How to More Effectively Manage Your Time

Hello, thank you for having me.
I'm super excited. Before we jump in and start talking about to do list and your app, I would love for you to share a little bit about your background and your history. And what really prompted you to see that a this is a problem in the world that people are not getting their to do lists done. And what made you want to start an app to like really help fix this problem that's in the world.
Okay, well, I'll try to keep the background short. I studied computer engineering, but then my father passed away. And I'm half Thai, my father's like in Thailand. So I had to go back and take care of some stuff. And when I moved back to Thailand, at that time, this was talking like a long time ago, there wasn't really a tech scene there. So my engineer, a computer engineering degree didn't really help. So I ended up going to business. And I helped turn around a retail clothing company and then eventually took it public. After that, I kind of thought to myself, well, I wanted to know the theory behind what worked and what didn't work, right. And so I went and did an MBA in Hong Kong, staying close to, you know, to Thailand. And then after that, I worked at Louis Tom for about four years, as a in house executive. And my job was very kind of cross departmental. And so I was juggling a lot of projects from, you know, from finance, to, to marketing, to PR to operations at the store. And I needed to kind of figure out a way to organize myself, right and divide my time, understand when I should say yes to certain projects that people propose, and no to certain meetings and say, I'm sorry, I can't write. And then I tried all the, you know, all the To Do lists, and all the different methods that, you know, different books talk about. And I found them to be kind of very cumbersome. Right, I ended up kind of managing this the system more than I was actually working on the stuff. And I kind of fell onto this article, talking about how the most successful people schedule instead of working off a to do list. And so I kind of tried to try to follow that using a standard calendar app. But that didn't really work out for me, because it always felt very clunky move as scheduling my my day in a calendar. And so eventually, I thought, you know, I tried all the apps on the, on the App Store at the time, and none of them really worked for me. And so I started conceptualizing what I would want as an app for myself. And that was the first version of sorted, which I wrote for myself. And then I used it for a couple of years. And then I finally thought, Well, yeah, this is, this is great. I Don't need to search anymore, right. And then after a while, I actually left Louis tall. And then I taught coding at a boot camp called General Assembly, where I met my current co founder. So Harry saw me using this little tool on my iPhone and asked, what is that? I'm actually looking for something similar, right? Something to manage my day and my tasks. And so I loaded it on his phone. He used it for like, maybe six months. And then one day, he just came back to me and said, This is the longest time I've been able to stick to a routine, a simple routine. And then, so why don't we put this up on the app store and see what happens, right. And so that's kind of how sort of came to be. It was really just a tool for myself to solve my own problem. And then Harry kind of saw value in that. And then after we put it in the app store, more and more people kind of got to know the app. And now it has over I think, 1.8 million downloads. And then they are I think we've grown into a nice little community. And then yeah, and it's great that sorted and, and our concept of hyper scheduling, it's kind of helping a lot of people.
