Productivity 101: High-Performance Essentials for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Pat Sahany. I'm an author podcaster and success mentor to High Achievers. Through my writing, podcasts, courses, and other meaningful creations, I enjoy sharing life changing ideas and insights related to personal development, philosophy, success mindset, and the human condition. My recent books include an Apple a day, the daily learner series, and thriving in the new normal. And I also created a course called Stoicism one oh one, not too long ago. For more information and other useful resources, check out my main website, part sahany.com. In this course, I discuss life changing ideas from the best resources on productivity, time management, and the art of extraordinary performance in simple and digestible lessons. If you're interested in becoming more purposeful and intentional in today's fast paced technology driven world are looking for a way to be more focused and less distracted and are wondering what tools and strategies can help you achieve stressful productivity in your daily life than this class is for you. These sessions are for all levels, and you don't need any prior knowledge, tools, and experience before beginning the class. In this course, you learn how to focus on needle moving tasks that bring significant outcomes, eliminate the constant rush and stress in our everyday life while making sure you achieve your big goals, develop lasting habits of high performance, achievement, and fulfillment, and systemize and better manage your life so that you have more time to do what you want. I've included some exercises and writing prompts in the accompanying PDF worksheets as well. To make sure that the lessons in this course stick, I encourage you to complete these exercises and write down your unfiltered thoughts in them. So with those things discussed, let's get rolling right away. I'll see you inside. 2. Understanding Productivity: I'm immensely grateful to you for choosing this class. This particular course is my attempt to distil life changing ideas from the best resources on productivity and time management and easy to grasp lessons. So what exactly is productivity. The classic definition suggests that it is a way to measure efficiency. Many people assume that productivity means getting more things done on a given day. If you think the same, you're wrong. Productivity is getting the most important things done on a consistent basis. No matter what line of work you are in, there are only a few tasks that are truly essential to achieving your desired outcomes. At a score, productivity is about getting the results you want with minimal time and effort. Learning how to be productive involves designing a strategy that helps you systemize and better manage your life so that you have more time to do what you want. Your chief aim is to achieve your big goals while having time to spend on things that matter the most to you. We often make the mistake of equating being busy with being productive, but those things aren't the same. We all know people who run around haphazardly throughout their days, busy being busy. It's almost as if they're addicted to constant motion. I'm not judging anyone. In fact, I've been one of them. Working hard, yet not achieving your desired outcomes is a double whammy. And yet many of us fall into the busy trap so that we can adhere to the status quo. You must quit being busy. Instead, it's much better to be productive. Not only will you achieve more, but you'll also get rid of that uncomfortable t in your stomach. Yes, the one that tells you you're doing something wrong that you feel your entire day. The satisfaction of being productive always trumps the holllowness of being busy. Don't mistake movement for achievement, Jim ron explained. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is, busy doing what? It's much better to focus on progress, not motion. To stop being busy and start being productive. We must be efficient and diligent with our time. We all have 24 hours in a day, and it's wise to make the most of them and develop lasting habits of high performance, achievement, and fulfillment, instead of running around like a headless chicken and chasing endless lists of tasks. In other words, work with intentionality, not intensity, work smarter, not harder. Focus on tasks that bring significant outcomes and spend time doing work that truly matters. Living and working with purpose and intention helps us eliminate the constant rush and stress in our everyday life. It slows it down and free us from the modern madness of living a faster life. It empowers us to create an alternate world for ourselves and to only keep the essentials letting go of the frivolous and the insignificant. Furthermore, it drives us to pursue those things endeavors and activities that bring joy and add value to our life. If we want to transform our lives, then learning about productivity and time management is not enough. We need to practice it as well. As Tony Robbins rightly said, repetition is the mother of skill. We can change our core beliefs and enhance our mental skill set by repeating the important learnings every day to ourselves. John Maxwell echoes his truth in his book, the 15 invaluable laws of growth as well. You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. In the following lessons, I have extracted the knowledge and wisdom from the best resources on productivity, time management, and the art of extraordinary performance in a form that is easy to digest and consume. Every lesson has been crafted to give you either the essence and the formula, if you will, of the subject at hand or a groundbreaking idea introduced by the respective author or thought leader. The repetition of the priceless gems and core principles of productivity in these discussions is intentional in order to help you learn and internalize them in a quicker way. I'm sure the condensed timeless knowledge in these lessons will assist you in navigating through the complexities that come with working in the modern world. The fundamentals to achieving better results and mastering the