“POP is the best and only needed productivity course.”
Laura Gamp
Gym Owner and CEO
Productivity has gotten a bad rap. When you hear that word, you’re probably picturing someone hunched over their desk, grinding away endlessly at mind-numbing tasks from morning till night.
I don’t blame you! So much productivity content out there is just different ways of getting yourself to do things you hate doing. It’s become synonymous with hustle culture, never-ending busyness, and the opposite of what makes us come alive.
But I’m here to tell you: That is not what productivity is!
Boring chores and drudgery
Your ability to take a vision in your head and manifest it in the real world, to make your ideas happen
Working harder and longer
Working efficiently, which means minimizing waste (think wasted time, effort, energy, potential, imagination, ideas, or relationships)
Random hacks and silver bullets
A system that you can rely on and that gives you the confidence to handle anything life throws at you
Always staying busy and beating yourself up for wasting time
Having the self-awareness to pause and recognize what’s going on so you never have to force yourself to do more than your body and mind allows
Ticking off all tasks on your to-do list
Creating the clarity and focus to work on the right priorities that create the life you want
AUTHOR & CREATOR OF BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN
I’ve spent more than 10 years researching, teaching, coaching, and personally experimenting with new ways of organizing our digital lives and improving our productivity.
Creating a system for productivity was one of the most profoundly impactful things I ever did for myself. It’s given me a deep reservoir of confidence that I can handle whatever life throws at me.
I realized that anything life demands is just information, which can be broken up into manageable pieces (for example, content to consume, tasks to complete, appointments to schedule).
I feed these pieces into digital tools that are so much better at keeping track of them than my own brain ever could be – especially since I became a dad and can’t hold anything in my mind for longer than a minute (parents will know what I’m talking about).
Projects that seem overwhelming at first (an unexpected tax bill, finding the right pre-school, launching a new product) are now approachable, so I can tackle each piece until I arrive at the outcome.
The richness and variety of my life isn’t limited by my mental capacity – my system can handle anything!
My work has been featured in
Make big promises to yourself and follow through, not because of perfect memory but because of your system, even if you have no idea yet how you’ll make it happen
Manage multiple projects and roles you play in your life simultaneously, without having to stretch your mental and physical capacity to the breaking point
Gain the sense of determination to make progress on multiple fronts of your life and work in parallel, without the burden of multitasking
Have more of what you want and less of what you don’t in life, pulling your ultimate vision for your future forward in time
Think of your productivity system as a building you're constructing. There are four pillars at the corners of that building that hold it all together.
Each pillar is a software program – an app – that fulfills a critical function in modern life: a digital calendar, a task manager (or digital to-do list), a digital notetaking app, and a read-later app.
You can offload all the information coming at you (e.g., from emails and many other sources) to those four pillars and resurface it right when you need it.
The Weekly Review ties it all together. It’s your ritual to finish every week with a sense of completion, finality and fulfillment, and start the new week with clarity and purpose, not based on wishful thinking but on thoughtful preparation.
These tools are so powerful, but no one ever really taught us how to use them effectively. That’s exactly what this course is designed to do
POP gave me a system that I can adopt and become more productive and less frustrated with the amount of information that I am exposed to every day.
Lucio Mello
Future Studies
POP is a simple to implement method to improve your effectiveness and productivity. The feeling of overwhelm is already decreasing.
Priscilla Rolvers
Cosmetic Scientist, Writer & Sustainability Consultant
POP is a one-stop shop to build an "Operating System" (OS) for your life. I feel WAY more empowered, looking forward to 2024.
Clarence Cheuk
Attorney
POP helped me reduce digital tools to the “effective few” and maximize their potential for helping me maximize my potential in life.
Ken Donajkowski
Director
POP is an online tutorial on how to use some of the most basic apps that all assume to know and be experts of even though we are doing it all wrong from the very start!
Aromica Bhattacharya
Senior Programme Manager, Strategic Initiatives
POP is the best way to quickly get ahold of your digital mess and turn it into something beautiful. I mean since the course I actually want to do email! I finally feel like I am in control of my digital life again!
