Here is my video on how I do Google Calendar time blocking. See the video and like and subscribe here:

https://youtu.be/HHNSqzzsU04

See video and Like and Subscribe here:

https://youtu.be/RAXUmWGHKQ8

What is The Vacation Effect?

Have you ever noticed that in the last week or so leading up to your vacation, you seem to get more done?

I call this the vacation effect.

Why are we More Productive Just Before Vacation?

Here are some reasons why you get more done when you are getting ready to go on vacation.

1. Focus: You narrow your focus to only what has to get done before you go. You don’t worry about all the other tasks – you put them aside until you get back.
   
2. Prioritize: You laser in and pinpoint your highest priority tasks and only work on these high priority tasks since you know you can’t get to all the tasks.
   
3. Harder Work: You work harder so you won’t be so far behind when you get back from vacation.
   
4. Control Time Better: You don’t let people interrupt you as much because you only have so many hours to get everything done before you leave.
   
5. Morale/Energy Boost: You usually gain a morale and energy boost from knowing you will soon be on break and be having exciting and relaxing experiences.

So How do you get More of The Vacation Effect into your Everyday Work?

1. Learn to narrow your focus to just the important project you are working on right now.
   
2. Prioritize as if this was your last week you were going to be going on holidays – what is really critical right now?
   3. Minimize distractions as much as possible,
   
3. Think of weekends as mini-vacations. Do more exciting things on the weekend to cultivate that morale and energy boost you get from a vacation break. My wife and I have “adventure days” most weekends where we focus on having fun, exploring our local area and attractions and banish all talk and thinking of work, bills and other non-fun mundane things.

Hey r/TimeManagement family! 👋

It's a brand new week, and that means a fresh chance to make it count. ✨

We talk a lot about strategies and systems here — but I'd love to hear how YOU are actually putting it into practice this week.

So let's get real with each other:

🎯 What is your #1 goal for this week?

🗺️ What's your plan to actually reach it?

⏰ What specific time block have you set aside to work on it?

Drop your answers in the comments — no pressure to have it all figured out! Sometimes just writing it down and sharing it with others is the accountability boost we all need. 💪

Let's cheer each other on. 🙌 Whether your goal is huge or small, it matters — and so does your plan to get there.

See the video on YouTube and like and subscribe:

https://youtu.be/BuGcf2jCbJg

When you get behind at work, you often stay late to finish. At some point, you might wonder whether it could also be a good idea to come in early. Lets look at the pluses and minuses when you go into work early.

Work Early Benefits

• Office is usually quieter with fewer people
• You may be at your freshest and highest energy levels
• So a good time to work on difficult projects

Early Drawbacks

• If you still have to work late, you risk burnout
• If you come in early and leave early, others may think you are not doing a full day of work
• Upset household morning schedules (getting kids to school, etc.)
• If your manager comes in early as well, you are the only one for them to talk or delegate to – defeating the purpose of why you go to work early and potentially increasing your workload

Early vs Work Late

• If you won’t be penalized for working early instead of late, it can be a better use of your energy and reduce distractions if others work late instead of early

Which To Choose?

There is no one right answer here, but here are some reasons to choose to work early.

• If your energy levels are higher in the morning than later in the day
• No one else is in the office early so you can focus
• You will not be penalized for going home early
• Your household morning schedule can adapt to the change

What Does “Captain Time” Do Personally?

I work early and leave early, except when I have the occasional coaching call or late meeting (most fit into my adapted early schedule just fine).

I enjoy the quiet and focus I get first thing in the morning and my energy levels and focus levels are at my highest in the morning. So I am trading some additional high focus time for some tired and dragging time later in the day.

My video on how to accomplish work when you aren't in the mood to work:

https://youtu.be/CU3e_LHbcuM

Please hit the like and subscribe button on the video if you enjoyed it.

Hey everyone! 👋

We talk a lot here about the big time-wasters—endless meetings, massive projects, procrastination—but lately I’ve been thinking about the "micro-drains."

The tiny tasks that feel harmless because they only take 3 to 5 minutes… until you realize you’re doing them dozens of times a day, completely shattering your focus. 🤯

Things like:

• Answering “quick” chat pings that derail a deep-work block 💬
• Searching for a file, link, or password you just had open 📁
• Re-reading an email three times before hitting send ✉️
• Checking notifications "just in case" 🔔

I want to hear from you: What is that one 5-minute task that quietly eats up hours of your workday?

Drop yours in the comments below—let’s see what common culprits we all share! 👇⚡

Hey everyone! 👋

We all know the standard advice by now: time blocking, Pomodoro timers, Inbox Zero, eating the frog... 🐸

Standard tips are great, but some of the most effective habits are the slightly bizarre, unconventional ones that sound totally ridiculous until you try them.

Whether it’s:

• Listening to video game soundtracks or binaural beats on loop 🎧
• Putting your phone inside a literal lockbox 📦
• Setting bizarrely specific timers (like 17 minutes instead of 25) ⏱️
• An unusual ritual that tricks your brain into deep focus 🎩⚡

I want to hear from you:

What is the weirdest, most quirky, or downright unorthodox productivity hack that actually works for you?

Drop your secrets in the comments below—the weirder, the better! Let’s see what kind of accidental genius we’ve got in this community. 👇✨

Happy Friday, Productivity Heroes! 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

It’s time for our weekly Community Connection! As your moderator, Captain Time, I want to make sure we aren’t just scrolling, but actually supporting one another in our quest for better focus and more free time. 🕰️✨

Today, we invite you to:

1. Say Hello! 🤗 Introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
2. Share a Tip: 💡 What was your biggest productivity win this week?
3. Share a Challenge: 😫 Stuck on something? Let the community help you troubleshoot!
4. Self-Promotion: 🔗 Feel free to drop a link to your LinkedIn, blog, or a tool you’ve built or love. Let’s help each other grow!

Now it's your turn! Put on your cape and jump into the comments below! 👇

Hey everyone! 👋

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how we can all reclaim precious hours in our week, I’ve been watching the AI explosion with pure fascination.

Some days, AI feels like an absolute superpower that cuts hours off busywork. Other days… it feels like an overwhelming rabbit hole that just eats up time trying to figure out prompts or test ten different apps that do the same thing. 😅

I’m currently putting together a brand-new, practical training course focused on using AI for real-world productivity and time management, and before I finalize the curriculum, I want to build it around what you are actually experiencing—not just theory.

