As a coachee of Paul, my statistics alone demonstrate the magnitude of Paul's impact on my personal productivity: His sessions unlocked 5-8 productive hours in my week compared to my pre-coaching baseline. There's a lot of additional nuance and color to this: Thanks to Paul, I'm less distractable, I generally feel better, and I continue pushing myself sustainably.
Working with Paul has improved my long-term productivity and well-being, and I expect many changes, habits, and lessons to be permanent. In terms of an investment in yourself, I can highly recommend Paul.
Founder of Future Forum, PhD MIT
My 12 sessions with Paul were instrumental in helping me recover during the biggest period of burnout during my life, and in the process helped me develop lifetime habits and mindset shifts that I expect to still be paying dividends years from now.
His focus on self-compassionate experimentation is something that I'm using almost every day, and helped me move away from self-criticism and perfectionism.
Working with Paul has been transformative. We've been collaborating for 3 months and I feel more energetic, motivated and focused than I have in years.
Paul takes a very holistic approach and within a few sessions helped me put in place better frameworks to think about my life that were much more motivating than what I had before.
I've worked with other coaches who had a more held back style of asking questions and letting me figure out the answers. I always thought this was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Paul is more like a sports coach who knows what works and is not afraid to make the calls. Yes, I am in the driving seat of what I want to do, but Paul has strong opinions on how to best get there--and they usually pan out.
Paul has also figured out a great way to structure sessions so that they tie together various tools for thinking and productivity, big picture considerations and finding and fixing small, every-day problems. I feel confident that we discover something meaningful in every session while also I'm building up a better structure for my life and productivity over time.If you are ambitious in trying to make the world a better place, you should consider a coaching experiment with Paul.
Try 6 sessions. If you don't see results, move on. I continued without hesitation.
Senior Software Engineer at Google
When I began working with Paul, I struggled with prioritization and efficiency. I wasted hours on unimportant tasks and procrastinated frequently. Through 16 coaching sessions, Paul helped me tackle these issues head-on. He guided me to the core of each problem, questioned ineffective habits, and provided practical tools while eliminating others that didn't fit my needs.
The impact has been significant. Tasks that once took four days now take two. I follow a consistent daily routine. In addition to being more productive than ever, I maintain balance in my personal life.
Paul's strength lies in his empowering approach. He equips clients with the tools to identify problems, implement their own solutions, and establish systems that create lasting habits. I strongly recommend his coaching to anyone seeking genuine improvement.
Bi-monthly coaching with Paul has substantially improved my productivity. Working with Paul got clearly stronger results for me than working with other coaches. He's also been valuable for my personal life goals like social life and happiness. He's helped me create regular systems and develop helpful mindsets. His intuition and social competence often lets him spot the key issue behind a challenge I face, and he has the tools up his sleeve to fix it. Finishing a coaching session always leaves me invigorated, motivated to overcome challenges I often didn't realize were tractable. Before working with him, I didn't realize being coached would be as enjoyable as it is now.
I received coaching from Paul for a little over a year. Paul introduced me to important new concepts and systems for effective self development, planning, and task management, and provided accountability to make sure I implemented these.
This has accelerated my personal growth and provided long-run productivity gains.
Senior Manager at Rethink Priorities
Throughout our 150+ sessions, Paul shines as a coach with his thoughtful, highly demanding and compassionate style.
Over the 4+ years that we have worked together he has significantly contributed to my personal and professional development. He guided me in making and implementing transformative career decisions, like switching from electrical engineering to machine learning.
He also enabled me to establish my self-actualisation system and helps me embody my high and joyful standards. In our weekly sessions, he consistently shows up with prime dedication. And I can trust on his deep and nuanced mental models, apt communication, and genuine quest to enable his coachees to actualise their full potential. Thanks my dear friend! Looking forward to all the goodness to come.
Research Manager at SERI-MATS
Paul is a truly excellent coach.