Jan Langner
Project Manager and Master Student
Build your personalized system for productivity on your own time and at your own pace.
My biggest win is the mindset shift that email is NOT my job, but instead a to-do list that I have allowed others to give me. Once I understood that, it was an "ahh-haa" moment. I realized that I do not need to respond immediately and that it is OK to say no to many, many requests. I have emptied my inbox daily and love how much more time I have gained to do my REAL job.
Stacey Bansch
Customer Service Manager
This new, much faster, way to process email has already saved me a couple of hours of time! I was able to take that time and invest it in some long procrastinated projects! Pillars of Productivity is an action-packed course filled to the brim with valuable insights and tips. Taking just a few of the recommended action steps will result in life changes!
Ryan Ward
Production Director
POP redirected my life in a more organized way. This is one of the best courses and simple ones that are easy to understand yet powerful at the same time.
Siva Arunagiri
Academic Director at a private school
Even if you think you're productive, this course will show you how to work smarter, not harder. It improves the way you work in simple yet incredibly powerful ways. My biggest win was managing my email inbox to get it down to zero every day in a short space of time and letting me proactively plan my week (using the recommended structure). This course has reduced the amount of 'noise' in my world and increased my focus.
Sonia Gill
CEO of Heads Up
I finally set up my task manager so now I always know what my main tasks are every time I sit down at my desk which has significantly impacted my overall productivity and has taken a lot of stress out of my life and work. I used to sit down and always second guess what I should be doing and oftentimes get no work done. But now I sit down, look at my task manager, and get straight to work. POP is an all-in-one course that fixes most if not all of your productivity issues while still going into detail in each one.
Nickolas Kostyuchek
Student & Entrepreneur
More productive, feeling better despite large work volumes, lower stress. POP creates space for what's important. It’s a systematic approach to managing multiple inbounds that is easy to understand and apply.
Dan Ogborn
Researcher, Physical Therapist
Most large organizations, and many smaller ones, will reimburse tuition for professional development. We’ve created a proposal template that you can use to request reimbursement.
Click here to download a proposal template.
If you caught yourself nodding your head to any the points above, then I absolutely can’t wait to share Pillars of Productivity with you.
You’re enjoying life for the first time away from your parents, but are now feeling the pressure to manage your coursework and extracurriculars.
You’re starting your career and need help adapting and keeping up with a fast-paced, demanding workplace.
You want to equip your children with critical life skills at an early age, and model those skills yourself.
You’re juggling multiple roles and responsibilities with limited resources and pressing demands on your time, attention, and focus.
Build your personalized system for productivity on your own time and at your own pace.
CHRO and Co-founder
Founder of Filip Perpetuum
Financial Advisor and Corporate & Life Coach in Italy
Software Engineer
CEO
Postdoctoral Researcher
Executive Director, Leadership Coach & Writer
Paediatric Neurooncologist
Owner & Head Coach
Education Manager, Des Moines Performing Arts
President, Hilton Media Management
stay-at-home-mom & writer
Head of Product Support
Project Manager
Recruiting Manager at Robert Half
University Researcher
Senior Analyst, Creator & Full-Time Dad
Pillars of Productivity is focused on leveraging the essential digital tools (email, calendar, task manager, notetaking app, read-later app) that turn you into a capable, mindful professional who can handle anything life throws at them.
Building a Second Brain zooms in on the notetaking part and teaches you how to consistently turn the information you consume into creative output and concrete results, leveraging your notetaking app.
A Second Brain is your holistic ecosystem of digital tools, encompassing the material from both courses. It is a trusted place outside your head where you can collect and organize your most important ideas and insights and use them to do your best work.
You’ll have access for the lifetime of the product.
We’ve designed Pillars of Productivity to fit your schedule and pace.
While you can watch the video lessons in about two and a half hours, we highly recommend that you follow the action steps to put what you learn into practice.