art of stress free productivity will never change. And that's why it's crucial that we learn and practice them in our day to day life to advance forward both personally and professionally. As you watch these lessons, some patterns will emerge. When internalized, they will guide you in your quest to live a productive and purposeful life, enriched with incredible achievements. If any particular insight piques your interest, feel free to embark further in your self education journey and read or listen to books and other meaningful content by the respective author or thought leader. Once you've done watching this class, I would be grateful if you pay forward by recommending it to your loved ones. As I've discussed previously, cultivating a discipline to serve and contribute not only will help humanity, but will add immense value, meaning, and purpose to your life as well. Last but not least, keep coming back to this class whenever you get a chance. As Robin Sharma puts it, education is inoculation to disruption. As you learn more, you can achieve more. I'll be honored if this class ends up becoming a part of your personal library and your quick go to resource for recalibrating to the productivity mindset as you move forward in your journey. I hope you enjoy watching these lessons and learning from this class as much as I've enjoyed working on it, wishing you excellence and everlasting success. 3. Lesson 1: How to Achieve Deep Work: Many people think doing a lot of things at once is the best way to increase their productivity, but this mindset is absolutely incorrect. If there's one thing you can keep in mind as you begin your workday, it's this maxim. Multitasking does not equal productivity. Multitasking makes you less focused on the most important task at hand, and the same applies to incessant electronic connection. While the constant buzzing of your cell phone and the habit of keeping social media and e mail tabs open in your web browser may seem innocuous. The truth is that each of them is robbing your focus and your precious attention. Even if you don't immediately address notifications while working, simply seeing things pop on your screen and or listening to repetitive tones can easily derail your focus and concentration. So how do you overcome these harmless seeming road blocks and set yourself up for accomplishing deep work? Here are a few effective strategies that you can experiment with. Number one, the monastic approach. This strategy involves eliminating all sources of distraction and isolating yourself like a monk. Number two, the bimodal approach. This method entails setting a clearly defined long period of seclusion dedicated to working and leaving the remaining time on your calendar for everything else. Number three, the rhythmic approach. In the strategy, you form a habit of doing deep work for predetermined chunks of time. For instance, blocks of 90 minutes and using the calendar to monitor your accomplishments. And number four, the journalistic approach. Here, you take any unexpected free time in your daily routine and use it to do deep work. It doesn't matter which technique you choose to employ. What's important to remember is they're purposeful and metorical, not random. The key difference is what distinguishes deep work from being in the zone. Getting in the zone happens only by chance and often requires a surge of will power after hours of procrastination. Deep work on the flip side is an intentional and conscious effort, and hence necessitates setting up rituals to prepare your mind for it, such as defining your space and creating boundaries. Distractions and temptations have occupied every nook and cranny in the modern world, and multitasking is quickly becoming our default approach to stay on top of things. This is not only killing our productivity, but also negatively affecting our health and well being. However, we can always choose to eliminate everyday distractions and let our brains focus on one task at a time. In an age where technology is evolving at an exponential rate, it's crucial that we become proactive and learn to practice deep work consistently. 4. Lesson 2: How You Spend Your Time Defines Your Life: A couple of thousand years ago, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal. It is not de that a man should fear, but he should fear, never beginning to live. It's wise to remind ourselves that we are not immortal beings. Our life is not infinitely long. You won't be here forever. Let this truth motivate you to work harder and smarter. Every breath matters, every second counts. It's not easy to keep the constraints of time in mind day in and day out, but it's absolutely worth it. Let your finite time on the spinning or propel you to get better and more purposeful at work. To not only get more done, but also get the right things done as quickly as possible so that you're able to get back to living the way you want to live. According to several research studies, the average person loses 3 hours per day in misspent time. This means that there's a great chance you might be spending those 3 hours every single day doing mundane, meaningless work that doesn't even need to be done by you. You must stop doing things that you hate and spend your active time performing tasks that you love and excel at. This will lead to increased engagement and thus skyrocket your productivity. Essentially, you'll be getting more things done with more enjoyment and enthusiasm in less time. Isn't that awesome? Ultimately, life is a sum total of what you decide to focus on. That's why it makes sense to stop focusing on drudgery and instead, fill up your schedule with things that you're passionate about. Here are nine steps to help you just do that. One, formulate, decide what you want. Two evaluate. Determine your route. Three, rejuvenate, re energize your mind, body, and spirit. Four, eliminate, strengthen your no muscle. Five, automate, remove yourself from the equation. Six, delegate, clone yourself or better. Seven, consolidate, plan your ideal week. Eight, designate, prioritize your tasks, and nine, activate, overcome interruptions and distractions. 