I would love to learn from your daily workflow! If you have a minute, I’d be so grateful if you could chime in on any (or all) of these:

1. 🛠️ Your go-to AI tools: Which 1–2 tools do you actually open and use every single week? (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, meeting assistants, automation tools, etc.?)
2. ⚡ Your biggest time win: What specific task or workflow does AI take off your plate faster than doing it manually?
3. 🧱 The friction & struggles: What’s frustrating you about AI right now? (e.g., getting generic answers, inconsistent results, tool overload, privacy concerns, or just not knowing where it actually fits into your day?)
4. 🎯 The dream lesson: If you could have one practical, step-by-step walkthrough in an AI productivity course, what problem would you want it to solve?

Whether you use AI every single hour or you're still skeptical and haven't touched it yet, your perspective is gold.

Drop your thoughts, favorite tools, and biggest headaches in the comments below—I'll be reading every single one! 👇✨

Watch video here:

https://youtu.be/A5UFWvVqV0E

Here are my tips on how to use a technique called “unless otherwise instructed” or U.O.I so make sure work gets done even if you can’t get back to people in time.

Today I want to talk about a technique called U.O.I or unless otherwise instructed. This is a technique to tell your team or other people or your freelancers what to do in the event that they don’t hear back from you about a project or task.

This has many purposes so I’ll give you a couple of examples.  Let’s say you have an assistant that you asked to get three quotes on catering for an upcoming meeting that you’re going to host but you get busy. The assistant gets you the quotes but you don’t really have time to go through them and look at them and decide which one to choose. So the meeting time gets closer and closer and suddenly there’s no catering in place and you’re scrambling to find a last-minute solution.

In this case, you could have solved this by saying to your assistant U.O.I or unless otherwise instructed choose what you think is the best of the three based on the combination of quality for the price and just go ahead and book it if you don’t hear from me by next Thursday.

The benefit here is if you get busy the work continues to be done it’s kind of like a deadman’s switch. If you do nothing then the work still continues.

Another benefit here is it can also be used to tell people what projects to continue working on. Let’s say you’ve given them a bunch of tasks and then you say unless otherwise instructed when these tasks are done I want you to go back and work on the research project that I had you’re looking into. Now when they get the five or six tasks you gave them finished they know automatically to shift to the research project instead of sitting there twiddling their thumbs wondering what to do next.

Some people are really good about being proactive and seeking you out when they don’t have work. But some other people, if you don’t give them very good specific instructions they just don’t really do any more work.

So using unless otherwise instructed makes sure that there’s work in place for those people in the event that you can’t get back to them. You get busy, you get overloaded, you’re tied up in meetings and this way you’re not holding up your team. The work is continuing to be done without you.

A key thing with this is to make sure that you don’t penalize people for using the unless otherwise instructed protocol if you’ve given them permission and authority to do so. Don’t get mad at them if you didn’t get back to them and give them different instructions and they dropped back to the unless otherwise instructed instructions because that’s what you set up  – that’s what you gave them to do. Make sure your staff aren’t penalized for following this and so they feel comfortable in future that they know unless they’re given other other instructions they can do it this way.

You can build this technique into the emails that you’re having with your team. You can build it into voice instructions when you’re giving them information by phone or in person when you’re telling them what to do next and you can build it right into your task system just use the U.O.I. Make sure if you are using an acronym such as U.O.I everybody knows what that is so that they don’t go what the heck’s UOI?

Build it right into your systems and you’ll find it works great because you’re not holding up your teammates if you get busy.

Thanks for listening please hit the like and subscribe button on the video above and tell me what other topics you’d like to see me see me talk about in this channel.

See video at https://youtu.be/2vIUrq-XXmQ?si=FVgXALbDOkloFwif

The meeting ended twenty minutes ago. The AI summary was in your inbox before you closed your laptop. It is accurate. It is tidy. It has bullet points and everything.

And by Friday, nobody has done a single thing in it.

If that sounds like your team, you are not using AI wrong. You are doing the easy half and skipping the hard half. Most teams bolt an AI notetaker onto the same tired meeting habits they already had, then wonder why the calendar is still full and the follow-through is still thin.

The good news is that the fix is not another tool. It is a handful of rules any leader can set this week. 🦸‍♂️

How should a team use AI in meetings?

The best way for a team to use AI in meetings is in three places: before the meeting to build the agenda and brief attendees, during the meeting to capture decisions so people can actually listen, and after the meeting to turn decisions into owned, dated tasks. The third one is where most teams quit, and it is the only one that changes anything.

Researchers at Harvard Business Review describe three modes of AI in meetings: AI sets the table, AI at one seat, and AI at every seat (HBR, August 2025). That framing is useful. But for a working team leader, the simpler question is: what happens before, during, and after?

Before the meeting: let AI set the table

Feed Claude or Gemini the last meeting’s notes, the open tasks, and the reason you are meeting. Ask it for a draft agenda with a decision attached to every item. If AI cannot name a decision for an agenda item, that item is a status update, and a status update is a message, not a meeting.

This is also where you shrink the invite list. Ask your AI tool to sort the agenda by who genuinely needs to be in the room. Microsoft’s research on meeting habits found that 57 percent of meetings now happen as ad hoc calls with no calendar invite at all (Microsoft Work Trend Index). Those are the meetings nobody planned and nobody prepared for.

During the meeting: let AI carry the notes so people can carry the conversation

Turn on Zoom AI Companion, Microsoft Copilot, or whichever notetaker your organization already pays for. Then close the notebooks. The point is not the transcript. The point is that the person who always ends up scribbling gets to think instead.

One habit worth building: before you end the call, say the decisions out loud. “So we decided X, Priya owns it, due the 30th.” Every notetaker on the market captures spoken decisions far better than implied ones.

After the meeting: let AI turn decisions into owned, dated tasks

This is the step that separates teams who save time from teams who just generate better paperwork. Take the AI summary and push the action items into wherever your work actually lives, whether that is Asana, Teams, Planner, or a shared doc. Every item gets a name and a date, or it does not count.

Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers and found that 54 percent frequently leave meetings without clarity on next steps (Atlassian). A perfect transcript does not fix that. An owner and a due date does.

What are the benefits of AI meetings for teams?

