The best productivity apps (for people who hate planning and want to stay creative)

i'm bringing some christmas mood to your home because i know that this december especially with all the lockdowns everything i'm looking forward is christmas and new year's and i'm just hoping to brighten up your day by sitting in front of the christmas tree in this video today we're going to talk about productivity apps about what i do during the day to stay productive and i wanted to warn you that this video will not be this typical productivity videos that you see on youtube because in those videos people come up with different methods how they have this one big goal that they split up into sprints and they do things during the week during the day and they do marathons and they do this this and that i don't do any of those the thing is i'm such a person that really wants freedom and i'm the most productive on the days when i have nothing planned when i just wake up and do whatever i want i start creating i start writing scripts and the only method that i used to use was a method when you work for 25 minutes and then you rest for five minutes i know the timing can be different you can do like 50 minute work 10 minute rest but i realize that i use this method only when i do something i don't really enjoy so for example a couple years ago i was writing my book in russian and it took months it was such a long process and i became so tired of it i was like oh my god because i i wanted to redo every single page and it took me a while and i was completely exhausted so i realized i have to finish that book i have my publisher who wants me to send them the text in like four months and i have this period of time to finish it so i did those sprints where i wrote for 25 minutes and then rested for five minutes and whenever i told my brain you know marina it's only gonna be 25 minutes it was a lot easier for me to start because when i told my brain marina it's going to be only 15 minutes my brain was like no no 15 minutes is a lot so 25 minute sprints really work for me when i'm doing something i don't really enjoy when i do something that i love i don't need any schedules i don't need my day planned every 15 minutes because this just makes me depressed and i know people are different and i also understand that i have big goals i have a team i have some things that i want to achieve so in order to interact with people in order to have meetings in order to have things scheduled of course i have a calendar let's talk about the calendar that i use i use google calendar i started using it back in 2015 when we came to silicon valley and people were like marina send me an invite i'm like what does that mean so i started asking around and people explained that when you're asked to send an invite that means you're sending an invite in google or google calendar so i started using google calendar myself and what i really like is that it helps with time zones especially when you're traveling and the second thing i like is that i can have multiple calendars the first calendar that i have is my personal calendar no one has access to it just me so it's like personal stuff doctors whatever the second calendar is open to a lot of members on my team it's open to linguatrip members it is open to my assistant so for example my sales manager tells me marina we have this company who wants to sponsor your video i'll be like okay perfect and she would create an event in my calendar with all the technical details that i need to go through in my video so that the next time i'm in the studio i open this calendar and i say okay i have this scheduled i need to film this ad what happens later is that i send everything to my editors and when they start working on a video instead of asking me marina or instead of asking my sales manager what should we do with this ad they just open my calendar they see all the technical details and they know exactly what to do because they see everything that the company wanted and then once they finish the video they create an event when this video is going to be published with a link to the video so my sales manager just takes it from there and sends it this just removes all the unnecessary communication especially because we're fully remote people are in different time zones and it would have been very difficult to have all of those messenger conversations asking for details etc so this way calendar really saves lives and when linguatrip wants me on some call or when linguatrip wants me to promote something they open my calendar they see what's scheduled and i have a very clear instruction how to work with my calendar for example if i already have a meeting that day there can be another meeting because i have to spend time with my baby as well so once you put something like that in practice you really need to have very clear instructions for everyone on the team so you have all the details about it now let's talk about communication for communication i use telegram this is my work messenger and everyone who i work with is normally in that messenger whatsapp is for family only and for example telegram is completely muted on every single device because for telegram i have a very strict schedule i try to switch it off at 7 00 pm because otherwise it's like with email back in the day you just keep checking it what's happening what's going on and this is really unhealthy this is really unproductive and if you're doing something on your laptop and you have this telegram icon jumping all the time and making sounds you just lose focus and this is something i can't afford when i try to be the most productive so telegram is completely muted whatsapp is always on because it's only for family and it's like 10 minutes a day i also use imessage and facebook messenger somehow all of my american friends prefer uh those messengers if we go into telegram the thing i like the most about it is that you can create folders and then they're all muted all hidden in folders and this way you are really focused on chatting to people instead of like constantly checking different channels by the way i just realized that five years ago if i made this video i would tell you every morning i wake up i check my email and i have 50 emails that's no longer the case i think during the day i get five to six emails maybe less and with email i also have a very strict rule i check it in the morning and in the evening because when we talk about email i mostly get things that i really need to work on like signing an agreement i need to really go through it and make sure there are no things that i want to change or getting some offers from other companies so it takes a while and i realized i don't want to split my day to check emails because if something comes up i would be like oh i need to go through this so it's only in the morning and only in the evening the next thing that's related both to email and to the notes that i'm going to talk about after this when i did a lot of email communications i thought oh my god i'm gonna use all the folders and i'm gonna put every new email to the folder with the company's name or maybe it's my lore so i would put everything in one folder and then i realized that i spent a lot more time arranging my emails than actually looking for them because it's a lot easier to look for them by just typing things in search so if you're still doing it really stop there and ask yourself whether you want to continue doing i know some people just love order but in my case i realized that i spent so much time doing that and it's completely unproductive if you want to hear some fancy app that i use for taking notes unfortunately there isn't any fancy app i use notes that are on ipad iphone and mac they're all synchronized i have an ipad pro mini with an apple pencil and i love writing notes with my hand it's a nightmare when you want to search for something because sometimes i read in russian sometimes i read in english and this ai is not too smart and it cannot recognize most of my handwriting but the thing is before having this ipad i had so many notebooks i had so many pieces of paper everywhere and once we started traveling i was like i just need to carry everything