Your calendar is the real boss. Brad Geddes hammered that home at Hero Conf Philadelphia. Everything else is just support.
Meetings. Managers. Email. Those three eat more hours than bad software ever will. Jason Fried calls the first two the M&Ms. They chop your day into tiny pieces. Real work needs 3-to-5-hour stretches. Shorter than that and the hard stuff never finishes.
Paul Graham wrote about this years ago. Managers live in one-hour chunks. Makers need half-days. So protect the four-hour maker blocks. Let the managers meet each other then. Only break it when something’s actually on fire.
Meeting Rules That Save Real Hours
Brad’s list is short and sharp:
- Meetings default to 15 minutes standing, 25 minutes, or 50 minutes. Never a full hour.
- Kill recurring meetings whenever you can get away with it.
- No meeting unless there’s a clear decision waiting.
A lot of us do both maker and manager work. Split the day. Deep work first. Reactive stuff later. Brad starts early on purpose. He gets a pile done before the office can steal his time.
Email Is the Distraction You Keep Choosing
McKinsey’s numbers still hold up. Knowledge workers burn about 28% of the day on email and another 19% just looking for information. That leaves roughly 39% for the job they actually get paid for.
Inbox Zero helps. Checking mail only at set times helps more: 11:00, 13:00, and 16:00. Close the app the rest of the day. If it’s urgent, people will call or walk over. Checking less also drops the stress.
Once a thread hits four replies, just call. Faster every single time.
Slack still beats most options for team chat. An internal wiki cuts the endless search. Confluence or something like it keeps answers in one place instead of buried in old messages.
Project Tools, Time Tracking, and the Rest of the Stack
Still running projects through email, meetings, and spreadsheets? Stop. Pick one system and use it: Asana, Basecamp, Trello, or Wrike.
Time tracking is the thing most service businesses hate but still need. Even if you don’t bill by the hour, you should know where the hours go. Start with Controlio. The Controlio Tool shows the real picture without the usual drag. After that you can look at Harvest or Toggl if you want.
Cloud storage is basic now. Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or OneDrive. Bigger teams often pull projects, time, and files into one system.
Notes belong in the cloud too. Evernote, Google Keep, or OneNote so they go where you go.
Feedly keeps blogs under control. Pull newsletters into the same reader with Emails 2 RSS and stop letting them clog the inbox.
Support tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk keep tickets from taking over the day. Video runs on Zoom or Google Meet.
Map your processes once. A simple flowchart shows what to automate and what to leave alone. LucidChart or similar makes it quick.
PPC Tools That Still Matter
Brad skipped the obvious stuff (Excel, the Google and Microsoft editors, and basic bid tools). He focused on the specialists that actually help once accounts get big.
- Ad testing: AdAlysis, Boost Media
- Competitive research (search): SEMrush, AdGooroo, The Search Monitor
- Competitive research (display): Moat, WhatRunsWhere, Adbeat
- Keyword research: Keyword Studio, Ubersuggest
- Reporting: DashThis, NinjaCat, Swydo
- Quality Score and optimization: Optmyzr, Tenscores
- Landing page testing: Hotjar, Optimizely, Unbounce, VWO
Grab at least one solid tool from each group once you’re managing real volume. Tool use climbs with keyword count. That pattern hasn’t changed.
Final Words
Guard the long blocks. Treat your calendar like the scarce thing it is. Cut meetings that don’t decide anything. Batch the email. Track time honestly with something like Controlio so you see what’s really happening. Then add the specialist tools on top.
Most productivity problems start with a chopped-up day, not missing software. Fix the calendar first. The rest gets easier after that.
