 Hey, in this video I'm going to show you an exercise called Shortcut-O-Matic, and this is a great exercise to help you reduce stress by finding shortcuts in your life. All right, let's have a look. So my name is Jonathan Courtney from AJ & Smart, product designer and CEO, and in this video I'm going to show you how you can take one piece of paper and do a little one-person workshop just for yourself, and in this workshop you're going to be able to solve very critical life issues. Now obviously it's not going to solve all problems in your life, but what I am going to do is show you how to list challenges you're having in your life and how to have a systematic way to solve them. I use this exercise anytime I start to feel overwhelmed, and other people at AJ & Smart started to use it as well, so it's gotten some great results, and I'm going to show you exactly how to run it here. And if you're watching this video and any questions come up during it, just pop them in the comments, we answer everything. So to run Shortcut-O-Matic all you're going to need is one piece of paper in the US, it's letter paper in everywhere else, it's A4, and one normal pen, but if you like to get fancy like me and if you're maybe like a stationary nerd, you can bring loads of colors with you, you can bring some stamps, you can bring some like, I don't know, pens and stuff, I just like stationery so I'm a bit of a procrastinator. Okay let's get into it. Step one, take your piece of paper and fold it in half. There you go. Step two, just simply, I think I'm going to take a colored pen for this, just write Shortcut-O-Matic on the top. Step three, and I'm going to stop talking in steps because I'll forget the numbers, and also by the way there is an article, there's going to be a link in the description where you can read about how to do this exercise as well, so if I miss anything don't worry about it. So step three is ready to list out the challenges, and to do this we're going to split into three categories, it's going to be Work, Health and Life. So I'm going to write Work, Health and Life. Now I'm going to split those into three vertical categories. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to list out some things that are irritating me or causing me stress in those aspects of my life, and so work, you know, things that are happening in my work environment, health, you know, this could be related to even working out, and life, this is personal life, so this is, you know, your relationships, your friendships, things like that. Okay, so let me start with Work, and I'm going to list out a couple of things that have been irritating me or causing me trouble in Work. So sales calls, they've been stressing me out because, yeah, they've just been stressing me out. You don't need to go into detail about why they're stressing you out right now, just write down some things that are standing out as irritations. Okay, the podcast, okay, meetings outside the office, so I'm just going to write meetings, but I mean off-site meetings, it's irritating to travel. Going to write, I've been doing a lot of overtime recently. Okay, whatever, I can keep listing things out here, Work. Last thing I'm going to put in here is scheduling meetings, that's somehow also irritating, scheduling, I'm just going to put that in here. Oh, one last one, hiring. Hiring has been irritating me lately. Okay, health. What's up with health? I have not, I'm basically not going to the gym. Eating bad, actually. I've been drinking a little bit too much lately because I've been doing a lot of friend visits and a lot of traveling. Too much drink. So you can see it's really, you can write them whatever way you want. It doesn't matter right now. Okay, personal life, let me go here. So what am I going to say? No time with friends. I haven't really been spending enough time with my friends. Keeping the apartment clean. And I also have a lot of paperwork, like kind of financial tax paperwork that I haven't been doing. I'm just going to write personal finances. So basically once you're done, what you have is a couple of things and like a list of different things that are irritating you. Now the goal of Shark Chromatic is just to be a very quick exercise to slowly help you kind of make your life more simple and less stressful. We're not going to do all of these. In fact, we're just going to select one. And how you're going to select one is basically what's irritating you the most right now. What's taking up the most of your time, but in a negative way, or what's taking up the most of your headspace. Now, when I look at this list, right now, I'm going to have to say that it's the podcast. And why the podcast? Well, you're going to see soon because we're going to be listing out the challenges. But for me right now, the podcast has been very much an irritant. I love doing the podcast, but everything around it is causing me stress constantly. Okay, so I'm circling podcast here and podcast is what I want to deal with in this shortcut omatic. Okay, let's move on to the next main step. So people have started, there's like building going on right outside. So if you hear some drills and stuff, we can't do anything about it. All right, let's just keep going. Whatever. It doesn't matter. YouTube, right? So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to move to the second page. So I'm going to open up my shortcut omatic and I'm on page two. And what I'm going to write here on the top is just podcast because podcast, that's what I've selected as the thing that has irritated me. And what I'm going to write under this, and this is something I stole from Tim Ferriss. It's a really great statement. And it's going to be what would it look like if the podcast were easy or was easy? I don't even know what's the correct grammar there. What would the correct grammar for that be? Yeah. Is that, is that right? Okay. So podcast, what would it look like if the podcast were easy? So what I'm going to go into now is looking at a world where this is not stressing me out at all and how I'm going to do that is I'm going to write, so I'm going to write things in the format wouldn't have to. So WHT or as Irish people say, WHT. So I'm going to write WHT. So this is wouldn't have to. And so I'm writing these things, you know, if the podcast were easy, I wouldn't have to export the video. This takes ages and I have to wait around for like 30 minutes for it to work. So export video wouldn't have to export video. So I'm writing WHT export video. Next I'm writing, wouldn't WHT upload to YouTube? I hate doing that. WHT schedule calls with Jake. This takes a long time. Did you get it? And then I'm starting to think like in general, I'm starting to kind of go down the path. I'm like, wouldn't have to do video at all. I wouldn't have to think about it. Wouldn't have to do video at all, wouldn't have to. So you should think really, you know, what would it look like if the podcast were easy? Think as crazy as you possibly can. Wouldn't have to even do a podcast. How about that? So what if I what if I we just don't do a podcast anymore? That would make my life easier. It would. So I'm going to write that down. Wouldn't have to work on the San Francisco time zone. Wouldn't have to host it, whatever. I wouldn't have to do any research. Okay, so in this case right now, I've written down everything that in a world where the podcast was easy, these things would have to be true, right? And that for me, I mean, if I didn't even have to do the podcast, great, you know, then there'd be no stress for the podcast. Okay, but this is not really going to help me yet. But what it has done is given me an overview of the things that how the world would have to look for the podcast to be easy. So next step, we're going to stay on the same page. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to see how much time it would save me to actually do these things. So I'm going to sort of start writing how much time each of these things take or how much time I would save, depending on how you want to do it. And I'm also, so I'm basically going to give it a tag. It's going to be the amount of minutes and how annoying the actual thing is. Okay, so it's literally writing 20 minutes, very annoying, 10 minutes, kind of annoying. And if it's not annoying at all, I'm just not going to write it. I'll show you how that looks. Okay, so there you go. That's how that looks. And basically what I can do now is based on what the most annoying thing is or based on what's taking the most time or based on like what I'm really, really, really sick of. And that's really irritating me. I'm going to just mark that and say that's what I'm going to work on first. But in this exercise, that's the main thing I'm going to work on. So I'm going to say for me, the thing that irritates me the most, because it feels the most useless, now that I see it, it's exporting the video. I hate doing that. Okay, so exporting the video is what I've selected. Let's move to the next step. So here's what I'm doing on this page. What needs to be true for this world to exist where I don't have to export the video? What things would need to happen? So I'm just going to list out a few things that would need to happen. I'm going to show some crazy things. I'm going to show some like potentially real things. And basically, I'm just going to think, okay, I wouldn't have to export the video. What sort of things would need to be true for that to happen? So let me let me give you some examples. So just don't do the video. Let's maybe not do YouTube. Get a dedicated podcasting computer for the office. Maybe that's something that because everything could be automatically set up and not on my own personal laptop. Leave the laptop in the office overnight. Maybe an assistant could come and export the video if I just had a dedicated laptop for a podcasting and just left that in the office. Instead of a video on YouTube, we just use like a still frame. So just like a still frame image instead of the video. Set up an auto save feature from the recording software to Dropbox and I just drop it onto Dropbox. Wait a second, why didn't I do that before? Okay, so that's also the interesting thing that you start to figure out. While you're doing this exercise, you might actually have an epiphany and go, wait a second, why am I doing it the long way around? Shortcut-O-Matic is about finding shortcuts. Actually, I should have said that at the start. Shortcut-O-Matic is about finding shortcuts in your life. We have to go back and do that. Okay, so what I'm going to do next is I'm going to choose one of these and try it out as an experiment and see if this really shortcuts my problem and makes my life easier when it comes to podcasting. And how I select this time is a bit more about gut feeling. It's a bit more about, okay, I'm just going to try this and I'm going to do like a two week experiment or a one week experiment. I'm just going to see if I still hate doing the podcast after that. So in this case, I'm going to choose, set up a way to save the recordings and automatically put them on Dropbox because that way I wouldn't really have to export it myself. It could just be dumped on Dropbox and then Callum or YouTube guy could just deal with it. Okay, so I'm going to choose that. So now, now that I've selected the thing I want to do to try to create a shortcut for myself, I'm going to write down on the final page the shortcut experiment. So the first thing I'm going to write here is, you know, how will I validate that this actually worked? So I'll, I'll say the validation check is after the next episode. So after the next episode, I'm going to see if this actually solved one of my big problems with the podcast. So I'm going to say after next episode, the experiment itself, I'm going to write down here what I'm actually going to do to make this happen. In this case, it's going to be invite Callum and Brittany to a shared Dropbox folder with me. Email them to explain that this is now where the files are going to be auto exported to. And what I'm finally going to do is set the save path in Ecamm call recorder, which I'm doing to make, which I'm using to make the videos, I'm going to set that path to automatically send to Dropbox. And there we go. That's basically it with shortcut automatic within just around 15 minutes. You're able to go from a fairly zoomed out vision of all the problems that you're having, all the things that are irritating you and down to a simple experiment that you can try over the next week, over the next two weeks, over the next two days. And what this does for you is helps you just to take some perspective on all the little things that are going on in your life and try to look for some shortcuts. So that's shortcut automatic. So thanks so much for watching this video. I'd love to hear in the comments what you thought of shortcut automatic or what things you're going to try to use it for or what you actually did use it for. I use it all the time and it's super useful. So I hope you like it. We'd love to get a like down below because that always helps other people to find the videos. And if you want to see more things like this from AJ and smart, we've got a free podcast out every Monday. It's called the product breakfast club in all podcast apps. We've got a Facebook group called innovation hackers where people are sharing different types of workshops and sharing different types of innovative links and creative things. It's great. We also have an Instagram page which is at AJ smart design and every single day we're showing you what it's like working at a creative agency behind the scenes. And of course, every week here on YouTube, we have a new video. So I hope you enjoy it. I hope this helped you. Thanks so much. Goodbye. So this looks a little bit like this. Can you tell that I'm not actually writing stuff that can basically help you solve any problems in your life?