Why Does Your To-Do List Keep Growing, No Matter How Hard You Work?

Pillars of Productivity is focused on leveraging the essential digital tools (email, calendar, task manager, notetaking app, read-later app) that turn you into a capable, mindful professional who can handle anything life throws at them.

Building a Second Brain zooms in on the notetaking part and teaches you how to consistently turn the information you consume into creative output and concrete results, leveraging your notetaking app.

A Second Brain is your holistic ecosystem of digital tools, encompassing the material from both courses. It is a trusted place outside your head where you can collect and organize your most important ideas and insights and use them to do your best work.

You’ll have access for the lifetime of the product.

We’ve designed Pillars of Productivity to fit your schedule and pace.

While you can watch the video lessons in about two and a half hours, we highly recommend that you follow the action steps to put what you learn into practice.

Pillars of Productivity is tool-agnostic, meaning our methodology will work in any software you prefer. The videos in the course will show you examples in different types of apps and we’ll give you concrete recommendations for free and paid tools to use in each lesson.

With that being said, you’re more than welcome to use any other tool that you feel works better for your needs.

Pillars of Productivity is focused on leveraging digital tools for your productivity because we believe that digital tools provide many advantages over paper, for example:

That’s why we encourage you to choose digital tools over paper in our course. With that being said, you might also benefit from some of the methods and guidelines we teach in your paper-based workflow. 

We’ve done our best to make this course as accessible as possible. Each video has captions so you can follow along more easily, and a complete transcript if you prefer reading. You can use the search function to find and review specific points within each video. We've also added chapters to each video so you can navigate directly to specific sections. This allows you to revisit key concepts or jump to topics that are most relevant to you.

There are no official prerequisites to take Pillars of Productivity. However, we do expect you to be reasonably comfortable with using a computer or smartphone.

Your satisfaction is our #1 goal, and we want the decision to join Pillars of Productivity to be 100% risk-free so you can focus on learning. If you decide the course didn’t deliver on its promise for any reason, submit a request within 7 days of your purchase to get a refund.

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On our checkout pages, you’ll find these options under “Payment Methods".

Currently, “Buy now, pay later” is available in the United States only.

This is one I’ve been thinking about for years. Part of the reason I waited so long to release a new course is because I’ve been seeking a good answer to it. 
Here are a few choices we made to maximize your likelihood of completion:

• We made the course short, only about 2.5 hours’ worth of instructional videos, the length of a Hollywood film
• We made our videos YouTube-quality, borrowing all the lessons we’ve learned about making engaging, informative content on our channel
• We made the implementation steps as easy and clear as possible, and put them all in a workbook available in digital and printable formats
• We made all the videos and course material available upfront, on demand, and across any device using Circle’s excellent mobile app, so you can fit it in whenever you have time
• We added a discussion space, so you can see where your peers are getting stuck and what they’ve done to overcome it

Some of you pointed out that I recently published an article about the crucial difference between beginner and advanced advice, and how important it is to consume advice at your current level. So is POP a beginner course or an advanced one?
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I’d say POP is about the “fundamental moves” of productivity, on top of which all other more sophisticated and specialized techniques are built. Martial artists have the straight punch, tennis players the forehand, and chefs their chef’s knife – as knowledge workers we have our to-do list, our calendar, and our notes.In that sense, this is a beginner-level course, in that we’re starting with the most basic, essential tools.
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‍But the thing I’ve noticed about expertise is that it’s often about refining and perfecting the more fundamental moves, rather than adding on complex, fancy ones. The basketball player never stops working on their shooting technique. The golfer never stops refining their swing. Since everything is built out of these more basic parts, you can never really improve them enough.
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‍So in that sense, even the most advanced productivity enthusiasts have a lot to gain from revisiting the fundamentals and rethinking how they use them.

Yes indeed! Each of our books and courses is designed to complement and build on the others. In the Building a Second Brain course and book, I zoomed in on digital notetaking, the core of our creative workflows and the missing piece in most people’s digital portfolios.

But I’ve always maintained that a Second Brain is not just about notetaking – it encompasses all the digital tools you use to produce, organize, and express yourself. Your notes app is like one lobe of your brain, carrying out a critical function. But that’s only one part!

In POP, I’m zooming out to look at the holistic system that is your Second Brain, and showing how all the parts can work together fluidly and intuitively just as your first brain does.

The Getting Things Done (or GTD) philosophy created by David Allen has been a major influence on me and on POP. But it’s now been over 20 years since Allen’s book was released, and there are many aspects of it that are outdated, irrelevant, or simply not applicable to the much faster-paced, more digital-centric, and cross-platform world we live in today.

I’ve borrowed a few key ideas from GTD, combined them with multiple other methodologies and my own discoveries, to offer an approach that is eminently practical and can be “installed” without a lot of theorizing. So to answer the question, POP is not different from other productivity methods – it distills the best of what they have to offer into a practical setup using working software.