This is it's so fun. It's like, I'm so excited. Because like you I have downloaded, so many apps like to do list and project management systems and not so much for myself, because I suck at doing them. But I'm awesome at making them and delegating them out. And so find it for me, it was more about finding the system, or the project management system, or the To Do lists, or whatever it's going to be. It had to serve my team members. And I have different personalities on purpose very strategically, and they like to see things differently. So I have one team member who we see wonder list, and then they did away with it. And then Microsoft to do bought it well, we're an apple based company, we don't really use PCs, or Mike or Microsoft products, like we're all creatives. And then I have one girl that likes Trello. And she likes boards and she likes the way that looks, then we have clients that have their own project management systems, too. And so we ended up even with some of our clients, it's like, we're gonna stick to it, we're gonna make this shit easy, is we're gonna stick to a Google Doc and a Google Sheet. Because everyone can can learn how to use that. And he can share it. It's all in real time. But it's not really the best for like managing a project like in workflow. So when I saw this, when I was reading about it last night, I'm like, Oh, my God, I'm so excited to talk to Leo, because I want to learn more about this. I'm obsessed with these types of things. Because I cannot stand it when people say out loud, oh, well get that to you. Or I'll follow up with you. Or yeah, I'll do that. Like if I'm at dinner, and I'm over here making a note on my phone on my iPhone. So I can like, share the note and send it to somebody in my team to make sure the follow up actually happens, which really is not productive. But if I can open our project management app, which now we use something called to do list and assign it to the person and follow up. And then the key was to set a deadline. But I go into all these companies and I I see these productivity problems and the inefficiencies of the communication breakdown, what actually needs to be done clarifying what needs to be done or how to do it. And then if somebody doesn't do it the right way, or do it on time, usually it's because the person telling them the leader, ie me, I'm not clear. And so having to learn, I mean, just as simple like this has been ever changing, like and it's just been getting an I don't want to say the word worse. But even with what we're doing now, and after the pandemic, it added so much more detail of things that had to be done. And when you're managing lots of clients, social media accounts, you need to make sure you're on the right account with the right stuff. So there's so many details that go into one to do item. And so, I mean, I could talk about this forever, but I want to know more about hype scheduling? Because like, for me personally, it's like hyper focused is what's on my calendar, which is what scheduled. But for sorted. What is hyper scheduling mean?
Right? So I guess you, you talked about time blocking, right. And so I would think hyper scheduling is sort of a evolution of time blocking. So the traditional time blocking is we're talking about like, oh, on Monday, I'll set aside two hours from maybe one to 3pm, for marketing, right, and then five to 7pm, for finance, or something like that, right. So the reason why you're blocking out such a big chunk of time is to make sure you have, you block out a set of time for you to work on certain items. But you might not need two hours every week for marketing, right. So it's probably better if you schedule and say, Oh, I'm going to spend half an hour to email this certain person, I'm going to spend one hour to work on a marketing report. Right. So instead of scheduling, general blocks, you should be scheduling specific tasks that you want to do. And so then, if you only have half an hour worth of marketing stuff, then it should only take up half an hour on that day, right. And then you might be able to interleave, like one hour of finance or four hours of finance stuff for it's separate tasks, right, you need that. So that's part of hyper scheduling. The second part is that you should be really putting everything together into a unified place, or timeline, as we call it. So you shouldn't be you shouldn't have like, your calendar on one side with all your meetings, and then to do lists on another side, and in sticky notes on another wall, you know, that doesn't help you understand how to allot your time, because it's not all, you know, time kind of, for us mostly work linearly, right? We have 24 hours in a day. And why do we have three separate lists? You know, floating around. So we should be scheduling everything into one single timeline. So both your tasks, your notes, your events, the information you need, right attachments, and whatever. Second is that, as I mentioned before, traditional calendar apps, they're nice, right? They serve their purpose, but it's kind of a pain to kind of like drag and drop things around to figure out your day. Right? So what if a tool helps you with that. So for example, and sorted, we have a tool called auto schedule, so basically, two taps, and it'll automatically generate the schedule for you for that day. And then you could rearrange it, move it around a little bit if you want, right. We also have specialized tools, such as our time ruler, where you can batch select a bunch of tasks, and then shift them by an hour if you're running late, or shift them up if you're running early, right. So your schedule becomes really flexible, and adaptive to the actual circumstance of your day as your day plays out. And so that altogether, kind of is what we call hyper scheduling. It's like scheduling, but it needs to be fast, and near effortless. So now for the past, maybe five, six years that I've been using, sort of on my own. I think I spend on average, maybe three to four minutes a night, to plan my next day. And then I wake up, and I'm very clear on what I'm supposed to do that day. Right? And I tried to follow it. It's a very simple routine, I tried to follow that schedule. If I fall behind I tap auto schedule again, it will reflow my layout. And then I if I'm running, like if I can't fit everything in that day, and then I move a couple of things off to another day lower priority stuff, and then made sure that I have enough time to to finish what I intend that day. And then that's it. And then I repeat the process, basically couple times a day, and so it becomes really freeing, I would say it's like I feel so much less stressful is I know I'm accomplishing the things that I need to I don't have to try to remember or worry about for getting anything? Right? Anything that I have on my schedule, I just work on that. I'm very focused when whenever I'm working on a specific thing, because I know I don't have to worry about anything else, everything else is later. Right? So yeah, so that's the whole concept of hyper schedule.
So and I was like, I'm over here, looking at the website again. But how does it integrate with I cow or Google towel? Or do you see this more as taking the place of your calendar?
Not exactly. Um, so on your iPhone, when you sign into your Google Calendar account or your iCal account, will read that, once you give us permission will read your calendar for you. Right, so you can use continue to use like calendar li or any other service that you need to. So events will pop out into your calendar, and then it'll show up in sort.
Gotcha. It's just it's, it's, it's so neat how, like, I'm just fascinated how it all works. And I'm constantly telling people, like, you know, have three buckets have your personal bucket, you know, your business? And then what, like, what are the things that you actually need to work on? And much like you, you, you needed something to make things better for you. And almost for what I think it was, like, literally almost 10 years, that I would go through meetings all day long. And they were meetings that needed to be meetings. I mean, we were planning events and weddings. And I mean, people were spending anywhere from 250,000 to over a million dollars on an event. And it needed a lot of meetings, and a lot of planning sessions and design sessions. And as social media came about, and Pinterest came about, it just added more and more and more and more. And so I would go through all these meetings, but then I would have this massive to do list. And a lot of it. I thought at the time that only I was capable of doing these things. I don't know what I was thinking. I just didn't know what I didn't know. And then it was a coach that a mentor that taught me he was like none and and and under that No, no, no, you're not doing that. Like, first of all, you're taking too many clients, you're half assing some of this stuff, you just need to do full service. And every time someone books, you then you go on the calendar, and you slot these these dates out. And we started to do like four full day focus sessions rather than like a two hour meeting here, a three hour meeting here a tasting here and there. And we started like compartmentalize everything completely changed my life. And so we went from doing like 250 Plus clients a year to like, 30. And we were more profitable 30. And so it's like, once we meet those goals, it's like, what even what you were saying earlier, say yes to it, or no, you know, you have the choice then. But it's like when when we take on a client now, I know because we've tracked our times psycho Lee, about how long it takes when we take on that project, and then we go and we block it out on the calendar. So I mean, clients have to change every once in a while. And most of the time they don't because they know that they're gonna have to wait another month or two or even longer to like, get another day back on the calendar. So in that in that process, how does does sorted work? Like, if we book a client? Would we go in and say, Okay, we booked this client, we know over the next six months that we're going to allow, or a lot 10 hours a month or 20 hours a month, or whatever it is? Do we put that into sorted and then based on our previous? Like, is there AI? That based on our previous like how we set things up, then it generates that over time? Like, well, how does it work?
I guess what, what you can do is if you if you put on your cap, your calendar or through sorted we could put on your calendar and that's one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is set up some templates that that we have, and then they'll kind of like then you just press in Okay, I want this template, that template, that template when when when and then and then I'll just populate those tasks for you. So templated tasks or events for you. So that that could be one way for you to work. If you have something that is very regular, in some sense, right, but maybe just happening on different days for different clients. Yeah, I would probably go that route. And then once you have that, then what I normally do is, when you, if you delegate something to someone, I usually would mark down a note and say, Okay, I want to follow up with that person, maybe Wednesday or something right at 3pm. And then I'll leave a little note, a little task for myself to your follow up with that person. So that's kind of how I would work. For us, as a remote team, we are much more free on our the way we handle our own tasks, especially with programming, right? I like to program at night, my co founder partner likes to program way early in the morning he's in, he's in Taiwan, I'm in Macau, another one of our engineers in Hong Kong, one in Canada. So. So our time is very flexible. So what we usually do is we have, we each know what kind of tasks and what kind of stuff we want to work on. And I will keep track of