🏴 Build your proprietary systems

Hey folks.

Anyone building a personal brand has busy days and weeks.

There is always much to do.

You never get a moment of downtime, although it is necessary that you create downtime.

If you don’t, you’ll burn out.

In today’s edition, I want to discuss some of the lessons I am learning as I leverage systems to support my personal brand growth.

Let’s go. 🚀

Apple Reminders

I am using the Reminders app as a dumping ground for all my tasks.

I only use one list and it includes everything from buying my son’s soccer jerseys to paying bills to finishing up an ad campaign for my 9-5.

My life can easily become a mess, and if I had separate categories, it could get even messier.

That’s why I’ve opted to stick to one list.

I tend to forget things, so immediately when an action item comes to mind, I add it to Reminders.

And I frequently revisit this list and knock out the simple items.

I have heard a number of productivity geeks say if a task takes less than two minutes, you should do it right now.

I agree with that, which is why I am trying to be more mindful of it.

Notion as life organizer

Notion is going to house just about everything I need in order to keep myself on track.

Because I have so many roles and responsibilities, it is easy for me to lose track of which habits I want to maintain and which ones I want to drop.

Let me give an example.

I want to be more consistent with my meditation and journaling habits.

Those are two habits that easily fall by the wayside, given how busy my life is.

But…

I absolutely have 10 minutes to meditate and 10 minutes to journal every single day.

Which is why I am developing a life organization system within Notion.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like just yet, but I know it involves brain dumping literally everything into a Notion file.

It also involves calendaring basically everything.

And speaking of calendar…

E-mail & calendar organization with Outlook

Let’s be real.

Apple Mail and Apple Calendar suck.

That’s why I have been using Outlook for the last few years.

About 66% of my commitments make it into my calendar, but as I build my personal brand, I know that I need to get 100% of my commitments into my calendar.

Including my work hours, journaling sessions, website building (deep work block), and much more.

That way I can stay on-track with my mission.

As far as e-mail goes, I want to pare down my newsletter subscriptions to just a few and set up rules so those newsletters go straight to folders and I can read them when I have the time.

Ideally, I’d like to be at Inbox Zero, which I think is possible once I set up my systems.

What’s next?

Once I build out these three systems—Reminders, Notion life organizer, and e-mail/calendar optimization—I plan to implement a system for batch creating tweets and I will start scheduling them one week out using Tweet Hunter or Typefully.

Haven’t decide which one I am going to buy.

If I was able to get to 500+ followers without batch creation and scheduling, I can’t imagine how much that will help.

Now it’s your turn!

There are so many systems you can implement to help you stay organized and dominate your mission.

I’d urge you to spend some time thinking about the systems you can put in place to do that.

It won’t look exactly like my setup… you have to do something that works for you.

Hopefully this edition was helpful for you!

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a DM on 𝕏.

Have a great week!

—Neil