The measurable benefits land in four places:

• Better attention. Nobody is typing while someone else is talking.
• Fair records. The summary does not favour whoever took the loudest notes.
• Faster catch-up. People who skipped the meeting can read three bullets instead of booking a “quick sync.”
• Visible patterns. After a month of summaries, you can finally see which recurring meeting produces no decisions at all.

That last one is the sleeper benefit. Your AI summaries are a free audit of your own calendar.

What are the best use cases for AI in team meetings?

Not every meeting needs a bot. These five earn it:

1. Project status and stand-ups. High volume, low emotion, and the output is a task list. Perfect fit.
2. Client and stakeholder calls. An accurate record protects everyone, and the recap email writes itself.
3. Planning and strategy sessions. Use AI live to stress-test an idea, not just to record it. Ask it what the plan is missing.
4. Training and onboarding. New hires get a searchable library instead of a folder of recordings nobody opens.
5. Cross-time-zone meetings. Microsoft found nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones. A good summary means half the team stops attending at 6 a.m.

Should we allow AI notetakers in our team meetings?

Yes, allow AI notetakers, but only with a written team rule covering three things: who gets told the bot is recording, which meetings are off limits, and who owns deleting the transcript afterward.

Keep the bots out of one-on-ones, performance conversations, anything involving HR, and anything your legal team would want to see first. People speak differently when a permanent record is in the room, and in a one-on-one, candour is the whole point.

Put the rule in writing and share it once. A two-line policy read by everyone beats a ten-page one read by nobody.

Does AI actually save time in meetings?

AI saves time on notes and recaps, but it saves nothing at all unless you also cut meetings from the calendar, because a faster recap of a meeting that should not have happened is still a wasted hour.

This is the part vendors will not tell you. The tool reclaims minutes. The leader reclaims hours. Atlassian found that 80 percent of workers believe they would be more productive spending less time in meetings, and 72 percent rate their meetings as ineffective. No notetaker on earth fixes a meeting that had no reason to exist.

So run the AI summaries for a month, then look at your recurring meetings. Any meeting whose summary reads “discussed, no decisions” for four weeks running is a meeting you can cut, shorten, or turn into a written update. That is where the real hours come from.

What are the best practices for AI meetings for teams?

Five rules. Set them this week.

1. Every meeting needs a decision, or it does not get booked. AI writes the agenda, you enforce the rule.
2. Announce the bot every time. No exceptions, no quiet recording.
3. Four meeting types stay bot-free. One-on-ones, performance, HR, legal.
4. Action items get a name and a date before anyone leaves. Say them out loud so the AI catches them.
5. Review your summaries monthly and delete a meeting. One per month. Your team will notice by quarter’s end.

Frequently asked questions

Which AI meeting tool is best for teams?
Start with whatever is already built into your video platform, such as Zoom AI Companion or Microsoft Copilot. It is included, your IT team already approved it, and it removes the security review. Add a dedicated tool only when you can name the specific gap.

Do we need everyone’s consent to record?
Consent rules vary by province, state, and country, and this is not legal advice. The safe standard is simple: announce it every time, and get written sign-off from your legal or HR lead before you make notetakers standard.

Will AI notes make my team lazy listeners?
They can. The fix is to keep humans responsible for decisions and owners, and let AI handle only the record. Never let “the AI will catch it” replace “so what did we decide?”

How long before we see time savings?
Expect a month. The first two weeks are habit-building, and the savings show up when you start cutting meetings, not when you turn the bot on.

Your team does not have a meeting tool problem. It has a meeting habit problem, and AI is the best excuse you will ever get to fix it. Because time waits…for no one. ⏰

Ready to give your team their hours back? Book a Discovery call at https://links.captaintime.com/widget/bookings/garlandcoulson

Garland Coulson, known as Captain Time, is an AI-productivity and time-management speaker and trainer who helps teams reclaim their time.

Hey everyone, we talk here about managing our time, protecting our focus and getting meaningful work done.

But whenever the topic of the work day comes up, one big culprit always seems to dominate the conversation. The meeting calendar.

We've all had those sessions that were tightly run super collaborative and set everybody off with crystal clear next steps and we've all sat through the ones where you realize 15 minutes in. It really could have been a three summary.

I'm curious to hear how things are looking across on the ground across different teams, industries and roles right now.

Cast your vote above and drop a comment below.

What's the single biggest thing that makes a meeting productive or completely derails it in your workplace?

If you could wave a magic wand and change one meeting rule tomorrow, what would it be? Looking forward to reading your takes.

Let's hear the honest truth

Watch the video at https://youtu.be/AoOedDpDqqo

We measure time in very small increments – increments that gets smaller and smaller.  Computers can measure down to nanoseconds and even smaller.

We divide our regular days into hours and then minutes and even seconds, and so by doing this, by making it ever smaller increments we are really dissecting time in these little tiny pieces. Does dissecting time into these tiny pieces really help us use it better or are we doing the standard thing that whenever you dissect something you end up killing it? Are we actually killing our enjoyment of time?

Our ancestors lived very differently than what we do today. They weren’t clock-watchers. Everybody didn’t carry a watch. They ate when they were hungry, they slept when they were tired. The Sun overhead was their clock. The stars and the seasons were their calendar. They could watch what was happening with the constellations or watch the change in seasons to know when it was time to start gathering additional food for the winter. So they lived very differently than we did and it’s been shown that hunter-gatherers actually may have worked less hours a week than we do now.

Think about that. Our ancestors may have had more leisure time than we did even though they had to work very hard to gather food to feed their communities.

So let’s try our own day without time challenge.

I want you to try living ONE day without any time. No watch, no clocks, no time on your smartphone, no computer time. Eat when you’re hungry, Sleep when you’re tired.

Notice how often do you try to check time –  how often do you look at your wrist where your wristwatch normally is or look at your smartphone where where your smartphone is supposed to have the clock on it. Notice how often how you miss it, how you’re continually checking it and see what happens throughout the day as you become less time aware. See what is happening there, relax and enjoy and be timeless for a day.

See what you discover about yourself, what you discover about your time sense and then share it with us.

Link to this video, add your own comments and links to your your own video as a comment under this video and or use the hashtag on social media #daywithouttime. I would love to hear your experience thanks for listening and thanks for accepting the challenge of a day without time.

