Design Your Own Mindful Productivity System - Anne Laure Le Cunff

Introduction welcome back everybody to the selling with love podcast very very excited about the conversation we'll be having today I have a woman who has built an amazing community of curious minds that are looking to be more productive get more done and are always challenging the way that they're getting things done to make sure we're more effective to do it in a way that's more fun and I can't wait to bring some of those ideas to everybody listening in if you've ever heard of Nest Labs well you'll definitely want to go and peek at what this is all about we're talking about people that are obsessed about productivity and are part of an amazing Community to do so together I was on a journey looking at some of the most well-run communities on the internet and I stumbled upon Nest labs and of course productivity being a passion of mine I then went to research who was the person behind all of this movement and that is how I discovered anla laun who is here with us today has a book called tiny experiments which we're going to have a link in the show notes for you to discover more coming out early 2020 T 5 and we're going to have some conversations around how to challenge the way that we do things doing more productively what's the role of community if you're building your own business and just seeing the whole journey on how her movement is now looking at hundreds of thousands of people on her newsletter has been featured in Rolling Stones Forbes Financial Times wired and now she is an adviser for the applied Neuroscience Association and allp party parliamentary group for entrepreneurship things on Mental Health at work probably will touch a a little bit on that as well I'm so excited to have an with me and welcome thank you so much for having me this was an amazing introduction and I'm excited for a conversation you know we I was just talking about this with you before there's so many times you go on podcast and they do the intro after right but I just I love when an intro happens first cuz then I'm like yeah that's me I'm excited to have a conversation I love that also I feel like it's helpful in the sense that because of the bits you picked about my journey and my work I also get a sense of who your community is and how I can be helpful so I actually find it really good to have that background before we get started we kind of set the frame of where we want to go but then again we never know until we get there right um so the first thing I would love to kind of go into is like this is impressive and I'd want to see maybe if there's some more uh Nuance we'd want to add to this but right now you have this uh Redefining Productivity mindful productivity newsletter 100,000 people are tuning in I'd be curious to just know a bit more what do you think inspires so many people to want to learn more about what you're sharing on productivity today I think the reason why the newsl grew so fast is mainly because of the approach I'm taking to talking about these topics it's not prescriptive at all I am giving people tools and information based on both research papers that I'm reading but also interviews that I'm conducting with real world entrepreneurs knowledge workers and creators and everything is framed more like hey here are things that have been shown to work based on that information you can use some of these tools and decide which ones you want to add or not to your own toolkit and I'm really trying to empower people to design their all their own mindful productivity tool set where no two tool sets are going to look exactly the same so it's very different from sometimes more rigid structures and Frameworks that you can find in other books and online courses where you have someone telling you hey this is a system that you should apply and that's going to work for everyone and obviously it doesn't some people have kids others don't some people are freelancing and have a lot of freedom when it comes to how they organize their schedule others don't some people want to run startup they raise money and investors become their new boss whereas other people decide to just run their own small business and again keep that freedom to make the decisions on an everyday basis because of that you can't really come up with one mindful productivity system that's going to work for everyone and I think it's really important to trust people's intelligence when it comes to designing a system that works for them you know I I have to be one person that calls himself out as guilty uh because I'm someone who loves seeing a system and then replicating it cookie cutter I'm like yes I've found the one so I have productivity oneitis but I've switched I'm a Serial monogamous productivity oneitis person I switch from one system to another but at at the end of the day there's always there's always like resistances to it there's always something that decays it's almost uh what do you call it some uh entropy that happens to the productivity methods uh and I've interviewed a lot of people in the field of productivity and I'm I'm just curious within your own practice since you're very much in the space of Neuroscience um is the entropy something that we should just accept or is it something that we have some cool discoveries that allow it to fight us fight it and keep us more on track with our productivity tools I think this is something we should absolutely Embrace and not only go with but play with our brain keeps on changing BAS on all of the experience that we have everything we learn the interactions we have with other people those can be positive or negative but there is this constant change happening in the way we navigate