You can have hashtags, so it’s a little bit Twitter esque. But the the main benefit is that we know you know if we’re going to have a conversation about something, and I’m opening up my hip chat right now, so hopefully people don’t message me. It could be about podcast, or we made an Austin one since three of us live in Austin. Daily huddle, which is what we tell our team what we’re doing daily. So it could be used just internally, or you might be able to convince outside teams that this is a cool thing to do because it’s it’s becoming more and more popular in different industries.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s something that I’ve heard about. I’ve actually done a little bit of research into as well, and it looks very very appealing. It’s just something that’s it’s been on my kind of I’m going to do that eventually list, but I have so many other systems that I’m trying to perfect, but yes, Slack is definitely something that I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about. I just know that it’s so impossible to get any of these outside vendors to adopt any type of system at all. But I think that if you’re right, there’s no way that anybody’s going to adopt Trello. It’s even hard getting people inside an office to adopt Trello just because it’s such a new idea and it’s actually organized and people just don’t really want to take the time to get organized and they just prefer the systems that they have even though they don’t really work. But Slack is definitely something that I’ve wanted to look into for a while and I’ve looked into it enough to know that it’s incredibly useful. So for anybody that’s listening, if you want to look into. You’re saying, “Oh, this might work for my team. It’s definitely worth looking into. I just haven’t, I can’t talk about it firsthand because I haven’t used it myself yet. But I know that it’s a really good complement to Trello and Evernote and everything else. So that’s a really, really good point.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, and it does. You know, kind of when we’re talking about all these tools, it it seems like, you know, how many apps do you need at a certain point, but the way I’m starting to think about certain applications is, well, you know, you can have one that’s kind of crappy at everything, aka email, or ones that are specifically very useful for certain tasks. So OmniFocus is great for personal task management. Trello is great for team and project management, Slack is great for having particular discussions in groups that that can be searchable. That doesn’t have all the noise of newsletters and emails for mom and all of the noise in one area. It’s just specifically we’re only discussing this one area, and anything that we discuss is going to be put in here. Any resources that you need is going to be put in here, and you could search it, and you can remember. A lot of times with email too, you don’t want to be in it all day because it would just be completely overwhelming. But Slack or HipChat are things that you can kind of keep on the side because people just give you a little quick message, and you can respond really quickly back. It takes a little of the formality of emails out. You don’t necessarily have to have everything grammatically or spell checked right because sometimes people get a little snooty with emails if they’re not they’re not perfect. But the messaging system is a little less formal, so you can kind of get your ideas across a little bit more quickly, or use little emoticons if you want to, as well. So, it’s it’s something you might maybe a Trojan horse strategy might work well for you. Find somebody on the the visual effects or whatever team you’re working with that seems to be an early adopter, and be like, hey, I want you to be on the inside track. You know, email. You know, that’s that’s for for other people, but you and I were a team here. We, you know, if you want to message me, if you want to get that message to me instantly, hit me up on Slack, and we’re gonna make this private room just for the two of us. And you know, maybe somebody on the visual effects team looks over the shoulders like, “Oh, what? You could. You’re just talking to Zack right now. You guys all have all this stuff, and that you know, you might be able to sneak it in there that that method is just rather than trying to force it, just show how well it works and and get somebody else to show how well it works, and then you’re off to the races.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that one one thing that you brought up that makes a lot of sense that I want to go into a little bit further is the idea of there are so many apps and systems, and there is just a flood of productivity apps that are out there, and you can get really, really lost in it. And I, there’s, I know a lot of people will say, “Well, there’s just too many of them. I just want to do everything in one app, and that’s great idea in theory. But the reason that I don’t think that works, and you can back me up if you agree. Is that you have to be able to filter your mindsets or your context, so to speak, is like OmniFocus or David Allen won’t say your context, which I’ve I’ve actually kind of adapted the word mindset because it’s easier for me to kind of understand it that way. But you have to be able to to get yourself in a specific mindset, and if you have one app or one program like email that’s doing everything, there’s no way to filter information. So if I’m going to be in a specific mindset where I’m only working on Empire, that means that if somebody wants to email me on Empire, they can, and I’m going to see it. If somebody wants to message me on a Trello board that’s a Trello Empire board, they can do that, but because I’m using specific systems for specific mindsets, I can filter out the notifications that I don’t want for those other things. Which means that I can be much more focused and not constantly cutting a scene and say, “Oh, I just got an email from this person. Oh, this this happened over here on this one project. Because I’m using these different apps for very specific different purposes, I’ve created a system of filters. So if I’m not being bothered by something that is for the specific mindset that I’m in, I’m not can even know that it exists. So, like you said, like oh, you’re chatting with Zack right now. Like I’ll have people that will say, well, I just I sent you an email and I never got a response, and everybody thinks that when they send an email, they should get a response in about 40-seven seconds, which drives me nuts. But they’re like, “Well, wait, what do you mean he responded to you? He hasn’t responded to me. It’s because the context is different. I have a notification set up if it’s something that would be empire specific for whatever app or system I’m using. But if it’s something that’s for a side project that I’m doing that I maybe would be doing on nights and weekends, I might not get that email, or I might not get that notification because it’s in a different application or a different system. So that allows you to be much more focused because you can break things down. But I also don’t want you to think you have to get 15 different productivity apps. So if we kind of review specifically the ones we’ve talked about, if you’re no longer going to be managing. Tasks and email. You’re talking about Trello, Evernote, OmniFocus. If you’re going to kind of go to the next level like me, and Slack. If you want to adopt a conversation system and a way to have discussions, everything in that list except OmniFocus is 100% free. So it’s not like it’s going to be a big investment. They’re all there. They’re all available, and they’re all free, and they can literally complete. I wouldn’t even say double your productivity. I would say like 345, x your productivity, just because you’re able to filter so much more information. And outside of OmniFocus, which I think is what like 5060, bucks, it’s not like it’s a big investment. But outside of that one program, everything is free. It’s just an investment of a little bit of time. So I just I can’t imagine a reason why you wouldn’t want to at least give it a try and see if there’s a better way to filter all of the endless information, whether it’s paper information or digital information, so you can be more focused and be creative.