Santiago (00:00)

Hi there, welcome to ProductiviTree. I’m Santi Tacoronte and I’m here to help you succeed and be happier. In each episode we’ll explore new ways to work smarter, manage your time better and grow as a person. We’ll share fresh ideas, find ways to improve and help you become your best self at work and life. Join me as we learn and grow together on ProductiviTree.

Santiago AI (00:31)

In today’s episode, we will talk about productivity systems and how to measure productivity with Marius Vetrici. Marius is a serial entrepreneur and tech innovator based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 2003, he’s founded five successful businesses and launched 11 cutting edge software products across diverse sectors, including e -commerce, no -code SaaS, inventory management apps, and developer tools.

Marius built a web development agency, growing a global team of 20 plus professionals, and has accumulated over 10 ,000 hours in product management and business analysis. With expertise in AI automation and AI strategy, digital transformation, and startup mentorship, Marius excels at crafting business strategies, launching products, and managing high performing technical teams.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:25)

Hi Marius and welcome to Productivity. We’re very happy to have you here.

Marius (01:29)

Same here. Hello everyone and thanks Santi for the invitation. I appreciate it.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:35)

Marius, let’s start setting the scene. What means productivity to you? And how do you define productivity in an era where the nature of work is constantly evolving? We have had so many definitions about productivity in the last 30, 40 years. So what does it mean for you and what do you think it in the current status of society?

Marius (01:57)

Yeah, indeed. Life is shifting, technology is shifting. Everything is in a constant move. But in my opinion, first and foremost, working on the right thing is by far the most important aspect of productivity. I think productivity is the ratio, to me, it’s the ratio between what I achieved divided by what I wanted to achieve in a day. in…

It’s more simple words. I know I was productive at the end of the day based on how much stuff I finished compared to what I wanted to achieve. And actually there are psychological studies. There’s a meta study that says you get an uptick in like a boost of self -confidence the moment you achieve stuff that you set yourself as a goal to achieve. So if you just do stuff without setting it as a goal,

you don’t get this benefit. But if you set your intention and you achieve that thing, you get the benefits.

Santiago Tacoronte (03:00)

have a follow up question. recently read in the Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, he wrote a very interesting article about productivity And what does he does to be more productive? One of the things he said, I’m going to read it. It’s don’t fall into the trap of productivity porn.

chasing productivity for its own sake isn’t helpful. Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system and not nearly enough asking if they’re working on the right problems. Which is basically what you just said. I don’t know if you have read the blog of Sam Altman, but let’s elaborate on this one. How do you…

help not falling into these traps and making productivity do more harm than good.

Marius (03:50)

That’s actually a very interesting take from Sam about chasing productivity for its own sake. And I would start by just picturing a life, a timeline. It’s my timeline. Years ago, I fell in love with David Allen, getting things done methodology. And I would spend time just organizing the tasks.

estimating the tasks, planning the tasks and so on and so on. And then moving to the right on my timeline, years later, I found out about Peter Drucker, who actually shed some light on the bad feelings I had on my way of organizing things according to the getting things done system. Because I was organizing the tasks, but there was still a feeling of, hmm.

It seems like I’m not moving forward, I’m not achieving things. To me, it was an unknown unknown at time. I didn’t even realize what I don’t know. So later, I came to Peter Drucker’s wonderful book, it’s called The Effective Executive, and there he says, there’s surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what you should not be doing at all.

If you’re working on the wrong things, it just doesn’t matter how effective you are. And the encouragement here, and again, from my personal experience is to increase the chances of working on the right things. I currently take about two days every six months just to think about the business, the strategy, just to let my mind go to a higher level of thinking.

focusing on how are we going to be different and better within the next six months, what are strengths and weaknesses, what opportunities and threats are there. And if we just keep organizing tasks every day, every hour, it is very, very difficult to get our minds into a higher level thinking that Sam Altman is talking about and that Peter Drucker is advocating.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:07)

You have successfully launched companies, software, digital products, in the context of methods and to the point you just mentioned, efficiency versus effectiveness and balancing the two of them. Which methods, what are your frameworks? What is your…

to go to process your modus operandi to be so productive and at the same time successful.

Marius (06:28)

I don’t know if I’m that productive, but indeed I have, I’m a big fan of productivity. I’ve, I’ve studied several productivity systems and for me, mixing is the key. And if you want an exhaustive list for high level planning, I prefer Peter’s Drucker approach to effectiveness and focusing on things that will create an impact. So this is the keyword, the key, creating an impact.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:31)

Yeah, I think.

