The Best Free Productivity Tool

How do you organize your thoughts?

Something I’ve been doing during quarantine is cleaning up all my files, photos and random notes I have on my phone on laptop.

It’s a good feeling…

Cleaning out the junk, freeing up memory, organizing thoughts.

And I’ve been experimenting with a new note-taking system, too.

It’s early days, but this new system is allowing me to do something no notebook or productivity app like Evernote has ever really managed…

At least not effectively, or efficiently enough to be worthwhile:

Being able to organize ideas by ASSOCIATION.

This really is a game-changer.

When I’m more familiar with the system, I’ll show you exactly how it works.

But the whole process got me thinking about how sleep helps your brain to consolidate memories.

During dream time, your brain can reorganize and review the day’s events.

And connect new experiences to old ones.

That’s why getting enough REM sleep doesn’t just help you remember things properly…

It also helps you make connections between things that aren’t immediately obvious.

That’s how you learn, grow, and become a competent, reliable person.

If you want to know how to immediately improve the quality of your REM sleep, just download Sleep Like a Lion, and turn to the first paragraph on page 28.

https://gumroad.com/l/nkiWp

P.S.P. French

Dear Frustrated Friend

There are some problems you know about and some you don’t.

This is true for everyone.

And because it’s true for EVERYONE…

This is one of the cornerstones of good copywriting.

Because you can’t show people a solution to a problem they don’t know they have.

So when building a copywriting promotion, you need to understand your market’s LEVEL OF AWARENESS.

It looks a bit like this:

Level 1 – no idea
Level 2 – aware of problem, not aware of solutions
Level 3 – aware of solutions, not aware of your solution
Level 4 – aware of your specific solution
Level 5 – considering buying your specific solution

When I was writing Sleep Like a Lion, I wanted to understand how to message people at their level of awareness.

So I conducted a quick poll on Twitter…

And it went like this:

There are 3 main sleep problems

Which one do you struggle with?

  1. I wake up feeling groggy
  2. I have trouble falling asleep
  3. I can’t stay asleep

And the answer was VERY useful.

Because 70% of people answered that they wake up feeling groggy.

Which told me EXACTLY what I needed to say, and the specific problem I needed to provide a specific solution to if I wanted to make my book HELPFUL to the most amount of people.

So that’s what I did.

The book provides solutions to all three problems.

But if you’re someone who wakes up feeling groggy rather than refreshed, then this is your lucky day.

Here’s the link you need:

https://gumroad.com/l/nkiWp

P.S.P. French

How to Sleep Your Way to Success

If you’re serious about learning copywriting but don’t know who Ken McCarthy is, then this post is for you.

If you do know who Ken McCarthy is, then you’ll be happy to keep reading.

About 30 years ago, when the internet was only nearly a thing, Ken saw the commercial potential of a connected network of computers.

He saw it before Steve Jobs saw it.

He saw it before Bill Gates saw it.

And if it weren’t for Ken, Jeff Bezos wouldn’t be a name you know.

In 1994, for example, he organized the first-ever conference where business opportunities on the web were even discussed.

I don’t know how old you were in 1994, or if you were even in 1994, but there were no smartphones and no consumer broadband. There were probably less than a million people using the internet, compared to more than 2 billion today.

Ken saw the future.

He saw:

Online video. Email marketing. Banner advertising. Pay-per-click. SEO.

And in Ken’s own words:

“Not to take anything away from anyone because the Internet world is chock full of great minds and great people, but just about everything that is considered “hot” in Internet marketing today is derivative of something that I or one of my close colleagues first introduced at one of my seminars years ago.”

All because he saw the future.

When you predict the future, you get paid for being right.

So Ken’s reputation is second-to-none.

And looking to the future is something that I’ve been trying to do in my writing, my relationships and my outlook in general.

And, in my own humble way, I’ve written something that I’d like to share with you:

My new book, Sleep Like a Lion.

I wrote this book because learning how to sleep properly has changed my life.

It is my belief that the future belongs to those who understand the power of REAL sleep.

Not just “getting “enough”.

I’m talking about systematically optimizing sleep, which accounts for one-third of your entire life.

It’s the lowest hanging fruit humanity has available when it comes to enhancing your intelligence, hormones, immunity, athletic performance and powers of persuasion.