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, and I’m glad you mentioned that there is a little bit of an investment. It’s of your time and attention and energy to learn these tools. The nice thing is they’re becoming easier and easier and more and more user friendly, so that that investment is is less. If you’ve texted, if you’ve tweeted, if you’ve done email, you can do Slack. If you understand the basic concept of a whiteboard with lists and note cards. You can do Trello. OmniFocus. That’s got a more of a learning curve to it. But Evernote, if you understand the idea of putting words or pictures or PDFs into a big, you can organize it with lists if you’d like to. You can organize it with tags, or you can just throw it in there. Actually, was talking to the one of the founders of Evernote a little while back when I was doing the the tour. He was nice enough to be on the podcast. He said, “I don’t, I don’t do anything. I just use the search function. For me, I don’t love that because there might be some things that might slip through the cracks, and I have a little bit more of a process for making sure that doesn’t happen, but you know there’s there’s a million ways to use and slice these tools, and and I think it’s it’s right when you say that it’s about putting filters up. There there is so much noise out in the world these days that if you don’t have the right filters, it’s overwhelming, and it’s not overwhelming because there’s so much information. It’s that there’s so much potential meaning, and email is the worst with that. Every new little bing you get on the email, and I think we’ve said it before, but we can say it again. If you’re getting those bings, turn it off. You don’t need to get those. You don’t need to be interrupted every every time some you know somebody decides to put something, one of their to-dos in your inbox, or just a marketing message into your your inbox. But if you are constantly bombarded by these potential meaning, like oh, this could be something very important for Empire, or this could be something very serious for maybe my doctor, or this could be just some little distraction. I don’t know. I must go check it. If you’re if you’re in that mindset, doesn’t matter what job you’re is. It can be video editing. It could be just about anything. If you’re constantly being reactive instead of proactive with with what sort of information you’re giving yourself or focus that you’re allowing yourself, not much is going to get done, and you’re gonna spin your wheels, and it’s gonna feel like you’ve worked hard. At the end of the day, you’ll be like, “Oh boy, what a day! And then you can look back and see, well, what did I get done? And not much, because you just started and stopped, started and stopped, started and stopped, started and stopped so many different times. You just worry yourself out doing that. And and it’s great that you’ve set up those those filters with email that allow you to do that, I think I think more people, especially your listeners, are technically inclined. They they they can adopt a similar system, and I’m sure you you went into it in more detail before. I think you’ve written about it as well, so should make sure to link up to that and and let people do that if they think if they think nobody in their world is is going to adopt any new tools like Slack or Trello, and if not, if they think they can use the the Trojan horse strategy, just start start feeling it out and and playing around with these things and seeing how you can you can tweak your workflow to to have more attention on the right things at the right times.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and and that’s really what it’s all about for me. Like for example, I’ve permanently turned off Notification Center in my computer. I never have it on. Anything that will give notifications, if like I said, if it’s not context specific with what I’m doing at the moment, the notifications will not be in front of me. And I’m not 100% perfect. I mean, everybody needs their dopamine snack, so it’s it’s a constant struggle to try and make sure that you’re not having them in front of you. But at this point, I never hear bings, I never hear dings, notifications. The only thing that I do still have on all the time, which I’m never going to be able to get away from, is text messaging, and the reason for that is because I will not. Answer my phone when I’m working. I will not check my email. But if something happens and there’s an emergency with my family, my wife has to be able to get a hold of me. So as much as I would love to live my world in airplane mode, 24 hours a day, and be a hermit, when you have wife and kids and they’re out into the world, you can’t do that. So, but there are really no people that I have a text message relationship with, and of the, I’d probably I could fit everybody that I have a text message relationship with on one hand, maybe two at the most, and I know that if they send me a text message, is probably something important, and that’s just the kind of thing that you develop with people, right? Like once they start to get to know you and understand your system, whether it’s politely saying, “Oh yeah, I know if you need this, go ahead and send me an email as opposed to this send me a text message. People just start to almost subconsciously learn the way that they communicate with different people, and I think that once you start to make that a conscious decision to say I don’t want the notifications, but here are the people that I get notifications from all the time. How do I filter these? Just have a conversation with them and say, hey, this is the way that I’m doing things, and you know, let’s converse this way. Like for example, even with my assistant editor, who I spend more time with than anybody else on the planet, she’s down the hall from me. But I’ve said to her, listen, I’m working in time blocks. I use the Pomodoro technique when I edit. Right, that’s what keeps me focused. And I tell her, listen, if you know that my office door is shut. That means that I’m in Pomodoro mode, and if something comes up where you’re going to need me before I’m out of the office, go ahead and send me a Google Chat message. Right, so it’s not even a text message. I have my Google Chat window open, and it’s only her discussion, and nobody else knows how to even get a hold of me on Google Chat. And that’s way if she’s like, “Hey, somebody’s looking for you, or “Hey, I have this one shot and they need an answer in five minutes, that’s now context specific to what I’m doing. And yes, it’s annoying if I’ll be cutting a scene and all of a sudden it’s like, “Hey, I need you to check out the shot right away. That’s still I lose my train of thought, but it’s not an email from my mom that’s making me lose my train of thought. It’s an email that’s very time sensitive for the job at hand. So I think just developing those relationships with people and trying to figure out how do I filter the information for them and not offend them because I haven’t responded. But people even start to learn email etiquette. I’m sure that for you as well, you would agree with this that there are certain people that you know. If I send them an email. By the time I hit the send button, they’re probably going to reply. And there are other people that I’m going to send them an email, and I’m probably not going to get an answer from them for three or four days.

