The interface is a calendar grid. You drag blocks for your work hours, deep work, family time, exercise, whatever modes matter to you. You color them. You theme the days at the top. Then you export the result as a PDF, an image, an ICS file, or a Markdown document.
The export options are what set it apart. The ICS file means you can drop your ideal week into Apple Calendar or Google Calendar as a toggleable planning layer. Turn it on when you are sketching out a week. Turn it off when you are looking at the actual schedule. The Markdown export means anyone working in Obsidian can paste the template straight into a personal retreat note, a quarterly planning doc, or a roles-and-goals review.
I sat with the tool on the air while Mike walked through his on the latest episode of Focused. It slotted right into the way I already think about weekly planning. Designing an ideal week is one of the most useful things you can do for your time. Most people never do it because the friction is high. Mike’s tool brings the friction down to almost zero.
Shortform sponsored this post, but they didn’t tell me what to write. Here’s an honest take from someone who’s been using their service for years.
On most days, I am not the person who curls up with a book for two hours.
I’d like to be. I picture some better version of me with a quiet evening, a comfortable chair, and a thick hardcover I go through start to finish. The reality is closer to twenty minutes between meetings and a few quiet minutes before I fall asleep. Those are my reading hours.
For a long time I felt bad about this. Reading in the cracks isn’t real reading, I’d tell myself. The serious people sit down and put in the time.
Reading in the cracks can be some of your best reading time.
Think about it as picking ideas. I keep a running list of topics I want to think about. When I have twenty minutes, I pull up a Shortform summary on whatever I’m trying to figure out that week.
Last week the topic was difficult conversations. I had a hard call coming up and wanted to think it through before getting on the phone. Not by reading three books on it. Just by sitting with the core ideas for twenty minutes. Their summary of Crucial Conversations got me there. I read it standing in the kitchen while waiting for water to boil.
Five minutes later I was thinking about the call differently.
That kind of just-in-time reading is something I could never do with physical books. By the time I’d found the right book, opened to the right chapter, and remembered where I left off, the window had closed. With Shortform, I pull up the one-page version, get the spine of the argument, and decide whether to go deeper.
Where this gets really useful is with Shortform’s Master Guides. A Master Guide pulls from ten or fifteen books on a single subject and gives you one guided read across them. You see where the authors agree and where they argue with each other.
Shortform doesn’t replace deep reading. A book that grabs me, I still read in full. Some books deserve the long evening and the chair. I’ll keep doing that for the ones that earn it.
What it replaces is the guilt pile. The stack of books I bought because they sounded important and never actually opened. Now I read the one-page summary, decide if it deserves more time, and either commit to the full guide, read the full book, or move on.
That triage is the part I didn’t expect to value. I read more by reading less of what doesn’t deserve a full read.
If you want to try Shortform, use my link and you’ll get a free trial plus a 25% discount on the annual plan. Pick one topic you’ve been meaning to think about. Read the summary in five minutes. See if you walk away with something useful.
That’s how I started. I’m still using it years later.
I want to talk about stretch goals, because I think they’re doing you more harm than good.
The idea sounds reasonable. You pick your top three priorities for the week, then you add a few more items labeled “stretch goals.” If you get to them, great. If not, no pressure. Except that’s not how your brain works. (Or at least mine.)
Your brain sees five things on the list. It doesn’t care about the label. It sees five commitments. And by the time you finish your actual priorities (if you finish them), you’re looking at those stretch goals and feeling like you failed. The word “stretch” doesn’t protect you from the guilt of not getting to them.
We’ve all got the scars from committing to too much. And stretch goals, in my opinion, are just one more self-inflicted injury. Force yourself to be realistic with your tasks for the day. That’s one of the reasons I like putting my final list for the day on a note card or in a pocket notebook. There is only so much room on the page.
That’s the shift. Going from “I have a lot to do, and I’ll see how far I get” to “I chose these three things, and I’m going to do them, hell or high water.” It changes your whole relationship with the work.
I don’t have a hard number myself. Sometimes it’s one big thing for the week. Sometimes it’s five, but when it’s five, a lot of them are small. It’s never more than five. And I stopped doing stretch goals entirely.
If you finish your priorities early, that’s not an invitation to add more work. That’s a reward. Go read a book. Take your dog for a walk. Call a friend. The fact that you finished your priorities means the system is working. Don’t punish yourself for being effective by piling on more.
If you can’t bring yourself to cut the list down, at least be honest with yourself: those extra items aren’t stretch goals. They’re wishes. And wishes don’t belong on a planning document.
How much of your day is spent on your actual work?
Not the email triage. Not the task shuffling. Not the calendar juggling, the filing, the follow-ups, the status tracking, the scheduling, the data entry. The real work. The creative stuff. The thinking. The making.
