📖 Read the full transcript of this episode
In this episode, Andrew chats with Charlie Grinnell, the productivity-obsessed Co-CEO of RightMetric. Together, they get into his foolproof system for getting things done and how AI has revolutionized his workflow.
Tune in to learn how to boost your productivity and achieve more with less.
00:00 Intro
00:33 Getting to Know Charlie
3:17 Charlie's Typical Day
5:15 Charlie's Journaling Routine
11:56 Charlie's Library of Journaling Questions
13:48 Facilitating Deep Work
15:39 Dealing With Low Priority Tasks
20:09 Avoiding Distraction While in Deep Work
21:19 Time spent in Deep Work
23:19 Meeting Recordings, Transcripts, & CRMs
26:48 Charlie's System for Reading
31:35 Keeping Track of Interesting Podcast Tidbits
34:22 Dealing With AI's Recency Bias
35:57 How Charlie Keeps Consistent With His System
38:11 What Drives Charlie to Create Systems
42:18 Broken Parts of Charlie's System
44:00 What Charlie's Looking Forward to With AI
45:55 Other Interesting Ways Charlie Uses AI
49:30 Products Charlie Really Loves
LinkedIn: /charliegrinnell
Twitter/X: @CharlieGrinnell
Instagram: @charliegrinnell
Auto-generated from YouTube. May contain minor errors.
when we think about AI everyone goes oh like AI is coming it's going to take our jobs I think the benefit for AI first and foremost is like personal productivity when you start to add up that hours saved on an individual level when it comes to personal productivity that's really really exciting what I actually did was I created a prompt that can shuffle questions each day so in my note when I go for a walk I quickly look down and there's five questions already there I'm able to dump my brain out in a way I can go into my notes and chat about books that I've read and taken highlights from like have I read anything that would be helpful for this and it will like pull things together I'm like oh that's awesome Charlie what's up what are you up to it is a nice sunny day here in Vancouver and excited to chat with you about the nerdy productivity stuff that you and I talk about in our group text with all of our other nerdy friends yeah so Charlie and I have a group thread with what like maybe 10 other guys and it's all the most anal retentive productivity nerds that I know and we like exchange tips and stuff and Charlie is like he's the man in this group because he will often share these amazing walkthrough videos of his setup and I recently watched one and I was like I got to have him on because more people need to know about this
before we dig into all that I think this podcast often like I interview somebody I just want this to be like a learning session basically for people to understand how you work and some of these tools because the way that you use AI and note-taking tools and some of the stuff that's out right now is very unique I haven't seen anyone else do it before we do that do you want to give a little bit of background on yourself yeah absolutely I think that my kind of foray into the world of digital note taking and productivity was more so a function of me and my career and where I was at so like you I dropped out of University I never went back and I got into marketing so I'm a marketer by trade I worked on the brand side for many many years at Brands like Aritzia and Red Bull and I think like as I went through my career and marketing just being chaotic I realized that I just needed to get my stuff together I needed to organize myself and I think that with how the way the digital world has gone with all these different devices there was all these kind of like new tools coming into play and so it kind of became this like side hobby of like researching into these things but then as I started to put them together it allowed me to get more done
and I think about like now as I build a company this idea of like needing to organize yourself before you kind of organize anything else really rung true and so as you said like we have our productivity group chat with everybody and it all started about us just kind of sharing like how can we get organized to get more done and then that started with recording some videos and now here we are so I think like my foray into it has been very much like hobby on the side to then also looking to improve myself in various areas which has led to me just like building these systems so that I can just be a better version of myself whether that's at work whether that's in my personal life you can kind of apply it to anything so that's really what led to me kind of developing these systems and going down the rabbit hole and becoming a nerd I guess in this space let's zoom out before we zoom in so tell us about your typical day how do you structure your day I try to kind of cherry-pick and curate from a bunch of different places right so like there's all these kind of different productivity nerds out there whether it's Ali Abdaal or Thiago Forte or whoever I think for me what I really focused on was what do I like my typical day I've even taken inspiration from you I really like doing deep work in the morning so I really try and avoid morning meetings
so I typically keep my mornings pretty open and try and put my meetings into the afternoon I wake up every morning and before I actually start my deep work I go for a walk and I do some journaling which we'll talk about in a little bit here I come back home I do some deep work until I get to lunchtime eat some lunch then the afternoon is typically meetings from like 1 to 4 and then 4 to 5 is kind of like clean up and organize for the next day and then dinner time all that good stuff reading in the evening that sort of thing so that's kind of like the typical work day I also really try to do no meeting Mondays which like sometimes is very aspirational it definitely doesn't happen but I think just like protecting that time especially like us as knowledge workers we spend so much time hopping on zooms or calls I just think we need to really focus on getting work done and having that uninterrupted time so I really try and protect that so the four kind of core elements of your day so one is journaling and reflecting the other is deep work time the next is scheduled meetings and then the final is kind of reading and digesting yeah that's a good way to summarize it and then there will be like different social commitments put in there but I think I've just tried to chunk my day down and simplify and really just streamline
right like I know when you had Jason Fried on he was talking about just like saying no to things and being more disciplined with your schedule so yeah we're going to talk about productivity and that sort of thing but half the battle is just like saying no and like ruthlessly prioritizing things which is definitely easier said than done so let's zoom in so let's talk about journaling because I have really struggled with journaling I've always wanted to do it and I think that everybody loves the idea of being able to note take and be in meetings and remember what happened and say even like with an employee hey in that meeting you said you'd do this and you didn't to hey I feel depressed today why might I feel depressed and digging into those thoughts or whatever you have a very interesting system that I've never seen anything like before can you walk us through it yeah absolutely I can maybe I'll talk about the challenges first so like you journaling has been that thing that we've all heard about where it's like you should journal all the benefits of journaling and then you feel like a total schmuck for not journaling and it's so hard to actually get into I think for me I have awful handwriting I'm not a designer like you and I wish I was the guy that could sit in the coffee shop with like a nice leather notebook and have really nice handwriting and dump my brain out over my coffee I am not that guy
if you looked at my handwriting it looks like a serial killer and so I think writing in a notebook while I really wanted to be able to do that was a pain and the other thing is when you're staring at a blank cursor in a Google doc or Notes app I notice that when I sit to write something I tend to edit my thoughts so I'll start to write something and I'll be like ah is that what you really mean and you stop yourself and so I was like I just want something that's like a natural brain dump like how can I eliminate the friction of just getting thoughts out of my head and the third thing I noticed for me was I love walking and I love walking in the morning and that's usually when I'm thinking about things and so I kind of just started looking around and thinking about how I could do this and I landed on a note taking app called Reflect and this is the note taking app that you and a bunch of the people in our group chat use it has this really awesome transcription feature so what I started to do was on my morning walks I was like huh could I actually just record voice memos and dump my brain into how I'm feeling and that was kind of like the first version was I would just go for a walk and the first few minutes of the walk I would just be like how am I feeling today what am I anxious about what am I excited about who am I trying to be today and that was really the start of it