Pillars of Productivity is tool-agnostic, meaning our methodology will work in any software you prefer. The videos in the course will show you examples in different types of apps and we’ll give you concrete recommendations for free and paid tools to use in each lesson.
With that being said, you’re more than welcome to use any other tool that you feel works better for your needs.
Pillars of Productivity is focused on leveraging digital tools for your productivity because we believe that digital tools provide many advantages over paper, for example:
That’s why we encourage you to choose digital tools over paper in our course. With that being said, you might also benefit from some of the methods and guidelines we teach in your paper-based workflow.
We’ve done our best to make this course as accessible as possible. Each video has captions so you can follow along more easily, and a complete transcript if you prefer reading. You can use the search function to find and review specific points within each video. We've also added chapters to each video so you can navigate directly to specific sections. This allows you to revisit key concepts or jump to topics that are most relevant to you.
There are no official prerequisites to take Pillars of Productivity. However, we do expect you to be reasonably comfortable with using a computer or smartphone.
Your satisfaction is our #1 goal, and we want the decision to join Pillars of Productivity to be 100% risk-free so you can focus on learning. If you decide the course didn’t deliver on its promise for any reason, submit a request within 7 days of your purchase to get a refund.
We don’t offer discounts or scholarships. Instead, we offer Purchasing Power Parity Pricing. Based on your location, you might qualify for a reduced price for Pillars of Productivity.
If you do, you’ll automatically see a banner with a discount code on this page. Make sure to disable any VPN since this will block the banner from showing.
We’re happy to offer you “Buy now, pay later” options through Klarna and Afterpay/Clearpay, which enable you to pay for our courses in interest-free installments.
On our checkout pages, you’ll find these options under “Payment Methods".
Currently, “Buy now, pay later” is available in the United States only.
This is one I’ve been thinking about for years. Part of the reason I waited so long to release a new course is because I’ve been seeking a good answer to it.
Here are a few choices we made to maximize your likelihood of completion:
Some of you pointed out that I recently published an article about the crucial difference between beginner and advanced advice, and how important it is to consume advice at your current level. So is POP a beginner course or an advanced one?
I’d say POP is about the “fundamental moves” of productivity, on top of which all other more sophisticated and specialized techniques are built. Martial artists have the straight punch, tennis players the forehand, and chefs their chef’s knife – as knowledge workers we have our to-do list, our calendar, and our notes.In that sense, this is a beginner-level course, in that we’re starting with the most basic, essential tools.
But the thing I’ve noticed about expertise is that it’s often about refining and perfecting the more fundamental moves, rather than adding on complex, fancy ones. The basketball player never stops working on their shooting technique. The golfer never stops refining their swing. Since everything is built out of these more basic parts, you can never really improve them enough.
So in that sense, even the most advanced productivity enthusiasts have a lot to gain from revisiting the fundamentals and rethinking how they use them.
Yes indeed! Each of our books and courses is designed to complement and build on the others. In the Building a Second Brain course and book, I zoomed in on digital notetaking, the core of our creative workflows and the missing piece in most people’s digital portfolios.
But I’ve always maintained that a Second Brain is not just about notetaking – it encompasses all the digital tools you use to produce, organize, and express yourself. Your notes app is like one lobe of your brain, carrying out a critical function. But that’s only one part!
In POP, I’m zooming out to look at the holistic system that is your Second Brain, and showing how all the parts can work together fluidly and intuitively just as your first brain does.
The Getting Things Done (or GTD) philosophy created by David Allen has been a major influence on me and on POP. But it’s now been over 20 years since Allen’s book was released, and there are many aspects of it that are outdated, irrelevant, or simply not applicable to the much faster-paced, more digital-centric, and cross-platform world we live in today.
I’ve borrowed a few key ideas from GTD, combined them with multiple other methodologies and my own discoveries, to offer an approach that is eminently practical and can be “installed” without a lot of theorizing. So to answer the question, POP is not different from other productivity methods – it distills the best of what they have to offer into a practical setup using working software.
