Most productivity advice assumes you're sitting down. If your day is meetings, drives, sites and doorsteps, that plan falls apart by ten in the morning, and no amount of colour-coding a planner will save it.
The workflow below assumes the opposite. You're moving, your hands are full, and the only reliable input you have left is your own voice.
The rule: capture in the two minutes after
The window that matters is the two minutes after a conversation ends, while you still remember what was actually agreed. Not that evening. Certainly not on Sunday, staring down a list you can no longer decode.
So the habit stays small, deliberately:
- Conversation ends.
- You talk for sixty seconds about what happened and what needs to follow.
- You walk into the next thing.
Everything else, mercifully, is the tool's problem.
What to say out loud
New users, I've noticed, under-say things. Give it the context you'd give a good assistant:
- Who you spoke to and what it was about
- What they asked for, in their own words if you can manage it
- What you promised, and by when
- Anything you need to look up before you reply
Three ways to capture, depending on the moment
- Listen for meetings, calls and the walk back to the car.
- Type when you're somewhere you can't talk. Same pipeline, same drafts.
- Converse when you want to think out loud and be asked questions back.
Folders, not one big pile
Give each project, client or property its own folder. Then the captures, the drafts and the tasks all land somewhere you can actually find them, and a colleague you share the folder with can see what's live without needing a handover meeting.
What the end of the day looks like
Instead of a blank inbox and a bad feeling, you get:
- Minutes for each meeting, written up
- Follow-up emails drafted in your own account, ready to check and send
- Tasks with the due dates you spoke aloud
- Calendar entries for what you said you'd book
The goal is not to write less. It is to never write anything twice.
If you want to test the habit, do it on a single busy day rather than an entire week. One day is quite enough to tell whether the evening got shorter.