5. Lesson 3: Stop Procrastinating: Oh. In this fast paced world, we all have a multitude of tasks to be achieved. There have never been so many opportunities for success and prosperity ever in human history. We have countless avenues and options to choose from. On one side, this can aide us in living the life of our dreams. On the other hand, it can stagnate and paralyze us. Unless we diligently prioritize our tasks, it's easy to become anxious, overwhelmed, and fall into the procrastination trap. Consider this. If you were to start each day by eating a frog, first thing in the morning, once you are done with that, you could spend the rest of your day with the relief that the worst part is over, right? If you want to march steadily towards your big goal and attain long term success, you must cultivate the daily habit of eating your frog, the most intense and ugliest needle moving task of the day and tackling it as soon as you start your day. Procrastination is the ultimate killer of productivity and success. It not only drains your time, energy, and attention, but also makes you feel guilty and stressed. And because of this, you distance yourself away from peace, joy, and tranquility. However, when you decide to eat a frog, every morning, you get the mighty and most impactful tasks done faster and better, freeing up time to pursue other activities that bring value to you. Hi. My name is Pazani, and welcome to my video mentoring session. For more useful insights on productivity and time management, check out my book daily productivity. I'll add a link to the book in the description below. That's solve for today, and I'll talk to you soon until next time, relax, stay calm, and keep moving forward. Bye. For more useful insights on productivity and time management, check out my book daily productivity. I'll add a link to the book in the description below. That's all for today, and I'll talk to you soon until next time, relax, stay calm, and keep moving forward. Bye. Hi. My name is Pat Sahani, and welcome to my video mentoring session. 6. Lesson 4: The Growth Cycle: Oh. The key to long term growth, whether to be in your mindset, body set, heart set, or spirit set is to achieve a good balance between stress and rest. It's not too different from the discipline of weight training. When you lift with the same group of muscles multiple times a day, and you keep repeating this every day, it leads to burnout and muscle damage. However, when you take rests and work on different muscles, the results are far better. If you want to achieve sustainable growth, you must follow this four part cycle. One, isolate what you want to work on. Two, stress it. Three, let it rest and recover. And four, repeat with a little more stress than the previous time. This proven process will help you achieve your desired growth. Stress is not inherently bad. However, when you don't limit it and tackle it well, it can transform into distress, which can be unhealthy and difficult to go through. You need some tension and constructive stress to live well. After all, growth and anti fragility come from struggle. Become better and gain new skills and abilities by pushing yourself harder. The important thing to keep in your mind is to seek out challenges that are manageable and lie on the threshold of your skills. In this way, you apply considerable effort and push yourself a level up while still making sure that you don't feel anxious and are overwhelmed in the process. 7. Lesson 5: The Seven Key Habits to Become Effective: We're all unique creatures. We have our own paradigms based on our perception of the world, defined by our upbringing, beliefs, values, and experiences that shape our view of almost everything under the sun. This is the reason two people who watch the same movie, docu series or presidential debate may have polar opposite opinions. Instead of paradigms, we must focus on principles. While paradigms are subjective and inaccurate, principles such as honesty, compassion, and human dignity are self evident and timeless. And that's why it's much better to have a principle centered paradigm as it is the most constructive way to view people, situations or events. In order to cultivate this approach, we must follow character ethics, not personality ethics. This means, you must aspire to cultivate virtues like courage, self discipline, integrity, and humility and act in accordance with them, instead of becoming a social chameleon, who changes their behavior repeatedly to successfully manipulate situations. Character ethics lay the foundation of human achievement, and each of the seven habits of highly effective people is rooted in them. First, we must move from dependence to independence and self reliance. Our private victory makes us more self confident and leads us to a stronger character. On, be proactive. Take 100% responsibility for your own actions. Two, begin with the end in mind. Figure out what you really want and design your life with intention. Three, put first things first. Focus on your core values and act in accordance with them. Once we make the interchange, next, we must cultivate habits that take us from independence to interdependence and secure the public victory. Four, think win will. Seek a paradigm of cooperation and work towards mutually beneficial outcomes. Five, Seek first to understand, then to be understood. L earn empathic listening and dial into other people's viewpoints. Six, synergize, open yourself to others and discover better creative results with trust and vulnerability. And lastly, we must focus on ourselves. We must take good care of ourselves, maintain our new paradigm and continue with our growth. Seven, sharpen the saw, pay constant attention to self renewal and strengthen your habits. Becoming an effective person is an inside out process. That's why we need to focus inward first. Change starts from within. We must change ourselves before we work towards changing anything or anyone. As Wayne Dyer wrote, when you change the way you look at things, that things you look at change. We must keep in mind that there's no magic bullet or quick fix to become a highly effective person. It's a process that you need to commit to perform and nurture day in and day out. This can be an arduous journey for sure, but in the long run, the rewards that you get out of it make your time and effort totally worthwhile. 