For most of us, the honest answer is painful. We sit down intending to do meaningful work and spend the first hour sorting email. We open our task manager and burn twenty minutes reorganizing instead of doing. We have systems. Maybe several. None of them talk to each other, and all of them need feeding.
It’s not the work. It’s the work around the work. I call it the donkey work.
I’ve been building something to fix this. It’s a method for using AI to handle the donkey work so you have more time for everything else. I’ll tell you all about it Tuesday.
This post is sponsored by Drafts. Sponsorship doesn’t influence what I write. Here’s my take.
I’ve been a Drafts user since its release. It’s the first place text goes on every device I own. Grocery lists, blog post ideas, meeting notes, quick reminders. Anything that starts as words starts in Drafts.
What makes it work is speed. You open the app and start typing. No picking a folder. No choosing a notebook. Just a blinking cursor ready to go. You sort it out later, and Drafts gives you the tools to send that text wherever it needs to end up.
Version 50 Is a Big Deal
Greg Pierce just shipped Drafts v50, and this one matters for anyone who cares about automation.
The Shortcuts support got a complete overhaul. There are now over 50 Shortcuts actions.
You can query drafts by date ranges and location, access version histories, control the interface, and run granular commands for appending, prepending, and editing drafts. The kind of stuff that used to take workarounds now just works.
On the Mac side, the AppleScript integration got a serious expansion. You can query your entire draft library, update drafts, run actions, and work with workspaces. If you’ve ever wanted to build Mac workflows that pull from or push to your Drafts library, this is the update you’ve been waiting for.
The MCP Server for Claude
This is the one that caught my attention. Greg built an MCP server that connects Drafts directly to Claude. If you use Claude Desktop or Claude Code on your Mac, you can now talk to your Drafts library through the AI.
That means you can ask Claude things like “summarize the drafts I created this week” or “find all my drafts tagged with project-x.” You can create new drafts, run actions, and manage your library through natural conversation. It connects through AppleScript locally on your Mac, so your data stays on your machine.
I set this up and it took about two minutes. You can install it right from Claude Desktop’s Extensions settings. Search for “drafts” and it’s there. For anyone already using both Drafts and Claude, this is worth trying immediately.
There are plenty of note apps. What keeps me in Drafts is the philosophy behind it. Text first. Decide later. The capture friction is zero, and the automation layer lets you build exactly the workflows you need.
With v50, that automation layer got considerably deeper. Whether you’re building Shortcuts on your iPhone, writing AppleScript on your Mac, or connecting to AI through MCP, Drafts meets you where you work.
Check out Drafts if you haven’t already. And if you’re already a user, make sure you’re running v50.
This is the course that teaches you to stop optimizing and start becoming.
Most productivity advice is about doing more, faster. This course is about identifying who you want to become in every role you play and building systems to get there.
The ancient Greeks called it Arete: the pursuit of excellence in your own character. The kind of thing that makes you want to leap out of bed and put a dent in the universe.
What’s inside:
80+ video lessons (8+ hours of focused instruction)
A 140+ page book (ePub and PDF)
The complete system: roles, Arete, reviews, hyper-scheduling, shutdown rituals
New for 2026:
Shadow Roles & The Inner Vader
The Arete Radar (and the meditative gap)
Physical Anchors
Solving for Meaningfulness
The Blank Page Ritual
The Overhead Tax
Two Editions:
Essentials Edition — All videos and the book Pro Edition — Adds the eight-session Workshop Series with live implementation, Q&A, and companion guides. Plus invitations to live quarterly planning sessions throughout 2026.
Both editions are 10% off through January 26th with code PFG26LAUNCH.
This system works. I’ve been teaching it for two years and I’ve seen the results on myself and others. However, if you’re looking for a quick hack, this isn’t for you.
If you’re looking for something that fundamentally changes how you approach your life and work, this is it.
P.S. The Pro Edition Workshop Series is brand new for 2026. Eight structured sessions walking through the entire system:
Also, in 2026 we’ll be doing quarterly planning sessions with the Pro Edition to help keep you on track.
All sessions recorded and added to your course library.
In productivity, we worship efficiency. The fastest way to clear an inbox. The most automated way to track a project. The most frictionless method to organize our lives.
I’m going to suggest something different.
When it comes to your goals and plans, efficiency is the enemy.
I learned this the hard way last year. Trying to be hyper-efficient, I dictated my quarterly review and used AI to organize the text into a structured plan. The resulting document was thorough and efficiently produced.
It failed completely.
My Q1 plan was hand written for a reason.
By skipping the struggle of manually organizing my thoughts, I hadn’t actually internalized the goals. The plan remained a digital file rather than a core part of my squishy human brain. The process of birthing the ideas is what makes them sink into your core.
I learned, again, that you cannot optimize the pursuit of virtue and your character.
Much of the tech industry has monetized us as advertising units, designing tools that prioritize engagement and speed over our personal flourishing. Choosing to go intentionally slow is an act of rebellion. It’s the refusal to live your life randomly.