I had 40 sessions with him over the course of 2 years, then tried some other coaches, and then continued coaching with Paul.
In our sessions, I made transformational progress on topics as broad as motivation, procrastination, communication, teamwork, leadership, time and project management, and decision-making. Paul's science-based and no-bullshit approach aims at long-term growth, not only fixing this week's issues.
Paul has outstanding knowledge about psychology/personal development, which he shares if appropriate without taking ownership of the coaching session away from the coachee.
Research Manager at EU AI Office
Coaching with Paul has been transformative. Across fourty sessions, Paul's systems-level approach to coaching has empowered me to implement several systems that produce sustained, long-term value.
We have worked on self-compassion—more constructive, functional, and tender emotional functioning—longer-term goal-setting, developing masterpiece mornings and weeks, and much more.
Regular reflection and discussion on progress, challenges and success with Paul have gifted me a greater sense of agency in my life and increased self-awareness. I find Paul a knowledgeable, kind, and well-versed coach—I would not hesitate to recommend working with him.
Research Team Lead at Anthropic
Paul taught me quite a few of the mental models and (self-)management tools I use today.
I appreciate his focus on (and vast toolbox for) long-term growth, which strongly differentiates him vs. your average productivity coach. Thanks Paul!
Director at Blue Horizon, ex-BCG
A confession from a recovering sceptic of most self-development: Paul is an excellent coach and role model.
Due to his coaching, I felt empowered to leap from a safe job into independent research and submitted my first paper with little supervision, setting me up for more impact throughout my career. Before starting coaching, I thought my self-limiting beliefs were merely an accurate judgment of my abilities, based on reality. Paul challenged them successfully over the course of over 30 sessions, never hesitating to call me out on my bullshit and highlighting how I get distracted from my actual goals.
My past self from 6 months ago would be surprised to hear that I joyfully set goals and meet them, track metrics I care about in spreadsheets (I used to hate spreadsheets with passion), and recover from any hardship I encounter within less than 24 hours. Due to the knowledge management and tracking systems we set up, I can stay on this trajectory in the long term. Thank you!
Chief of Staff at Tomorrow Biostasis
I've had 13 2-hour coaching sessions with Paul and found each one well worth the time and money. I expect to continue working with him as a coach for a while. I recommend Paul to others often and for a wide range of purposes, since I've experienced him being helpful across many areas.
My sessions with Paul have led to improvements in, among other things, my habit formation, people & project management skills, high-level prioritization, strategy-setting & leadership, day-to-day pace of work and intentionality, handling of some complex and high-stakes projects, and sleep. I have also been able to emulate some coaching techniques and impart some insights from these sessions in my interactions with people I manage or advise, which seems to have led to some durable improvements in *their* productivity, self-management, habit formation, etc.
Head of Talent @ RAND TASP Center
Coaching with Paul had an incredible impact on my performance as well as my well-being. It empowered me to step fully into my new role as a company executive and make my team and myself thrive.
He's not only a great source of useful knowledge and wisdom but also really made sure that I implement the big ideas and tools he taught me into my life. And that's where Paul's greatest strengths lie. Changing thinking and behavioral patterns for the better.
Co-Founder & CTO of
Bloom (acq. by Spring Health)
Coaching with Paul transformed overwhelming professional demands in communication, coordination, and prioritization into strong abilities to manage, motivate, and contribute impactfully while flourishing in my non-professional life.
Paul is a role model for dedication to mastery and has my highest recommendations for any researcher, team-lead, or ambitious entrepreneur.
Chief Medical Officer at Alvea
Coaching with Paul has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. Our 43 sessions (and counting) have enabled me to substantially increase my lifetime impact by making wiser and more audacious decisions that are aligned with my values and the change I want to see in the world (e.g., pursuing a coaching path and moving to a different country with sparse savings while navigating covid).
Importantly, Paul has also enabled me to appreciate and cultivate self-compassion and self-determinedly discover what real happiness is for me — thereby, incrementally and consistently designing my masterpiece life.