the world we perceive it we make decisions and this should be reflected in the way we engage with our own systems so things that worked for you in the past may not work in the future and really the challenge is not that entropy the challenge is the resistance we have to it and when we try to keep on sticking to that one same rigid system even though it's not working for us anymore so the one thing there's only one thing I'm very prescriptive about when I talk about mindful productivity and it's the self-reflection aspect I tell people whatever you do whatever tools you use that's completely fine but you should have someplace and someplace in your system some space for self-reflection for a lot of people that looks like a weekly review for example that can take five minutes what worked what didn't work and what you want to focus on next for other people who maybe have a little bit more time and more space or find this more helpful that can be daily journaling for people who don't like writing that can be having an accountability body someone where maybe you grab coffee once every couple of weeks and you just ask each other how are things going are your systems working are you feeling productive are you feeling overwhelmed are you noticing any signs of burnout and again the system itself can look very very very different even the self-reflection method can be quite different but it needs to be there there needs to be some place where a little bit like a scientist you analyze the data and then you decide where you want to go next with the way you approach things and the way you approach your productivity there's a couple things things I want to kind of expand on one of them it would be how does this or how has this even changed uh given that a lot of us has moved over to working from home and that's been the big shift that happened particularly accelerated uh by Co which by the way that was four years ago which blows my mind like I feel like it was yesterday but that was actually four years ago um so we've kind of adapted to this new workstyle and a lot of us have had the opportunity to start working from home and I'd be curious to know what you've noticed as a whole whether Working From Home it's around the mental health or the productivity as a whole since we've had those changes happen this is actually connected to what we were just talking about I think what can be really dangerous at home is when we don't have self-reflection is to fall into routines that are not really serving us the nice thing about being in an office environment is that routines get disrupted all the time that entropy that we talked about earlier which is a good thing actually when you're trying to do things in the same way over and over again but you get interrupted by a colleague from time to time who says hey let's have a chat about this project like I want to talk about this when we have space for Creative brainstorming with other people when there's team building when there's a manager who's there sitting not too far from you and challenging you sometimes saying hey you know don't mean to pry but maybe that's not how I would go about this this is also how you learn because you can't be an autopilot when you're working as part of a team all sitting together it's a lot harder to have this intrinsic chaos and messiness when you're at home and where every interaction is pre-scheduled when we say hey actually we're going to talk from 8 to 9:00 and this meeting is going to be about this specific topic so you have a lot of that almost creative messiness that comes from sitting next to each other because of that also you can design your way your days in a way that can be quite repetitive where in some ways it can be good if you have good routines but in some ways it can be bad as well you can maybe uh you know get sucked into emails very early in the morning without having space for deep work and you just close your laptop in the evening and you realize oh wow I actually haven't made any progress on any of the important projects I wanted to work on equally in the evening you can realize that it's 10 p.m. and you're still sitting in front of your computer and you maybe you may be making significant progress on a project but also you're not taking any time to recharge your batteries in the evening or spend time with loved ones so there are a lot of bad routines that can set in as when you stay at home and because of that you need to make a conscious effort to really really reflect on how things are going it's particularly important when you're working from home so I would really really recommend again you decide whatever that looks like but just make sure that you're not waking up at home and going through the motions closing your laptop in the evening and you haven't really thought about the way you work I'm going to give an invitation for anybody listening here that if you haven't had that kind of activity happen in your life recently perhaps you use this episode as a moment to do this self-reflection uh maybe as a prompt or as a disruptor itself whether you're listening to this at home or you're on the run or in a car perhaps just putting in a reminder by the end of the day to do that self-reflection if you haven't set that up in your own routine I think that might be a very powerful little disruptor that could have been an invitation that came serendipitous or not well you can use it as an opportunity I um I wanted to have another conversation based on something Manager Productivity that we discussed earlier which was around finding our own style for productivity but at the same time like I'm in a manager position and I have a small team that I want them to follow my system because