The world will try to bury you with petty nonsense. Everyone has good intentions when they ask for just one more little thing. But every “yes” to the unimportant is a “no” to what actually matters.
Solving for meaningfulness means giving yourself permission to ignore the siren song of doing more. It means taking an hour in the morning to read and reflect, or taking two days for a personal retreat, even when your inbox is screaming.
These aren’t inefficient uses of time. They’re the highest and best use of your life because they ensure you’re actually heading toward a destination that matters.
As we enter a new year, resist the temptation to optimize everything.
Some things deserve to be slow. That’s where the meaning lives.
For several years now, I’ve been getting back into woodworking. It’s a hobby I love, but through 2024, I kept running into the same problem: I never felt like I was getting enough time in the shop to actually make things.
During my regular reviews, I’d look at my role as a creative person and feel disappointed. I was talking about woodworking more than I was doing it. By the end of 2024, the gap between intention and action had grown so wide that I genuinely questioned whether I could still call myself a craftsman.
Looking back, I think my mistake was planning for specific projects instead of just getting time in the shop. I’d have a project in mind, but life would get in the way, the project would slip, and weeks would pass without me touching a tool.
Heading into 2025, I tried something different. Rather than plan specific projects, I committed to spending an hour in the shop every day. It didn’t matter what I did out there. Pushing a broom counted. Organizing a tool drawer counted. Actually building something counted. The only rule was one hour a day, away from work, being creative with my hands.
This experiment worked brilliantly.
Now I regularly spend time in the shop, and I look forward to it. Every day, one of my 24 hours goes to working with my hands. I find it personally satisfying, and it makes my other work better too. There’s something about stepping away from screens and into sawdust that resets my brain.
My Studio Book Shelf – One of the projects I started (and completed in 2025)
The experiment worked so well that I’ve expanded it. I now spend an hour a day on fitness, health, and exercise. Another hour goes to reading books and reflecting on what I read. That last one has let me dive back into the classics I enjoyed in college.
As we head toward the end of the year, I consider this one of the most successful experiments of 2025. It’s been a real improvement in my quality of life.
If you’re heading into a new year with something that’s got you stuck, maybe consider committing time to it rather than specific plans. Stop thinking about the project and start thinking about the practice. See how it works out for you.
When I was a boy and first showed up for school, I was tested and found to be entirely … adequate. I wasn’t particularly sharp, but I was earnest. As such, I didn’t find myself in the “smart” classes with the “smart” kids.
And yet…
In those ordinary classes with the rest of the ordinary kids, I bumped into some of the most extraordinary teachers. To name just a few: Ms. Carol, Ms. Sartor, Ms. Puckett, Mr. Mercer, and Professor Peterson.
Each of those teachers saw things in me that I did not see in myself. In turn, each of them gently yet firmly put their hands on the tiller of my life, making the most subtle course corrections that, so early in my life, entirely changed me and the course of my life.
I don’t have the skill or subtlety of those magical people.
And yet…
I would still like to help. I owe it to my teachers.
So I’m announcing the second year of Productivity Academy Summer Sessions.
A Unique Opportunity for Students
Earlier this year, I released the 2025 Productivity Field Guide, which helped many find focus in a distracted world. This summer, I’m excited to announce the 2025 Productivity Academy. This exclusive program offers the Productivity Field Guide and a four-part webinar series over the summer for select high school and college students.
Why Should You Join?
In today’s hyper-connected world, staying focused has become a superpower. Distractions are everywhere, competition is fierce, and the ability to concentrate on what truly matters will set you apart in both academics and life.
But focus isn’t just about staying on task—it’s about understanding what’s important to you and what you want to achieve. This course will help you discover your “why” and give you the practical tools to build a focused, purpose-driven life.
What You’ll Get
The Productivity Field Guide – Learn practical strategies that actually work
Comprehensive PDF Book – Dive deep into the concepts with a complete guide
Actionable Worksheets – Apply what you learn with hands-on exercises
Month-Long Webinar Series – Participate in interactive sessions to reinforce your learning
What’s the Cost?
The course is free. However, I want something more valuable than money: your commitment. You must be willing to work through the material, complete the exercises, and attend the webinars. This isn’t for casual observers—only dedicated students should apply.
Why I’m Doing This
When I was your age, I struggled to find my focus. It took me decades to figure out my “why,” and once I did, my life transformed. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did. You can achieve that clarity much sooner, and I want to help you get there.
How to Apply
If you’re ready to take this step, send an email including:
Who you are – Tell me about yourself
Your goals – What do you want to achieve?
Why you’re interested – What draws you to this program?
Applications are due by June 11. Recipients will be notified shortly after, and the webinar series will start later in June.
I often think that I must be unbearable to my developer friends. Sometimes I get the bit between my teeth on some pet feature and I just won’t shut up about it.