Marius (06:58)

Moving a bit down for a balanced allocation of time and energy and attention between all the hats that I wear, both personal as well as professional. I used Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people because even as a professional, we do wear several hats. You can be an employee at the same time. You can be a manager of somebody. Then you can be a project manager in some cross -departmental

project and so on. And then as a family member, you are maybe a father, you are maybe a spouse at the same time, you might be the son of your parents and so on and so on. So it’s good to keep in mind and to have an inventor of all the hats. Now moving down for project planning and identifying next actions, coming back to David’s Allen, getting things done methodology. As you can see, I still enjoy this methodology, but now

I know more about the limitations of it. So there’s two levels on top of this. It’s the Stephen Cavett and Peter Drucker methodology. Now moving even lower, I really enjoy the OKR objectives and key results system popularized by John Doerr in his book, Measure What Matters. And then for staying like at the task level to staying focused on the tasks, I just use a little productivity trick.

Some people call it the Pomodoro technique. Basically, before I start working on a task, I write my intention. I write what I want to do on a small piece of paper that I hold near keyboard because our minds really just jump here and there. Even if I turn out all the notifications, which I do, by the way, I don’t have any kinds of new email notifications, new messages, notifications on the laptop, but

Still, that’s the nature of our mind and it jumps from one thought to another. So I just hold a small piece of paper near the keyboard. Like for example, I have now one here that says, prepare for the podcast, which I have been doing just before our meeting now. Yeah. So that works really, really fine. And lastly, if I really have a hard time focusing,

Then I’ll just practice meditation for five minutes, like in the middle of the day, I’ll just stop and observe my breath with my clothes, or I’ll just do pushups or squats, or eventually I just go for a walk. So as you can see, the mix is the key for me. I discover that if I just get stuck in one system, I eventually end up hugging the tree and I miss the forest.

Santiago Tacoronte (09:44)

This is very interesting. I love how we have put different types of productivity or different productivity frameworks for each one of the different shades that you might have or aspects you might have in your life more strategically as a entrepreneur and company owner, but also down to the, can I say very basic level of keeping yourself physically focused onto something

What is the most common misconception about productivity that you have encountered? That thing that everybody thinks is productivity but you say no, don’t go there.

Marius (10:18)

I think counting productivity by the number of hours is on a task or in the office. Or years ago, people would use to measure, because I’m a software developer at heart, I’ve been coding for 20 years. Years ago, people would measure productivity by the number of lines of code that you wrote. And later there were studies that would show that there’s a difference of productivity around.

Santiago Tacoronte (10:21)

Yeah.

Wow.

Marius (10:46)

of 10 to 1, there might be a 10 to 1 difference of productivity between a top software developer and a junior developer. So lines of code won’t get us too far or number of hours.

Santiago Tacoronte (11:01)

Let’s talk a little bit about inspiration and productivity. There is a part of productivity, particularly to leaders and in your case, strategists that talks about creativity and inspiration. Inspiration or creativity rarely arrives on demand. How do you reconcile the quality of aspects of using frameworks and

Marius (11:04)

Right.

Santiago Tacoronte (11:23)

those techniques that you previously mentioned with getting this some sort of enlightenment and inspiration that you need to do something that is creative. And creative not necessarily something that nobody has done before, but find a way to solve a problem in a creative way, something that you can just not trigger by sitting in front of the computer.

Marius (11:43)

Yeah, that’s a good question. as many people already noticed, also noticed myself creativity arises when the mind is relaxed. If you command creativity, if you demand creativity, in that particular moment, second, you are tense. You are not relaxed. You are craving for creativity and it won’t come. So if we accept

this reality that creativity comes to us when the mind is relaxed. What we could do is eventually just create space for ourselves when our mind gets more relaxed. For example, just taking some breaks throughout the day. Maybe, and this might sound funny, but if you’re just stuck in a task that just doesn’t lend itself to be solved,

and you want to go to the toilet, just stand up and go to the toilet. You will… Some people, and that’s pretty funny, some people I talk to, including myself, just because you detach yourself from the task, you start seeing your challenge from a different perspective. And again, coming back in a more maybe organized way to invite creativity into your life, just setting aside two days every six months.

to do higher level thinking. if you just do it for one or two hours, it’s very hard to disconnect yourself from the, from the minutia of, of the day -to -day tasks and concerns and, and stress. But if you go to some remote place, not in your office, because your mind will keep being triggered by the same office, by the same environment, by the same things that

that you see and you won’t get enough relaxation for the mind. But if you go to a remote place, just hire an Airbnb apartment, take your two or three colleagues with you. Maybe you have like a nice terrace in that apartment or maybe some hotel or whatever, and spend two days there in a different environment, free from the old triggers for your mind. And think about…

Where would you like to be? Just envision. Where would you like to be as a company, as a team, as an individual in six months? And then thinking about…

How can you get there? Just brainstorming and then thinking about how can you eventually measure the steps towards moving to that goal. Again, all of that will not necessarily bring the creativity to you because again, as you mentioned in the beginning, creativity can’t be invited. But by doing this, you will increase the likelihood, you’ll increase the chances that the creativity will eventually come.