Zack Arnold: So I know that if it’s super time sensitive, email is not the way to go. And you just have to kind of develop these relationships. Where I used to be the kind of person that had my email in front of me all the time, and if I hadn’t answered within like 10 minutes, I literally felt guilty. Like, oh my god, I can’t believe I haven’t responded this. I have to get to this right away. I have to finish. Oh my god, I have another email. Oh my god, I’m never going to get anything done. Like that was my train of thought. Because, like you said earlier in the episode, you’re a little bit ADD, ADHD. I’m diagnosed, so it’s not just, oh yeah, you know, I’m ADD. Like everybody says, I’ve had the test done. I am add, and that’s why I’ve developed all these systems to be able to develop focus and not be distracted. Because I know that that’s just a part of who I am, and it’s a tendency that I have, and I need to find systems to work around it. But those systems will work for anybody. But people now know that if they send me an email, if it’s not super time sensitive, it’s probably going to take me a couple of days to respond because I only check my email maybe 345, times a day, which frankly still is too much. But I’ll have specific time blocks during the day where my mindset is I am catching up on email and I am responding to emails, and if one of them is somebody’s house is on fire, and I need to put it out, which on a network TV show is every single email every day is there’s always a fire. I swear to God, I’m putting a filter on my email where if somebody sends me something with ASAP into it, it’s automatically going into the trash. But the idea is that you’re just you’re trying to filter that information. So if you’re getting something that doesn’t need to be taken care of immediately, people just start to understand. Oh, you know what? I’m probably not going to hear from them for a day or two. And once they have that expectation, they’re not going to get mad at you or feel like they’ve been slighted. So it’s just it’s having that that conscious mindset of how do I reorganize all of this information that’s coming into me. Whether it’s paper and what can I do with the paper? Whether it’s notifications, just how do I filter the world around me so I’m not so reactive all the time? And kind of the the thesis of all of this and where I’ve been leading to all of this is that my whole aim for this program is to help people be better at what they do, to optimize their own operating system, so to speak, to be better at what they do, and people will say, “Well, if I have all these checklists and all this stuff, I’m just going to feel like a robot, like I’m just checking off all these boxes and I’m not thinking. That’s the whole point. If you’re doing all these systems and you don’t have to think about it, what you’re doing is reserving energy for creative thought that is. Focused and undistracted, which now makes you better at what you do. You’re able to have more profound thoughts. You have them more often, and they’re more focused at the times that you need them. So that’s the whole reason that I’m going through this. Is I think the the why is something that’s really missed in a lot of the information that’s in the the internet right now. the internet is just an endless array of tips and tactics, right? And even I say that I’m trying to provide tips, tricks, and tactics for my audience. But if there isn’t a why behind it, if it’s just the what and it’s the how, and there’s no why, you can’t really bring it all together. And the why for me, why I go paperless, why I have these different apps, why I filter email, is because I’ve automated so much of my life now, where I don’t have to think about it.

