A Googler’s guide to getting things done

Laura Mae Martin is simply a large believer successful the settings menu. As Google’s enforcement productivity advisor, Martin spends overmuch of her clip moving with different Googlers connected improving their productivity and connection systems — and 1 of the things she often recommends is taking a fewer minutes to poke done the options. “With your phone, with your email, your Slack, each these things, the features are there, but we don’t instrumentality the clip to dive into them,” she says. She adjacent thinks you should possibly person to look astatine settings earlier you tin usage the app. “Like, you can’t get into the app unless you walk 10 minutes figuring retired what it tin do.”

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, the archetypal successful our three-part miniseries astir each things productivity and work, we speech to Martin astir however she sees things changing. Four years aft the pandemic forced america each to enactment from home, are we yet figuring retired distant and hybrid work? Are managers realizing that butts-in-seats isn’t — and possibly was ne'er — a bully metric for productivity? And is the epoch of the hard-charging hustle bro yet giving mode to a healthier, much holistic mode of reasoning astir being productive? Martin sees each these things from truthful galore perspectives and has tons of thoughts connected everything from connection styles to vigor flows.

We besides speech astir the emergence successful integer productivity tools similar Notion and Slack and wherefore email is inactive truthful important — and inactive truthful terrible. One of Martin’s jobs astatine Google is to consult with the teams gathering Workspace apps similar Docs and Gmail, and she has tons of thoughts connected however those products enactment and however they could beryllium better. We besides speech astir whether AI stands to alteration the mode we get things done and whether it’ll assistance america bash much oregon conscionable springiness america much to do.

Along the way, Martin offers america tons of applicable tips connected however to negociate our integer lives a small better. Charging your telephone extracurricular the bedroom, no-tech Tuesdays, and a mates of prettier email labels mightiness really spell a agelong way. And if you person excessively galore notes successful excessively galore places, it’s clip to get a Main List going.

If you privation to cognize much astir everything we speech astir successful this episode, present are a fewer links to get you started: