The Generalist’s Productivity Stack

Our favorite techniques and tools.

Jan 30, 2025

“Without it, I would suck at my job.” — Zeus, a paying subscriber

Friends,

This may be the most self-congratulatory beginning to an edition of this newsletter, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me how many writers The Generalist employs. When I tell them that, barring a few guest posts, it’s just me, they’re usually very surprised. Ok, but how do you do that?

This is a flattering question and one that usually takes me a bit off-guard. It is true that we consistently publish quite long pieces and push ourselves to improve The Generalist’s work each year.

But there is no secret formula. I love writing and do it for fun; technology is endlessly absorbing; we are hyper-motivated by what we are building, and we work very hard because of those things. This is the only answer to this question – regardless of who poses it or answers it. The secret to Rick Rubin’s output is not a special app or esoteric tactic; Jensen Huang can not teach you One Great Trick to Supercharge Your Productivity.

And yet, there is value in these little things. In the subtle tweak and perfectly calibrated tool. In the well-placed reminder or well-suited system. In the process, the decisions, and choices that people make, and how they make them. Over time, practices compound; seconds turning to minutes to days.

It is with this spirit that I’m sharing The Generalist’s Productivity Stack. It will not miraculously 100x your writing output, nor is it a magical shortcut to exponential productivity. Instead, it is a list of the principles, techniques, and tools that accelerate my progress. My hope is that they introduce you to some new ideas and perhaps encourage you to try a few out.

If you have a favorite technique of your own, I’d love to hear it!

P.S. I’ll be going live with friend and writer Packy McCormick tomorrow, January 31, as part of Substack’s “Market Forecast Summit.” Join us at 11:30 am ET for a discussion about the venture landscape in 2025. Note: The conversation is open to everyone, but takes place in the Substack app. You’ll need to download it to join!

P.P.S. On the subject of venture landscapes…a little personal update: I’ve started working with Hummingbird as a part-time Venture Partner! Long-time readers will know from our 2023 case study on the firm (still our most popular piece ever) that I consider Hummingbird to be a unique firm with an almost-singular approach to identifying extreme outlier founders. I’m excited to learn from them and am certain it will make me a better investor and writer.

Now, onto the piece…

1. Set three daily goals

At the start of each day, sit down and choose the three most important things you need to accomplish. (It can be less than three, but it shouldn’t be more. Force yourself to prioritize.)

I had heard this advice for years but rarely followed it. Since making it a habit, I can say that it is timeless for a reason. Though it only takes a few minutes, it routinely better focuses my day and pushes me to complete tasks that I might otherwise let slip.

I’ve especially enjoyed writing down my daily tasks on the Kindle Scribe or in Cortex’s Sidekick Notebook (thank you to Jorge for introducing me to it).

The Sidekick is an elegantly designed daily planner that sits neatly in front of your computer and offers space for note-taking or sketching out ideas. For this recommendation, any word processor or piece of paper will do, but I’ve found this to be a thoughtful solution.

2. Speak your emails

One of the most frequent snags I hit during the day is processing an email to which I don’t really want to reply. This (usually) isn’t because I don’t like the other person or aren’t interested in continuing the conversation, but because some aspect of the correspondence feels just difficult enough to make it irritating to respond to.

It’s the kind of task that is neither interesting enough to be absorbing nor completely brainless. Often, these are the messages that get snoozed again and again, growing stale.

Rather than writing a response, consider talking one. Using a tool like Wispr Flow, you can have your words transcribed with the press of a button as if your laptop were connected to a magic walkie-talkie. In addition to transcribing, Wispr does an excellent job of cutting out superfluous words and conducting some light organization. It’s not always perfect, but it reliably takes you at least 80% of the way toward a response and usually closer to 95%.

Now, when I hit an email I know might take me a frustrating 5 minutes to craft, I simply save it and do a batch of voice responses later in a fraction of the time.