I want to be able to get reports and I want them to follow my structure and so I'd be curious to know uh what are the types of uh advice or the the kind of uh diagnosis you give when you know as a manager you kind of want to control and create order and predictability but there's a lot of different personalities and they might not like your system I know for a fact that when someone else imposes their system on me I've quit a job because somebody wanted me to use air table before um so I'd be curious to know what do you typically advise around this scenario I think it's very important to divide two parts of that system there's the doing and the reporting as a manager I think it's completely fair to ask everyone on the team to use the same reporting system so everybody can have clarity as to how things are going where someone might need help for example where things are going a little bit slower than what we expected I think that's completely fine when I used to work at Google we had this centralized reporting system that was incredibly helpful because we could see at the team level but then also at the org level how things were going and we could diagnose any issue very quickly so I think that's good what can be less good and less useful is to try and force people to use a certain productivity system for the doing aspect of things for the execution here really everybody is different and some people for example work really well with task lists other people like Canan boards where you move tasks across those different panels depending on where if you have started them if they're ongoing or whether they're done and I think trying to force people to use one system or another is not going to be particularly helpful and is actually not going to make them more productive it can actually be counterproductive to do this so I think as a manager what's helpful is just maybe to sit down and it probably would only take a few minutes but asking yourself what part of that system is reporting and I'm going to enforce for the team to use and what part is execution is doing where it's fine for everyone to do it the way they want it doesn't matter as long as it gets done and then they can put it in the reporting system then that's F another tool I find really helpful that I've been using with my team is a um a personal user manual and it's a little bit similar to how you when you buy furniture at Ikea for example it comes with a manual that tells you this is how this thing works and this is how you assemble it and you have to use those pieces in this order for your table to actually look like a table and the personal user manual is the same thing so I ask every new team member to create one and it's a very creative process I show them examples from other people but there's no template and that makes it part of the fun I only tell them here are the key things that it should include but then if you want to communicate that with a lot of little illustrations bullet points so very minimalistic that's your style and that's fine and it includes information such as this is the way I like to communicate so for example just send me an email I prefer this or ping me send me a little chat um message or don't do that I hate it and interrupts my flow so except if it's really urgent please email only or if you're in an office come and tap on my shoulder I love that like we can have a little chat or I love that one of my team members said when we were working together for a week we do a little team Retreat and saying when I have my headphones on do not come and talk to me that means I'm in deep work I'm in the flow don't come and interrupt me but if my headphones are off on the the desk that means anyone can come and chat with me and we can grab coffee there's also a bit about how I like to receive feedback some people they like to just get it straight just give it to me I'm fine like I just want to know what it is other people they might say actually with me it's nicer if you use the sandwich method give me something nice something I've been doing well and then a piece of constructive criticism and then something nice again and I'm more likely to respond to the feedback if you do it this way so it's a lot of little things we also include whether music is disruptive to you or not in the background like a lot of small things that add up to your personal user manual how to best work with me how to get the best out of me at work and we don't really expect everyone to really remember every single piece of every other person's personal user manual but it's a great way to connect when people join the team it's also a great way for the person writing it to reflect on how they work best because a lot of people they've never been asked to reflect on these things they don't even know what they prefer so they can think about it and that allows them then in conversations with their colleagues to communicate at about that in a clearer way just being able to tell your colleague you know by the way you've been pinging me a lot and it's been a little bit um disruptive when it comes to my focus would you mind when you have all of these queries to maybe wait until you have a few ones and send me one email with bullet points and I promise I will address these by the end of the week or just tell me if something is more urgent and you can do that in a very calm and clear way when you are clear yourself about what works and what doesn't for you that's definitely something I've never thought about before and I think is brilliant and I actually think I'm going to bring it up to the team uh I think it would make for a great exercise we're doing like a halfe uh meeting and I think this might be an exercise I