8. Lesson 6: Walking on the Path of Essentialism: These days, most of us are busy but not productive. We overstuff our schedules, put too much on our already filled plates, and start giving priority to other people's agendas and saying yes to them instead of focusing on ours. Once we give ourselves permission to stop becoming a and try to do it all, Only then we'll be able to focus on things that truly matter and perform the daily tasks that reflect our values and take us towards our goals. Instead of repeating our misaligned hamster wheel patterns, we can start walking on the path of essentialism, which is nothing but a disciplined systematic approach for establishing where our highest point of contribution exists, and then making execution of those key things almost effortless. Here are four fundamental principles of essentialism that can help us live a simpler and streamlined life. Number one, doing less and doing better. Focus on quality not quantity. The more things we try to accomplish, the more rushed we end up feeling. Instead, it's best to focus on fewer tasks and do them exceptionally well. In that way, we perform better and produce more. We're no longer motivated to reach the finish line and check things off our to do list. We bring attention and awareness to our work related tasks, cultivating mastery in them, rather than just trying to get them done. Number two, do your one thing. A true essentialist focuses on maximizing their gifts, talents, and strengths. Living an aligned life, whether it be professional or personal, is the best decision we can make for ourselves. Rather than trying to do everything, we can only focus on things where we can tap into our genius. The more we spend time in our genius zone, the more streamlined our life becomes. When we find our one thing and only do that with a laser sharp focus, we cultivate true mastery in it. Number three, questioning constantly and course correcting when needed. It's never a guarantee that things will work out exactly as we plan them to. Life happens. We may change as people. That's why it's important we pivot when it's required. Certain things may be essential in one phase of our life, but not in another. Hence, it's extremely useful to constantly question ourselves about what is truly essential and narrow our focus to those things. If some object or task loses its importance and becomes non essential, can let go of it. And if something ends up gaining importance, we can categorize it as essential and all lot more time and attention to it. In the end, it's all about flexibility and adaptability and knowing and executing what's important in the current phase of our life. And number four, following through on your plan. Most of us make great plans, but we never end up executing them. As we pursue the path of essentialism and craft a plan based on it, we also need to act upon it and garner the necessary skills and habits to follow through it. As a popular adage goes, easier said than done. Knowing and coming up with a plan is the easy part, but executing it is difficult, that only a tiny percentage of us do. 9. Lesson 7: Jumpstart Your Productivity: Do you feel your ability to concentrate has steadily diminished over the past couple of years? Has it become difficult for you to focus on a single task for a few hours without looking at your phone or checking e mail and social media? If your answer is yes, like most people, then it's a sign that you are prioritizing pleasure and instant gratification over efficiency and productivity? It's tempting to procrastinate as it brings short term relief. In addition, e mail, social media, and all the notifications, spike up Dopamin and serotonin levels in our brain, giving us instantaneous highs. It's not too different from getting addicted to drugs, sex, or gambling. They give you intense pleasure for a brief time, but eventually leave you depleted and exhausted. It's crucial that you overcome procrastination and distance yourself from these technological slot machines and amusement parks if you really want to enhance your focus and creative output. Here are some tips and strategies to help you skyrocket your productivity. One, think about your daily and weekly cools in sets of threes, instead of staring at a long list of chores. Two, identify your biological prime time, BPT, the time when you have the most energy to dedicate to tasks that require considerable focus. Three, cultivate a habit of creating written lists of tasks, action items you're waiting on, and even things that you find irritating or are worrying about to declutter your brain. Four, focus on engaging your pre fritter cortex rather than surrendering to your limbic system by procrastinating. Five, stop multitasking and limit your use of digital devices, especially during your PPT. Six, practice letting your mind wander and allow yourself more time to day dream. And seven, do little experiments with your diet, exercise, and sleep schedule to see what makes you feel best and perform at an optimal level. 