All right, let's move on now. Our next question is from Gary. Gary says, what is the difference between the productivity funnel and the capture configure control method? All right, well, now we're getting into the weeds, which I appreciate. These are two different productivity-related frameworks or systems I have discussed at various times on this podcast.

So for those who don't remember the productivity funnel, this was my way of trying to give a framework for professional productivity in general. I said any approach to professional productivity can be understood as implementing the three layers of a funnel, where at the very top of the funnel, you have what I called activity selection.

What is my philosophy or systems or figuring out what I actually work on? In the middle of the funnel, you have organization. How do I make sense of and keep track of all of the different things I have selected to do, the things that did enter onto my proverbial plate?

And then the narrowest part at the bottom, the bottom level of the funnel, was execution. How do I actually execute effectively the thing that I should be executing right now in the moment? So my argument is any professional productivity system or philosophy has to have a coherent approach to each of those three layers.

Capture, configure, control is one element you might use in implementing, in particular, the organization layer. So it is an instantiation of you need some way of organizing all of these things on your plate in the time you have available. You need some way of doing it. One way you could do that is with things like capture, configure, control.

And so if you remember capture, configure, control in that system, which comes from the early days of the podcast, it talks about how you need to have a way of capturing the things you need to do. You need a way of making sense of the things on your plate, and you need to control your time.

So have some control over when do I actually want to do this work. And those types of ideas roughly fall under organization. I mean, you might argue that capture maybe overlaps a little bit with activity selection, but it's really just a David Allen inspired idea that no open loops.

Configure, that's what is your system for actually tracking and keeping track of these things. And control is you should actually be doing something like time block planning, figuring out here's my time available, and here's what I want to do. So I think the right way to think about capture, configure, control is that zoom in on the organizational level of the productivity funnel.

And once you're there, this is one way you might start to implement that funnel. Where this actually gets confusing is that capture, configure, control is itself also somewhat general. So I don't say specifically how to configure or specifically how to control your time. So it's a more refined framework for what you might find in that middle layer of the productivity funnel.

You would then go in and actually implement those things with real systems. I'm going to use a Trello board for configure. I'm going to use a time block planner for control. Now, this sounds really recursive and complicated. That's because these aren't really supposed to nest, Gary. These are just two alternative ways of talking about productivity.

So I wouldn't try to nest these two. I would say, look, you can think about I want a capture, configure, and control system. Or you can think about I want to implement the three layers of the productivity funnel and think about it. And they inform each other. But they're both kind of trying to do the same thing.

And so maybe think of the productivity funnel as my second attempt at having a general framework for professional productivity. Because I realize that execution is important. And how we even select what should be on our plate or how much work we should be doing is important. So maybe you could think of the productivity funnel as being a more general swing at what I was trying to do with capture, configure, control.

But if you like one better than the other, you're perfectly fine sticking with it. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)