the stuff and say I'll follow up with them when when, when. And then, but then I might schedule to follow up with them maybe this Friday, but they have similar tasks scheduled throughout the week for them to actually work on the detailed steps throughout the way throughout the way. Um, so that's another way to work. A third thing that I could mention, you said you use to do this right now? Yep. So we're actually working on some integrations. Now. We're in that phase of the app. One of them is to do lists. And then another will be GitHub and some other stuff. Trello we're thinking about as well. So after that, basically, almost be like the way we handle calendars right now. We'll be able to ingest your to do list tasks. And then, so you can schedule it in sorted, and then work off of sort. But then continue to collaborate with your teams through to do this. Right. So that would be I think that the ultimate vision for us is basically to allow people to schedule everything. Yes. Right. So if if you like to work on Trello, or if for a particular project with a certain client, you're using Trello, then you should be able to pull in what you need from Trello into sorting. So then you can work off, you're sorted your copy of sorted and organized yourself. But then things will feed back to Trello. Like, let's say you complete something, you'll move to another board for to do lists, if you complete something in a to do list item and sorted. Oh, complete there, right? If you need to chat with people in the in the Todoist chat, then basically, it's sorted, you could expand it, expand that task, and then press a button and you'll jump back to to do this. And then you could do whatever, detailed stuff there. So yeah,
I mean, I my head is just spinning, because I'm like this could help a company scale so much more quickly. Because I find myself at times, which I'm not a control freak, I'm really not okay. But somebody, like has to take control of stuff sometimes. And I'm willing to do it. But I'm really good at like delegating a lot. And, and I always tell my team members, you know, if you're overwhelmed, or if there's too much, I need you to tell me, like, I need you to communicate that to me, that you you have no more capacity so that I know that I need to either go hire somebody else to help with the workload, you know, or we need to we need to do some things differently. But I also find myself it's like, there's so many things I delegate out and then every once in a while, have a team member come to me and say what do you want me to do today? There's so many things that you have put on Todoist with the deadline of tomorrow. And there's only you know, even if and I am so much more of a proponent of like work life Balance and like, let's have a healthy work life balance because I didn't have that for 10 years, and I almost died from it from and when you love working and you love what you do, but there has to be some unplugged time. And even if they work 24/7, which don't do that that's not healthy at all. Like, they still wouldn't get everything done that I put that was due tomorrow. So oftentimes I'll have to go back and I'll say, Okay, let's look at and let's reevaluate, and then we prioritize because shit comes up, right? So it's like, I may have said, Go, let's do these blogs, let's do this. Let's do that which we try to batch our own content. Now we do it for clients. But I have to go back and tell them how to prioritize because they're not sure. Because it's my fault. Because I'm the one I'm like, just get it done by Friday, get it on a Friday, get it? And then they're like, but it's Thursday. It's so you know, it just comes up. And I'm like, Oh, God, so I do have to sit down with him sometimes and say, Okay, this is not important this week. But then also, what happens to some of our own stuff as a company is I look up and I'm like, Oh, my God, six months has gone by and we still haven't done those blogs. You know, because we were always putting clients first. So do you have any recommendations for like, those types of things like when it comes to, okay, I think this is a priority right now. And you could get it done by Friday. But we had something come up with a client where they got an opportunity to go on the today's show, and it's in 48 hours. So setting up a landing page and a lead magnet like that's to help them with lead capture, which is going to bring in revenue to provide a customer service experience. That's going to be more important. And you know, it doesn't happen a lot. But it does happen every once in a while at least once a month. And I always say like your emergencies, not my emergency. But if it's a client and something an opportunity like that comes up, it kind of is our emergency to help them market it. And then things get pushed off. So how does sorted deal with stuff like that?