want to bring over uh for everybody to put together and report back at the next week's meeting to share their own little user manual in a loom video for five minutes or something um and then that'll be super fun but I can see the power of doing that and I think it's absolutely brilliant brilliant so thank you for sharing that um of course me being someone that loves templates as you probably picked up on when I said I use so many productivity Tool uh there's a part of me that's already thinking like oh I wonder if I if I want to build a personal user manual uh if I'd be using Chad GPT to help me get the right prompts and to include the right things uh which kind of will L into an AI conversation uh eventually but first I i' I'd love to know do you have an article that speaks about this that people could go deeper in yes absolutely if you look up personal user manuals Nest laabs I'm the kind of person I write I write a lot I've written hundreds of Articles and almost every single thing I've been curious about at some point I ended up publishing an article about so yes nice I would assume this is maybe how the book came together on Tiny experiments um and I wanted to maybe open up a bit about how did this book come together and what got you Tiny Experiments motivated to get started on writing a book yes I um I started writing online more seriously I've been writing online since I was a teenager I've been managing online forums I'm a little bit of a nerd but I started my newsletter about four to five years ago and that was when I decided to really commit to the craft of learning how to research learning how to write learning how to communicate ideas in a way that was both educational and practical and um once the newsletter reached about I think it was around 50,000 subscribers I started having Publishers reaching out and asking me hey have you thought about turning these ideas into a book and I thought you know what actually I think that would be amazing because I've been curious about all of these ideas hundreds of articles but at the moment for someone to you know people who have been subscribed to my newsletter for a few years they've been reading those as I was writing them and Publishing them but if you're new to my work today it's actually quite a lot and it can be maybe a little bit overwhelming to know where to start what is the most important article there and so the idea of having this project where I could go back to everything I wrote and distill it into something really useful really engaging which had a little bit more of a road map and again I call it more of a a road map but it's not prescriptive like it's really a toolbox and so this book has all of the best tools that I have written about as well as a way for people to design their own system based on these tools what I expect is that anyone who finishes reading this book again is going to have a different system from someone else who read it and that's exactly how I designed it I want people to have this system that is really truly their system and to have self-reflection embedded in that system so their system can keep on evolving and so when they look back in three years they almost don't recognize their system and that's fine because if you grow and you evolve yourself ideally you don't want to be able to recognize yourself either and you want your system to change in the same way you do so that's what the book is all about it's called tiny experiments as you mentioned at the beginning and it's all about having this experimental mindset and becoming the scientist of your own life I can't help but imagine or at least think about the fact that most of the people I speak or I've spoken to in the field of productivity seem to be men and it seems like a lot of these sys that have strong rigidity seems to have what I would call like the masculine quality of like order maybe like going into like Jordan Peterson's like Order and Chaos and it sounds like you're bringing in the the the call it the solution to the problem that that causes which is getting stuck in your own ways you're lacking the creativity uh you're lacking The Innovation you're getting into a system and then you're so dug into the system that you can't even you know reinvent yourself and it sounds like you're bringing that Gap and and like putting a highlight on it and then coming up with methods that we can deal with it in a way that might make it much more The Way We Learn (S) accessive to a lot more people than most people who look at these systems that are so rigid and they're like G it's like you're almost turned off by it because it's just so rigid that it doesn't even feel like it could fit within your lifestyle is that ever something you've thought about or that you've intentionally went with you know it's really interesting is that I don't really think about it as teaching people how to have more flexibility or be more creative in the way they approach their productivity um I really see it as teaching them how to relearn that because they they knew it all along it's within them already if you look at the way children navigate the world that is our natural way to learn we poke at things we ask questions we try things we see how that works we make mistakes we fail and then we learn from that we're like oh that didn't go as expected interesting okay let's try another way and that's how we normally learn until we start going to school or at least traditional schools where we get we receive this curriculum very a very linear way of learning a very structured way of learning where we tell you first you're going to learn a once you've mastered a we're going to move on to be and then only you can learn C so instead of seeing