PP 277: My New Favorite Productivity and Focus Tool

Kim Sutton Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. Today, I am so excited to share with you a new productivity tool that I just found. Quite honestly, I am an affiliate, but I am not sharing it because they are paying me to or because the show is sponsored by them. I am just sharing information about this new tool because I am so excited about what it is already doing for my business. And the tool is called Focuster F-O-C-U-S-T-E-R, and you’ll be able to get links in the show notes at thekimsutton.com/pp277. Now, let me tell you how it works and why I love it so much. Focuster has its own interface, you log in, and you put in the tasks that you want to work on, how long you expect it to take. And you can schedule that task in for a certain day. And even for a certain specific time on that day. I am not setting it for specific times on specific days, though, I just tend to tell it what day I would like to do that task on. And if you’ve been listening to previous episodes of the Positive Productivity Podcast, you know that I really tried to limit my tasks, or my priority tasks to three personal and three professional on any day, and only when those three to six tasks are done, do I add any more. So the reason I love Focuster so much is because I have it integrated with my Google Calendar. That’s the calendar program I use and Focuster looks to see when I am busy. For instance, with client work, with kid activities, with podcast interviews, and then it schedules my tasks around those previously scheduled appointments. Now one thing that I do want to mention is that it’s only going to put an appointment into my calendar into a block that is big enough for the whole task to be completed. So for example, if I say that a task is going to take four hours, and I would never recommend this by the way, it is only going to put that task into a slot that is four hours big, long, I think you get my point. If I say that I want that task to be completed today, and I don’t have a slot that is four hours long, then it’s going to go out as many days as necessary to put that task in. What I do instead of saying I have a four hour task is that I actually break bigger projects, and that’s what I always want you to call them is bigger projects into individual tasks. For example, what I’m doing a solo podcast episodes such as this one, I break it out into numerous sections or numerous tasks. One task will be you record the episode, the next will be edit the episode, and then post the episode. And each of those tasks is a smaller task that can be performed at different times during the day or even on different days if I really wanted it to be. Now, here’s another cool thing about Focuster, I have a zap set up so that any email that I star within my Gmail is automatically created as another task in Focuster. And how I’ve even maximize this feature is that I have filters set up within my Gmail to automatically star some emails based upon their subject line. So for example, anytime a new guest schedules the recording session, a link needs to be set up within Zen caster the platform I use to record my guests episodes. And those tasks emails based upon their subject line are automatically starred and within 15 minutes, those tasks are zapped into my Focuster account. Now if you’re not familiar with Zapier, I want you to go over today to see all the awesome features that you may be missing out on. Zapier is a great way to connect all the various tools and systems that you’re using to each other. And while you can get a free account, with a paid account, you can do even more.

Now the last really awesome feature that I want to share with you about how I’m using Focuster is that any new card that’s created in Trello is also added as a task to my task board. Now, this is also a zap. And I know they have other project management tool integrations. So as long as you have Zapier, it really doesn’t matter what project management tool you’re using, but you should be able to set up Zap so that anytime you’re assigned a new task is automatically added onto your focused or dashboard. Oh, I forgot to mention just one more important feature that is native to Focuster, and that is that it has you when you’re setting up your account, tell it what hours of the day you are going to work. So let’s just suppose that you say your working hours are 9am to 5pm. So right there, you have eight hours. If you did not have any appointments scheduled for that day, you would have eight hours of workable task time. If you schedule five hours of tasks to be completed during the day, right then on your daily dashboard, it’s going to tell you that you have five hours of tasks scheduled and that you have three hours remaining. I have been adding extra tasks into my main task list and not assigning them today’s but occasionally I haven’t been able to finish tasks from previous days and they’ve been carried over to today. So it even shows me how over scheduled I am. You know it’s really important to me that we are never overworking ourselves and that we’re not being pressured by too many tasks on any given day. So I love this feature I do not want to see red on my daily dashboard and I will do whatever I can to move all those extra tasks to a different days so that I am not seeing red. If everything that I’ve talked to you about today about Focuster is peeking you’re interested and if you want to get a two week free trial then I want you to go to thekimsutton.com/pp277 and click the link in the show notes. Or you can simply go to thekimsutton.com/Focuster F-O-C-U-S-T-E-R and sign up today. Trust me you will not be disappointed. I would love to hear what you think of Focuster if and when you sign up. So be sure to leave a comment in the show notes if and when that should happen. Now with all this said go forth and make it a positive and productive day.