So here’s an excerpt:

“Humans are beginning to explore and spend money on enhancing their health, intelligence and productivity. Unlike the past, when snake oil salesmen peddled health-boosting elixirs, we have entered an age where these benefits are real, noticeable and destined to accelerate. The ‘nootropics’ community on reddit has close to 170,000 subscribers, while a quick Google Trends search for biohacking should tell you everything you need to know about the upward trajectory of these desires. Some of us are going to choose a path towards a future in which we have more money, better relationships, excellent health and enviable power. The rest are going to risk being left behind.”

James Altucher has a rule he calls ‘The Daily 1%’.

“Most people stick to their routines,” he writes. “They lose track of the idea of 1% improvement. They forget the magic formula: 1% a day improvement, compounded, equals 3800% a year.”

So, given the benefits of high-quality shut-eye, what if you could just decide to have a good night’s sleep?

And what if you could compound all those benefits, and the ways they diffuse into your waking moments, day after day, week after week, year after year?

How different would your life look? How much more of your potential would you live to understand?

If you want to find out, here’s the link:

https://gumroad.com/l/nkiWp

P.S.P French

Building a Beautiful Mind for Twitter Growth

Russel Crowe has starred in some good movies that aren’t Gladiator.

In A Beautiful Mind, for example, he plays Princeton graduate student John Nash who gets the idea that will eventually win him the Nobel prize while trying to hook up with girls in a bar.

A beautiful blonde walks in…

She’s with four other girls.

Nash is with three of his friends.

And he does something none of them expect.

He warns them against trying to compete for the blonde because if they all go for her, all the others would know they were second choice.

And no-one would get to boogie.

But, Nash argues, “If none of us go for the blonde, we don’t get in each other’s way, and we don’t insult the other girls. It’s the only way we win. It’s the only way we all get laid.”

It’s quite a famous scene. You probably remember it anyway.

But I don’t bring it up because I want to talk about Russel Crowe movies that aren’t Gladiator.

I bring it up because it’s about a BIG IDEA that changes the way people think.

So I’ve been thinking about Twitter a bit recently.

And of the generally agreed-upon strategies for growth is to get bigger accounts to retweet you.

But there’s a problem here.

Bigger accounts have lots of smaller accounts already trying this strategy on them.

It’s hard to get them to notice you because you’re competing with everyone else, especially if you’re an account without many followers.

Big accounts are the blonde in the bar.

I believe a much better strategy, at least if you have less than 1,000 followers like I do right now, is to get the attention of accounts who have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers.

Much less competition.

Much more fun, too.

So that’s my play.

P.S.P. French

Ian Fleming’s Daily Routine

What does your perfect day look like?

For twelve years in a row during January and February and a bit of March, Ian Fleming flew off to his Jamaican hideaway, a beach house called Goldeneye, near to a little banana port called Oracabessa, to write a James Bond novel.

Recently, I was reading about Fleming’s daily routine.

And I have to admit, it’s a thing of beauty.

I’ve typed it out below:

I get up with the birds, which is to say about half past seven, because they wake one up, and then I go and bathe in the ocean before breakfast. We don’t have to wear a swimsuit there, because it’s so private; my wife and I bathe and swim a hundred yards or so and come back and have a marvelous proper breakfast with some splendid scrambled eggs made by my housekeeper, who’s particularly good at them, and then I sit out in the garden to get a sunburn until about ten.

Only then do I set to work. I sit in my bedroom and type about fifteen hundred words straightaway, without looking back on what I wrote the day before. Then about a quarter past twelve, I chuck that and go down, with a snorkel and spear, around the reefs looking for lobsters or whatever there may be, sometimes find them, sometimes don’t, and then I come back, I have a couple of pink gins, and we have a very good lunch, ordinary Jamaican food, and I have a siesta from about half-past two until four.

Then I sit again in the garden for about an hour or so, have another swim, and then I spend from six to seven – the dusk comes very suddenly in Jamaica; at six o’clock it suddenly gets very dark – doing another five hundred words. I then number the pages, of which by that time there are about seven, put them away in a folder, and have a couple of powerful drinks, then dinner, occasionally a game of Scrabble with my wife – at which she thinks she is very much better than I am, but I know I’m the best – and straight off to bed and into a dead sleep.”

There are three lessons here:

1. Cultivate the pleasures of eating, sleeping and drinking
2. Get some sun on your balls 
2. Consistency is key

The text is an extract from an interview Fleming did with Playboy, just a few months before his death in 1964.

Playboy re-published the interview in 2012. It contains a host of wisdom and insight, as well as knowledge about 007 you won’t find anywhere else. 

In fact, the magazine has re-published a lot of their old interviews as a big Kindle book. Worth checking out.