Zack Arnold: So that when the time comes that I do need to think, and I need to think intensely, and I need to make hundreds of micro decisions over the course of an hour, I have the energy and the focus to do it. So that’s the whole thesis of why I think all these little systems and apps and all these little tricks. That’s why they’re so important. So that’s that kind of wraps up all of this and why I wanted to have this conversation today. I

Zack Sexton: Love it. Keep up the good work. You really the why is so important because you need to have a well-conceived plan of action if you want to get things done. But in order to keep that plan of action going, if you don’t know why you’re doing it, it’s it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’ll you’ll peter off after a little while. So knowing your why and and creating a system like you’ve been creating for yourself when it comes to paperless, when it comes to projects, when it comes to communication, kind of hit the trifecta here. Without that why, yeah, it becomes difficult to maintain because you’re like, well, why am I even bothering with this, why, why even listen to two Zacks yack about a bunch of apps for 40 minutes? Well, because if you want that clarity and that focus and that creativity that comes from not worrying about the minutia, you got to create some systems for it, and it’s not as hard as you think.

Zack Arnold: That is an amazing show out, but I can’t let the show go yet because I just said one of my profound creative inspirations because I’ve automated my life. You and I need to start our own podcast, and we need to call it “Two Zacks Yaking. That was perfect. I love that when you said that

Zack Sexton: Zack Yak Attack.

Zack Arnold: Right there, you go the Zack Yak Attack. Or if we wanted to go out into the wilderness and get two yaks and record them, it could be two yaks zacking. I really need to stop. I need I need to go to work now. I need to I need to stop. But no, this has been fantastic. Really really glad to be able to have you on the show again. And just before I let you go, real quick, if people want to find you or Asian efficiency, or they want to get you for personal efficiency coaching. Where can I send people to make sure that they can find you?

Zack Sexton: Well, we’ve got a. If you’re in iTunes right now or listening to a podcast, the Productivity Show is where I talk weekly every Monday with other productivity experts or people on the Asian Efficiency team. So, love it if you’d want to listen to that. The AsianEfficiency.com and my method of communication over email is actually Twitter. I like the shortness of it. So at zw sexton, if you want to tweet and ask any questions or or hit me up, I’m happy to happy to hear from you. All

Zack Arnold: Right, thank you, sir, and I promise that we will be having another one of these. I’m sure in the the near future.

Zack Sexton: Awesome. Well, look forward to it.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Natalie Boschan, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.