10. Lesson 8: Pushing Through Resistance: Have you ever struggled to turn a brilliant idea on paper into reality? Or maybe you have finally mustered the courage to finally start working or on that dream project. However, you feel you can't make any significant progress and feel stuck whenever you try to tackle it. If your answer is yes, then it's important that you know that there's a powerful invisible force working round the clock to derail your efforts and hold you back from achieving your desired outcomes. Steven Presfield calls this antagonistic force, resistance, a very real entity that gets in the way of your meaningful endeavor from its conception all the way to its completion. Doesn't matter whether you are an author writing your next book, a sculptor, creating new artwork, a filmmaker, working on a new documentary, an actor playing a new character or an entrepreneur, starting a new enterprise. You will encounter resistance and histvious ploys. It will obstruct you time and again by putting barriers in your way. Self doubt, procrastination, fear, self sabotage, diminishing confidence, lack of self belief, and indecision, to keep you from advancing forward. You must be wary of this sinister force as it always comes into play when you try to do something good and, beginning a fitness challenge, launching a new start overcoming a debilitating addiction, starting an educational program, or raising your voice against discrimination and injustice. If you want to accomplish any of these undertakings and get on the other side, you must get rid of instant gratification and cultivate patience and persistence within you. You must prioritize long term growth over short term pleasures. You have to understand that resistance will never go away. It'll always be there to keep you from going ahead with your plans. The only way to push through is to show up every single day and take consistent actions that help you advance forward to your mighty coal. In addition to resistance, anyone who tries to start something meaningful or special must wrestle with two other powerful forces, rational thought, and the opinions of friends and family members. No one is immune to them. You will experience a voice in your head that will tell you to stop working on your dream project and put your time and energy to good use. And you will encounter position and well meaning concern of loved ones, questioning your work and advising you to do something sensible. If you're not careful, the amalgamation of these three forces can stop in your tracks and malign your efforts to do something wile. They can get you back in your comfort zone and pull you away from capitalizing on your gifts and doing the creative fulfilling and necessary work that you are destined to do. You must fight these evil forces and cultivate steadfastness and grit to successfully push through on your new endeavor. There are three useful techniques you can employ to move forward in your creative journey. First, you must start before you're ready. Otherwise, you may never start at all. Overthinking and over planning are nothing but effective disguises for resistance, and you must avoid them at all costs. If you love your idea and it feels right to you, don't delay with over preparation, act on it right away. Next, you must embrace the process and all the bumps in the road along the way. Obstacles and setbacks breed creativity and innovation. You can't eliminate resistance, so you must learn to work with it and roll with the punches to keep moving forward. Lastly, you must finish strong. Completion is the most critical part of any project. You must confront your fears and push on so that you're able to bring your project over the finish line. If you don't see a project through to completion, what do you have to show for all the effort you have put in? Just ship your work. It'll communicate to the world that you are a brave professional because you finished what you started. You didn't quit and you didn't back away. You delivered. 11. Lesson 9: Take Charge of Your Work Calendar: As we go through the pressures and obligations of modern life, it's normal and natural for us to assume that we are time poor. Our work assignments keep us busy and drive us to pull insane hours at work. Our smartphones keep buzzing all day and all night, and in order to manage the pressure, we hardly give ourselves permission to switch off. Our computers and TV screens keep us glued to them on the evenings and the weekends, and we keep everything else on the back burner. Due to this, our health and relationships suffer, and at the end of the work week, we feel exhausted and unfulfilled with zero energy and intention to pursue things we're truly passionate about. However, compelling research has shown that we are not as time poor as we think we are. Besides our sleep hours and full time employment schedule, we all have enough time for errands, childcare, fitness, and hobbies. Yet somehow, most of us don't feel we are time rich. The best solution to this is to take control of our time by changing the way we organize our life. In order to become time rich for real, it's crucial that you take charge of your work calendar. You must be able to pinpoint what exactly you want to achieve in your career. With a definite outcome in mind, you'll be in a better position to identify your priorities. Visualize who and where you want to be in five years, and then working back from that, set an annual goal, and then break it down further into monthly milestones. Each Sunday, sit down and write a list of goals for the coming week and then evaluate how long each task will take you. Block out time in your calendar for those assignments and make sure you do all of them without fail. Here's a tricky part. You'll come across numerous occasions where you'll have to forego activities that fall beyond your core competencies in order to stick to your previously made commitments. This is incredibly important because when you perform tasks that you are not naturally good at, you basically waste time that you could have devoted to something else. Keep in mind, just because you're capable doesn't mean you have to do everything. If there's someone who is better at doing a certain activity than you are, try to have them take care of it. And if a certain tasks is unavoidable, do your best to minimize the time it takes in your schedule. For instance, team meetings can be a huge time suck on a given day. In order to be more efficient, discuss with your boss if you could opt out of certain multi person meetings where your presence might not be needed. That way, you can move forward with tasks that matter the most. Bottom line is that we have to take ownership of our time by constantly discerning whether or not a particular activity is a priority, and if it's not, then we are parter of minimizing it or abandoning it altogether. This will free a precious time that we can use to advance our careers and focus on things that bring meaning and fulfillment to our lives. 