Santiago Tacoronte (14:39)

Okay.

Yeah.

So far we have, and I don’t have any doubt, we are a very productive individual. In the framework for productivity I have developed, there are four pillars. Individual productivity, team or group of productivity, automation and accountability, accountability culture. Let’s talk about organizational productivity. I keep hearing that there is productivity particularly in the US.

it’s decreasing. At the same time, I see that we have more and more tools to be individually productive. So this is a bit of a paradox because we seem to have more individually productive people, but collectively we are less productive. What’s your perspective on the intersection between you as a productive individual and you working in a company with 15, 10 ,000 or 50 ,000 and making it productive?

Marius (15:33)

Maybe as I listen to you, one word comes to my mind, it’s alignment or lack of alignment. And maybe it’s because of the increase in the remote work. And we probably spend, some of us spend less time together, just doing nothing together like.

for five or 10 minutes having a chit chat by a water cooler or enjoying a coffee together in some breaks at the office. Because some people say you build a relationship in those moments when you spend with somebody by just doing nothing together. That’s when you build a relationship. And coming back to the alignment, again, I think even an…

especially in spite of us working remotely, gathering together for one or two I would suggest, in person, in a remote area. I think that would also address this alignment issue that the companies are recently experiencing, because we are productive at an individual level. But if we are not rowing, we are not pushing in the same direction.

then collectively we’re not that productive.

Santiago Tacoronte (17:03)

Let’s follow up on this one. Productivity guilt refers to the feeling of anxiety and stress and unease that arises when an individual feels that they’re not being productive enough. How do you recommend people to deal with this?

Marius (17:17)

Yeah, you mentioned some people are feeling guilty, they’re stressed and probably this could be maybe summarized in a, in a, you want in a simple way, it’s probably, it’s reality minus expectations. And that’s how do you eventually feel. So what you could do is eventually work more.

If you eventually could, so adjust the reality, which sometimes is very, very hard, albeit impossible. But what we could also do is adjust our expectations or maybe the expectation of our colleagues, of our, our superiors. And because again, if they expect me to do something and I am at that line, then I’m good. But if I do the same amount of work, but they expect us to do more.

then I’m not good. So adjusting both the reality and the expectation will eventually address my feeling. Now, assuming we can’t adjust neither the reality because we are already overworked nor the perception of and expectation of other people, what I would do in these cases, will just come down my body and my mind reaction to this type of stress.

I would just resort, I would go back to my meditation practice. I am a big fan of Vipassana meditation, which works very well. I practice it on a daily basis. Exercising works really, really well. Just going for a walk in, preferably in a natural environment, in a park, in a forest.

something that also helps to calm down the mind. Because again, our reaction of stress and shame, comes in guilt, it comes from our reaction towards the reality. So if we can somehow modulate our reaction, calm down our mind and focus on the things that we can control, that definitely helps. And by the way, just to share a resource, one meditation technique,

Santiago Tacoronte (19:27)

Thank

Marius (19:37)

technique which is very simple and works very well. It’s called mini anapan meditation. If you just Google mini anapan, we can put it in the links eventually later. It’s about observing your natural breath, which if you do it for at least five to 10 minutes, it will calm down the mind and the feeling of guilt. And you will see things in a different perspective, in a more clear…

men are more connected to what is and what you can do. Just reconnecting to the reality by reconnecting to your natural breath you reconnect your mind to the reality in a more genuine way.

Santiago Tacoronte (20:17)

Hmm.

You mentioned remote work and I was also recently reading that there is an expectation or a forecast in the US that up to 50 % of workers in a few years will be independent. They will not be working full time for a company. And as a corporate guy, I feel that there is fear about adopting these

frameworks. Imagine that half of your team is just independent. How do you think measurement of productivity will evolve when the people that work for you, they are not part of your payroll? I’m asking you this because I know you have worked with a lot of freelancers and you work with a lot of independent contractors. What is your advice to companies to be able to adopt this type of

work.