knowledge as this messy network of nodes that are all interconnected that don't always immediately make sense and where again we have to just try and experiment and see what works and what doesn't in order to learn we are taught that you need to learn things in a certain order that is there is a certain order to things and if in order to be successful you need to both understand and follow that order so what I'm doing with my work is really helping people unlearn that and know when they want to use structure structure can be helpful but really letting go of the idea that structure is always the best way to approach things it's really about having again this experimental mindset and being able to always ask yourself the question is this a situation where I need a pretty structured system maybe I have a team of 30 people working on a project and we need a pretty solid Reporting System where everybody's going to use the same template because we have clear kpis and we just need to know what's working and what's not working that is completely fine or are we working on something a little bit more creative or a bit earlier in the project where we don't really know what we're trying to achieve here or how we're going to do it and there is a risk in narrowing down our approach too quickly so maybe we want to keep it quite open then and we're going to have a different approach appr then and it's really about having that that approach that is really aware that is really trying to intentionally decide the way you're going to go about things instead of being on autopilot I think anybody doing anything a little more conscious is going to benefit everyone as a whole and what I'd want to do is just again I just want to direct everybody if this whole field of productivity is something you're curious about I do want to direct you to the nest Labs where you're going to see an entire community that and law has put together and uh the book tiny experiments is coming out early 2025 it is available for pre-orders and of course as someone who's written a book and I know how important it is to have pre-orders it's so helpful when you go do that and I think for anyone who wants to accomplish more and you're tired of just seeing productivity methods that are so rigid out there and maybe you want to break out of your own cognitive biases in the way that you get things done and maybe have a bit more joy in the process definitely grab that pre-order you'll get a chance to get that book early next year and I think it's going to be a wonderful tool kit thing that you'll be able to add to go Business of Productivity even Beyond some of the things that were shared already and the reason I kind of transitioned this n is uh I I wanted to go and talk about the business you've built around this because a lot of people are looking at this and they're saying wow okay you got 100,000 people on a newsletter you've built a community and this was actually how I discovered you I was looking at some of the most well-run communities and I kind of wanted to dig uh with the business behind your productivity and the things that you create and I I'd just be very curious to know at what point did you decide uh that you were going to build a community and then I know you charge for people to be on the community so i' I'd be curious to know your journey into getting to that point and what made you choose that as a kind of model for monetization absolutely it was as almost everything I do based on listening to the signals around me and internal signals of how I feel and where my curiosity wants to take me so I had been writing the newsletter for about maybe six to no eight month at that point and it was going really well people were responding very positively to my content and at the end of each newsletter I had a little question which was something like how do you feel this week what's on your mind what's going on in your world and that was a way for me to engage with people not just to broadcast whatever I was writing but to have bit more of a two-way relationship with the audience that was reading the newsletter and in March 2020 you can imagine the kind of responses I got to that question a lot of people replied and said I feel lonely this is terrible I'm stuck at home my creativity is completely gone I can't do any kind of good work I'm a bit of a zombie at work and exactly at that time I connected with two uh Founders who were working on a product called which is a platform that allows you to host an online community and I just connected the dots and I just felt like H What If instead of having that two-way relationship where I just have those little conversations every week after I sent the newsletter to people what if I created a space where there could be a multi-way type of relationship where I'm not kind of a Buttle neck anymore and people can talk to each other not just to me but to each other support each other and learn from each other so I told the founders of circle that yes absolutely I would be happy to be one of the first few people to test their platform and then what I did is that I went back through all of my emails all of those onetoone conversations that I had and I personally invited everyone I had a personal conversation with in the past 6 to eight month when I had started a newsletter and I told them hey you know I really loved our email conversation what do you think about more of an online Forum where you could also connect with other people and that's how I started the nest lab's private Community seeding it with people who were already very engaged with the newsletter in terms of why I decided to charge for people to join I wanted this to be sustainable and I know running a