Zachary Sexton

Zachary Sexton has been reading, writing, experimenting, speaking on productivity for the last 3.5 years and nothing gives him more pleasure than showing business owners and individuals how to be more productive by using online and mobile tools to create their own digital organization systems.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Zachary’s success

Using to-do lists

Result if you follow the steps in Zachary’s session

Keep your stress-level down, and never lose a good idea or important notes ever again by writing everything down and organizing your thoughts into a customizable system

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Some of the tools that I use, first, it’s easy to write them down if you have a good quick capture system, so paper works great. I love having in my back pocket, I don’t actually have it is a moleskin when I go out and I feel like I don’t want to be using my phone, if I’m talking with somebody, I’ll have a have a little paper notebook there where I write little notes down.

For the most part, I actually use my phone and there’s a there’s an application called Quick drafts that I use on my iPhone, that you just open it up and you write little notes on it. And this could be anything. It could be maybe a quote that I thought was cool. It could be a little reminder to follow up with something. It’s sort of just an easy way to get something into my system.

The other place where I write things down is Evernote. I’m a journal or so i just i prompt myself with certain questions, but I also just journal what I’ve done throughout the day, and oftentimes running through the day, especially at the end or the next morning reminds me, Oh yeah, I gotta follow up with that or I need to set that calendar appointment or that one would be a cool project, let me put it on the someday maybe list.

So Evernotes the second place that I have my capture system and OmniFocus is the to do list manager that I use. And the nice thing about OmniFocus is that you can have your someday maybe list somewhat hidden, so you don’t have to see it every single day. And set it to pop up every however often you want.

It could be every week, every three weeks, every month, every quarter, you could set up my Spanish one probably, I would imagine set to every 90 days, it’ll pop up like all right, Spanish, somebody’s got to do right now. And I say no or decided next action or yes, and I put it in my projects list. So that’s the benefit of OmniFocus.

But there are ton of task managers out there assignment to do list, use Trello for very long time. So there’s a lot of different ways. And then the Google Docs and my dad had separate google docs for each one at first and then I think he just ended up using one Long Google Doc, he wasn’t a big fan of the Sunday maybe.

So he didn’t have to worry about being distracted by that, like I did. So he just had like, okay, these are, these are some next actions that I have to do this today, here’s, here’s something that I need to get done by the end of the week, here are some things that need to get done by the end of the month. And write them down there.