One of my strongest beliefs is that the separation between “work” and “life” is quickly eroding. You used to have two separate identities in these two domains, but that’s less and less the case, for a few reasons:
I’ll be honest: this merging of worlds can be a bad thing if you don’t manage it right. It can mean working longer hours, never quite being able to relax, and finding every minute of your attention colonized by tasks.
But I prefer the optimistic view: we can now be more aligned and authentic between our professional and personal worlds, and treat them as two important parts of a holistic picture that is our life. For our purposes, this means choosing digital tools that can encompass both work projects and personal projects, and help us manage both work responsibilities and life responsibilities.
I manage it all in one place, and I suggest you do too.
My teaching and advice is definitely influenced by my profession as an independent creator. Many of my examples are creative projects or educational products that you might not be able to relate to.
But I do believe that most of what I have to say applies equally well to corporate work, for a few reasons:
I used most of what I teach in POP when I worked for a large company, and I use it today in the context of an international team at Forte Labs.
I have a deep aversion to any belief system or philosophy that claims to be “all or nothing.” Even if they are effective in some situations, such extremist philosophies tend to be brittle, breaking under the slightest change in conditions. As I moved across 4 countries through my 20s, I encountered too many such changes to be able to maintain any such totalitarian system.
Instead, I came up with a “modular” approach to my productivity. I chose 4 apps that would be my core tools, each one chosen for its utter simplicity, reliability, and ease of use. If one failed, either because of a technical error or because the mental burden of maintaining it was too high, I would just switch to something easier. There were interconnections between these apps, but they were optional. If links broke, it wasn’t the end of the world.
What this modular approach allows me to do is, anytime life gets overwhelming or my bandwidth scarce, I can put any of my apps on pause and step away knowing everything I was working on and towards is frozen exactly in place. There have been many periods when I reverted to using only 3 core apps, or 2, or even 1, like a single lifeline when the seas of change were tossing me back and forth. This isn’t possible when you try to use a single app to do everything. And that modular approach is what I’ll be teaching you.
This speaks to one of my beefs with many productivity courses: they just unload a grab bag of random “tips and tricks” on you, seemingly chosen at random, and leave you to sort through it all and decide what actually works. In contrast, I see my main job as curating and distilling the vast universe of productivity advice out there, into a bite-size package you can absorb in a few sittings.
And look – there are a lot of productivity tips that work in isolation. The mistake is thinking that by piling them all together, you’ll have a system. Each tip and trick adds its own mental burden, so what you really end up with is a house of cards – it holds together only until the slightest wind blows, revealing that there is no connective tissue.
Every single lesson in POP was chosen because it is necessary to the functioning of the whole. Every tactic makes all the other tactics more effective and functional. I’m not giving you a bunch of theory or good-sounding advice. I’m giving you the exact system I use every day.
A question I asked myself as we began working on POP was, “Why should someone have to finish 100% of a course to receive value?” I know I rarely do. So I decided to structure the 4 pillars of POP in order of priority, from most to least important: your calendar is the first and most important pillar to master; then comes your task manager in second place. These tools are more important in the short term.
Only after you’ve figured out these “actionable” tools should you turn your attention to the remaining two: your digital notes app and read-later app. They will be more powerful in the long run, since they allow you to leverage the compounding power of your ideas and creativity.
This ordering ensures this doesn’t become, as one of you put it, “another productivity white elephant on my digital shelf, collecting dust and guilt.” You’ll see results upfront, regardless of what level of skill you’re currently at, and then get introduced to new tools one by one if you have the time and headspace for them.
If you drop off at any point, that’s ok! Just take some time to practice what you learned up to that point, seeing what benefits it brings you (or which parts aren’t needed), and the course will be ready for you when you return.
Absolutely! Everything I teach is platform-agnostic, meaning it will apply just as well to any software program, operating system, or kind of device. I’ve had to change platforms so many times over the years that I was forced to adopt a workflow that functioned seamlessly even as the underlying tools changed. I’ll teach you to do the same.
Build your personalized system for productivity on your own time and at your own pace.