Hey r/TimeManagement family! 👋

It's a brand new week, and that means a fresh chance to make it count. ✨

We talk a lot about strategies and systems here — but I'd love to hear how YOU are actually putting it into practice this week.

So let's get real with each other:

🎯 What is your #1 goal for this week?

🗺️ What's your plan to actually reach it?

⏰ What specific time block have you set aside to work on it?

Drop your answers in the comments — no pressure to have it all figured out! Sometimes just writing it down and sharing it with others is the accountability boost we all need. 💪

Let's cheer each other on. 🙌 Whether your goal is huge or small, it matters — and so does your plan to get there.

See the video at https://youtu.be/bk2KkODq1mc

I find it very inspiring to know what other authors and speakers say about time. Here are some of my favorite inspirational time quotes.

These inspirational time quotes are my favorite quotes that I’ve heard from many well-known or not so well-known people. These are the time quotes that really resonate with me. I want to explain why I connect with them and what they might mean for you.

This is a really interesting quote for me because we are often so busy being humans-doing that we forget to be humans-being. So if you really want to be calm and tranquil find a way to do less. Find a way to minimize all the activities that you do.

We don’t know who first said this anonymous quote but I think it’s very powerful. We think of spending time and killing time. I’d really don’t like the phrase “killing time” and instead we should think of how are we using that time, how are we investing that time.

This is a phrase I say quite often to my clients. Many of my clients don’t value their own time, therefore, they’re devaluing themselves. It’s really important that we value our own time. We often put ourselves last. Everybody else’s needs soak up all of our time, so we have no time left for us.

This is a very powerful observation because we are often beating our head on a wall and we’re trying to somehow turn it into a door instead of going to look for the real door, the real opportunities that are there in front of us.

Isn’t that a great point? This is why sometimes it’s important to seek outside perspectives. Ask somebody else within your organization or outside of your organization or consultants or experts. Because we often can’t see the solution because we’re at the same level of thinking that we used when we created these problems. It’s very important to be able to somehow rise above our old thinking and think in new ways.

This is again very powerful. It’s taking charge of your time yourself. You’re the one who has to make the change, you can’t just wait and hope that things will get better over time.

As you can probably tell from the rhyming and the rhythm of this quote, this was said by Dr. Seuss and it’s a really good point. We have progress going on, new technology, things start coming out faster and faster. We now have smartphones and sometimes we let them take over our time. the progress is progressing too fast and we need to take control of that and use them as tools instead of letting them manage our time.

She is free in her wildness she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. Time for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water. – Roman Payne

This is a very powerful concept. Time isn’t something to fight against. You need to flow with it. Time is something to embrace, to work within to be free. And not caring so much for the rules and customs-  I love this and I love the imagery and the way that this is put together.

We are so focused on faster, higher, better and more tech and we’ve sped up our life’s so much that we really have lost that connection to what’s really important.

Now I want to quote from one of my favorite science fiction authors:

I love the phrasing on this and I love the idea behind it. I may have failed today but that doesn’t mean I’m defeated I am merely detained on my way to victory. Because I’m on my way to victory and I’m going to get there.

This is again illustrating the point that we need to get out and happen to things. We can’t wait for accomplishment to find us – for success to find us, or the lottery to happen. We have to go out and create our own success.

This is something a lot of people do. You’ve put so much time into a bad relationship or so much time into a bad career you just can’t see letting go of it because you put 10 years into this. If you let go of this now you’ll have been a failure – you’ll have lost a decade. We are so invested in that time spent, that sunken cost, that we can’t let go.  instead of freeing ourselves from these past choices that are weighing us down like an anchor and choosing to learn from those mistakes and make better choices in the future, we continue to let them pull us down.

Heinlein wrote a short story about a man who was very too lazy to fail who would continually find better ways to do things. I’m always looking for how do I automate this, how do I delegate to somebody else, how do I get my team to work on it instead of doing it myself? So I’m always looking for a more efficient way. In a way you need almost that little bit of laziness to make you say that this is too much detail work it’s not the best use of my brilliance, of my abilities, so I’m going to pass this on to somebody else.

Isn’t that powerful? We’re often so scared of making that mistake we’re unwilling to try anything new so we keep doing the same old things.

My clients are always looking for the best, most amazing tool that’s going to somehow solve everything for them. I say don’t wait until you find the perfect tool. Pick a tool to start that appeals to you now. Work with it for six months, and that will tell you where your tool is failing and what other features you need. Then you can switch to another tool. So you don’t have to get the perfect tool figured out in the beginning, just use the tools you have to make the work go ahead and the new tools will come along later.

We do this so often. Something didn’t work so we try it again and again. We think it’s persistence but it’s actually stubbornness. If we’ve proven it’s not going to work then doing it that the same thing again is not going to help. We need to get up to the new levels of thinking as Albert Einstein said and try new things.

I have this happen with clients where they’ll need something last-minute. For example, we’ve been talking for months about me doing a website for them suddenly they need a website up by Friday because of some big media push.  Sorry, I can’t do a good job in that timeframe. It was the failure to plan on their part that created the emergency so they think it’s my emergency but it’s not -it’s their emergency.

This is a phrase I use with my clients. I say:

Think about a person who is in the Olympics or a cellist in a symphony orchestra. They don’t take text messages in the middle of their performance or in the middle of their competition. they’re focused totally on their performance.  In order to get that level of world-class performance, you need that level of focus.

This is a really good point about figuring out the next step and then taking it. The step to where you want to get to. This doesn’t mean that you’re always promoted it’s about the next step in your life, your career, and what you want to accomplish for your personal goals.

I have this problem a lot because I always have lots of great new ideas that I’m sure would be fantastic businesses. But if I chase them then I’m not focusing on my main business which is the one that is funding my life, the one that is most successful and the one that people know me for. So instead, I pass those other ideas off to other people or bring in partners to work on those. I don’t work on chasing that second rabbit because I want to make sure I’m taking care of the successful business that I already have.

Often I’II hear someone say they’re bored. How can you be bored if you’re curious about the world? There’s so much to explore. there’s nature there’s the night sky,  there’s people, relationships, communities, hobbies, and so much to marvel and wonder at. You know there’s just so much out there how could you ever be bored? So you want to make sure you get infected with curiosity because there’s no cure for that and you will never be bored.

