Cover of Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

By: Erik Fisher
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Beyond the To-Do List is a productivity podcast hosted by Erik Fisher. Each week, Erik sits down with experts, authors, and creatives to explore time management, habits, focus, deep work, work-life balance, mindset, and what it actually means to live and work well.

The show has featured guests like David Allen, James Clear, Cal Newport, Gretchen Rubin, Seth Godin, and Daniel Pink — covering everything from getting things done and morning routines to burnout, procrastination, creativity, digital minimalism, goal setting, and intentional living.

The premise is simple: productivity isn't the point. It's the means to a whole life.

© © 2023 Erik Fisher Career Success Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Personal Development
Episodes
  • Optimism: Why It’s a Behavior, Not a Mood with Michelle Gielan

    Optimism: Why It’s a Behavior, Not a Mood with Michelle Gielan
    15 Oct 2026
    Optimism isn't a mood you're born with, and it isn't a mindset you can summon on command. It's a set of habits you practice, especially on the hard days. That's the case Michelle Gielan makes in her new book, Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times.Michelle is a positive psychology researcher, a former CBS News anchor, and the bestselling author of Broadcasting Happiness. She holds a master's in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and runs GoodThink, a research and training firm, with her husband, Shawn Achor. She left the anchor desk after years of reporting recession news to study the opposite problem: how people find a path forward when things are hard.In this conversation, we cover:Three minutes of bad news: Her study with Arianna Huffington found that three minutes of negative news in the morning left people 27% more likely to call their whole day negative six to eight hours later. Pairing problems with solutions made people 20% better at creative problem-solving.The best-moments text: A one-to-two-minute nightly practice that swaps "was today good?" for "what was good today?" and trains you to notice what's working.Stress and meaning: Why stress usually points at something you care about, and how asking what's behind it changes what it does to you.Commitment triage: Sorting your commitments into a core impact list, a secondary list, and a not-to-do list. Plus what to do when you don't control your own schedule.Recharging smarter: Why resilience isn't about how much you can endure, and why ten-minute daily recharges matter as much as the vacation.This one's for anyone running a full life on a low battery. Michelle hopes none of this ever gets mistaken for a productivity hack. The point is protecting your energy so you can actually live the life you've built. Find the book and the resources that go with it at resilientoptimism.com.Connect with Michelle:WebsiteResilient OptimismGoodThinkLinkedInConnect with Erik:LinkedInThreadsFacebookBlueskyThis Podcast is Powered By:Brain.fm - 20% off your first monthDescriptDescript 101CastmagicEcammPodpageRodecaster ProGrab Shortcasts from Beyond The To-Do List by Blinkist:http://beyondthetodolist.com/blinkistSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    48 min
  • Focus, Sleep, and Stress: The 90-Minute Method Behind Better Work with Christian Poensgen

    Focus, Sleep, and Stress: The 90-Minute Method Behind Better Work with Christian Poensgen
    12 Oct 2026
    Focus, sleep, and stress all run on the same 90-minute cycle — and Dr. Christian Poensgen argues that's where productivity that lasts actually begins. He's a scientist turned executive coach whose doctoral work was on the relationship between stress and performance, and co-author, with Eric Partaker, of Ultraproductive: The 90-Minute Method to Optimize Focus, Sleep, and Stress.Christian's own wake-up call was the quiet kind. No ambulance, no emergency — just an 80-hour week, seven hours in bed, and the feeling every morning that a truck had hit him. He had the PhD in stress and performance and still walked into near-burnout. What he found on the way out is the spine of this conversation: three levers that carry most of the weight, and a body clock that was running underneath all of it the whole time.In this conversation, we cover:Pseudo-productive busyness: Why long hours and a cleared inbox can leave the things that matter untouched — and why an inbox is really a to-do list other people built for you.Working the edges of the day: Deep focus is hardest between nine and five, so Christian makes the case for claiming 15 or 30 minutes before or after, and the 3-3-11 rule for finding your own best windows.The fight phase: Why the first five to ten minutes of focused work always feel lousy, for everyone, and why that resistance is a sign you're about to do something good rather than a sign to stop.Junk sleep: Seven hours in bed is a quantity. Deep and REM sleep are the nutrition — and Christian found he was getting under 30 minutes of deep sleep a night while doing everything "right."Stress as a signal, not an enemy: Nearly everything worth having arrives with some stress attached. The line that matters is duration — and the exhale is the fastest way back down.If you've been doing all the right things and still feel like you're running on empty, this one will make sense of why. Christian's practical takeaways are small enough to start today: a full exhale when stress hits, and ten minutes of bright light in the morning. The deeper framework is in the book.Connect with Christian:Ultraproductive.comChristian's writing at IMDConnect with Erik:LinkedInThreadsFacebookThis Podcast is Powered By:Brain.fm - 20% off your first monthDescriptDescript 101CastmagicEcammPodpageRodecaster ProGrab Shortcasts from Beyond The To-Do List by Blinkist:http://beyondthetodolist.com/blinkistSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    1 hr
  • Simplicity: Confront, Delete, Amplify — Getting 50% More Done with 50% Less with Roy Schwartz

    Simplicity: Confront, Delete, Amplify — Getting 50% More Done with 50% Less with Roy Schwartz
    8 Oct 2026
    Simplicity and decision fatigue are the focus of this conversation with Roy Schwartz, co-founder and president of Axios.Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios and Axios HQ after helping build Politico, where he first saw how much of modern work is just noise competing for attention. His dyslexia forced him to compress everything down to the core just to keep up — a coping strategy that became the foundation for Smart Brevity and, later, his new book Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less, co-written with his Axios co-founders.In this conversation, we cover:Confront, Delete, Amplify: Roy's three-step framework for finding where your time actually goes, cutting what doesn't serve your real goals, and redirecting that time toward the few things you're genuinely good at.Why delete is harder than it sounds: the evolutionary pull to accumulate — meetings, reports, obligations — and why saying no requires deciding what you're protecting time for, not just what you're cutting.Decision fatigue and the handcuffs method: how removing small daily choices (clothing, groceries, consumables) frees up mental bandwidth for decisions that actually matter.AI as both the problem and the fix: why the same tool producing more content than ever can also become your most honest editor — if you give it the right instructions.The four levers of a whole life: relationships, fitness, diet, and sleep — and why Roy ranks relationships first, even in a book built by a productivity nerd.This episode is for anyone who feels like their calendar, inbox, or life in general has gotten away from them and suspects the answer isn't a better system — it's fewer things. Roy's framework gives you a place to start today: one decision, one meeting, one "no."Connect with Roy:Simplify — the bookSmart Brevity free resourcesConnect with Erik:LinkedInThreadsFacebookBlueskyThis Podcast is Powered By:Brain.fm - 20% off your first monthDescriptDescript 101CastmagicEcammPodpageRodecaster ProGrab Shortcasts from Beyond The To-Do List by Blinkist: http://beyondthetodolist.com/blinkistSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    48 min
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