Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done

Latest Episodes:

20% of your effort makes up 80% of your success — The Pareto principle Mar 31, 2025

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How you can use this law of nature, work, productivity and creativity to focus on the stuff that will have the biggest impact, and eventually ditch the rest.

How to be a polymath – Leonardo da Vinci Mar 24, 2025

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Being a creative person in this most digital of decades means needing to be good at more than one form of creative expression. That means thinking like a polymath, and luckily we have history’s greatest multi-hyphenate to learn from.

The super-productive women missing from time management history Mar 17, 2025

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Let’s spend a bit of time today with some of the women of productivity history, some of whom you know, some we’ll meet for the first time.

How Ben Franklin used timeboxing to stop missing deadlines Mar 10, 2025

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If you have to meet any kind of regular publishing schedule, you’ll know how time can stretch out into infinity until the night before you have to hit Publish, when suddenly it feels like you have to cram 8 hours of work into 30 minutes.

But Benjamin Franklin had a neat little system that helped him keep on top of his commitments, and all it takes is a pen, some paper, and a watch.

What happened to the Inbox Zero guy? Mar 03, 2025

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Inbox Zero is a pretty good way of organising your email, but behind the system is a dude who stepped off the hamster wheel of productivity, got some perspective, and became one of the Internet’s true treasures.

How to make fewer mistakes – The Checklist Manifesto Feb 24, 2025

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Simple mistakes are more common than it’s comfortable to admit. But there’s a dirt-simple technique that has dramatically reduced the number of preventable deaths, and it’s stuff we can use to make our own lives run more smoothly.

Thanks to Ayesha Khan of Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever* for lending her voice to Mark's silly opening sketch.

How to work when the sky’s caving in — Lincoln vs Churchill Feb 17, 2025

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When things look bleak, either in your head or out in the world, being “productive” is probably the furthest thing from your mind. We live in difficult times, no doubt, but two outliers a hundred years apart, fought oppression, propaganda, and dehumanisation all while under their own personal dark clouds.

Bullet Journal – Productive or performative? Feb 10, 2025

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Can this analogue system for a digital age really help us get more done? Has it strayed from its roots and become synonymous with people who call things “super aesthetic”? And, if we can learn what we need to about the system in 3 minutes, why does it cost three and a half grand to learn to teach it?

How to get into the zone — Flow Feb 03, 2025

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Time stands still and you’re in that sweet-spot where the work you're doing is challenging enough to hold your attention, but not so difficult that it causes you stress.

This is flow, and it might just prove itself to be one of the keys that unlocks long-term happiness.

The tomato of productivity – the Pomodoro Technique Jan 27, 2025

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It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re thinking over your day. Did you actually get anything done, or were you just reacting to a bunch of distractions?