3. Make Claude your note-taking assistant

I am still discovering the miraculous efficiencies Anthropic’s Claude provides. My new favorite use case is to use Claude as a kind of research amanuensis, taking down the main points from whatever I’m reading.

For an upcoming piece, for example, I’ve been reading a number of books about Amazon and the management techniques of Jeff Bezos. I tend to read on my computer or my Kindle. Historically, I’ve made notes as I go along, penning them in a Word document as concisely as possible. I’ll write the page number, briefly summarize the anecdote, and distill the primary takeaway.

This is not a terribly efficient process, especially when navigating multiple themes, sources, and anecdotes. You can take the time to structure it perfectly as you go (time-consuming) or wade through it all when it comes time to write (a little frazzling).

Claude changes this entirely. Now, when I start a new process, I open up a fresh chat with Claude on my phone. I tell Claude what I’m researching and that I would like it to structure notes in a particular way, noting the location, themes, and so on. Then, as I read, I either speak what I would like Claude to note or take a photo of a highlighted passage. The second of those is especially efficient and quite magical. Claude reliably understands the main point I want to take from it and structures it as part of a clean set of notes.

If your work requires you to continually transform information from one source into a new one, I highly recommend trying this out.

4. Use your calendar as a to-do list

This practice remains criminally underused. No matter how beautiful a to-do list app might be, it has a fundamental flaw: it is infinite. You can add as many to-dos as you like to it, regardless of the finiteness of your time. The result is an unbreachable mismatch that cannot be resolved. No matter how tirelessly you work, you will be left with a barricade of uncompleted tasks.

In my experience, forcing yourself to schedule time for each task immediately makes me much likelier to complete it. Instead of having to decide when to tackle it, I know. Though it’s difficult to forecast how long certain tasks take, your accuracy improves over time.

Amie has been my preferred solution for the last couple of years and has been specifically designed for this behavior. It is a combined calendar and to-do app that makes it easy to drag your tasks into open slots and track completion. (It is also a beautiful, intuitive product with many other thoughtful features.)

5. Make email a P.O. Box, not a messaging app

In my experience (both running The Generalist and previously), it’s extremely rare that an email rots in less than 24 hours. Yet, employers trained us to visit email inboxes as often as a text messaging app. “Responsiveness” and “availability” are seen as virtues rather than symptoms of a distracted, chaotic mind. It’s startling how absorbing it can be to fall into this pattern and how quickly it can redirect your day in undesired directions. You might have started your morning with the goal of finishing a project but can quickly get waylaid by any number of other people’s prompts that seem urgent but usually are not.

If you can manage it, change this default. Rather than popping back and forth to your email account throughout the day, absorbing little morsels of dopamine as you do so, visit it as you might a P.O. Box located a 10-minute walk away. That’s not difficult to access, but you wouldn’t want to go more than a couple of times per day at most.

As often as possible, I don’t touch emails until the afternoon around 3 pm. By this time, I’ve hopefully completed a couple of my most important tasks and used the best of my brainpower to do so.

6. Create an absurd amount of snippets and templates

If you must write something more than once, consider making it a snippet or a template.

The two tools I use for this process are Superhuman and Raycast.

Superhuman remains the best email client and allows you to process your messages quickly. It also supports creating templates with dynamic placeholders, specific formatting, subject lines, and recipients. If I know I’m likely to send an email more than once, I’ll turn it into a template. I cannot estimate how many countless hours this has saved me.

Raycast is a productivity app that acts as a kind of non-technical command-line interface. With a few keystrokes, you can rapidly navigate your digital environment, get answers more quickly, take notes, set snippets, and more. I have a truly ludicrous quantity and range of snippets saved from frequently used blurbs, URLs I don’t want to search for, random administrative info it’s annoying to dig up, and emojis I don’t want to have to use the mouse to access. Some are short, saving a dozen keystrokes; others are long, several sentences in length.

