Anthony English

Productivity & tech shortcuts, so you can get on with your day.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

@patio11 Is this similar to What3Words, which gives “every 3 metre square of the world a unique combination of three words.”

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

@RorateCaeli @CatholicSat I’d be even more curious about the acceptance of the resignation of French Bishop Hervé Giraud the following day.

https://t.co/ps3Luy7PkS

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

@CarmelFran29456 @christopherhale What event would that be for?

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Use failures as lessons, and don’t see them as complete time loss.

Speak kindly to yourself.

Don’t mistreat your team, even if the team is just you.

Build in public, share your progress (especially failures and lessons).

Use new skills and failure points as habit builders.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

How to complete high value projects in 2025.

A project has multiple tasks, and a clear outcome.

They may be

📝personal projects
- 🏡🏋️‍♀️🥗🏦
📈business projects

Most projects require:
✅ skills 👷
✅time ⏰
✅tools /apps /materials 🛠️
✅money 💰
🗺️a process

Where to start? 🧵

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Pick projects which use your existing skills, time, materials, money, and have minimal friction to implement.

Set clear, concrete, measurable milestones.

Build on skills you already have.

Automate, shortcut, simplify, streamline major points of friction and frustration.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Ideas are cheap.

You don’t need a great original idea to build a business or side gig.

Enough to identify a costly pain that a business has … especially if it’s one which their competition is already doing better at.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

I’m going to learn this but if there’s someone out there who can create a way to minimise this switch apps and search maze, without having to create a database of file names and descriptions, I’d be grateful.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

It’s not switch tasking exactly. The task may still be the same, and I might be hyper focused on it.

Still, frequent alt-tab switches, or clicking between tabs in Chrome or Explorer is inevitable.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

I asked @perplexity_ai how to address this, and discovered Unified Search (searching across apps) using https://t.co/gKysHMdegb

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

This leaves me doing multiple searches: for files in Teams, or maybe in File Explorer.

If I’m lucky, it was a recently used document, but I can’t be sure.

The effect of this: “where can I find it?” hunt is switching between apps frequently.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

I may remember a colleague sent me a spreadsheet, but was it through Outlook? Maybe as an attachment in a Teams chat.

Or perhaps they shared it via OneDrive.

I remember what the spreadsheet was about, but don’t recall its name.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

“Can you send me that document again?”

I’m so sick of asking this (and being asked.)

I reckon we’re spending up to 20% of our time looking for documents, emails, Teams threads, or asking colleagues for a copy of them.

No solutions here, but here’s the problem:
🧵

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Procrastination often is due to a lack of process.

I know a bookshop bookkeeper who does daily bank reconciliations, but has a quarterly royalty report that takes 4 days to compile.

The bank rec is super easy. The royalties report is friction on steroids.

Find the friction.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

2) when you create a form or document, it can be very hard for anyone to admit it’s not needed.

I think by killing this kitten straight after I created it, our team has dodged a bullet.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

I created a document this week, which was semi-automated … and a complete waste of time.

It purported to document steps in a process, as evidence the project team had followed those steps.

IF the team needed to create this document, my approach was an easy way.

But … 🧵

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

The document itself was superfluous. Every step has some other proof further downstream that it had been run.

My automation was clever … but unnecessary.

Here’s are two important #productivity lessons for me:
1) sometimes automation is worth trying

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Make things simple, especially forms or applications.

Don’t ask me to re-enter information you already have (unless it’s for security purposes).

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

🔘choose non-snoozable start times

🔘control the controllables (I can’t control the traffic to the church, but I can control what time I go to bed the night before)

If you follow me, I’ll share my progress with my daily 5:08 wake-up call.

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

I’ve set my alarm to 5:08 am for the next month.

Why 5:08 specifically? And how can I be (almost) certain I’m not going to hit the snooze button?

I’m not a resolutions/goal setting sort of a guy, so why am I confident I’m going to hit this morning goal?

🧵

[Anthony English @AnthonyEnglish]

Lessons here for sticking to a project time line:
🔘choose something where if you fail, you know you’ll be letting others down
🔘make an incremental change (I’m getting up 20’minutes earlier than usual, not three hours!)
🔘choose a ridiculously specific time to start