Marius (21:13)

Yeah, indeed. I was, I started freelancing 10 years ago. spent 10, I spent two years as a freelancer myself, and then later I started hiring full -time people. So currently, because due to our business model, we do have half of our team, it’s full -time employees and half of them, they are, they’re part of our team, but they are paid on a

project by project basis. in this case, and by the way, all of them are remote. One year before COVID, we moved all of us remotely. So it wasn’t due to COVID, it was a strategic decision. And the way we managed to measure productivity and to actually to ensure the productivity is right, it started, this discussion started

before productivity, it started with a recruitment. It started with a company culture, with the company values. It started by us writing the values. We want our colleagues to adhere to all the colleagues, both the contractors as well as the full -time employees, writing those values in the job ads. So essentially we would telegraph through the job ad, these are the types.

and kinds of people would love to work with. And these are the people that would thrive in our company culture, in our organization. Once you do that and you just communicate on the right wavelength and you attract the right type of people, then you can start measuring productivity. But again, values are very important. Things such as accountability and…

Just making sure people, you can rely on people and make sure that people are just doing the best they can, even though they aren’t supervised, even though nobody’s watching over their shoulder. That’s part of the culture. It’s part of the education that you got as a child, as a student.

It’s something which is terribly difficult to just enforce. And if you aren’t structured that way, I don’t think you can mold somebody into this. Now, how can you make sure somebody has these values? We do have a set of questions through which we probe into the existence of these values and a genuine…

desire to live up to those values by just discussing past examples, personal as well as professional examples. So values are the cornerstone. Next, it’s about mixing KPIs related to the deliverables, the time spent

Santiago Tacoronte (23:59)

Mm

Marius (24:15)

on working that, but also on the quality of the deliverables. So we need KPI data related to the quantitative side. For example, we have a couple of lines of business. We do web development. We’re website specialists. We also do AI consulting. So for example, for a web development project, if we have a developer or if we have a project manager,

The way to measure their work would be for a developer, it would be by reviewing their code. That’s the quantitative way or to ensuring they deliver the code on time. That’s another quantitative way. Another way would be how many defects or bugs did they leave in the deliverable. And that’s being checked by another colleague who’s a quality assurance specialist. So this is how we do it through quantitative KPIs. Now the qualitative KPIs.

Santiago Tacoronte (25:08)

Thank

Marius (25:09)

are related to the quality of the code, to the user experience they have created through the piece of software that they have delivered.

Santiago Tacoronte (25:21)

Mm

Let’s speak about AI. You are an advocate of AI and I want to ask you about information overload, which is one of the incumbent problems for productivity. on a given day, I might receive 25 meeting invites, and around 150, 200 emails.

How do you think AI can help us overcome the information overload that we are, can I say suffering these days?

Marius (25:49)

Yeah, all of us are already feeling the pains of information overload. There’s so much news, so much information, so many social media posts, so many experts. Who do you listen to? What is relevant? So many documents in the company to process, so many emails. So indeed, we do feel the burden of this. AI, it could be a very powerful tool in managing the information overload.

Santiago Tacoronte (26:04)

huh. Yeah.

Marius (26:17)

But at the end of the day, it’s a tool we need to understand very well both what kind of things we can achieve with the AI, but also what limitations are there. So for example, if you don’t need precision, like fact checking precision, AI is absolutely wonderful for generating ideas, for brainstorming.

Even for getting the essence from a bunch of documents from our webpage Even from a youtube video you can ask ai to sum up a youtube video That would definitely help definitely help with information overload Now the question is what do you do if you actually do need precision? And here I can give you a recent example Like a few weeks ago I got a customer

who sent me about 15 PDF documents, long documents in French. I’m still learning French. I’m already doing well. I recently moved to Switzerland, but reading…

technical French, legal French, that was still a challenge. Still, because I wanted to give all my attention to the case, I just needed to understand the context of this client. he sent me the documents. I actually spent like about two hours going manually through the documents. But then, because I didn’t want to miss the big picture, I used AI and I load the…

those 15 documents and asked the AI to answer some specific questions that I needed answers on. So AI used AI to get a different perspective on those 15 documents. If details wouldn’t have been important, I would just use AI, would not have go manually through the documents. But in my case, I used both approaches. But…

Just to make sure that AI gave me the right answers, I eventually took the answers from those questions. I went back to the person who gave me the documents and I said, look, I use the AI to sum up and to get these answers. Could you please fact check this for me? And it was very easy for the person because number one, the person spent years working on that thing. So she knew all of that stuff.

Santiago Tacoronte (28:30)

You

Marius (28:39)

And number two, I just had the summary of one page that was fairly quick to read. Now, the answers that the AI got me were 90, 90 % accurate. In most of the cases, that would have been enough. Do you see what I’m saying? So coming back to what I originally said, the AI is just a tool. We need to understand that it is very good at summing up information and helping us with information overload.