I started coaching with Paul to make sense of competing priorities, comparative advantages, and conflicting feedback. Paul is an expert at teasing apart uncertainties until they resolve while also reminding me of the big picture.
I have tested four other coaches throughout the last years and have talked to Paul for >20 hours. He feels like an important part of my team at this point. Our 2h sessions pay for themselves in multiples. They are often the most crucial reorientation moments - personally and professionally.
Whether philosophically or tactically, Paul keeps up or even sets a good pace. He has clearly done his research. He's got a strong inner compass but never imposes his solutions or ideals. His patience and presence, paired with targeted questions and explanations are excellent. I was skeptical of the lengthy weekly sessions and system setup but have come around to really appreciating the entire effort.
Paul has also adapted quickly to my feedback and really makes sure our sessions translate into concrete changes in my life. From communication to project planning, culture and hiring, Paul gives well-contextualized advice. At the end of every session, I have a distilled list of actions that feel so meaningful that I end up naturally executing them to 80%, even if I don't have additional time available throughout the week.
Co-CEO at Simon Institute
Paul is at the Pareto-frontier of being stringent enough for accountability to work well and being nice and fun in a way that makes very comfortable to bring up any topic.
Paul’s impact has been quite transformative on my life.
I wish I had discovered Paul's coaching earlier. I’d recommend to anyone without any doubt.
I want to recommend Paul as an executive coach! I've had 10 two-hour coaching sessions with Paul Rohde, and I'm still benefiting from them.
Here's how sessions work:
1. We use an outliner like Roam to take notes and structure the conversation. I screen share and write a lot during the sessions. I find this really helpful as it's much easier for me to think while typing.
2. We usually do a deep dive into one specific topic related to some challenge I'm facing, like time management, hiring, or product strategy
3. Paul asks questions, prods here and there, helps me figure out the answer, and suggests experiments/interventions to try
How it has helped me:
1. Paul is good at ensuring that my day-to-day efforts are linked to the long-term goal I care about, increasing the amount of good reasoning & truth in the world. He’s always looking out for bottlenecks and ways to make the problem-solving process more rigorous.
2. As part of our regular goal and plan audits, we've explored how to scale up enterprise sales at Elicit. We identified making arguments for Elicit based on objective evidence as a particularly high-leverage approach.
3. As part of our first time audit, we discovered I was spending a lot of time recruiting. We identified several potential changes and designed experiments to check their promise. For example, as the result of a delegation experiment, I overcame my skepticism about delegability and ended up hiring a strong generalist who is now doing a lot of work that I previously did.
Paul is pretty booked these days, but it is still worth reaching out if this is something you could benefit from! Probably best for founders & execs who like thinking by writing, have a lot of flexibility in how they spend their time, and so lots of room to get things wrong :)
I used to spends weeks or months in unproductive spirals, feeling sorry for myself, and not working on what I think are the most important things. Working with Paul has given me the tools and self-belief to identify and overcome these challenges, and I'm incredibly excited to continue my coaching journey with him.
My job is to support people to learn about pressing global issues, and to inspire them to take action to solve those problems. I really love my work, but I've found it really challenging to determine what to prioritise, how to maintain focus, how to set ambitious but realistic long-term goals, and develop plans that drive us towards those goals. Before I started coaching with Paul, I felt pretty demoralised about this, and didn't see a pathway to improve. As I walked out of the call booth after my first coaching call, I had a huge smile on my face, and felt more motivated and energised than I had in months, and it's been the same thing every week after our sessions.
Paul's wide-ranging expertise in "life systems", his incisive and piercing questions, and his enduring support and kindness have been transformative for my wellbeing, productivity, and impact. My habits are improving, my decision-making is much more intentional and is leading to better outcomes, and I'm feeling overall much happier with my life. If you aspire to be the best version of yourself, and would like a co-conspirator to support you on that journey, I cannot recommend Paul enough :)