community is a lot of work I used to run online forums as a teenager and I loved it but also I didn't have a job I was a teenager I was spending way too much time in front of my computer and so that was okay I also had someone else who was paying the bills for me and making sure I had food on the table so I didn't have to worry about these things now as an independent adult who has a rent to pay and uh who needs to have Financial Independence I wanted to make sure I had the time the energy necessary in order to make sure that that Community would Thrive and that meant making it financially sustainable and that meant charging I really don't charge a lot it's about $50 a year which is very low compared to a lot of other private communities so it is really not even about making as much money as possible but about making sure I am making enough money that I can make this sustainable that has also allowed me to hire a community manager which has been so helpful because it means that I can focus on doing the things where I can't remember who came up with that phrase but you know your zone of Genius where you can really contribute and you can really move the needle in terms of the experience you're building for other people and the product that you're building so I do workshops I do online courses I do group coaching sometimes I do those kind of things but anything logistical when people are like oh how do I change this in my account or my credit card didn't work and all of that I don't do anymore I have someone helping with this which again would not be possible if the community was not financially sustainable so that's the story the origin story of The Nest laabs Community I agree 100% And um I think that when you have a paid Community it actually creates it's a natural filter for people that are actually serious in investing something aside from just like oh it's free I'm just going to go in right so I'm a big advocate for that but when you're at the early stages it's it's very interesting it's it's quite intimidating to uh go out and start charging for money for a product online and I don't know if you had any experience with that before was there any resistance to it and where it's like Charging for Value oh my God I'm going to take money cuz for a lot of the audience listening to selling with love uh blocks around taking money do exist I don't know if this is something you've faced absolutely I've been told so many times that I should charge more and I I'm still not charging more um so I completely understand I also have a bit of resistance around charging but I think ultimately it's about having confidence in the value that you're providing while making sure that your offer is accessible to the people who need it in my case for example I have people joining from everywhere in the world we have people from India from South America from Africa Europe and North North America and so I wanted to have a pricing that anyone anywhere in the world could afford that was really important to me I also realized that a lot of the the help that we're offering is targeted at people who are sometimes like you know a bit early in designing their productivity system and so because of that I also wanted to make sure that younger people who maybe were in their first job or second job could also afford it that was really important to me so I think it's really about asking yourself who is your offer targeted to what are you offering who do you want uh to have access to it equally I have friends who are in that space who only work with CEOs and their Community has maybe 20 people in there and that's it mine has 2,000 so only have 20 people and they're charging $3,000 for people to join but again there's nothing to feel bad about here because they are offering the kind of really you know onetoone coaching that means that they have to charge more to make it sustainable and they are also working with people who are trying to go from maybe six to seven or sorry seven to eight figures in revenue and who can afford that kind of investment in their productivity systems so there is no bad price and there is no problem with charging as long as you feel like you are aligned in terms of what you're offering and what people need and what they're willing to pay for it once once you figure out that ven diagram you can go about it with confidence and you can absolutely charge and uh you know with love maybe as you say in your in your podcast because you know you're contributing something positive and that it is an investment for people in your community who decide to purchase your service or product 100% agree and yes I would say that is definitely the loving approach to do it um now one of the things is Growing A Newsletter very very impressive is you know you've put together this newsletter and you got yourself into having extremely high numbers on that newsletter you're very early on and I'd be curious to know what were some of the ways that you got your initial momentum for the newsletter and then you've gotten a chance to have it grow quite substantially um so I'd be curious to know some of the initial marketing methods or connections or Partnerships that you form uh because I think going to a place where you create a community and you start charging for it when you know you have that many people that are in the back that have shown interest then you're like okay let's go into a charge uh but to get that initial momentum that's often the most intimidating part so I'd be curious to know about that early part of your journey yes um there's a a chapter in my book called learning in public and that's really what I did here um so the way it works is that instead of doing what we instinctively