Dan Shipper: The Sultan of Superorganizers

Hey all! Dan here—today is a special edition of Superorganizers. We're turning the tables! The amazing Kieran O'Hare who has co-written many editions of this newsletter over the last few months is writing one about me. I think you're going to love it. Enjoy!

I’ve been working with Superorganizers founder Dan Shipper for a while now, so I suggested that he let me profile him for this newsletter. I mean, why not, right?

Well, he agreed—after a little convincing—and we scheduled an interview.

So what would you expect of a guy who started a publication about ‘how smart people organize what they know’? A veritable overlord of organization? A guru of GTD? A nabob of Notion, maybe? A royal duke in the realm of Roam??

Perhaps.

Me? I really wanted Dan Shipper to be a hot friggin’ mess.

Yes, I admit it freely: I wanted Dan Shipper to be a planless putz, a disgrace to productivity, a monument of disorganization—a shambling schlub failing miserably to comprehend let alone impose any order upon the chaos of this unfathomable world. What delicious, soul-filling irony that would have been!

Failing that, of course, it would have pleased me no less if Dan Shipper had been an utter circus freak who listened to two audiobooks and five podcasts simultaneously at 20x normal speed while running his daily marathon, speed-dialing his P.A., and mentally reorganizing his Airtable—with electrodes strapped to his head to track the beautiful upward-sweeping curve of his profoundly expanding neural capacity. All while live-simulstreaming his hopes, dreams, and fears to YouTube, Clubhouse, and Twitch, natch.