One of my strongest beliefs is that the separation between “work” and “life” is quickly eroding. You used to have two separate identities in these two domains, but that’s less and less the case, for a few reasons:

• We use our mobile devices for both, meaning we’re faced with work info during off hours and vice versa
• Remote and hybrid work environments blur the boundary and make mixing different kinds of information together inevitable
• Work is more international, asynchronous, and fluid than ever before, which sometimes means being productive and communicating during small pockets of time at odd hours

I’ll be honest: this merging of worlds can be a bad thing if you don’t manage it right. It can mean working longer hours, never quite being able to relax, and finding every minute of your attention colonized by tasks. 

But I prefer the optimistic view: we can now be more aligned and authentic between our professional and personal worlds, and treat them as two important parts of a holistic picture that is our life. For our purposes, this means choosing digital tools that can encompass both work projects and personal projects, and help us manage both work responsibilities and life responsibilities.

I manage it all in one place, and I suggest you do too.

My teaching and advice is definitely influenced by my profession as an independent creator. Many of my examples are creative projects or educational products that you might not be able to relate to. 

But I do believe that most of what I have to say applies equally well to corporate work, for a few reasons:

• The world of free agents (freelancers, consultants, entrepreneurs) is often just a few years ahead of large organizations, which means what we are dealing with now is coming soon to your doorstep
• An increasing percentage of the workforce is made up of independent contractors (now making up a majority of all employed people), which means that kind of career path may very well be in your future (or at least, more and more of the professionals you collaborate with will be)
• When coming up with guiding principles, it’s helpful to start with a freeform canvas with minimal rules, and then adapt from there as you add in corporate restrictions and requirements

I used most of what I teach in POP when I worked for a large company, and I use it today in the context of an international team at Forte Labs. 

I have a deep aversion to any belief system or philosophy that claims to be “all or nothing.” Even if they are effective in some situations, such extremist philosophies tend to be brittle, breaking under the slightest change in conditions. As I moved across 4 countries through my 20s, I encountered too many such changes to be able to maintain any such totalitarian system.

Instead, I came up with a “modular” approach to my productivity. I chose 4 apps that would be my core tools, each one chosen for its utter simplicity, reliability, and ease of use. If one failed, either because of a technical error or because the mental burden of maintaining it was too high, I would just switch to something easier. There were interconnections between these apps, but they were optional. If links broke, it wasn’t the end of the world.

What this modular approach allows me to do is, anytime life gets overwhelming or my bandwidth scarce, I can put any of my apps on pause and step away knowing everything I was working on and towards is frozen exactly in place. There have been many periods when I reverted to using only 3 core apps, or 2, or even 1, like a single lifeline when the seas of change were tossing me back and forth. This isn’t possible when you try to use a single app to do everything. And that modular approach is what I’ll be teaching you.

This speaks to one of my beefs with many productivity courses: they just unload a grab bag of random “tips and tricks” on you, seemingly chosen at random, and leave you to sort through it all and decide what actually works. In contrast, I see my main job as curating and distilling the vast universe of productivity advice out there, into a bite-size package you can absorb in a few sittings.

‍And look – there are a lot of productivity tips that work in isolation. The mistake is thinking that by piling them all together, you’ll have a system. Each tip and trick adds its own mental burden, so what you really end up with is a house of cards – it holds together only until the slightest wind blows, revealing that there is no connective tissue.

Every single lesson in POP was chosen because it is necessary to the functioning of the whole. Every tactic makes all the other tactics more effective and functional. I’m not giving you a bunch of theory or good-sounding advice. I’m giving you the exact system I use every day.

A question I asked myself as we began working on POP was, “Why should someone have to finish 100% of a course to receive value?” I know I rarely do. So I decided to structure the 4 pillars of POP in order of priority, from most to least important: your calendar is the first and most important pillar to master; then comes your task manager in second place. These tools are more important in the short term.

Only after you’ve figured out these “actionable” tools should you turn your attention to the remaining two: your digital notes app and read-later app. They will be more powerful in the long run, since they allow you to leverage the compounding power of your ideas and creativity. 

This ordering ensures this doesn’t become, as one of you put it, “another productivity white elephant on my digital shelf, collecting dust and guilt.” You’ll see results upfront, regardless of what level of skill you’re currently at, and then get introduced to new tools one by one if you have the time and headspace for them. 

‍If you drop off at any point, that’s ok! Just take some time to practice what you learned up to that point, seeing what benefits it brings you (or which parts aren’t needed), and the course will be ready for you when you return.

Absolutely! Everything I teach is platform-agnostic, meaning it will apply just as well to any software program, operating system, or kind of device. I’ve had to change platforms so many times over the years that I was forced to adopt a workflow that functioned seamlessly even as the underlying tools changed. I’ll teach you to do the same.