Do you find you are still searching for that ‘perfect’ productivity app? Then this week’s episode is definitely one for you.

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Script

Episode 107

Hello and welcome to episode 107 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week we return to that polarising question of what app is right for you and how do you choose the right app or apps. 

But before we get to this week’s question, in case you missed it, my Create Your Own Apple Productivity course has now been updated for 2019. That means there’s a whole new section on the new Reminders app as well as updates for Notes and Calendar. 

If you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update for you and if you are not, and you are quick, you can pick up this course for just $39.99 on the early-bird programme. But you will need to be quick as this discount will end very soon.

If you don’t want to invest in expensive productivity apps and want to just use the built-in apps that come with your iPhone, iPad and Mac, then this course is perfect for you as it will give you the know-how to build your own system using just the Apple productivity apps including Calendar, Notes, Reminders and iCloud. It’s all there in this course.

There’s a link to the full details of this course in the show notes to this podcast.

Ok, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I've been looking for a really good to-do list manager for years and just cannot find the right one. Do you have any advice on finally finding the right app? 

Hi Tim, thank you for your question. My answer would be “no I don’t” and there’s a very good reason why. 

that's because the tools you use—whether that is a to-do list manager or notes app or calendar—really doesn't matter. What matters is your system or framework. 

You see no app will ever do the work for you. All a productivity app will do is show you what you need to see when you need to see it. Of course, you can add dates, times and tags, labels or contexts to narrow down the lists, but essentially all these tools will ever do is show you what you have to do. Doing the work is completely in your hands and that is not going to change anytime soon. 

So what it all comes down to is how you organise your lists. All you are going to get with different apps are just different ways to list things. You may get some different colours, some may show you your projects and tasks in a Kanban board style, others may show you your lists in a traditional list format but they are all essentially doing the same thing, they are showing you the tasks you inputted into the app. That’s because they are just lists. 

When you base your whole system on an app, if the app updates or, as in the recent case with Todoist, changes some of the features. If that happens, you can find your whole productivity system no longer works and then you are going to have problems.

This is why I preach building a system around COD—this is a stripped-down absolute basic System anyone can adopt—All you need to do is collect everything that has your attention into a trusted place. That could be a piece of paper you carry around with you in your pocket or it could be your phone’s built-in notes app. It really doesn't matter where you are collecting. All that matters is you are collecting and you trust you will look at what you collected every twenty-four t