Santiago Tacoronte (28:55)

Mm

Marius (29:06)

But if we need 100 % or 99 % accuracy, it would be nice to just double the AI approach with something else. And that’s up to us. What is this something else?

Santiago Tacoronte (29:20)

What specific tools do you have on your AI productivity Swiss knife?

Marius (29:27)

we do use a couple of things in our day -to -day and I’m actually subscribed to several newsletters and I do keep looking for new tools and experimenting with new tools. Some of the things that I like and that we are using would be WriteSonic, which we are using for writing blogs and…

Sometimes we use it for LinkedIn posts. And then my colleagues use a custom GPT from OpenAI called Humanizer. Because sometimes OpenAI, like chat GPT, will sound overlaid, exaggerated. So we need to tune it down. We need to humanize it. Then I really love the vids .io.

video editor that would just translate a video of yours in a different language. It would add subtitles automatically that would color themselves as you go through the video. And then we use Zapier. With the recent editions of Zapier, can use Zapier to automate different processes, to do the same things faster and…

better and avoid having so many manual tasks. And we’ve actually went beyond that. And with my team of developers and myself, because I’m a developer at heart, we used OpenAI for creating chatbots for e -commerce websites. So basically we would have a chatbot that would get trained on the products from an e -commerce website and then it will make recommendations. And the other thing

Santiago Tacoronte (31:05)

And then.

Marius (31:16)

We are about to launch very soon. It’s a Chrome extension for translating email messages and LinkedIn posts and LinkedIn comments to different languages. As I mentioned, I’m now living in the French speaking part of Switzerland, but it’s so much easier for me to write an email in English and just select the text, press a shortcut on the keyboard and see OpenAI rewriting my email.

Literally, I my cursor moving and this Gmail we made it talk to OpenAI and it’s using OpenAI to rewrite my email in place. I don’t have to copy paste my email, go to OpenAI, come back and all that. So all of this is very, very productive and we love, we love speeding up things and spending less time typing on the keyboard and more time with our kids, family and just, yeah. Having a walk in the…

Santiago Tacoronte (32:12)

Right.

Marius (32:16)

in the forest.

Santiago Tacoronte (32:16)

Let’s close up this episode, Marius, with your… I know you read a lot, I know you love reading. What are three recent books around productivity that you would recommend?

Marius (32:29)

Around productivity, would really encourage any executive or anyone who’s envisioning and wants to become an executive to read Peter Drucker’s, the effective executive book. It has been written, I think, 40 years ago or 50 years ago, and it’s still very applicable, super practical, very…

It cuts through the chase and, and Rick and it tells you what you have to do. And it gives you the most important, it gives you the right mindset about productivity. It’s not about the techniques. It’s about your awareness. It’s about how do you see things? How do you see your tasks, your projects? How do you see your role? Your roles in the company in life. That’s where the productivity, the strategic productivity, if you want, that’s where it starts. Then measure what matters.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:10)

Hmm.

Marius (33:27)

I think it’s important book to actually understand how can we, once we know what’s important, how can we structure those projects, those tasks in a meaningful way. That’s where the OKRs, objectives and key results come in. It’s a methodology and how to use it on a day -to -day basis. And lastly,

my first love getting things done. still, I think still it’s a very powerful book and the simple act of identifying the next action in a project, it’s trickier than it seems. And that book really, really teaches you and it just raises your awareness about the importance of really thinking about, what’s the next action here? Because we sometimes, we leave a meeting,

We don’t know what’s the next section. We leave a conference, we don’t know what’s the next section. We have an encounter one -on -one with somebody. Yeah, you need to improve. Okay, what’s the next section? And this book really has a chapter on this. Productivity is about very, very simple things, like basic, basic things, core things. And I didn’t properly think the next section, I think it’s a core thing.

Santiago Tacoronte (34:47)

That’s amazing. Marius, thank you so much for being with us today. It was very insightful, very focused. And I want to thank you for dedicating the time and sharing your knowledge with us. And of course, you’re invited to Productivity Podcasts anytime that you want to be with us and give us your point of view on what means being productive.

Marius (35:08)

Thanks as well for the opportunity. And I wish everyone to be as productive as they can, but not more than that because there you’re getting over life productive and you’re losing the forest and hugging trees. So be as productive as you can, but not more than that.

Santiago Tacoronte (35:20)

Okay.

Santiago (35:27)

Thanks for listening to Productivity. I hope you found something useful in today’s episode. If you did, and it helps improve your life even a tiny bit, that’ll make me really happy. Remember, you can find Productivity on all major podcast platforms, like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, why not share it with a friend who might also find it helpful? Until next time, and keep growing and stay productive.