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- #204: Working less boosts income (hundreds of companies prove it)
#204: Working less boosts income (hundreds of companies prove it)
Adventure > Another Productivity App
Jenae Spry
August 01, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 204
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Adventure > Another Productivity App — The Surprising Benefits of Adding Adventure to Your Life
Google's new Web Guide search experiment organizes results with AI
Working less boosts income (hundreds of companies prove it)
I tried Capacities and here's why I'm never going back to traditional productivity tools
Anthropic unveils 'auditing agents' to test for AI misalignment
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
This system is science based and it just WORKS.
This is for you if you answer yes to any of these:
✅ In full-blown burnout?
✅ Can’t seem to get old routines going again?
✅ Coming back from a vacation or “work sprint” and everything is wonky?
✅ Just feeling a little “off”?
✅ Tired of feeling like you’re always “falling off the wagon”
WHO SHOULD SKIP THIS
❌ People looking for an overnight transformation
❌ Anyone who wants super complex systems
❌ Those who think burnout is "just being lazy"
❌ People who are thriving and everything is working perfectly already
Join this sprint and:
🏆 Get Your Reset Type (They’re not all the same!)
🤝 Take Your Brain From Enemy to Ally (Your brain tries to protect you, but not always the right way)
🚀 Your “Meet Yourself Where You Are” Toolkit (Get a plan sized for today’s you.)
♻️ Reusable System. 💩-proof your system.
About me and my Frameworks:
I’m Jenae and you’re reading my newsletter. 😊
You may not know this, but I used to work 16-hour days on the regular until a trauma landed me with PTSD and VERY few focus hours. I continued to grow my business and income in just 4 hours a day.
My experience wading through science (I was a science translator) allowed me to build evidence-based frameworks to help not just myself, but you do the same (minus the trauma!).
You’ll get FOREVER access and support for two full weeks!
🔥Quote/Prompt
Keep focused on who and what are most important in your life. Making a life is more important than making a living.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
My immediate reaction to this is...not sure how I feel about it. Here's why: Making a living and making a life aren't competing forces -- they're dance partners.
As business owners, we're not choosing between success and fulfillment. We're building businesses BECAUSE of […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Adventure > Another Productivity App — The Surprising Benefits of Adding Adventure to Your Life
Anxious thoughts are more than just a nuisance for us, they can be true productivity and business disrupters (not in a good way). This research from the University of Oklahoma reveals how even brief outdoor adventures can significantly reduce anxiety symptoms, with 90% of participants showing improvement.
The McLain et al. review of prior research focused on anxiety disorders as the target of AT. Therapy for people with anxiety disorders would incorporate decreasing negative symptoms, increasing the use of coping mechanisms, and helping people become more motivated to change their behavior. By engaging with nature, clients could also develop a deeper sense of connectedness to the natural environment or what some call "ecowellness." [...] Using a carefully controlled method known as meta-analysis, the research team began with an astounding 73,409 publications that mentioned a treatment method related to AT. After trimming the data set to those that matched screening criteria, the final 12 studies still contained an impressive 2,000-plus participants, all of whom had anxiety symptoms. The final number produced decent effect sizes, meaning that 90 percent of individuals with anxiety disorders could expect to benefit from AT.
Key Insights:
Adventure therapy doesn't require extreme sports – even simple activities like walking in a park or gardening count, making it accessible for busy professionals regardless of fitness level.
The shortest effective intervention was just 2.5 hours, meaning you don't need week-long retreats to see benefits from incorporating outdoor challenges into your routine.
The combination of physical achievement and nature exposure builds self-efficacy, helping you feel more capable in both physical and professional challenges.
Read the full article for specific activity suggestions, the complete research breakdown, and practical ways to incorporate adventure therapy principles into your daily routine without major time commitments.
⚙️ Optimization
Your carefully crafted SEO strategy might need a major update. Google's new Web Guide feature uses AI to reorganize search results into topic-based groupings, which means your content needs to clearly address specific aspects of broader topics to show up in the right sections. With that said, this is in Google’s “lab” phase so like many tools/features, it might be dead soon. So don’t rush to upend your entire strategy. It’s just good to be aware of what Google is trying. In this case, it seems like maybe…just MAYBE…it hears creators and business owners and is looking for a way to combine AI with sending traffic to us? Maybe? Is it too much to hope for? Anyway, here’s the situation as it stands right now:
Google suggests the feature works well for open-ended search queries, like "how to solo travel in Japan" or even more complex, multi-sentence queries. For instance, you could ask something like "My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?" Each section of the search results will focus on one type of answer to the query. With the solo travel example, Web Guide would display groupings like those focused on comprehensive guides, safety tips, links where people have shared their personal experiences, and more.
Key Insights:
Instead of targeting broad keywords, your content now needs to focus on specific aspects of topics - for example, rather than "business coaching," you'd need pages specifically about pricing strategies, client onboarding, or results tracking.