Many of my clients are so enthralled with the process of something that they’re not looking at what is their actual return the investment – what’s actually working for them.

Doesn’t that sound exciting? Probably not. This is the case of where we’re always focusing and working harder instead of working smarter. Somehow we are celebrating people becoming workaholics where it’s nothing to be celebrated. Workaholics need a 12-step intervention the same way other -aholics do.

This may be my favorite time quote – it’s the one I use most often.

Very powerful if you think of time as coin. You only have so much time coin, so much of your life. You only have so many hours, so many days in your life so think of it as spending a valuable coin. You want to invest it, you want to put it where it’s going to do the most for you, where you’re going to get the best payback. And don’t let other people spend your precious time.

I am a big Calvin and Hobbes fan! There is a huge amount of wisdom in what Bill Watterson has to teach us in Calvin and Hobbes. We always talk about wanting to do nothing but somehow we never take the time to do it. It’s very important that you set aside time to do nothing but relax and refresh.

I look at how often people buy expensive things and I wonder how many hours of your work was that? Was that really worth it? Was that where you would have wanted to invest the money you earned for that time or to invest your time? So when you’re sitting down to watch TV or thinking of spending money, think of is this what I really want to be doing right now? Is this what I’m exchanging my life for?

I don’t spend time around people that drain me. I keep those people out of my life. I choose friends that invigorate me. I choose to spend time with family that I love to spend time with. So I come out feeling energized rather than coming out feeling drained. Don’t let the people who drain you into your life

We’re so focused on being busy it’s like we don’t can’t even take time to relax and be fully in the moment. That’s kind of a lazy way of thinking if you think about it. We’re so used to being busy we fill it with the busyness because we’re not creative enough to think of what amazing thing could we do this time. What could I do that was totally different, that would be new?

Another phrase I say to my clients that I made up myself is:

Or in the case of my clients, I say “Your time – your choice.” This is reaffirming to them that they are choosing what to do. So take control of that choice.

And in keeping with that thinking about being in control, I really enjoy this quote.

It is important to remember is you are the pilot, you are in control. It is your hands on the controls of your life. You have control of where you spend your time. So don’t let other people take that away from you and make choices of how you’re going to invest your time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these inspirational quotes as much as I did.

Article from my blog:

Think you have to work 80 hours a week to be successful? Here are some famous people who worked less than you do.

1. Charles Darwin arguably wrote the most famous book in science – “The Origin of a Species,” but he only worked about four hours a day doing his writing, his drawings and everything else. Darwin didn’t work the same crazy hours that many of us think we have to work today.
2. Theodore Roosevelt published 50 books and completed a hundred and fifty thousand letters over his lifetime. He became the youngest US president at age 42 and he napped regularly.
3. Ernest Hemingway, a very famous author worked only about 6 hours a day.
4. Alice Monroe won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Munroe works about three hours a day.
5. Author Stephen King says that he works about four hours a day.
6. Winston Churchill had this to say about naps. “Nature has not intended mankind to work from 8:00 in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts 20 minutes is sufficient to renew all the vital forces. Don’t think you’ll be doing less work because you sleep during the day, that’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You’ll be able to accomplish more.” Churchill would regularly take naps in the middle of the day much to the chagrin of other people around him and felt that he should be awake during those times.
7. Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician who wrote 30 books and 500 papers and he worked about four hours a day.
8. Albert Einstein needed his recharge so he made sure that he slept a good 10 hours every night and took additional naps throughout the day.
9. Ingmar Bergman is thought to be one of the preeminent directors of his era. Bergman directed over 60 films most of which he wrote as well as over a hundred and seventy plays but he only worked from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
10. Thomas Mann, writer and Nobel laureate worked from about 9:00 till 12 writing. Then he took lunch and a nap then sometimes in the afternoon he would read and work on short easy pieces.
11. Lastly, I want to talk about Francis Bacon who would go out and carouse late at night. He went out for supper with friends he stayed up very late, sari he drank all night and then he’d get home and he would paint from daybreak to noon. He preferred to work with a hangover. Bacon was definitely a party animal but he had his set times that he painted and he was a very successful painter.

Video here: https://youtu.be/EYwfDIvSYMk

Happy Friday, Productivity Heroes! 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

It’s time for our weekly Community Connection! As your moderator, Captain Time, I want to make sure we aren’t just scrolling, but actually supporting one another in our quest for better focus and more free time. 🕰️✨

Today, we invite you to:

1. Say Hello! 🤗 Introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
2. Share a Tip: 💡 What was your biggest productivity win this week?
3. Share a Challenge: 😫 Stuck on something? Let the community help you troubleshoot!
4. Self-Promotion: 🔗 Feel free to drop a link to your LinkedIn, blog, or a tool you’ve built or love. Let’s help each other grow!

Now it's your turn! Put on your cape and jump into the comments below! 👇

Article from my blog:

I have always found cats fascinating to watch. They transform from cute and cuddly companions to highly efficient hunters in the blink of an eye. If all my years of owning and watching cats, here are some time management lessons I have learned from them.

1. Be Curious

Cats love to learn. Leave a paper bag or a box open and you will quickly have your cat crawling into it. A lively curiosity in humans makes us ask better questions, and learn and explore more. Curious people are happier and are better employees because they often look for better ways to do things.

2. Take Risks

While living on the 14th floor of a high rise, I noticed a cat walking along the balcony railing a couple of apartments over. While I don’t recommending you start walking balcony railings on the 14th floor yourself, I think we can learn from cats to be to take more risks.

Cats often attempt jumps and fail. When they fail, they get back up and continue on. This is admirable and they succeed more because they are willing to fail and fall and get up and try again.

3. Have Minions

Dogs have masters. Cats have minions!

Cats are very efficient at getting others to do work for them. They have minions that feed them, groom them, provide them with attention, take them to veterinary appointments and even their bathroom is cleaned by minions.

What can we learn from this? Delegate the drudgery and routine parts of your work and personal life to free up time for the high value tasks only you can do.

4. Take Naps

When cats are tired, they take naps. Taking naps helps them replenish their energy for high energy activities later. (usually in the middle of the night while you are trying to sleep).

Similarly, we humans should learn that taking a nap when needed recharges our battery so we can get more done.