12. Lesson 10: Stop Adding, Start Subtracting: Oh. In a fast paced, convoluted modern world, being busy has become the norm. In fact, some of us even consider business as a badge of honor. We confuse motion with actual work and activity with productivity. We start believing that jumping from one task to the next without any brakes and juggling multiple priorities at once communicates to others that we are productive. But no matter how much effort we put in, we still find ourselves disorganized and behind our schedules. We become like the proverbial hamster on the wheel. We burn ourselves out by running day in and day out, and yet end end up going nowhere. Isn't that a miserable way to work and live? Intellectually, we're all aware of the popular nugget of wisdom, Less is more. However, in our quest to become more successful, we often wonder what tasks or activities can we add to our personal and professional lives to unlock bigger and better accomplishments. But the truth is that adding multiple things to your to do list would neither multiply your time nor maximize your success. Instead of addition, think subtraction, the most effective way to increase your productivity is to eliminate non essential tasks and activities from your life. As Robin Sharma explains, I see a lot of people hustling and marketing and working day and night, sort of like chickens running around with no place to go. If you look at the true craft person, and I believe the absolute geniuses, they had a monomaniacal focus around doing just a few things. Rather than engaging in the trivial mini, I would encourage you to work less and achieve more by dialing down on those few projects that will allow you to own your domain and change the world. Keep in mind that this minimalist approach to better productivity is simple for sure, but not at all easy. As humans, we create the satisfaction of achieving something, anything actually. And that's why we often engage in trivial activities just so that we can feel better that we have accomplished something. Have you ever completed a random activity and then simply added it to your turist later on to check it off? This is the reason behind that. Multipliers, the most productive amongst us, focus single mindedly on the essential needle moving tasks and constantly ask themselves what things they can eliminate. They are motivated by results, not activities. They know that success is not about the number of tasks you complete, but about how important those tasks truly are. If they're not making meaningful progress, they know they're not willing. You must think like the top performers and work towards multiplying your time by putting everything you do in the course of a day under the microscope and eliminating the pointless activities. A good starting point would be to get rid of these two notorious time wasters, television and meetings. Television, including online streaming platforms is a major everyday distraction. The average American watches over 34 hours of TV every week. That's almost as much time as a regular full time job. And if you zoom out and add up all those hours, you'll quickly realize that people on average spend a full nine years of their lives in front of the idiot box. That's insane. So if you find yourself glued to the TV every single day and still complain that you don't have enough time to get important work done, then you know it's time to get rid of this unnecessary intrusion. Secondly, eliminate whatever meetings you can from your schedule. According to a salary.com survey, a huge 47% of respondents revealed that meetings are their largest time drainer. So next time, when you receive a meeting invite, ask yourself two significant questions. One, do I really have to know what will be discussed in this meeting? And two, will I be called on to make any decisions in this meeting? If your answer to both of them is no, then eliminate that annoying time waster from your calendar. Every single day, countless individuals and organizations are wasting their precious time resulting in enormous financial and productivity costs. If this applies to you, you can still change your approach and regain control of your schedule. All you have to do is carefully evaluate your daily activities and eliminate all the trivial ones so that you are able to multiply your time at work. 13. Lesson 11: How to Gain Total Control Over Your Work: We all go through challenges in our everyday life, and when we come across stressful situations, we often let them get a better of us. We often allow them to overwhelm us and provoke a miscalculated reaction. For example, if you already have a plate and your boss calls you into their office to add one more project, you might feel overburdened and respond inappropriately. That's why it's crucial to attain a sense of control over all your work and develop a Zen mindset so that you don't react disproportionately and instead respond in the best way possible every single time. This is where the getting things done, GTD system can be a great help to you. When execute it correctly, this process enables you to tackle an overwhelming amount of tasks and activities in a calm and relaxed fashion and provides you absolute control over your work. Here are the five key steps in the GTD method. Number one, capture all your tasks, ideas, and reminders, in trusted external collection tools. This frees up your mental faculties, allowing your brain to focus on thinking and solving problems. Number two, empty the collection tools every week by doing two things. One, clarify what each item is, and two, organize the items into the right places. Number three, use a projects list to monitor the progress of your current projects and always ensure that each project has a clear and concrete next action. In addition, organize your desired results into lists like calendar and next actions rather than relying on your daily to do lists. Whenever you are dependent on other people's work, keeping a waiting for a list is totally worth it as well. And lastly, everything that has potential future relevance goes on the someday or maybe list or icular file. Number four, reflect on what's