Chris Hardwick on Scheduling and Note Taking

The Evernote podcast recently interviewed Chris Hardwick about his productivity habits. How did he go from unknown stand-up comic to the guy who seems to be the go-to nerd representative on TV?

First, he puts a priority on scheduling and organizing his calendar:

"There’s no trick to getting better at stuff, you just have to do that stuff. In order to do that, you have to organize your time."

"I think color-coding your calendar is really important because if your calendar is just full one color, it’s going to look like an overwhelming mess. Color helps you realize that your events are modular. The color is going to tell you what emotional importance it has, so you can make better decisions about how and where to put things and balancing out your days. Like, “oh I have all green this one"

Then, he stresses writing EVERYTHING down.

It’s important to write everything down. Whether it’s a notebook or Evernote or whatever, keep track of all that stuff because it allows you to manipulate it, like in your color-coded calendar, to make that information into modular bits of useful data that you can move around and use in more effective ways.

In the same way that you would organize a closet, and have everything stacked and put exactly where you know where everything is, it allows you to do that emotionally with your life in all the intangible things that you can’t see, but you experience. And it allows you to create so much better of an emotional flow for work and your personal life. But you can’t do that unless you really start tracking all that stuff.