How I Plan a Productive Week in Under 10 Minutes with Amplenote

Hey everyone! In this video, I want to show you my system of planning a productive day and week using Android. [Music]

So, in my YouTube channel, I talked about many note-taking apps like Obsidian, Remnote, and Rome, but in this video, I want to talk about Amplitude, which I think deserves more attention. That's because Amplitude does not only focus on capturing, creating, and developing ideas, but also focuses on turning these ideas into action, so you can get more things done.

I actually made a video about Amplitude before about how I take notes and manage projects, but I wanted to make another one because they recently released a new feature which I found incredibly useful. Unbeknownst philosophy is based on this concept of idea execution funnel where you fast capture ideas, connect and refine, turn them into to-do items, and finally schedule the to-do items in your calendar to get them done.

And this final part is the feature they released recently: the calendar is a game changer for me! Being able to drag and drop your tasks into your calendar and do time blocking in weekly or even monthly view is very useful when you are making a long-term plan. I've been using another app called Sorted for planning my day and managing my projects, but this new feature convinced me to switch to Amplitude, and now it's part of my productivity stack along with apps like Rome.

So, in this video, I want to show you the best system I discovered so far to help me build habits, plan and reach goals, and become more productive. Anthony’s strength is turning ideas into action. Everyone can get good ideas, but only few people take action on them. One of the reasons why I love Amplitude is that it enlarges you to take action on your ideas.

So, let’s say I want to make a plan for this weekend. I can use the jot mode to quickly brainstorm, then later in note mode, I make a dedicated note for it where I can develop the ideas further. While making a plan, we naturally encounter some tasks like researching places we want to go or booking a restaurant.

Next, if we go to tasks mode, we can see every task we made across different nodes, including the tasks we just made in the weekend planner. Now, I know there are lots of apps that let you create to-do lists and take notes, but almost none of them let you connect your tasks to your schedule.

In the calendar mode, you see your schedule on the left and your task list on the right. What I love about this is that the tasks are automatically sorted according to task score. This means you can always find out which tasks you should be working on right now because the most important or aging tasks are always shown at the top.

My most favorite thing about calendar mode is that you can drag and drop the tasks into your calendar, which makes time blocking effortless. In my knowledge, I don't know any other apps that let you time block like this in weekly or monthly view. This is amazing because being able to time block in weekly or monthly view makes it super easy to make a long-term plan.

Okay, now let me show you how I use Amplitude. The first use case is for planning the week ahead. Every Monday, I use the calendar mode to plan the week. First of all, I use my project tag to see what projects I have and pick one important project that I want to work on this week. For this week, I want to work on my new online course on creating YouTube videos, then schedule the tasks from the project.

I usually schedule them first thing in the morning when I have the most willpower; that way, I'm most likely to get them done. Then I schedule other tasks for the week. As you can see, I have big chunks of time for the most important tasks in the morning throughout the week, and relatively less important tasks like replying to messages and emails in the afternoon.

This is based on a productivity hack called "Make a Time and Manage Your Time," which I talked about in my previous video. I like to have some space between each task rather than packing my calendar because you always get unexpected tasks or some things might take longer than you expected.

This is a scheduling hack that I learned from Bill Harding, who is the founder of Amplitude. You can check how he uses Amplitude and the new calendar mode from the Amplitude YouTube channel. By the way, another hack I use is to include a link to relevant knowledge in each task, so it's easier to see the context.

For instance, let's say I'm making a new video for YouTube; I can link a task to the notes for the video where I can write a plan for it. This is one of the strengths of Amplitude: tasks can be connected to a relevant node.

Anyway, I usually take about 10 minutes to build a schedule for the week. I find it incredibly helpful that I can make a weekly schedule using drag-and-drop time blocking this easily. At the beginning of each day, I have a look at the leftover items from the previous day. The overdue tasks are highlighted in red.

If I want to do the task today, I can simply drag the task into today, or I can click reschedule for today. But if the task is not actionable yet, I can type "!" hide to hide a task for certain days. This feature is actually very useful, and I use it every day to get rid of irrelevant tasks and clarify my task list.

Everybody has a few tasks that are super important sitting on their task list for weeks. One of the cool things about Amplitude is that it acknowledges that your brain is prone to procrastination, especially on these kinds of harder, more involved tasks that require a lot of time and focus to complete. Anthony calls them "bionic tasks," and we often postpone to work on them. Instead, we work on non-important tasks.

There is actually a trick that I learned to solve this problem. That is to schedule a day by mixing recent, more exciting tasks with the bionic tasks. This is great because your brain tends to be more excited about tackling these recent items, which is a great way to build productivity momentum to get in the mood of getting more stuff done.

Doing this on Amplitude is really easy. Go to the calendar mode and sort your task list by recent, then pick a few tasks that you find exciting or fun and schedule them in your day. Next, sort your task list by task score. The task score algorithm makes sure that important or urgent tasks appear at the top, and they are often bionic tasks.

So, pick one or two of them and schedule them just after the fun tasks. This way, you can create productivity momentum just before getting to the procrastinated tasks. I really like how Amplitude tries to nudge you towards completing these important long-term goals, which tend to get buried under a mountain of other tasks.

Alright, so these were a couple of my favorite use cases of the calendar mode. Being able to time block in a weekly or monthly view is a game changer, but of course, Amplitude is great not just for scheduling and managing your tasks, but also for brainstorming ideas and taking notes.

Also, there is going to be a new series of tutorials on the Amplitude YouTube channel if you want to see more detailed how-to videos. They also recently launched a new update to their Chrome and Firefox capture extension and bootcamp, which I've been using to create tasks based on stuff I see while browsing the web.

And they have now released mobile versions of the calendar, so you can always have your schedule in your pocket. You can even do all the same task scheduling via mobile. Alright, if you want to try Amplitude, I leave the link in the description. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video. Bye! [Music]