important to you and consistently review the items in your system. This is indispensable to the success of the system as a whole and making sure that you work productively. And number five, engage with your tasks. You must choose what to do in each given moment based on the following four criteria. What can you do in the current context? What do you have time for? What do you have energy for, and which task is of the highest priority? As you employ the GTA system, you'll not only be able to better organize your work, but you'll also be in more tuned with your purpose in life. Equipped with a powerful process and an improved sense of clarity, your productivity will skyrocket and your stress levels will plummet as you feel calmer and more in control of all your work. 14. Lesson 12: Become the Master of Your Inbox: Oh, How many times during the day, do you stop to check your e mail? Do you have fixed times to do it, or you like those people who refresh their inbox every few minutes in anticipation of the next message. Addiction to e mail checking has become a major problem in the modern world. If you feel there's no harm checking e mails again and again and even find yourself a little obsessed with this activity, then it's highly likely that you may be more addicted than you think. And you're not alone. This has become the norm, unfortunately. The average office worker checks their e mail inbox 77 times a day. That's crazy. Our addiction mainly stems from a primal impulse that seeks positive rewards. This innate impulse propels us to check our inbox over and over in the pursuit of the next reward. We start sifting through endless junk mail and keep add it in order to find the worthy messages that bring us unparalleled excitement and pleasure. In addition, checking e mail also triggers a progress paradox. When we prioritize opening an e mail message as soon as it arrives, we're doing important work tasks, we trick our brain. As we reduce the number of unread messages in our inbox, we start to feel productive, but in reality, we accomplish nothing significant. No doubt, seeing zero hundred messages in our inbox feels like an enticing reward as it triggers the same neural pathway that gets activated when we accomplish an important task. But let's face the truth. Go through non essential e mails and discarding them repeatedly has no impact on our long term goals. That's why it's crucial that you get rid of this reckless behavior. The progress is just not real, and there are better and more important things you could be doing with your precious time. Keep this in mind? No one is pointing a gun at you, demanding you to immediately respond to an e mail or forcing you to respond in a certain desired way? Just focus on limiting the e mails you send and soon, the e mails that you receive will drop. Redirect your time and energy towards meaningful work, work that is incredibly important to you and contributes both to your life and your legacy. Take a pause and ask yourself, Am I doing something important that will help me achieve my big goals? Is this thing going to make me better at my craft? Will this improve my career and my life or help me contribute effectively to other people's lives? Your meaningful work might be creating a documentary film, writing a book, improving your sales and marketing skills, or teaching an online course to others. Whatever it is, you must identify that endeavor as soon as possible. Otherwise, you'll never be able to train yourself to use e mail intentionally. Wherever your focus goes, energy flows, to use your time efficiently, you must direct your attention towards a meaningful project. Only then, you'll be able to stop yourself from checking your inbox a zillion times each day and hence curb your e mail addiction. Make a commitment to not waste any more time on pointless messages. Develop positive habits and tweak a few things, so that you spend your time primarily on things that matter the most. It's time you become the master of your inbox. It's time you take charge of your daily work life. 15. Lesson 13: Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time: In the pursuit of achieving peak performance, many of us focus on time management, believing that we must squeeze as much work as possible into our limited 24 hour days. However, this approach never works. If you think about the last time you pulled an all nighter, you'll quickly realize that working nonstop is not exactly sustainable and hence never the right strategy for the long term. In order to perform our best that has unlocked the power of full engagement, we must focus not on accomplishing more into our finite hours, but instead, figure out ways to do more with the time we have on our hands. The most effective approach to achieve this is to shift our focus from managing our time to managing our energy. Energy, not time is the primary source of efficiency and high performance. Without it, no matter how much time we have at our disposal, we'll never be able to perform at our potential and achieve our goals. So rather than optimizing your schedule, it's much better to optimize the quantity and quality of your available energy. As counterintuitive as it may sound, a useful strategy to efficiently manage your energy levels and get more accomplished in a given time is to work less and take more breaks. Let's picture a scenario where you work for 4.5 hours straight. How do you think you'll feel after that, upbeat and ready for more or totally exhausted and drained? The latter, of course, you're a human after all. And no matter how many espressos or energy drinks you consume, you still find it extremely challenging to maintain your concentration and be productive. When we focus on working for hours on end, without a pause, it takes a heavy toll on our energy levels, thus making us less productive. Instead, it's best to maximize our energy and hence our productivity by working less and taking frequent breaks in between. These breaks can help us relax and recharge our energy levels, fueling us to stay productive for a longer time. Taking the slow and steady approach is the key. Never forget that if you truly want to win, whether at work or in life, it's always rewarding to be the tortoise, not the hair. When we focus on managing our energy effectively, rather than trying to cram as much work as possible into a single day, we not only become more efficient and productive professionally, but also have access to energy needed for our personal lives. In a nutshell, if we want to become fully engaged in whatever task we do and perform consistently at our absolute peak then we must first proactively build our energy reserves in all spheres of life, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual and manage this energy diligently. 