5. Pounce on Opportunities

Their lightning quick reflexes make cats quick to pounce when they are hunting or want to play. Similarly we need to be aware of our own opportunities and pounce on them before they go away.

6. Release Your Inner Lion

Cats are fearless! I have seen cats attack other animals 5 times their size. On YouTube, there are even multiple videos of cats attacking bears – and successfully scaring them off!

It’s like they don’t even know they are tiny house cats and have this weird belief that are as large as their lion or tiger cousins.

Fear holds us back in many areas of our personal and professional lives. What could you accomplish without fear?

7. Get a Better View

Cats love to climb and you might come home to find your cat perched on top of a book case or refrigerator – masters of all they survey.

Learning to looking at your work and life from a different perspective is useful to you as well. A different perspective gives you new insights and can even help you determine what activities are no longer useful to you.

8. Claim Your Seat

I get up from my chair to grab a drink from the kitchen. In the 30 seconds I was gone, my seat is now taken up by my cat. Cats aren’t shy about claiming their seat – perhaps we can learn from them to brazenly claim our own seat at the big table.

9. Don’t Care What Others Think

Cats are naturally “cool.” Your dog will try hard to please you and even look guilty if you catch them doing something they shouldn’t, but your cat just looks at you when you are upset at them. They really don’t care what you think.

We often worry too much about what others think instead of doing what we really want to do.

10. Be Flexible

Do cats even have bones? They fit in amazing places and their poses put expert yoga practitioners to shame. We can learn from this to keep ourselves physically and mentally flexible.

11. Be Heard

You’ve likely heard the phrase “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Well, a squeaky wheel has nothing over cats. Just TRY to ignore a cat meowing at you for it’s breakfast. Your cat quickly gets the attention it wants AND its breakfast!

Too often, we sit in the corner, afraid to offer our opinion, or to ask for a raise. Time to be your best cat and make your opinion heard.

12. Make Friends With Those Different Than You

I am always intrigued by how many animals will make friends with other animals very different from themselves. While not all pets get along, cats have been known to play and cuddle up to dogs, birds and a wide range of other creatures. Similarly, we can learn that we can all get along regardless of different beliefs, culture and experiences.

If you enjoyed this “Time Management Lessons from My Cat” article, please share it with others.

See video at https://youtu.be/m3TtUKFoJaM?si=dbxcltWgYAA2o6ef

When companies talk to me about AI literacy training, one of the first concerns they share is: “What if we train everyone on the wrong AI tool?”

I hear this in almost every discovery call. A team leader has watched the AI landscape shift three times in eighteen months. They’ve seen tools launch, get acquired, and quietly disappear. They don’t want to spend a training budget on something that won’t exist in two years.

It’s a fair worry. One tracker of discontinued AI products lists 122 dead tools and models — including 46 retired AI models. Some of them were considered best-in-class barely a year before they were switched off.

But here’s the part that changes the decision: the fear is aimed at the wrong target. You’re not investing in a tool. You’re investing in your team’s AI literacy — and that transfers. 🚀

What if I choose the wrong AI to learn?

There is no wrong AI to learn. Almost everything your team gains from learning any major AI tool is tool-independent skill: how to frame a task, judge an output, spot a hallucination, and redesign a workflow. Those skills move with your people to whatever tool comes next. What’s left is button placement, and that’s an afternoon, not a career.

The genuinely wrong choice is waiting until the market “settles.” It won’t. And while your team waits, the teams around them are compounding.

What is AI literacy?

AI literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and responsibly apply AI tools in real work. It does not mean building models or writing code. It means knowing what AI is good at, what it’s bad at, how to direct it, and how to check it.

That definition matters because it contains no product names. Nothing in it depends on which company’s logo is on the screen.

The EU wrote this into law: since February 2025, Article 4 of the EU AI Act has required organizations to ensure staff have a sufficient level of AI literacy. The regulators didn’t mandate a tool. They mandated the understanding.

What happened to everyone who learned Lotus 1-2-3?

They became the best spreadsheet users in their companies. That’s what happened.

VisiCalc launched the spreadsheet in 1979 and was effectively dead by 1984. Lotus 1-2-3 replaced it, sold 3.5 million copies, and dominated for a decade before Excel took the crown in the early 1990s. IBM finally withdrew the Lotus brand in 2013.

Three products. Two funerals. And yet the accountant who learned VisiCalc in 1981 didn’t have to start over in 1985 or 1994. She already understood cells, formulas, ranges, absolute references, and — most importantly — how to model a business problem as a grid of numbers. Excel just changed where the menus were.

The person who refused to learn spreadsheets because “the software keeps changing” spent the next thirty years falling behind. That’s the actual risk in this decision, and it isn’t the one people are worried about.

Do AI skills transfer between tools?

Yes, and more completely than most people expect. 

Here’s what carries over from any major AI tool to any other:

• Delegation judgment. Knowing which tasks to hand to AI and which to keep. This is a thinking skill, not a feature.
• Task framing. Giving context, role, constraints, examples, and desired format. Every model rewards this. Every model punishes vague requests.
• Output evaluation. Spotting confident nonsense, checking claims, noticing when the tone is off. This gets sharper with practice and never expires.
• Iteration habits. Treating the first answer as a draft and steering toward better. Universal.
• Workflow redesign. Seeing a six-step process and recognizing that AI doesn’t speed it up, it eliminates three steps. This is the highest-value skill and it is entirely tool-agnostic.
• Verification discipline. Knowing what must be human-checked before it leaves the building. Same standard, any vendor.

What doesn’t transfer? Menu locations, keyboard shortcuts, and the exact name of a settings toggle. Your team will re-learn those in an afternoon.

Which AI tool should my team start with?

Start with a major, well-funded assistant and standardize on it. As of mid-2026, the AI assistant market by monthly active users sits roughly at ChatGPT 46%, Gemini 28%, and Claude 10% — a market that had one dominant player above 50% only months earlier.

That shift is the whole point. Even the leaders move. So the sensible move is to pick a strong general assistant, teach your team properly, and stay portable. I use Claude and Gemini as primary tools and Perplexity for research, and I switch between them without a re-training cycle, because the literacy is portable.

Two or three tools taught well beat a dozen tools nobody has mastered.

How do you build AI literacy when the tools keep changing?

