Hello and happy Sunday!

I have two announcements for you. After that, some thoughts as usual—today, about an underrated skill we should all develop asap.

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Todoist: 1-click setup & calendar integration

First, for those of you who use Todoist, I’ve got some fun updates to share. You can now install my recommended Todoist setup with one click! I’ve been working with the Todoist team to make this happen and it’s exciting that it’s finally there. To install my recommended setup:

1. Open Todoist
2. Next to “My Projects”, click the + sign
3. Click Browse Templates
4. Choose Setups in the sidebar
5. Scroll down until you see my name (Peter Akkies) and click the card
6. Click “Copy Setup”

There’s more information about my setup right there in the app. I bet you’ll like it. And if you really want to learn the ins and outs of Todoist and of my recommended setup, enroll in my Todoist course.

Todoist has also received some more great updates lately, including the ability to show your calendar events in Todoist, which makes time blocking fun and easy. Even if you don’t time block, it’s just nice to see the day’s events along your tasks for the day:

Okay, that’s Todoist. Second announcement:

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Productivity 101: now live!

This morning I officially launched my latest course, Productivity 101.

It’s a fundamentals of productivity course. It goes back to basics, helping you execute on the essentials: getting your to-dos, emails and messages, notes and documents, and calendar under control.

If you haven’t already enrolled during the pre-order phase, I’ll tell you more about the course in the coming days.

(But, you can still enroll now, before the sales page officially goes up. And if you do so, you’ll get access to a bonus Q&A call with me on Zoom on July 20 at 1 p.m. New York Time…)

Anyway, now for today’s thoughts:

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An underrated skill you need to develop

In the past days, I’ve been thinking about one particular moment I remember from English-language class in Dutch high school. I must have been about 14 years old at the time.

This wasn’t in your average English-language class for Dutch people. It was an intense class because I was in a bilingual program, where half my classes were in English.

Social studies was in English, for example, as was arts. But German, French, and Latin class were in Dutch because, well, it’s a bit much to teach Dutch teenagers German in English.

My spoken and written English were already pretty good at that point, so I wasn’t focused so much on the language, but rather on how to write well. In English, but also just in general, in any language.

And the moment I remember so clearly is my teacher—Ms. Hitchcock—emphasizing the importance of writing precisely and concisely. If you can do those things, she said, you’re ahead of 99% of people.

A few years later, I was in Hong Kong, doing the last two years of high school at a boarding school there. I had a wonderful English teacher there, too. Justin—here we called our teachers by their first names—was and is not just an excellent teacher but also an excellent writer and he hammered the same point:

Be brief and use clear words.

Justin introduced me to The Elements of Style and to George Orwell’s writing rules. I probably took all of that writing advice a little too seriously, but isn’t that what teenagers do—take some things too seriously (and other things not seriously enough)?

My journey of continued in college, where I worked in the Writing Center, and gave other students feedback on their papers. After that, I worked as a litigation consultant, where whether you write well or poorly can cost your client millions. And, you know, here I am now, writing to you weekly since 2018.

But I’ve never forgotten that advice to write precisely and concisely.

Communicating with other humans is so much easier when you keep it short and when you say exactly what you mean. It’s a skill well worth practicing.

But you know what else is much easier when you write precisely and concisely? Getting an AI chatbot to help you.

The more I play with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude (my current favorite), the more I’m convinced we’re going to be using these tools all the time in the future. Being a fan of Apple hardware and software, I’m particularly excited about Apple Intelligence, because it’ll have so much more context about our lives by seeing our documents, reading our emails, and so on.

AI enthusiasts have been emphasizing the importance of “prompt engineering”, the skill of talking to an AI chatbot (say) and getting it to do what you want in the best way. I’ve heard some people say that prompt engineering might be the most valuable skill for knowledge workers to develop right now. They might be right—but really, we all just need to get even better at communicating clearly.

Already, talking to an AI chatbot the way you talk to a human works great. And tools like ChatGPT and Claude will probably sound ever more human-like in the coming years.

I’ve long hammered on the importance of being clear in your work communication, especially emphasizing the importance of writing clear to-dos, giving your notes descriptive titles, and your files descriptive file names—and now these things will become even more important to do to help AI models understand our data.

All this is to say: if you’re not amazing at expressing yourself clearly, practice. Work on it. It’s one of the most valuable things you can do. At home, at work, in your relationships—anywhere! I’m a big fan of Toastmasters, a public speaking organization, so start there if you like to do things together and on a stage. Or just get chatting with ChatGPT and practice writing good prompts.

Communication is key.

And now it’s time for me to flip the script: to stop writing and instead to read a book. Ciao!