tend to do when we work on a project where we work with the garage door closed and we wait until everything is perfect to share it with others I did the complete opposite of this so I was very public in the way I was building the new letter I would brainstorm ideas in public on Twitter in slack groups I was a part of on telegram those were the platforms that I was using at the time but I would really sometimes like post a list of topics and say hm this week I'm kind of hesitating in between those three topics which one do you think I should write about and people would vote on this I would pick one I would write about it I would share screenshots of my drafts and say oh I'm a little bit stuck here does anyone have a recommendation for a book or a podcast I should listen to that is about this topic because I'm not really quite sure where to go next for the next paragraph and this article I'm writing and people again would contribute ideas here and say oh actually I listened to that episode I think it would be great you should listen to it and then I would post a newsletter I would share my numbers every week and say we have 2,000 more subscribers this is growing this is great say and I feel like people were supportive because they were part of the journey I was also sharing all of the mistakes that I made there were articles for example there's one in particular that I remember that I published was about power posing and I I wrote about it I published it and then turns out actually there had been new research coming out showing that it doesn't work at all and so instead of quietly removing the article from my website I posted about it I said oh look I made that mistake I didn't see this new research I updated the article with the old version that was wrong and a note saying this is wrong here's what's right here's an update again learning in public being very transparent about the mistakes that I was making in the way I was growing the newsletter as well I tried different things I tried to learned a little bit about SEO I tried different social media platforms and I was documenting all of this and telling people this worked this didn't work so all of that really meant that very early on even before I launched the community on Circle feel like I had a community already it was never an audience it was never just me sharing my work and waiting for people to consume it we almost co-created Nest laabs together with everybody who was engaging with the content and I think that's why it grew so quickly because people felt like they were part of it and they were sharing it with their friends all of that obviously would not have worked if I didn't consistently write content every week uh this is very important in the sense that I think it's 98% of blogs that are abandoned after one year and so obviously you're not going to be successful in that space if you just stop creating content so yes first create content but second really try to connect with people at a deeper level learn in public share all of your mistakes what works and what doesn't and make sure that people want to help and be a part of it rather than just hitting publish and then disappearing again until the next newsletter yeah I think that human element that you bring probably makes a lot more people be excited about cheering you on and being a part of the journey so what you just shared to me is so valuable and I hope for everybody listening here you understand why this is so important to be there to care and to be doing something that aligns with what you're excited about creating because you're going to be continuously doing that and you know I see this happen in the podcast space in the blogging space in the social space and the influ any space it's like everybody gets excited to start but to continue doing it long term is a completely different thing good part is is there's not too much competition when it comes to going over a year so if you can go through that first year and then you continuously craft and refine your craft and then involve the community I think everything you've shared an is going to be very easy for people to take on the nuggets and then put that into their own space as well uh which brings me kind of about this the last thing I kind of want to Saving Time with AI talk about uh in this space is because of this um Jugger not elephant in the room which is the space of AI coming in automating content creation coming and taking away the humanity we're talking about a completely new species um whatever you want to label AI but that's obviously disrupting workplaces productivity uh creators uh and I just love to hear a bit of your own uh thought patterns and what experiments you've been doing with AI I love AI I think it's been incredibly helpful I don't think I'll be able I'd be able to do a lot of the work that I'm doing today if it didn't exist it has really expanded the realm of possibilities in terms of projects that we're working on because we're just saving so much time and the main way that I use it is almost as a a thinking partner I like to use it to challenge my ideas and the ways that I might go about approaching a project so something I I love to do for example it's said the very beginning of a project is to type up my notes in a document and just say you know this is how I would go about it those would be maybe the three main phases we would need to go through the resources that we would need and what we're hoping to achieve and then I would put it in chat GPT and literally ask it to tear it apart critique this tell me everything that's wrong with it what else would you do how would you approach this and it I might not use everything that it's generating but it's always coming up with ideas showing some blind spots that I had and it means that in 2 minutes I can get that feedback instead of doing it the old way where I would have to ask the entire team to find a time where we can sit in a room and all brainstorm together to get to something that is not even that generative we're not even doing work that is producing anything helpful we're just trying to find our blind spots so that's one use case where I feel like AI is a lot better and a better use of resources so people can focus on the ACT ual creative work actually using their brains to do the thing that they're uniquely good at so I love AI for this uh another way I use it which is also quite similar is when I'm writing articles I will write my outline and same I will put it in chat GPT and ask am I missing anything you remember that thing I mentioned about power posing and how actually I was not aware that there was new research showing that it was wrong this is helping me notice if there's something you know maybe I read about it a couple of years ago and I'm not aware of new research that has come out and especially nowadays you know when was it the last time that a man could a human could know everything that that was known to men I think it was in during the Renaissance like now it's impossible for you to know everything and science has become really fragmented so you can have a psychologist that has some knowledge and a neuroscientist that has some knowledge and an evolutionary biologist who has some knowledge and they use completely different words to talk about the same thing and so the psychologist will never know about the research that the biologist has come up with and AI is very helpful for this as a translator across different fields of research and so I can put my outline in there and I can say I'm a cognitive neuroscientist so I wrote this outline from that perspective am I missing anything and is there any research in other fields that I'm not familiar with that would maybe augment that outline or maybe that would contradict some of the ideas that I wrote about here and again so helpful and then when I get to the point where I'm actually writing the article I'm sure that I'm not missing anything important and I love the way that you're using it I love the way that you think and I think I've already assumed if I had your personal user manual I think I understand how you like your feedback probably quite direct so you can improve from there which is also how I appreciate uh the feedback but honestly it's been such a wonderful tool personally I've been using it for a non-b buus function I've been using it to help me plan my wedding where me and my partner are basically asking it to ask us what are the questions we should be making sure we're clear on and aligned on so we can make sure that happens without a flaw so I think there's so many beautiful ways to use it and I'm always polite with my AI buddy because you know when sentience comes I want to be one of the nice pets you know thank you always say thank you to your AI always and L I know there's so much more we could continue to discuss I absolutely love everything that you've been doing on the field of productivity I'm so excited for your book coming out again I want to encourage everyone grab the link in the show notes we're going to make sure that tiny experiments you get to put in a pre-order it's coming out early 2025 and we've only talked about a few of the little experiments that anla has put together but there's so much more that will help help you think more creatively be more human be more productive and not burn out in the process process of being more productive it doesn't mean being more productive is you're working day in day out and never taking care of your personal life rather you're finding ways to be more optimized so that you can enjoy your life more have more freedom and get more things done too I love the journey on how you built your community your newsletter which has this focus on the humanity which I think is something we often skip we're looking for the tips the tricks the shortcuts to growth and often times that's just tripping away the humanity which is the very essence that helps you build a brand build a following and having people that care about what you're creating so the way that you approach this I think is a very very useful reminder for everybody on how we can go about building our business for today uh it's been an absolute wonderful conversation I love my biggest takeaway being the personal user manual is something I really want to bring forward within my own team so I'm so excited to be able to apply that and honestly it's been an absolute Joy having this conversation and discovering more from Nest Labs which I'll also put a link in the show notes so you guys can actually go and join this community I've paid my dues I've joined the community and I have uh my team members actually looking around into the community H to see not only exactly all the amazing stuff you do on the productivity level but also on the amazing way that you do run your community is something to be inspired by so thank you so much for your time and for everybody else tuning in go out there be productive and of course keep selling with love thank you for having me thank you so much for listening to the selling with love podcast we have some previous episodes you can tune into right here and if you prefer the short form content where you get to the point in under 10 minutes we do have a ton of clicks from our best episodes that are being shared on this channel as well so pick which one supports you the most and of course thank you for liking subscribing and of course selling with love