16. Lesson 14: Eliminate Dead Weight From Your Life: When it comes to making hard choices over easy ones, we often engage in absurd and nonsensical methods. We behave like that boy scout who didn't use his sleeping bag and spent his night freezing just because he didn't want to pack it up in the morning. Why put yourself through pointless suffering just to save yourself work that lasts only for a few minutes. To avoid discomfort, many of us put off taking immediate decisive actions and hence, subject ourselves to long term regrets. Things would have been much easier if we had just focused on the simple solution, biiring the bullet and doing what had to be done in order to live in accordance with our goals. It's usually believed that will power is like a muscle, and the more we use it, the sooner it gets exhausted, and we think that the best way to strengthen it over time is to consistently exert self control day after day. However, the problem with this willpower muscle, is that it's a pretty weak one. No matter how much self control we practice, it's really hard not to tie will power out. We human beings, like other creatures on the planet, are undergoing natural evolution as we. We are unable to change our environments, so we adapt to them in order to survive, even if it doesn't benefit us in the long run. However, you're not as powerless as it seems. Like we control the environments of the animals we domesticate, we can also design our environments so that any adaptation is nothing but an improvement over our past situation, inching us closer to our goals. If we choose by architecting an alternate environment that is more favorable to our desired outcomes, we can trick ourselves into adapting to the ideal vision of ourselves. An effective strategy that we can employ is to eliminate dead weight from our lives. One way a majority of us fall short of our long term goals is by wasting our precious time and attention on the Internet. As soon as the going gets tough, while working on a project, we grab our phones to get some dopamine hits, which check our email inbox and social media repeatedly to get past bodom and monotony. And so rather than getting some real work done, we fall prey to the superficial pleasures of the Internet. Combat these temptations, we need to be firm and decisive. We need to create a work environment that protects our focus and attention. You must gather some courage and delete all the apps that pull you away from reaching your big goals. Throw away your excuses and empty concerns, and just go cold turkey and distance yourself from them. In this way, when you remove enticing distractions from your surroundings, you ensure that willpower doesn't even enter into the picture. When the attraction is just not there, you can't succumb to it, right? Once you remove distractions from the Internet, take the same approach and apply it to other areas of your life. Go one step further than Ulysses, tie yourself to the mast of the ship, and then even put bees wax in your ears so that no matter how enticing the songs of the sirens are, you are single mindedly focused on the task at hand. Whenever you identify the dead weight that's stopping you from achieving your goals, let go of it immediately. Eliminate anything superfluous that steals your focus and attention from the equation. To summarize, relying on willpower alone to get things done is not only pain inducing, but also an extremely poor strategy to bring positive change in our lives. Instead, the most effective approach is to create an alternate environment that compels us to live and act in accordance with our superior aims. And a good way to start is by annihillating dead weight from your life once and for all. 17. Lesson 15: Set Realistic Expectations: Many of us have incorrect perceptions about how much we can accomplish in a single day. We keep cramming things into our schedules and falling victim to the superhero syndrome. But no matter how invincible or powerful we think we are, we forget that time is a finite resource. It's just not possible to have ten hour workdays and then also have enough time for friends, family, fitness routines, mindfulness, personal development, volunteering, and a good night's sleep. Something has to go. It's crucial that we set realistic expectations about how much we can do. Many of us are time optimists, which means we routinely fail to estimate how long things actually take. Either we plan to fetch groceries, do multiple loads of laundry, prepare a meal for the family while helping kids with their homework assignments after work or take on too many commitments at the office thinking we'll somehow fit them in our schedule. But here's the problem with being over optimistic about time. We find our plans to be too ambitious as we confront reality, and as a result, we get stressed and overwhelmed when we actually perform those tasks. Often, time optimism is driven by our desire for perfection. We are so driven to accomplish everything that we overburden ourselves. But ironically, our pursuit of perfection can make us less productive. In order to set realistic goals, we must let go of our perfectionism and accept ourselves as we are not as the ideal person that we desire to when you become realistic and adjust your expectations accordingly, you allow yourself to be more relaxed and feel a sense of freedom. Developing awareness of how much time you truly have helps you focus on your priorities and hence make better choices in your daily life.