#4: Essential Tools for Productivity & Quality of Life

Essential Tools for Productivity: Time Saving Products, Services, & Hacks

For both Matt and Chris, noise-cancelling headphones help them focus, at home or on the road, and get important and urgent work done efficiently.

• Matt loves the Jabra elites
• Chris loves Sony's over ear headphones

Too many look myopically to save money, when they eat up too much time (which loses them money) and have things done poorly.

Matt and Chris both recommend hiring people for the menial tasks (shoveling the driveway, cutting firewood, grocery delivery, lawncare) and the high skills tasks (building a website, designing a logo, etc.).

Intelligently investing money in these areas saves you time in the long-term and makes you more money in the long-term. Ultimately, in both case you will see more value, in your life and business.  

Essential Tools for Productivity: Leverage AI

If you're not using AI, you need to. Lots of cool AI tools exist, that help save you time in different ways.

• Fireflies: great notetaking service for video calls
• Reflect: Chris uses as a one stop shop to reflect, keep notes, and improve his productivity
• Claude: can upload different documents that can inform the AI - great way to have complex code explained to you
• ChatGPT: best for quick general knowledge responses, web search capability, and quickly writing things based on prompts  

Essential Tools for Productivity: Books & Podcasts

Matt and Chris both love to use the combination of Kindle and Audible to consume books. They synchronize, so if you listen to a book in Audible and then later read it in Kindle, you will pick up where you last left off in Audible.

If they book is excellent, they buy a physical copy as well.

Below are some of their favorite books:

• Founder Brand - discussed on Build Your Business #2
• Never Enough - how someone transformed his life
• $100M Leads - effective marketing
• Buy Back Your Time - just like it sounds
• E Myth Revisited - best book for beginning business owners
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - better book for more seasoned founders on the crappy parts of being an owner

Below are some of their favorite podcasts:

• Founder Podcast
• All In 
• Invest Like the Best
• My First Million  

Essential Tools for Productivity: Sleep

Matt cares about sleep. You should too. Below are some of his favorite gadgets (general and branded).

• Eight Sleep: expensive, but you spend 1/3 of your time sleeping and this transformed his sleep quality; if you can afford it, buy it
• Manta Mask - great for naps and sleeping on the road
• Black out shades
• Weighted blanket
• Coop Pillows  

Essential Tools for Productivity: Health & Fitness

Whether it's fitness or hygiene, taking care of yourself helps you take care of your business. Don't short yourself here.

• Invest in a home gym - start small