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Carl Pullein - analog productivity interview

Carl Pullein - analog productivity interview

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I recently sat down with Carl Pullein, a productivity consultant and YouTuber who has spent over a decade helping people get organized. Carl has been using Todoist for twelve years, Evernote for sixteen, and last year he ran a full-year experiment with a Franklin Planner. We talked about why people keep switching tools, why paper still matters, and why convenience might not be as good for us as we think.What came out of the conversation surprised me. Not because the ideas were new, but because they made so much sense - and because science keeps confirming what a simple notebook already knew.Here is what I learned.Stop Switching Apps - You Are Not Doing Any WorkThe first thing Carl told me was blunt. When you switch productivity apps, you are not doing any work. You are just moving stuff from one side of your desk to the other. It is the digital version of shuffling papers around and calling it progress.Most people will never admit this, but the real reason they switch is because the new app looks prettier. Then they find a better excuse. “My current system feels overwhelming.” But here is the thing - it looks overwhelming because of what you put in there. It is not the tool. It is always what you are putting in it.Unless something is actually broken, switching apps is one of the biggest time-wasting activities you can do. Carl has been with Todoist for twelve years. He knows every keyboard shortcut, every workaround, every little trick. That knowledge compounds over time. You do not get that by jumping ship every six months.The Dopamine Trap of a Fresh StartSwitching apps feels good. That is the dopamine talking. You get a momentary sense of relief because you eliminate a lot of the mess from your old system when you transfer to the new one. But give it two or three weeks and it is just as overwhelming as before. Then you see a YouTube video about yet another new app, and the whole cycle starts again.Carl put it beautifully. You are focusing on the tools instead of focusing on the craft. A carpenter who makes chairs and works of art is not constantly shopping for new hammers. Those guys have tools that are a hundred years old, handed down from their grandparents. It is not the tools that make you productive. It is you. It is the clarity of knowing what is important to you and to the work you are doing. The tools are often a distraction, especially if you are changing them all the time.To prove this point, Carl regularly runs experiments where he switches to tools he does not normally use - Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, even a paper planner for a whole year. And every time, his system stays the same. The work gets done. The tools change, the output does not.A Carpenter’s Hammer and the Franklin PlannerCarl’s preferred stack is simple. Todoist for tasks. Evernote for notes. Apple Calendar for scheduling. That is it. No fancy project management software. No complex integrations. When I asked him about project management, he said he uses Evernote as his project manager. He even wrote his book over three years using Scrivener for the writing and Evernote for all the surrounding notes, meetings, and checklists.But the most interesting part of Carl’s system is not digital at all. It is the Franklin Planner he brought back into his life after first using one in 1992. What he loves about it is the layout - tasks on the left, calendar in the middle, notes on the right. When he writes out his appointments by hand, he can visually see how much time he realistically has to do actual work. If the page is full of meetings, he knows not to pile on tasks.This is something digital tools are terrible at. You can schedule your day three times over and the app will still accept it. Paper has a built-in constraint. When the page is full, the day is full. That limitation is not a bug. It is a feature.The Power of a Pocket NotebookCarl carries a small pocket notebook everywhere. When he watches his favorite podcasts in the evening - Cal Newport, The Rest Is History - he keeps his little notebook next to him instead of a phone. Random thoughts, content ideas, project sparks - they all go in there. It is, by his own admission, a complete mess. But every Saturday during his weekly planning, he goes through the previous week’s notes and pulls out anything worth moving into his digital system.The pocket notebook serves another purpose too. Carl’s wife is Korean and operates on Korean time, which means ten minutes late. Carl is from the UK, which means ten minutes early. So he often has a fifteen-to-twenty-minute window sitting in the car waiting. And instead of scrolling, he writes. He told me there is something about pen and paper that engages the brain better than any digital tool.I started doing something similar years ago - copying the day’s events and tasks onto a paper pocket notepad. If I ran out of space on the page, it meant I would not have the time to do the task. The page was the day. Simple, visual, ...
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