Well, I think the decision making is still up to you. Right. And I think that's the important part sorted as a tool that will help you make those decisions. At least let you visualize what your time allotment is like. And then but you still have to end up being the person to decide, right? Which is more important to you. Right? And nobody can really tell you that because, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of like the culture and the personality of of your company and you yourself right? What do you feel is more important, some may choose my own project is more important, some may choose, client is always more important. Somebody choose my family is more important, my daughter or my son is more important, or my wife is more important, right? So that is for you to decide. And if you let a computer decide that for you, then are we really humans anyway, right. So I'm a strong proponent, on on, on decision making, and that you need to be the one in charge of that. Tools are just there to assist you. Right. And so I think, in a sense, it's, it's still your call. And then, in some ways for myself, in my own business, I like to kind of try to instill some of this thought pattern to my coworkers, kind of explained to them my thought process and why. And then always like, have that time flight, the company, culture, explain to them what the company culture is, for example, we strive to make sure we answer customer emails within at least three days, but then we oftentimes reply maybe, like within hours, right? Or maybe instantly, it's very important. So I think that has been spread across all our customer service people and they understand, right, and so they also understand, like what takes precedence over others, like some, some, if a customer has an issue using the app that takes higher precedence over a customer who is just making a very simple suggestion, or I want, like a font change or something like that, right? So um, so I think that worked out pretty well. I think most of the time they make the right decisions and But sometimes, you know, they don't they they make a different decision than I would. But then I can't fault him for that, and I won't fault them for it. I'll just explain and say, Maybe we should, you know, think of it this way instead. And I'll give them my reasons why I would think that way and my thought pattern, and then hopefully they can kind of replicate that.
Yeah, I mean, I've noticed that based on personality type and how someone's brain is wired. There are some people that naturally, like, I mean, I've ADHD and some people think I'm all over the place. But when it comes down to like, deadlines and priorities, I'm like, really great at that. But it's all in my head. So it's like, getting it out of my head, and then trying to teach other people to have those, that mindset of like, okay, I know that my calendar says this are sorted says this, but this came up. And this is more of a priority. And like having that intuition of just knowing that this is more important, right now, I need to do this. And I have found over time, like, in having lots of team members and internship programs, and working with different types of personalities. That's not a superpower for everybody. They don't they don't know sometimes. And so having someone that they can go to and say, hey, you know, what exactly do you want me to do? I think some people like some of my friends that have businesses like it irritates the shit out of them, like they get mad. I'm like, Oh, my gosh, no, don't like you need to have a conversation. And some of these things like you can't teach teach these things like people's brains are not wired like that. And so, like you said, we're human beings. We can have computer generated AI all day long, but at the end of the day, like, we are human beings. So it's almost like, you know, a mom with a kid who the school calls and says, Your kid fell off and broke both legs, but sorted in your calendar says this, you know, you need to get your kid to the hospital like that other stuff can go. But when it comes to like business projects, it's not quite as clear. So it's like, yeah, just be human being and like going back
to them. I would rather I'd rather they ask. Yes. And not ask. Yes. So that's why I totally agree with you and say, don't get annoyed. Listen, just listen to them. Right? And, you know, it could be because of so many different reasons why they won't come to the same conclusion issue. The way they're brought up their education, or maybe their party's personal priorities will bias. And we're biased in one way or another anyways, ourselves. So I think it's would be unfair to fault them. But then you could try, just try to kind of like, let them know how you think. And so hopefully, with enough time, they will be will kind of replicate the same thought process. And even if they want to ask to confirm, I would gladly say yeah, just ask me. I'll just confirm I'd say yes, that's, that's good. I think exactly the way you're thinking let's do it. Right. So I think that will probably work better in the long run.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think this this tool, I think, is a great way to actually help team members really set up like you said, their day, and their task and their priorities, like the way they want to do it. And the way you know, they need to see it, which which is completely fine. And I was looking at it last night. And you guys does it give you the ability to color code things as well.
