How Productivity Star Thomas Frank Reaches Millions on YouTube

Thomas Frank is the James Cameron of YouTube productivity videos.

Where most of productivity YouTube is just clips of talking heads stitched together with screenshots of Evernote, one of Thomas’s latest videos opens with him lying face down in the grass in the middle of a field, like Jason Bourne’s long-lost productivity-obsessed cousin: 

(Side note: if Jason Bourne had used Notion as his second brain, he probably could’ve avoided a lot of trouble. But the movie would’ve been worse.)

Look at that shot. It’s visceral! It’s cinematic! It’s high-budget! It’s on a whole different level than the usual basement screencast that most productivity videos rely on. 

Best of all, he has a sense of humor about it.

“I have to sneak lots of explosion footage into my videos to make them exciting enough to watch,” he laughs. But it’s clear, at least to me, that he’s not just adding explosions to make his videos exciting. He’s adding them because he wants to make videos that verge on art.

We did our interview in the format that he’s most comfortable in — video. We were supposed to meet in person, but because of COVID-19 we ended up Zooming from our own personal quarantines in separate corners of the country.

We began by talking about the thing that’s on everybody’s minds.

“I’m more worried for other people than myself,” he said at the beginning of our conversation. “I worry about people who run restaurants, I worry about doctors, and I worry about my grandparents.”

When I ask him how he’s handling it, he’s straightforward and calm.

“Right now I’m just focused on staying positive, staying rational. When you do that you set an example for other people, and help them do their work and live their lives in the middle of this.”

Thomas is staying positive by staying at home. He’s working hard to make sure his team of seven is adequately prepared for the current crisis, and focused on making a series of videos about how to do effective remote work, a topic everyone around the world suddenly needs to become an expert on for the foreseeable future.

In this interview we delve deeply into this cinematic productivity star’s personal systems for getting stuff done. 

We talk about the white board he uses to prioritize his tasks, what he does when his todo list gets overloaded, and even walk through how he makes his YouTube videos from start to finish.

I’m super excited to get to this interview so let’s dive in! 

Thomas introduces himself

My name is Thomas Frank. I’m the founder of a website called CollegeInfoGeek.com. I'm also a YouTuber who talks about productivity, personal development, and organization. 

I originally started with content specifically targeted towards students, but over time, I’ve broadened what I cover to include topics for anyone interested in productivity and organization. I’ve found that a lot of the systems and techniques that are useful for doing well in school are also useful for succeeding in other areas of life.

He uses a whiteboard as his main system for daily productivity

It’s my job to show off productivity systems and to help people discover new ones. So I’m always testing new things.

Right now, I’m going back to how I used to do things when I was in college. Basically, I have a whiteboard on my wall, and at the end of every day I just use a marker to create a checklist of what I’m going to do the next day.

And I really like just having something on the wall, staring me in the face with what I need to do. So basically what I’m doing is every night I’ll pull the most important tasks from my Todoist, and put them on the whiteboard so that I make sure I tackle them the next day.

So for example, my priorities for today are to:

• Work out
• Clear out my inbox and todo list
• Write

I’ve already worked out — I went on a run and did bodyweight stuff because all of the gyms are closed. And after this I’m going to write a “Work from Home” primer which will turn into a series of 5 videos for my YouTube channel.

As I finish these tasks throughout the day, I’ll go and check them off of the whiteboard. It’s really enjoyable to check them off. There’s something about the tactile feeling of the whiteboard that makes it more fun than using a digital system. 

Once everything’s checked off then the day is over and I go play Fortnite or read books. 

What his todo list looks like (and his secret move to unclutter it in an instant)

Normally, it is nice and organized, but to be fully transparent I’ve been a little off my game with everything that’s going on. 

Usually I have everything broken out neatly into different projects, but because everything is so crazy, my Todoist looks very inbox-y. Everything’s currently unsorted at the top level.  And that’s because I’ve just been working nonstop, and I haven’t had time to organize it.

When I fall behind like this, I actually have a little trick to help myself get back on track: I switch to a different todo app.

Because my Todoist is so messy, I just temporarily started using another app called Taskade. 

It’s kind of the digital equivalent of clearing off your desk by dumping everything on the floor. 

Rather than going in to clean Todoist, which I don’t have time for, I just start another throwaway task list somewhere else with all of the important stuff I need to get done now.

I’ll keep using Taskade up until the point where I have enough time to do a reset sprint to organize my Todoist. Once that happens, then Taskaid becomes dormant for me. 

Temporarily moving to a new todo list lets me put everything else out of my mind, and lets me focus on what I actually have to do. And what I do is make videos.

Let’s talk about how.

He uses Roam to gather research and ideas for the videos he’s making

When I get an idea for a video I start out in Roam. I used to do this in Evernote, but I switched to Roam recently because it makes it really easy to link everything together.

Basically, Roam allows me to do a gigantic brain dump as I’m getting ready to do a video. It lets me get everything out, find patterns and connections, and start to understand what the video is going to be about. 

For example, right now I’m working on a video about how to work from home effectively. 

And in order to make the video, I tweeted asking people to tell me their big questions about it. So I gathered all of the questions and a bunch of research into one page in Roam so I could have it in one place.