The Productivity System I Taught to 6,642 Googlers
About this video
Jeff Su explains the ‘CORE workflow’ he taught in Googler-to-Googler workshops at Google, run quarterly for 9 years to over 6,600 Googlers, synthesizing frameworks from Getting Things Done, Make Time, and Building a Second Brain into a corporate system for never losing a file, task, or note. Workplace information comes in four types — tasks, ideas, notes, and media (digital files) — and the workflow is platform-agnostic: it works with Notion, Todoist, Apple Notes, or Microsoft tools just as well as Google’s. The four steps: Capture, Organize, Review, Engage. Worked example: his VP asks at lunch for Japan market slides for Thursday’s quarterly business review; he captures it immediately in the Google Tasks widget with due date today and the QBR detail (quoting David Allen: ‘Our brains are for having ideas, not holding them’). Assigning the due date completes Organize automatically. In his evening Review he sees the task and blocks two hours on Wednesday morning in Google Calendar, only then marking the task complete. Engage is doing the work in that block. He addresses the ’extra work’ objection with three principles: willpower and motivation are unsustainable (James Clear: ‘We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems’); a system should carry you on your worst days; and short-term discomfort of a new routine beats the ongoing stress of stalled goals. A second example uses ideas: a podcast idea about using Chris Voss’s negotiation techniques for a pay raise is captured in Google Keep (built for quick capture, not long-term storage) and tagged ’thoughts’ — information from ourselves is ’thoughts,’ from external sources is ’notes.’ He protects three 30-minute review blocks daily (morning, after lunch, before sign-off); during review he blocks prep time, adds ‘discuss compensation’ to his one-on-one doc in Google Docs (built for long-term storage), and archives the Keep note. He promises the workflow becomes second nature after just 2 weeks and stresses the tools don’t matter — capture quickly, organize clearly, review frequently, engage effectively.
Key takeaways
- Run every piece of workplace information — tasks, ideas, notes, and media — through the CORE workflow: Capture, Organize, Review, Engage
- Capture immediately into a quick-capture tool (e.g., a tasks widget or Google Keep) because brains are for having ideas, not holding them
- Organize lightly at capture time: a due date for tasks, a simple label like ’thoughts’ for self-generated ideas versus ’notes’ for external information
- Protect scheduled review blocks (he uses three 30-minute blocks a day) to process inboxes, convert tasks into calendar commitments, and archive what’s processed
- The system matters more than the tools or willpower: Capture quickly, organize clearly, review frequently, and engage effectively on any platform
Episode details: published October 21, 2025 · 8:12 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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