with me because i need this notebook because it's for language hub and i need this notebook because it's for my youtube channel and now i just have everything in one place and that's amazing let's talk about folders in notes i have a lot of folders but again i had a period of my life where i was like i want to sort every single note and i want to put it into a folder so i have everything organized etc and then i realized i never use the folders i only use the folders in two cases if i'm taking a course so i would just put all the notes that i was taking during this course into a folder and the second is instagram so whenever i create a post i read it in notes and then i would put it in the instagram folder just because later on i might want to use it on youtube or maybe i want to use it for one of my scripts or maybe i want to use it in one of my emails i just want to have everything in one place and whenever i post i try to create something meaningful so it's good to have all of those meaningful things in one place one of the notes that i always have on top is a list of things that i need to do during the week or during the next week this is something not very urgent but something that i have to do for example i don't know automate investing or sign this contract or figure out 401k plan or whatever like these tasks should be performed within the next week or two weeks and it's very easy to forget about them i don't like putting them in calendar you know finding the right investment platform is not something i have to do at 6 pm on wednesday it's just something i have to do in the next couple weeks so it's just a note with a list of tasks i try to keep it on five seven tasks because yes i can come up with a lot of those but if it's more than five seven ten i just become overwhelmed with the amount of things i need to do now let's talk about calls i have calls with a team some of them are regular some of them are not it is very important for me to prepare for every single call because if i come there with no agenda it just means wasting everyone's time so if you feel that you have too many calls on your team and there are calls just for the sake of calls stop doing them because we had we made this mistake we had so many calls planned with a lot of people and then we realized that during the calls we were just chatting about nothing so i really minimized the amount of calls to a couple per week and they have to be really really meaningful like discussing strategy or discussing current problem but calling for the sake of calling really makes you unproductive during the day because for me again it works in a way that if every single minute of my day is filled with something i don't have this time for creativity i don't have this time to really get excited about what i do because it's just you know following my schedule another app that you guys probably started using a lot this year is zoom and when it came around i was like why would people use zoom there is skype the problem with skype is that you have your id and if you're doing a lot of consultations or if you're doing a lot of calls people start following up on skype i never check my skype and people start getting offended like you never replied and i just don't check it with zoom that problem is solved you don't have an id well you have an id but you don't share it so whenever you attend the meeting it's just a link it's anonymous people can't follow up with you on zoom and another great thing that i love about zoom is that when you create a call there it automatically goes to your calendar it automatically goes to your colleagues calendar so you don't have to chat again and ask do you want to jump on a call or here's the link oh don't forget to join it just goes into their calendars very easy now let's talk a little about social networks if you watch my video about being unproductive and kind of depressed i talked about instagram so with instagram or with any other social network the problem is you keep checking it because more content keeps coming in you need to stop that influx of content so what i did with instagram i have this instagram which is my main instagram where i post stories where i interact with my followers i unfollowed almost everyone and i follow like 33 people i muted them and this way whenever i go to instagram nothing's happening i have another profile where i follow all my friends and they're not muted but i only go there when i really have free time maybe like once a day or even less and this way i was able to reduce my time on instagram for two to three hours to around 40 minutes every day and i use those 40 minutes mostly to create content not consume content you can do this with any other social network one of my favorite social networks these days is twitter i know it's very political and there is also a lot of hate there but the thing is you need to follow the right people so the people i follow are paul graham gary tan uh lenny rachetsky like a lot of talented people from silicon valley a lot of people who are from big corporations so they sort news for me i don't have to go to any news outlet or news resource i just follow those people and they talk about things that matter for me as well they talk about business they talk about major political things so i just followed them and that really helped me clear my mind and that really helped me consume more valuable content so if you want to follow those people just go to twitter linguamarina and see who i follow i don't really post there so no need to follow me i sometimes do really rarely but again i follow people who are really like they're not really present on any other social network so this is why twitter has become one of my favorite social media platforms recently as a person who creates content consumes content of course i use youtube i have youtube premium because i just can't watch all the ads we have a family subscription so it's a lot cheaper i just connected my mom my husband and uh my husband's parents and we can all enjoy ad-free content i also use creator studio a lot creative studio is an app for youtubers where you can just check your comments where you can check how your video is performing and it's on my phone so i use it every single day that was it for me for today guys as you've noticed this is not a typical productivity video i even haven't mentioned trello i haven't mentioned microsoft project or whatever i am this person who really feels that if i have less planned i'm a lot more productive and i know guys there are so many people out there we have our own personalities and you know i used to watch garyvee videos a lot and when i watched him he was like wake up at 4am 4 30 first call 5am company meeting i was like oh my god he's so so so productive maybe i should do the same and i was like okay i'm going to try gary v sal and i started waking up at like five or six a.m every single day and in three days my jaw started hurting like this this was the first time something that happened to me i couldn't speak because my jaw was really really hurting and i started reading on google and this is a consequence from lack of sleep and i realized you know waking at 5am is not my thing i feel a lot better when i wake up at 8 a.m 9 a.m but not 5. so you can try different things you can listen to a lot of people but really it's up to you what stays in your routine and what doesn't and if you feel that a person who you admire has everything planned every minute planned it doesn't mean that it's going to work for you it means that it works for that type of personality so really try things don't try to copy someone try to listen to yourself when you feel the most productive when you feel the best those are your methods thank you so much guys for watching this video up to the very end if you're not yet subscribed to silicon valley girl hit the red button down below if you enjoyed this content hit the like button and i can't wait to read your comments what are your productivity methods what works for you because all the methods that i mentioned in this video were taken from my friends from friends of friends something i heard of you on youtube and then i just left those that work for me.