So we have tags that you can add emojis and stuff like that and add little little meta information into your task. Yeah, some people like it, so you can show it all the time, or you can hide it and only show it when you expand, some people really hate. I tend to switch between the two. You know, sometimes I want to see all the details. Sometimes I kind of just want to shrink things and just see a title. So I think for myself, this whole kind of experiment with scheduling has given me a couple of I think benefits. One is that after you know it Did it does take a few days to kind of like, try out and try to follow. But afterwards, what I found is that I started to really understand my, the way I work, like biologically, like I work better at certain tasks at a certain time of day. And then I started noticing, you know, you're on how much I can actually accomplish each each day. So I'm actually better at kind of estimating whether I can actually complete, you know, all the stuff in a day, am I overloading myself or, or under loading myself, and stuff like that? So yeah, I would say, people should give schedule a try, I think it's a life changing thing. And then, since sorted, it's kind of like a free to download free trial tool. If you have an iPhone or Apple devices, download it, give it a try. One of one of our customers is actually an apple engineer from very early days. And, you know, he actually got a couple of us friends to start using sorted and have it on their home screen, the home bar at the bottom, on their iPhone. And basically, the way he got his friends to start using it, is to say, Okay, try sorted, and try it earnestly, for three days. You know, try scheduling for three days, right. And if you still don't like it after that, then don't use it. But then all his friends who did try it earnestly for three days, kind of fell in love with the concept of hyper scheduling, you know, it just like, make thing, it makes the whole kind of task management and all all the complexity, it just boils it down to schedule a day, try to follow it. And then if things don't, anything that you don't complete in that day gets carried over to the next day, so you'll never forget anything. And then just at night, plan the day ahead. And that's it. And just keep repeating that simple step. simple routine. Yeah,
that's awesome. I mean, literally, y'all, we'll put the link in the show notes. It's like sorted out calm. But literally, it's like scheduling doesn't have to be stressful. Like, it really doesn't have to be stressful. And so it's like your tagline is story of how we reimagine and build a solution to better manage our busy schedules. Because sometimes being busy, and scheduling things are stressful, but are you busy doing the right things? And that's where you have to go back. And it's like, what's the priority buckets? And time blocking, and then deciding what goes on here? And you still have to be human, like you said earlier and say no to some opportunities and meetings and, and say yes to the right things. So this is so awesome. Like, I'm going to dive into it and look more into it. If people want to connect
on our blog as well. We have some interesting insights in there.
Yeah, this is so awesome. I'm a geek when it comes to all this. If people want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
So on Twitter, we have at sorted HQ. So RTD HQ. So that's our Twitter. Or they can email us at Hello at sorted app.com.
Yep. Awesome. Yeah. And you guys go download that app and give it a try. So right now it is iPhone. It's funny how many apps we use that are iPhone only. But do you ever? Because we always get the question. Is it going to come out for Android? Oh, I think it ever will.
I think our next platform will be the web web version. Okay.
Before anybody can use it. Yeah.
So we have a lot of people want to use it on their, you know, company, Dell laptop and stuff like that. So yeah. So we'll be working on that next.
Yeah, I think it's funny because I only used to do this on my phone, but I use my phone for everything. And then most of my team members who are very different personalities, they want the desktop app, and they have everything set up like on their computer. And again, it's like however you need to see it to get the work done. So you feel good about it and you're productive. That's all that matters. It doesn't matter to me. So this is awesome. Thank you so much for your time today Leo and everybody that's listening or watching go Try out sorted, downloaded if you have an iPhone, and then I'm sure,
sorry, but for Mac or Mac,
any Apple users. And then I'm sure on your blog, you guys will be updating things and on Twitter when the web version comes out, I'm assuming. Yeah, this is awesome. So thank you so much for your time and everybody listening or watching thank you for your time. And I know that this will be a time saving takeaway, because I know that this is amazing, and I'm gonna go check it out. And be sure to tune in next week to another episode of business unveiled by y'all. That's it for this week's episode of business unveiled. Now that you have all the tools that you need to conquer the world and GSD get shit done. Would you share this with your friends and fellow business leaders? One thing that would really really help us and help new listeners is for you to rate the show, and leave a comment and Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you tune in and listen to business unveiled. You can check out the show notes at Angela proffitt.com/podcast and link up with us on social media so you can share your biggest insights. And I want to know your aha moments. Until next week, remember, the profitable shifts and structures you're creating and your business help you be more present in your life. So get out there and GSD