This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.
If you’re confused right now about reading this in the blog of a VFX artist, I’d recommend that you start from the introduction. Otherwise, here’s all the articles in order, in case you’d like to jump to any specific part once they’re all available. I hope you enjoy!
In the previous part I talked about the digital apps that are the most central to my personal productivity ecosystem (as of the date of writing this article!!)… my Weapons of Choice for taking notes and managing tasks, or ToDos. That’s the section where most of the heavy-lifting happens, so it came out pretty detailed.
However, there’s another suite of tools that are a core part of my personal “operating system” and are equally important, while falling outside the notes and tasks: those for time scheduling, automations, or just peace of mind.
Let’s dive into my favourites!
I manage all my events inside Google Calendar, and that works totally fine for me.
Even while being a pretty heavy calendar abuser, with my Head of VFX role alone involving more than 10-15 meetings some days.
I feel Google Calendar is a fantastic option for managing multiple calendars, and the iPhone app is able to show me the company’s calendar, my personal ones and even the university calendar (which is based on Microsoft Outlook) in the same view, with different colours, and seamlessly create and modify events for all of them.
It’s probably not an app for everyone, as people with teams that manage their times or with clients that can chip in and schedule meetings at any time might benefit from alternative calendars with more automations.
However, as you see I’m generally in control of my own schedule and normally don’t allow for many external inputs outside the designated time slots, so Google Cal just works fine for me.
My main work’s calendar tends to take priority over everything else (except health and family), so I organise my day around that one.
I use Google Calendar on my internet browser to see my work meetings and events, and on the iPhone app I also have it show my personal calendars overlapping. Won’t cover too much about this.
A few extras related to the calendar which are worth mentioning:
Although I manage my events in Google Calendar, I still hold a very special place for my Apple Calendar app. It’s where I set up all my time blocking. I’ve tried specialised apps for that and nothing beats how I enjoy the smooth workflow between Apple Calendar and Things.
Whilst being very simple by design, Apple Calendar is another pleasant-experience-machine like Apple apps generally try to be. If you’re already in their ecosystem and just need something simple, it’s a no-brainer… free and already installed on your devices.
In the Apple Calendar, I don’t want to see all my meetings. I just want some aesthetic colored blocks to tell me what I’ve decided to do at each part of the day. Here’s how I achieve it:
There’s one neat trick I learned from a YouTuber that is the final piece of the time blocking puzzle.
When planning my day, I’ll have a split screen of Things and Apple Calendar, and it goes as follows:
Here’s a screenshot of my actual process, where you can see all I just mentioned:
There’s many apps for time blocking, and I don’t have much experience with these as Apple Calendar proves just enough for my needs, but if you want to explore the terrain you might want to take a look at apps like Ticktick, Clockwise, Hourstack or Fantastical. Or even Todoist, as an all-in-one task manager and time blocker.
There’s many little apps that can help you be more productive by 0.1% each, but Snagit also has a special place in my list so I have to mention it.
It’s basically an app (Windows and Mac) that lets you take screenshots and annotate over them, or do quick screen recordings with your voice.
The way this helps me the most is the following: Any thing I need to explain to another person and I can avoid having to schedule a meeting to show it, I’ll try to document it using Snagit instead, and send annotated pics or a quick video where I go over the process with voice. This has some great added benefits:
When a meeting is more appropriate, though (or unavoidable), I’ll usually try to record it. So if there’s any information that can later be useful to anyone else, then I can simply make a quick edit of the relevant part of the meeting and then make it available to the team.
This is a huge topic on its own, but since I’m talking about my tools for productivity, the tools I use for managing and storing digital files can’t be overlooked. So I’ll briefly go over the tools and services I use to store all my personal files.
Here’s the last piece of the puzzle, which makes my daily work super easy: I have a NAS folder called “Active”, and I have it linked via Synology Drive to my MacBook’s Desktop!
So… how does this work?
Well, all I have to do is work in folders on my Desktop, and without thinking or doing anything else, they will be backed up to my NAS (2-way sync) as soon as I’m on my home network, which is usually the case. AND they’ll be backed up to the cloud too, via iCloud.
I find this extremely convenient: just by working in one place, it makes a local copy and a cloud copy of the same files. And if I delete something important by mistake… well, I have Time Machine of the Mac set up to my NAS, so it’ll let me go back in time.
Additionally, the Active folder in the NAS has an amazing Synology feature active, which is called Snapshot Replication, and that will also let you go back in time, even for some cases of hacking where someone tries to encrypt your files.
With this I feel secure enough for backups of my files, while all is pretty automated. Not an expert at all (and please don’t hack me 🥺) but I hope this helps.
iOS 15 introduced Focus, which lets your switch your device into specific configurations that only show you certain apps, block certain notifications (or all) and only allow calls and messages from specific people.
I use this pretty drastically as well, and I have a focus mode that is on all day by default, which only allows calls and messages from very specific people to notify me. And for the rest, all notifications off, period.
I don’t want any external inputs adding noise while my attention is elsewhere (remember we’re single core processors), so I’m really precious about any immediate requests for my attention. I won’t take 90% of calls, as they’re basically muted. If they’re urgent or they’re from family (or people trained to know they shouldn’t call me for non-urgent-and-important things) they will sound, thanks of my filtered list on my focus mode. If they sound and they’re not urgent and important, I will probably get angry and this might indirectly serve as an improvement to the future functioning of the system 😄.