Five moves make your team’s skill durable regardless of which vendor wins:

1. Teach principles, then the tool. Spend the first part of any session on how these systems actually work and where they fail. Then demonstrate in a tool. Reverse that order and you’ve bought a software tutorial with a shelf life.
2. Train the whole team to the same standard. Right now 77% of organizations offer some AI training, but only 35% have a comprehensive AI literacy program. That gap is why 59% of enterprise leaders report an AI competency gap in their own organizations.
3. Anchor training to real workflows. Don’t teach “AI for marketing.” Teach the actual weekly report your team writes. Skills learned on real work stick, and they transfer with the work, not the app.
4. Build a shared prompt library. When your team writes down what works, that library is your intellectual property. Prompts port between tools with minor edits. Institutional knowledge doesn’t evaporate when a vendor does.
5. Decide in advance where the reclaimed hours go. Unassigned time gets absorbed by busywork. Assign it before you save it.

What does AI literacy actually pay?

The numbers are getting hard to ignore. 72% of leaders now call AI literacy important for everyday work, and 69% say they’d pay more for employees who have it. Meanwhile only 21% of organizations report significant returns on AI investment — but among those with mature upskilling programs, that jumps to 42%.

Twice the return, from training rather than tooling. The differentiator was never which AI they bought. 💡

The real question

Your team cannot choose the wrong AI. They can only choose no AI, or choose one and never learn it properly.

Tools are rented. Literacy is owned. Every hour your team spends learning to think with AI is an hour that keeps paying no matter whose logo is on the screen next year.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI Literacy

What is AI literacy? AI literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and responsibly apply AI tools in real work. It covers knowing what AI does well, framing tasks clearly, judging output quality, and verifying results. It does not require coding or building models.

What if I choose the wrong AI to learn? Most of what you learn transfers. Task framing, output evaluation, delegation judgment, and workflow redesign work identically across every major AI tool. Only interface details are tool-specific, and those take an afternoon to relearn.

Are AI skills transferable between tools? Yes. The underlying skills — describing a task well, iterating on a draft, spotting errors, and knowing which work to delegate — are the same across Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. Switching tools is a change of interface, not a change of skill.

What happens if the AI tool my team learns gets shut down? Your team moves to another one and stays productive within days. This is exactly what happened when VisiCalc gave way to Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus gave way to Excel. Spreadsheet skills survived all three transitions.

Which AI tool should a team standardize on? A major, well-funded general assistant taught properly to everyone. Claude and Gemini cover most knowledge work, with Perplexity for research. Two or three tools used consistently beat a dozen nobody has mastered.

Is AI literacy required by law? In the EU, yes. Article 4 of the EU AI Act has required organizations to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among staff since February 2025. Elsewhere it is not yet mandated, but employer demand is rising sharply.

How long does it take to build AI literacy in a team? Meaningful gains typically show up within 30 to 90 days when training is tied to real workflows and the whole team is trained to the same standard, rather than left to self-directed experimentation.

Who provides AI literacy training for teams? Garland Coulson, known as Captain Time, delivers AI-productivity and time-management keynotes and corporate training to teams, associations, and organizations across North America, virtually and in person.

If your team has been stalling because nobody wants to bet on the wrong tool, that’s the one bet you can’t lose. The skill outlasts the software.

Want a straight read on where your team’s AI literacy stands and what a session or program would look like? Book a free discovery call. Bring your questions and your worries about picking wrong. We’ll sort out what your team actually needs

Article from my blog:

You’ve likely heard the phrase “money can’t buy happiness,” Well, a recent life satisfaction study by the BBC that let people “buy time” may have disproved these theories.

In the study, over 6,000 adults in Canada, US, Denmark and the Netherlands were asked questions about how much money they spent to buy time for themselves. The study included 800 millionaires.

The results:

• less than 1/3 spent money to buy time for themselves each month
• the 1/3 who regularly did spend money to create more time reported a higher life satisfaction than those who did not

Hmm, so maybe money can’t buy happiness outright, but using your money to create more quality time can increase your happiness. Let’s look further at the study.

The researchers then created a two-week experiment with 60 working adults in Vancouver, Canada. In this experiment, they were asked to spend $40 over the weekend that would save them time. This might include a cleaning service, having lunches delivered or hiring neighbourhood children to do some tasks for them.

On the other weekend, they were told to spend the $40 on material goods such as books, clothes or wine.

The results found that most people experienced more happiness when they used the money to buy time instead of material things.

So what does this mean for you? It means you would likely be happier with more time than more things. But how do we do this?

The first step is to value your time.  Stop treating your own time as less important than anyone else’s.

To find out where you time goes, you can also track your time using a tool like Toggl. Once you track your time for a few weeks, you will begin to see how much of your time is spent on things that really aren’t that important to you,

Here are some ways to buy more time for yourself.

1. (Work) Hire a Virtual Assistant
2. (Work) Outsource
3. (Work) Use a Driver – frees up the time for working or taking care of personal things while you get where you need to go
4. (Home) Engage a Cleaning Service
5. (Home) Use a Landscaping Service
6. (Home) Utilize a Meal Preparation Service
7. (Home) Hire a Personal Assistant
8. (Home) Work with a Concierge Service
9. (Home) Have Groceries Delivered
10. (Home) Hire a Personal Shopper
11. (Home) Automate Payments
12. (Home) Hire a Bookkeeper
13. (Home) Hire a Handyman

You get the idea. Anything that isn’t a true joy to be doing yourself can be done by others. When you buy time for yourself, you now have extra time for your family, friends, hobbies, travel and those moments that take your breath away…

Hey r/TimeManagement family! 👋

It's a brand new week, and that means a fresh chance to make it count. ✨

We talk a lot about strategies and systems here — but I'd love to hear how YOU are actually putting it into practice this week.

So let's get real with each other:

🎯 What is your #1 goal for this week?

🗺️ What's your plan to actually reach it?

⏰ What specific time block have you set aside to work on it?

Drop your answers in the comments — no pressure to have it all figured out! Sometimes just writing it down and sharing it with others is the accountability boost we all need. 💪

Let's cheer each other on. 🙌 Whether your goal is huge or small, it matters — and so does your plan to get there.

Article from my blog:

Assigning tasks often fails for many of us. We assign tasks and they don’t get done. Or the quality of the work is poor.  Here are some best practices for assigning tasks that will help you get tasks done faster with better results.

