Productivity Nerd

Welcome to Productivity Nerd by Personally Virtual – your go-to spot for smart, slightly nerdy conversations about productivity, time management, and working smarter (not harder!). Hosted by Virtual Assistant and productivity enthusiast Kathy Soulsby, we unpack powerful tools, books, and habits - from Getting Things Done to Slow Productivity and beyond. Whether you’re a solo business owner, a time-blocking fanatic, or just looking to tame your to-do list, you’ll find actionable tips, interviews, and real talk to boost your focus and reclaim your time.

Productivity Nerd is a business podcast hosted by kathy.soulsby, with 118 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

kathy.soulsby hosts Productivity Nerd, a business show with 118 episodes published.

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  Productivity Nerd

  Episode 59.5 - One Frog, Fifteen Minutes

  Sep 29, 20265 min

  Kathy thinks Eat the Frog by Brian Tracy should've been a blog post. Fair enough, it kind of is. But there's one idea worth fifteen minutes of your day, so that's what this mini-pod does with it. Your "frog" is the task you're avoiding. The big one. Tracy's whole argument: eat it first, before you've so much as looked at your inbox. Do the worst thing, and the rest of the day gets easy. Kathy gets into why we spend our energy on busywork instead of the task that actually matters, and the routines that stop you negotiating with yourself every morning at 6am. Multitasking gets a kicking too, obviously. Discipline, it turns out, is just a muscle - use it daily and it stops hurting quite so much.

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  Productivity Nerd

  Episode 59 - The Way of Excellence - Is Balance Overrated? with Claire Ennion

  Sep 22, 20261h 1m

  Forget hustle culture. Real excellence looks nothing like what you think. In this episode, Kathy sits down with Claire to unpack The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg, a book that swaps perfectionism and burnout for something far more sustainable: relaxed, deep engagement with work that actually matters. They dig into Stulberg's two pillars of excellence; mastery and mattering - the psychology of "episodic future thinking" (why imagining your future self can stop you doom-scrolling), and why balance might be the most overrated goal in productivity. Plus: the quit-fit-grit framework for finding your thing, why stress plus meaning equals growth (and stress plus emptiness equals burnout), and Stulberg's brilliantly reframed take on the myth of Sisyphus. "Busy" and "excellent" are not the same thing...and it's time we stopped treating them like they are.

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  Productivity Nerd

  Episode 58 - Why You Don't Do The Thing You Know You Should (It's Not Discipline...It's Design)

  Sep 9, 202646 min

  You know what you should be doing. So why aren't you doing it? Kathy's physio takes four minutes, twice a day. Eight minutes. It's the single most important thing for her recovery. She doesn't do it. Helen's got her own version. You've got yours. In this episode Kathy and Helen go looking for what's actually going on and it turns out this has been studied properly for decades. It isn't laziness, and it isn't a willpower shortage. What's inside: Why motivation isn't the problem - Piers Steel's Temporal Motivation Theory, and why anything without a deadline gets rationally deprioritised by your brain The three real barriers - BJ Fogg's Behaviour Model: motivation, ability, prompt - and why lowering friction beats pumping up motivation every time The intention–behaviour gap - Peter Gollwitzer's research showing good intentions predict only 20-30% of actual behaviour, and the if-then plans that close the gap How to write an if-then plan that works, and why the "then" should be laughably small - put on your trainers, open the app, sit down Identity over outcomes - James Clear on why "who is the type of person who does this?" beats "I want to do this" Mark Manson's ten-second meditation story - the moment a meditation teacher dismantled the all-or-nothing trap in one question The all-or-nothing bar you set yourself - why "it doesn't count unless it's thirty minutes" means you do nothing at all Practical, evidence-based, and mildly self-incriminating throughout. You don't have a discipline problem. You have a design problem...and design is something you can fix.

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  Productivity Nerd

  Episode 57.5 - How to Plan Your Week: My Real Weekly Planning Routine (ClickUp, Theme Days & 3 Priorities)

  Sep 2, 202610 min

  In this minipod, Kathy walks through her real weekly planning process: what she does on a Sunday so that 9am Monday never starts from a blank page. Inside this episode: How to use theme days to batch work into pots - content, BD, client management, agency management, admin and finance, personal - and aim for one day per pot Why everything lives in ClickUp but the weekly plan gets handwritten on paper or iPad How to pick your top 3 priorities - and why "spend 2 hours on project X" counts as a priority Looking two weeks ahead in the diary to catch meetings that need serious prep Time-blocking focus sessions (Kathy uses Flown) so you log on knowing exactly what you're doing - no decision fatigue The four rules that actually matter: keep one main list, be realistic about capacity, follow the damn plan, and check the list constantly Whether your system is digital, paper, or smoke signals, it only works if it reflects reality. Tomorrow's you will not be less tired than today's you. Plan for the human you've actually got.

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  Productivity Nerd

  Taking a well earned break

  Jul 30, 20261 min

  Welcome to a little message from the Productivity Nerd crew. We’re taking a bit of a break over August. The last few months have been hectic and a rather challenging personally so finding guests and reading business books hasn’t been a priority I’m afraid, the day job and staying sane has taken precedence, as it absolutely should. You know us, we work hard to understand what is important. What this means is that we’ve rather lost our nice buffer of Leadtime on episodes so I say we’re taking a break in August. That’s not actually the case. We’ll be prepping a load of episodes for you. We’re playing catch up in the background so we come back in September like the highly efficient folks you know us to be! I look forward to seeing you properly again in September. In the meantime, whatever the summer has in store for you, I hope it’s fun.

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