Alexis Haselberger, a productivity coach who’s taught 170,000+ people and worked with Google and CapitalOne, on improving our effectiveness at work by tweaking our systems (#12)

Alexis has over 15 years of experience in HR roles within fast-paced startups. She now channels her expertise in sustainable productivity into workshops, speaking engagements, and coaching. Her insights have been featured in Fast Company, Oprah Magazine, Thrive Global, The Muse, Forbes, Lifehacker, and Business Insider. A registered corporate coach with the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, Alexis has worked with leading companies like Google and Capital One and has been recognized as a top coach by Coach Foundation.

Top 3 quotes from the episode

"I think that the point of planning is to be able to make better prioritization decisions because there will always be things that come up."

"I think about a concept I call task realism, which is like, look, if you have, I'll simplify it. If you have time to do five things tomorrow, would you prefer to have five things on your list and do those five things or 25 things on your list and do five of them? Because even if you do the same five things, In the latter scenario, you feel terrible about yourself. And in the prior scenario, you feel good about yourself, but the same amount of stuff got done."

"I would pick just one thing and commit to trying it out for a week and then evaluating, iterating, seeing how it goes after that."

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More quotes from the episode

"There will always be stuff you didn't know about yesterday that has to be done today, and having a plan allows you to better evaluate those things. So you can say, oh, is this thing that's coming in right now more important or less important than what I'd already intended to do?"

"the work that I do with folks is really to help people learn how to use their time in accordance with their own goals and values so that they don't feel overwhelmed anymore. So that they're making time for the things that are important for them."

"So often we think it has to be either, or, like you can have a successful career or you can have a really fulfilling personal life. And I just don't think that's the case"

"Who's going to say they're unwilling to experiment, right? That's not a good look. Most people are willing to be like, yeah, let's try it for a couple of weeks. Let's see if it works. That's a whole lot easier than being like, let's change everything"

"We can control what we put into something. We cannot control what we get out of it. We can only influence it."

"And the real goal is to be ruthlessly realistic about what I can accomplish because I think that so often we show up with like a wish list of I want to get these 35 things done today, but I only have two hours to do them."

"I think it can be pretty easy to look at a list of 10 things and say, Oh, it's only 10 things. I can do those. But if you try to start mapping out how much time those things are going to take, you very quickly realize like you only have time for four of them"

Show Notes

Overview of her work (1:51)

Framing changes as experiments (3:17)

Focusing on inputs over arbitrary deadlines (7:04)

Changing default times for meetings (9:43)

Addressing distractions (12:04)

Understanding how we work best (17:45)

Rapid-fire questions (21:54)

Maximising the utility of plans (25:29)

Hypothetical scenarios (30:00)

Calendar vs todo list (35:17)