Web Guide favors content that answers complex, multi-part questions, so creating comprehensive resources that address multiple facets of a problem will likely perform better than short, single-topic posts.
Personal experience content gets its own grouping in results, making case studies and detailed client success stories more valuable for visibility than generic service pages.
Read the full article for details on how to access Web Guide through Search Labs, specific examples of query types that trigger the new format, and timeline for the rollout across all Google Search tabs.
⏲️ Time Management
3 ways companies successfully shift to a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied hundreds of cases
If large companies with complex operations can cut 20% of their work hours while boosting profits, imagine what you could achieve as a solo or small business owner. This research on hundreds of successful 4-day workweek implementations reveals three strategies that work just as well for solopreneurs as they do for big teams.
Finally, many businesses went deeper to question the tasks and projects they focused their time on, and whether they lined up with their company mission and overall strategy. One company re-evaluated the purpose of one of their newsletters, Schor says. "They spent a lot of time on the newsletter and realized it just wasn't really giving them anything, but it was extremely time-consuming." The team realized they were only creating and sending out the newsletter as often as they did because they'd always done it, Schor says, though it wasn't delivering the results they wanted. So, they ended up sending it less often, thereby freeing up the time for the newsletter team to work on more high-impact projects.
Key Insights:
Replace client check-in calls with written updates when possible – one company found that switching weekly calls to written status reports saved 5 hours per week while actually improving communication clarity.
Batch similar tasks like brewing workers did – instead of switching between client work, admin, and marketing throughout the day, dedicate blocks to each type of work to minimize context switching.
Question recurring tasks that feel obligatory but don't drive results, such as that weekly newsletter one company realized wasn't worth the time investment despite "always doing it."
Read the full article for specific productivity hacks from manufacturing companies, details on how businesses maintained profits with fewer hours, and Juliet Schor's complete research findings.
💻 Tools & Technology
Truthfully, after reading this…I'm still a ClickUp diehard (🙈), but many of my clients love Notion or Asana, and here's the thing – everyone's brain works differently. You should always test tools and try to find one that fits your brain and your processes rather than forcing your brain and processes into a tool. That's a lot of friction. If you're still looking for your unicorn tool, check out Capacities and these screenshots!
Most productivity apps, whether they are note-takers, task managers, or project trackers, are built around the concept of files, folders, and databases. However, Capacities has a different take here. For Capacities, everything is an object. This means that instead of just a note or a document, I can create an object type for it. I can have objects like Projects, People, Books, Meetings, Ideas, Articles, Recipes, and more, and have specific properties for each. For instance, I have an object type called Project. When I start a new client project, I create an object for it that has several properties, like Status, Client, Due Date, Budget, and Key Deliverables.
Key Insights:
The object-based system lets you create custom templates for different types of work - for example, a "Client" object with fields for contact info, project history, and payment terms all in one place.
Full offline functionality means you can work during flights or in areas with poor internet, with everything syncing when you reconnect - crucial for business owners always on the go.
The Android app includes a share sheet that actually works, letting you capture ideas from WhatsApp, web links, or photos directly into your workspace with one tap.
Read the full article for detailed screenshots of the interface, pricing breakdown, comparison with Notion and Obsidian, and specific examples of how the author uses objects for different workflows.
🤖 AI
I always tell you guys that we should keep our fingers on the pulse of AI and be "fluent" in AI – understand what it IS and IS NOT capable of. This article is important because it helps us think about where we are in terms of capabilities and where we are headed. In other words, what's far away and what is perhaps sooner rather than later, and, perhaps most importantly, where our humanity fits into all of that.
Alignment became a significant topic in the AI world after users noticed that ChatGPT was becoming overly agreeable. OpenAI rolled back some updates to GPT-4o to address this issue, but it showed that language models and agents can confidently give wrong answers if they decide this is what users want to hear. To combat this, other methods and benchmarks were developed to curb unwanted behaviors. The Elephant benchmark, developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Oxford, and Stanford University, aims to measure sycophancy.
Key Insights:
AI systems can become "sycophantic" – telling you what they think you want to hear rather than accurate information, which is why you should always verify critical business decisions made with AI assistance.
Even the most advanced AI companies can only catch alignment issues 10-42% of the time with automated testing, showing we're still far from fully autonomous AI systems you can trust without oversight.
The fact that AI is being used to test AI reveals both progress and limitations - we're advanced enough to attempt this but not advanced enough to do it reliably, suggesting a long runway before AI replaces human judgment.
Read the full article for details on the three types of auditing agents, specific examples of alignment failures, and what this means for the timeline of truly autonomous AI systems.
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
I caught up with my writing.
Everything went quite well and smoothly.
Everything work related got done.
What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!
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I hope you found this valuable!
Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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