Here's an approach to presentation building that has nothing to do with graphic design. The looks of your slides matter, but it all starts with the content—the story you tell and how you structure it.

You can't outcompete robots and algorithms on overwork and insomnia. Working with constant interruptions and without breaks is detrimental to those qualities we need most in the future of work.

It wasn't until the pandemic that topics like focus, balance, and everything else Saent had always been about hit the mainstream, and so I wanted to spend more time on Saent again.

July 2017 marked my return to the employed world. I took a role for the stability and salary package—which looked especially attractive compared to my startup subsistence.

We raised $500k from angel investors, got selected for a Y-Combinator (YC) interview, experienced with Teal and Holacracy, and shipped 2,000 buttons to over 50 countries.

I wanted to crowdfund our software, but doing so for apps was rare at the time. A friend suggested a physical button to control the software—hit it to end distractions and start a focus session.

People can't focus and have poor work habits. My solution? An app based on the simplest and strongest productivity hacks I knew of.

Hamlet's Blackberry argues we are getting too connected, with ramifications for our mental well-being, relationships, and happiness. What author William Powers described instantly resonated.

I had just started a video production company. With it came people to manage, business partners, and clients. My email inbox and head were exploding, and I forgot things—ideas, tasks, promises.

I'll walk you through my personal productivity journey and the history of Saent in this nine-part article series.

An overview of how I think about coaching in general and productivity coaching in particular, with a focus on soft, inner productivity skills.

An update on Saent's progress and plans for our members and partners—Q1 2022.

We're about to overhaul the user experience (UX) of our app Lifeline. To do so, we had to ask tough questions about what Saent wants to achieve and for whom. Here are our thoughts.

We recently hosted a ten-day focus challenge. Over 60 participants joined and came in asking: why can't I focus? Here are the ten most remarkable discoveries from our challenge that help find focus.

In the new year, let's check LinkedIn just once a day, and not on weekends. Join me? Here’s how we'll kick our LinkedIn addiction.

A wrap-up of 2021 by Saent cofounder Tim Metz, featuring the Find Your Focus Challenge, the Saent community we've (soft-)launched, and upcoming user research for Lifeline's UX.

Registration for our first challenge of 2022 is now closed. Join our community or leave your email address in the form in this page if you'd like to know when registration for similar challenges opens in the future.

Return-on-Attention reflects how much value you create from the attention you invest in your work. Even the tiniest interruptions tank it by throwing you out of flow.

A regularly updated overview of the best productivity books that have the potential to change your life. Plus, a list of duds to skip so you have more reading time for the great ones.

In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today's world.

While not an easy read, this is an invaluable and timeless guide on how to live a virtuous and fulfilling life.

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact.

World-class collection of research on what technology is doing to our brains, degraded to amateur level by author’s writing style.

This book is an exploration of happiness. a large part of the book discusses the why: why flow is important for anyone’s life, not just for athletes and other super-performers.

Does not do as advertised; more about management and team collaboration than about (personal) productivity.

if you’ve ever felt technology (especially the internet) is getting the better of you or those around you, this book provides a unique view on the problem and how we might get ourselves out of it.

Version 1.4.8 of Lifeline is now available and includes an improved planning and review panel, as well as an overheat warning when you stay in a session for longer than 100 minutes.

for anyone who has problems focussing on their work or getting the stuff that matters done, look no further; this is the book for you.

‍Version 1.4.7 of Lifeline is here, giving you the option to adjust the thickness of your Lifeline (head over to "Preferences > Your Lifeline" if you're eager to do so).

As a Lifeline user, I want to get nudged when I've been in a session for too long without a break. This feature addresses that need.

Here's what we did for Lifeline in Sprint #1 and what you can expect for the next one.

Here's what we did for Lifeline over the past few weeks and what you can expect for our upcoming Sprint #1.

Today we’ve launched Lifeline Pro, our macOS app that lets you go beyond Pomodoro with visual session progress, session labels, and our Calendar integration.

With our app Lifeline, you can work in 25-minute sessions based on the Pomodoro Technique. Unlike many other Pomodoro timer apps, ours provides flexibility, as you don’t have to stop after completing a 25-minute cycle.

Improving your productivity on your own is hard. That’s why Saent is launching monthly, cohort-based Challenges. Together with a coach and peers, you’ll build profound productivity skills in just two weeks.

We still receive questions about Saent Buttons often, even though it’s been more than two years since the latest production run. Below you will find answers to the five most common questions we receive.

After weeks of tweaking to meet Apple’s submission requirements, Lifeline is now live in the macOS App Store. With this step, you can trust that our application meets Apple’s strict privacy requirements and technical standards.