Raycast is a launcher for MacOS that can make you more productive in so many ways. It’s my preferred alternative to the well-established Alfred, which is also great.
I use the free version of Raycast and it has all of the features I need. It becomes your portal to opening apps, integrating with different services, looking for files, adding text snippets and shortcuts to everything else, etc.
Won’t talk more about this now but feel free to look at the tool’s website if you’d like to learn all it can do. Pretty crazy.
I have all sorts of hotkeys setup to make it quick to access my most-used apps and tasks.
While working on my Mac (on any app):
Also, if there’s any website you like and would like to always have at hand, web browsers such as Google Chrome have a feature to save it as a desktop shortcut. That will save it to your computer as if it were an app. And do you know what you can do with apps in Raycast? Exactly, add a hotkey! So I have hotkeys for Google Mail, ChatGPT and other websites I always want to keep quick to access. And they’ll even load up inside the correct Chrome user profile.
The Apple Shortcuts app is amazing, and the moment you start finding opportunities to use it you’ll enter a world of implementing little personal automations on your life that really add up. Here’s some of the shortcuts I use the most:
Can’t finish this section without discussing ChatGPT, as I’m using it every single day and for so many tasks.
I had only tried the free version of the LLM chat here and there, and thought I’d just do a 20 US$ investment in a one month subscription to the Plus version, considering it as if I had paid for a class. That way I would assess if I can integrate it into my life. And to my surprise, it literally took less than 2h for me to get way more value out of it than those 20$. It’s now saving me so much time I that I can only try my best to start describing how.
Funny enough, the main thing that it’s barely helping me with is writing — I enjoy forcing myself to explain things in my own words and have my text be a direct reflection of how I think. Even in English, while it isn’t my native language, I want to have a sense of ownership of how phrases are formed, and that’s not something I would want to lose, so at this point in time I’m writing without assistance – while redacting an email, article or anything else, I’ll only ask ChatGPT for help in case I’m stuck with some super simple thing I should know, like synonyms, translations or meaning of a word.
However…
There’s some other areas in which ChatGPT has become incredibly valuable for my work and productivity, and they greatly justify the Plus version pricing.
For all this, you can also make sure that ChatGPT starts every conversation already knowing your context (some info about you) as well as how you expect it to answer.
This seems like a minor detail but it’s proving huge for me! Because by knowing my name, location, professional background, interests, hobbies and goals, it’s suddenly able to reply to any single question of mine while making unexpected connections to some points I would’ve never thought would be relevant.
For instance, asking it for recommendations on which rig to purchase for my camera, it makes the recommendation based on my interest for clean and functional things. Or when asking it to translate something to Spanish, it knows it’s meant to be Spanish from Spain. Or… by knowing what my website url is, it can go ahead and look in there for more info when it needs it.
You can start by simply writing all the relevant info about yourself that comes to your mind in a regular chat.
Then, ask ChatGPT to tell you if it’d miss anything else in order to be able to help you better. And once it has all info, it can even help you summarise it in order to generate your perfect custom instructions!
Also, in case it’s useful, here’s my current text for “How would you like ChatGPT to respond?”:
For technical queries or direct requests, keep responses concise and to the point, omitting extraneous details unless explicitly asked for.
When discussing subjects like productivity, programming, or technical topics, approach them with expert-level insight, but calibrate your explanations to my existing level of expertise.
Feel free to express informed opinions; I prioritise the pursuit of truth over the avoidance of discomfort in conversations.
If I ask for a correction or translation over my text, please only provide the corrected or translated text and nothing else. And if it contains code tags such as html, please keep them intact.
Important: When I start a message with the letter t, I’ll just want the rest of the conversation to be a translation from English to Spanish or viceversa. And with c, I’ll want correction on grammar and spelling.
There’s even an option to create your own Custom GPTs, making it a huge time saver if you want to create versions of the chat for specific purposes. Your VFX assistant, your personal translator, and so on. This is the next level of custom instructions, and every time we’re getting closer to AI agents that will actually perform actions. Crazy times ahead.
There’s so many other things you can do with ChatGPT (including generating images, searching inside a pdf, looking for scientific references, or searching the internet), and covering them is not the goal of this article, so I’ll leave it to you to keep exploring as needed.
In brief ChatGPT Plus is a productivity powerhouse, so if you haven’t tried to use it or some similar alternative, I can’t encourage you enough to give it a try.
This article has been the collection of some of the main tools that I feel are crucial contributors to my current sense of productivity outside notes and tasks. There’s so many others and I hope to keep learning, while the possibilities available do nothing but improve how we increasingly delegate tasks to technology. This is something, as you can probably tell if you made it this far, that I find super rewarding: when you manage to integrate some little new automation into the digital portion of your brain.
In the next and final part of the series, I’ll be going over the main sources of inspiration that have shaped my thoughts around productivity, and that’ll conclude my little trip around the topic.
If you’d like to know when the other parts are up, read some random thoughts or stay updated on my posts, tools or courses, you can join my (still-upcoming) newsletter. I won’t write often, but when I do I’ll make sure it is condensed and interesting. You can join the newsletter here.
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