Each one helps me write and find information faster. Don’t overthink it; just start adding these to your repertoire, remind yourself to use them, and you’ll feel a noticeable difference.

7. Make unbroken time sacred

If you have autonomy over your schedule, set aside three hours daily for deep, focused work. Treat this time as sacred—only to be broken in the rarest, most unforeseeable circumstances.

In my experience, it takes at least 30 minutes for your brain to sink into true focus. Simply knowing you have an appointment within an hour can stop you from reaching this place of deep thought, and, of course, even once you’ve reached it, you can be shaken from it in an instant.

Many jobs make this process borderline impossible, expecting employees to constantly distribute their attention across Slack, email, and impromptu meetings. It is possible to build a successful career by surfing information at this weightless altitude, but if you want to do real, original work, there is no substitute for unbroken time.

8. Stack your meetings

Naturally, you probably can’t avoid all meetings. But as much as you can, protect your deep work time by compressing them into a discrete window. If you have six meetings spread across your day, it is almost impossible to get anything of note done. But if you squash those meetings into three hours, you still have nine good hours of unbroken work time.

Ideally, make your availability window relatively small – a couple of hours a day. Then, try to schedule as many meetings as possible during this window, back to back.

Of course, this isn’t always possible, especially if you’re scheduling across time zones. But if you have reasonable control over your calendar, you’ll quickly find that 80-90% of calls can fit into these parameters.

9. Delight in killing distractions

It is not enough to eliminate distractions; you must revel in it. Why? The more you consider blocking certain sites to be a privation, a sacrifice to the sober, grey gods of efficiency, the likelier you will be to treat accessing them as a reward. In such a framework, regular work begins to feel dull, joyless, and restrictive.

I prefer to view distractions as something like a swarm of evil wasps sent to disturb my peace and separate me from my goals. In that context, eliminating them is not a sacrifice at all but a reasonable (and gleeful) response to a threat.

To that end, I have put together an overengineered system that brings its own kind of pleasure. I use uBlock Origin to block advertisements, Blocksite to limit access to distracting sites, and News Feed Eradicator, which replaces scrolling feeds with motivating quotes. Sometimes, I’ll double this up with Raycast’s “Focus Sessions,” which also blocks distracting websites; pure overkill.

Every once in a while I’d get an interesting message on X or LinkedIn that would temporarily convince me I needed to monitor these sites closely. That, in turn, would force me to unblock them and begin to visit.

A founder I respect suggested a strange but effective solution (albeit one that requires an assistant.) Instead of visiting these sites yourself, ask a virtual assistant to do so for you, screenshotting any messages and sending them via email. Then, simply process them as you do email, ignoring some and drafting responses for your assistant to post on others. Though it continues to feel strange seeing X DMs pasted into an email, I’ve found it to be a permanent solution. I can stay on top of interesting conversations that come my way on these platforms without returning to them.

10. Replace calls with Loom

Nearly all calls can, and should, be replaced with either an email correspondence or a Loom. If someone asks if they can meet for 30 minutes sometime, ask what discussion points they have in mind, and then respond to them directly.

If you prefer, you can write these out via email, but I find Loom to be the most efficient and enjoyable solution. Though historically billed as a customer support or collaboration tool, Loom is a fantastic messaging app in disguise. When someone asks the questions they’d like my thoughts on, I’ll talk through them over Loom. I don’t spend time thinking about them in advance or trying to polish my responses. I answer them as I might over a call or coffee. If they’d like to hear my take more quickly, they can always watch the video at 2x speed.

I find this approach works especially well for broad requests. For example, students often reach out asking for my thoughts on working in tech or venture capital or are curious to learn about my journey to founding The Generalist. I love getting these messages! And if I had infinite time, I suspect I would be very happy having calls or coffees with all of them. A Loom is a good alternative: I can usually find 5-15 minutes to share a few thoughts and answer someone’s particular questions.

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