A new version of Lifeline is out. Here are the main updates: Keyboard shortcuts are here; check them out in Preferences. You can now disable the auto-timer popup, handy when you’re not using your computer for work.

Saent Lifeline is our macOS application that helps you develop an optimal daily working rhythm. The app combines the power of modern software with the best elements of the classic Pomodoro Technique: working in cycles of focused sprints and restorative breaks.

We take work wherever we live and life to where we work. Checking email on vacation has become as common as browsing through Facebook while you’re on the boss’s clock. Whether you like it or not, work and life are integrating.

Over the past years, we’ve quietly worked on Lifeline, a new Saent application for macOS. The app is now available on the macOS App Store.

Most productivity and time-management methodologies help us deal with information overload. How to organize data, which tasks to prioritize, what to work on next, projects to delegate to others, and so on.

Imagine this: you’re headed for the supermarket to buy groceries. You plan to spend $25 on a bunch of tomatoes, fresh juice, a bottle of wine, and half a loaf of bread.

Find calm, do great work, and live a fulfilling life. That’s what Saent is all about. Our newest product—a desktop application for macOS called Saent Lifeline—helps you achieve these goals.

An important component of our macOS application Lifeline is taking sufficient breaks, and in this article, I’ll explain why.

A war for your attention is going on. Some suggest to solve this problem with… technology!

Many productivity experts recommend planning your next day the evening before. It allows you to “hit the ground running.” For me this doesn’t work.

If you’re experiencing issues logging in to the Saent desktop app on Windows, you can download the below update.

Here’s (finally) a new update on the status of Saent. There’s some good news and some bad news, so let’s get the bad out of the way first.

Some users are experiencing a server error when trying to login to the Saent desktop software. It’s caused by an expired and invalid SSL certificate which we’ve been unable to restore over the past weeks.

Smartphones are pocket-sized computers that allow us to do things that would have seemed like magic just ten years ago.

There’s a new form of obesity — one caused by digital junk food. We’re online all the time. We fragment our attention between a million things.

Picking up a book allows you to connect directly with a great mind (assuming you’re reading a good book, that is). But most of us don’t read all that many books.

We’re still working in a manner designed for factories at the turn of the 19th century, even as digital technology has completely changed the nature of the work we do.

Working from home, a coffee shop, or even a remote tropical island all sound fantastic. Combined with the entrepreneurial dream of owning your own business it might even be heaven. But here’s what building a remote company is really like.

I often get asked, “what is your number one productivity tip?” The answer is consistency. Arriving at this answer did not come easy.

One of the most active Slack channels at Saent is our #reading room, where we share articles, books, and other media we come across each day.

Breaks are important for a number of reasons, and not taking them can lead to stress, burnout, poor productivity, and poor work quality.

We announced Saent’s first conversational user interface in a blog post in January 2016. Now almost a full year later, we’ve gone through several iterations on that initial design and learned a lot along the way.

Author William Powers makes a convincing call to disconnect from our devices and the internet more often in his 2010 book “Hamlet’s Blackberry.”

In parts I and II of this series on “The 30 Minutes of Focus Challenge” we covered the why and the how. But now that you have that half hour of uninterrupted time per day, what can you do with it?

One of the best ways to combat the modern issues of information overload, work stress, burnout, and poor work-life balance is through effective behavior change.

How can you carve out half an hour of completely uninterrupted time when you’re under constant attack from notifications, social media, and email?

Can you focus for half an hour on one thing? If research by Gloria Mark is correct, there’s a good chance the answer is “no.”

There is a substantial group of elite achievers who wake up at ungodly hours: Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used to get up at 4:30 am. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson at 5 am.

I’m working on a report while keeping an eye on my Twitter stream. I send out a few messages while having dinner with my girlfriend. I’m reading an article on my phone while queuing at Starbucks.

Earlier this month we did something we’ve never done before at Saent: we met in person. Saent is a fully remote team, operating from half a dozen countries and even more time zones.

We have some exciting news: almost the entire core Saent team will be descending on New York in a couple of weeks for The Next Web: Momentum conference!

While it was a tall feat, President Kennedy’s moonshot challenge was potentially achievable. As we’ll see later, this is one of the hallmarks of sound goal-setting.

Your day starts. A blank sheet, full of opportunity. What will it bring? What wonderful work will you get done? Then, on the way to work, you check your email on your mobile…

The holy grail of productivity usually involves getting to the bottom of things; your inbox should be empty. All your tasks completed. No more paperwork to file. All red badge alerts on your mobile gone.

