1. Choose something to shortcut

A great way to start this exercise is to make 3 categories:

• Work
• Health
• Life

Under these 3 categories, list out as many things as you can think of that you feel stressed about. Here are some examples:

Work

• Podcast
• Sales calls
• Meetings outside of the office
• Overtime

Health

• More muscles!
• Teeth issues (I’m Irish so I have a lot of these)
• Junk food lunches
• Less drinking

Life

• No time with friends
• Buying a place in Berlin

Now choose one of those, ideally the one that bugs you most, and get started!

Don’t feel like reading the whole thing? Check out this Shortcut-O-Matic checklist which you can download for free.

2. Write out the things that bug you about it (WHT’s)

Since you want to find the easy path, you’re going to have to envision it. What would this be like if it were easy? In an ideal world, what are the things you wouldn’t have to do?

You’re essentially going to list out all the little things that annoy you, starting with the words “Wouldn’t Have To…”. Framing your annoyances in this way lets you see the problems you can eliminate or improve. I call these “Wouldn’t Have To” statements, or WHT’s for short.

At first it might feel weird to use the WHT format, so I’m going to show you a few examples here:

Topic: More Muscles

WHT: Get up early to go to the gym
WHT: Work out alone
WHT: Constantly think of eating enough protein!

Just to lock this in for you, imagine you’re saying “I want to be more muscly! This would be easy if I wouldn’t have to work out alone”.

Okay, that should give you a pretty good idea of how WHT’s work.

3. Weight and choose

Now think about how irritating and time consuming these WHT’s are on a scale of 1–10.

Give each one a score (the higher, the worse), and pick an especially annoying one to work on. Make it count; you can always come back for the others later.

4. Write at least 10 potential solutions

There’s no need to overthink this and don’t worry about feasibility: Just take a new page, write your chosen WHT on top and list out 10 possible ways to solve it. This could either make the WHT dramatically easier or it can even remove it from your life completely. I like to start each of these sentences with “I could” or “I would” to make the format simpler.

How about an example here?

WHT: Work out alone

Possible solutions:

• I could contact friends who live near gym, see if they want to work out together
• I could get a personal trainer
• I could use an app to see if anyone in the area wants to be a workout buddy
• I could do a group workout like Crossfit

5. Choose a solution

Now choose the solution that either stands out to you the most, or one that seems like it would be a fast and easy experiment. I generally don’t choose anything that would take more than 2 weeks to validate. Don’t get hung up on your decision here; it’s not important to choose the “right” thing, just go with your gut feeling.

5. Create a shortcut experiment

Now, write your solution on top of a fresh page and create a simple, clear, achievable experiment that has an end date. On this end date you’ll check if your solution worked or not.

Don’t worry, there’s an example experiment further down.

Let’s see Shortcut-O-Matic in action

One of my first times using Shortcut-O-Matic was on the topic of my podcast. A few things were bugging me about it but I couldn’t quite figure out what… so I ran a quick session to pin them down.

I asked myself: “What would the Podcast look like if it were easy?”

I wrote down the “Wouldn’t Have To’s”

I took a piece of paper, put WHT on the first line and started listing every Podcast related task I could think of that I wasn’t enjoying. Here are some of the things I wouldn’t have to do in an ideal world:

• WHT export video + send to editor
• WHT upload audio to iTunes and Soundcloud
• WHT set up for each episode
• WHT schedule guests
• WHT research for each episode

And I kept writing until I ran out of things that would make the podcast easy for me.

Weight and choose

The next step was to add “weight” to each of the WHT’s. In the case of the podcast, I used time and simply added the amount of minutes I would save if these tasks didn’t exist:

• WHT export video + send to editor (20 mins)
• WHT upload audio to iTunes and Soundcloud (15 mins)
• WHT setup for each episode (10 mins, but sometimes with mistakes)
• WHT schedule guests (3–5 emails)
• etc.

Once I had some way to “measure” each of these WHT’s, I was able to move on to the next step: I simply chose the most time consuming and most annoying task that I have to deal with weekly.

10 potential solutions

Next, I took a new piece of paper and wrote my problem, “WHT export video + send to editor”, on the top. I then started writing bullet points underneath of potential solutions ranging from time reducing hacks to the all-out crazy. (I hadn’t come up with the “I could” framing when doing this for the first time so you’ll notice it’s missing from the photos.)

• I could let video editor do it
• I could get a dedicated “Podcasting” computer that stays in the editing room
• I could not bother with video, check how many people really watch on YT
• I could auto export to the editors’ Dropbox
• etc.

The crazy thing is, while writing the list I started to realise that the reason the whole thing was taking so long was just because I started with a stupidly inefficient system. I just didn’t spot how archaic it was until I did the Shortcut-o-Matic exercise.

Choose a solution

At this point I was looking at some great time-saving solutions, but the problem was that there were too many options. In the end I selected the solution that looked the easiest and fastest to experiment with:

• I could auto export to the editors’ Dropbox

Create a shortcut experiment

Next, I imagined how this would actually work in bullet-point steps:

• Invite editors to Dropbox
• Explain workflow to editors
• Set up “save path”
• CHECK BACK AFTER THE NEXT EPISODE TO SEE IF IT WORKED

The crazy thing is that I realised I had been doing work that the video editing team was happy (and getting paid) to do just because I was working so inefficiently. With this simple experiment I haven’t had to even think about the video edits for the last 3 episodes.

In this case the first solution I tried did the trick. If it hadn’t, I’d simply have tried another one. And what happens to the ones you never use?

Nothing :) Remember, this is meant to take the pressure off!

The End

So yeah, that’s all there is to it! I hope you give it a try, and if you do, I hope you’ll let me know either here in the comments or via DM on instagram (@jicecream). You can also download this free Shortcut-O-Matic checklist that will guide you through the process. Oh, and thanks to Jake Knapp for naming this exercise for me!

Thanks for reading if you got this far.