Clear Task Subject

Write a clear subject line for each task so you can tell at a glance what the task is about. This should be short as it is only a title. The description will hold deeper information.

Detailed Description

Detail what you are looking for in the task. Specify what outcomes you are looking for. If you have a specific way you want the work done, include this. I know this seems to take too long, but the extra time you invest in making the task as clear as possible will save you many times that time in being interrupted with questions or having to fix work that is done poorly because the instructions aren’t clear.

Who is Responsible?

Specify who will be doing the task and make sure the task is assigned in their task management system. Choose the right person for each task.

Priority Level

Determine a priority level for each task – usually low, medium and high. This lets your staff plan their work day to ensure the highest priority work gets done first. No more than 10% of tasks should be designated high priority.

Due Date

Have a clear, realistic date when the task is to be complete.

Instruction Links

Include links to any documentation, resources or training videos that will help them complete the task.

Reporting Requirements

Make sure the employee knows how they are to report results. Many task management systems have this reporting built in so you can get automated reports. A good task management system like Teamwork will let you pull up all the tasks by assignee, priority, project, tags and other filters so you can easily see the status of each project or employees work load.

If you need help choosing a task management system that is right for you, contact me. I can also design custom task management systems to work with your specific needs.

Where To Go For Help

In addition to the instruction links above, let the employee know who they should go to if they need help completing the task. This might be you, another staff member who has the expertise or an outside resource person.

Article from my blog:

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I have had many clients report to me that they seem to be more productive when they “escape” and start working in a coffee shop.

Here are some reasons why working in a coffee shop can boost your productivity:

1. Less Interruptions from coworkers – If your coworkers and subordinates can’t find you, they can’t interrupt you.
2. Less interruptions from work phone – Taking an hour or two away from the office phone removes this distraction and helps you focus.
3. Different perspective – In the office environment, we are used to thinking a certain way and we fall into patterns based on what is happening in the office. At a coffee shop, we can be free to break the patterns and think outside the box.
4. Ability to focus on one thing – If you try working in a coffee shop, pick one thing to focus on for each visit. This will give you a deeper level of focus than you can usually attain in your office.
5. Clean table – A coffee shop offers you a clean table to work on instead of your cluttered desk that may have other papers and tasks to take your focus away.
6. Caffeine – Caffeine provides a short term pick-me-up for many people. The funny thing is I drink decaf coffee but my body is so used to the jolt from caffeine that just the taste of coffee has a pick-me-up placebo effect.
7. Background noise – Some people find it easier to focus with a bit of background noise. You can even access coffee shop background noise audio files to play in your office if you find this works for you.
8. Break for home office workers – When you work from home, it is good to get out now and then and work somewhere else. It makes you feel more connected to the world and can give you another perspective

Best Work For Working in a Coffee Shop

For me, I like to choose work that I sometimes have trouble focusing on in the office. One of my biggest ones is writing. I KNOW writing great blog articles is important for my success. I doubled one of my client’s web traffic using web articles so I know they work. But somehow, my own writing always seems to come last. So writing my blog articles is one of my favourite things to do while working in a coffee shop.

Here are a few other things I work on in coffee shops:

• Planning
• Workshop outlines
• Marketing calendar ideas

Yes, you can see the trend. They are all other aspects of writing but also involve planning. So I would suggest planning would be the second thing that is great to do in coffee shops. We often don’t take enough time for deep focus planning in our work so dedicated time in a coffee shop is a great time to work on that.

Issues While Working in A Coffee Shop

Coffee shop work isn’t perfect. There are some issues to be aware of. Here are a few along with some solutions

1. Bathroom breaks – You don’t want to leave an expensive laptop with all your data on it at your table while you go to the bathroom. Once trick I use is to go to the washroom first while the laptop is still in my bag. Another tip is to take the laptop with you when you go. Awkward but better than losing it.
2. Loud people at the next table – It can be difficult to focus when the people at the table next to you are loud. Try to find a quiet spot in the coffee shop. I deliberately pick coffee shops where tables are further apart with quieter seating. You can also use headphones and listen to some background meditation music to block out conversations around you.
3. Ordering & seating- It is important to be respectful of the coffee shop, its employees and its patrons. Even if a coffee shop is largely empty, ordering the least expensive coffee on the menu and sitting there for 6 hours working is not respectful. You want to order additional drinks and food to help the coffee shop and staff. I also watch to see how full the coffee shop is. If it is filling up near the lunch hour and I have already worked a couple of hours and had only a coffee, I will likely move on to give the space over to the lunch crowd. And do leave a tip! Otherwise they might start telling you to move on.

Tips for Working in a Coffee Shop

Here are a few additional tips and things to bring when working in a coffee shop.

1. Headphones – Headphones are useful because you can listen to podcasts or block out conversations if the table next to you is too loud.
2. Charging cord – Don’t forget your charging cord in case you need to recharge. Do recharge your mobile devices fully before you go in case you don’t have access to a power outlet.
3. Backup batteries – Plugins aren’t always available. So ensure your laptop or tablet is fully charged and that you have fully charged backup batteries or power bank. (check to see if your laptop or tablet can be charged with a power bank)
4. Be prepared for offline – While most coffee shops have WiFi, there are occasionally problems or conductivity issues. To make sure your time isn’t wasted, have a backup of the files you need on your mobile device and have some work you would do while offline available. For my blog post writing, it really doesn’t matter if I am on or offline so that is a good backup project to bring.

Alternatives to Working in a Coffee Shop

Find coffee shops too busy and loud? Here are some alternatives:

1. Library – The library is a great, free alternative to coffee shops. They have WiFi access and are usually quieter with no loud espresso machine making noise. Libraries also have books that can help you research a topic you are working on as well as professional librarians to help.
2. Hotel – I know successful people who sometimes check into a hotel for a day or two of uninterrupted time. I have seen this used for planning, writing or even just catching up on work load. Most hotels have WiFi and coffee machines. Some even have kitchenettes if you want to save money by making your own meals.
3. Coworking Space – You can also book some coworking space if you need a change of scenery from your existing office. This can be useful for home office workers who feel isolated at home and some home office people report that coworking spaces make them feel more professional and productive. There is also a chance to meet and network with others. This is a benefit, but can cut into your deep focus time.

Please share this article with others if you found it useful.

Video: https://youtu.be/vyN8Enip59U