It’s that time of the year again: summer has officially started, so hopefully you’re one of the lucky ones who gets to enjoy a few weeks of vacation! But… I can already feel your dread for that inbox upon return.

When Michael Phelps woke up at 6:30 am on August 13th of 2008, he wasn’t in his own home. In fact, he was far from it, as he was rising to a new day in the Olympic Village in Beijing.

In August of 2014, as I was walking from my home in Beijing to the gym, I can clearly remember a thought firing off in my head. My creative thinking was in overdrive and several dots connected to form the basis for a software tool called SANE.

In the Bimonthly Productivity Top 5, I look back at the most important productivity hacks I’ve implemented in the past two months. This one covers May and June of 2015.

When I was running an online marketing company in Beijing in 2009, my coach introduced me to this classic time-management question: “How do you handle each type of task in the below table?” This model is also known as the Eisenhower Method.

In the Bimonthly Productivity Top 5, I look back at the most important productivity hacks I’ve implemented in the past two months. This one covers March and April of 2015.

For most of us, the challenge is to get more productive. But there are some folks out there wondering how to be less productive.

In a normal office situation, you usually know whom to go to for which information. Perhaps you have a short chat at the water cooler, or you plan a face-to-face meeting to have a more difficult question answered.

What is the most important thing you’ve ever learned? Walking? Reading? Counting? Or perhaps how to take care of yourself? Managing money? Do your job? Recognize emotions? Human psychology? Loving someone else? Loving yourself? It’s a simple question, yet not an easy one.

Creativity and productivity usually don’t go hand in hand. Designers tend to procrastinate. Musicians like to party like rockstars. Flashes of genius don’t happen between 9 am and 5 pm.

What do meetings have in common with the following conversation topics? Banks. The weather. Pollution in Beijing (for those living in China). Facebook. Taxes. Politicians. Your football team’s coach after a lost match.

Let’s not waste your time with a fluffy intro about why you should improve productivity. I’m sure the title of this article caught your eye for a reason, else you wouldn’t be here.

Reading. A skill we all possess, yet not all readers are created equal. Most of us struggle to read a 3,000+ word article, let alone a book. We’re too busy and too distracted.

In the Bimonthly Productivity Top 5, I look back at the most important productivity hacks I’ve implemented in the past two months. This one covers January and February of 2015.

You’ve probably heard this time-management advice before: don’t just use your calendar for meetings with other people. Also schedule appointments with yourself and treat them as holy. If you’re like me, that trick somehow never seems to work.

A blacksmith is useless without his hammer. The factory is nothing without a conveyor belt. A jockey gets nowhere without his horse. Jimi Hendrix is lost without a guitar. What is thunder without lightning… OK, that last one was a joke.

Saying yes is easy: We want to please others. We don’t want to disappoint. We want to be able to do everything. We don’t want to miss any opportunities. Saying no, on the other hand, is hard.

There are many things we can all learn from the story of Regie Shaw. The one that stands out most is probably this: each one of us could have easily been him, and still any one of us can easily become him.

What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of productivity? Probably not “flexible“. Most tools, systems and methods require you to follow a rigid procedure.

Many productivity tools and systems are difficult to implement and maintain. You need to read books, memorize all kinds of rules and then invest an hour each day to make it all work.

In Greg McKeown's 2014 book, Essentialism, he explains the way of the Essentialist—the disciplined pursuit of less but better. "It's about making the trade-off between pursuing lots of good things OR a few really great things."

Chances are you shouldn’t be reading this right now. You set off to do something else, yet somehow you ended up here. Welcome to the Age of Unlimited Distraction.

Do you know which shoelace you tied first this morning? Left or right? Did you give much thought to what you did first when you started up your computer? Do you recall how you ended up on this page?

Have you ever seen someone show up in the most professional snowboarding gear on the planet, on his first lesson? Had an intern who insists he needs a MacBook Pro to properly write his graduation report?

What have you changed about yourself in the past 12 months? It’s one of my favorite questions when doing job interviews. It tells you quite a few things about the candidate.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

When everything becomes a priority, nothing is a priority. In fact, until around 1950, people hardly ever used the plural “priorities”. They seemed content to only have one “priority."

Do you plan to go to the gym more often in the new year? Smoke and drink less? Get more engaged at work? Or maybe quit your job and go on that travel adventure you’ve always dreamed of?

"Having a lot to do isn’t the same as actually getting a lot done. Most of the time, people who have a lot to do end up doing a lot of unimportant, unnecessary things.” Leo Babauta