Transcripts
1. Why Productivity Matters: Your time and attention are your two most precious
resources and ultimately, whatever your discipline,
whatever your craft, making the most out of these is going to make you
more successful. Our recent study found that
the average UK worker spends on average two hours
and 53 minutes of a working day
being productive. That's about a third of the
day being productive and two-thirds of the day lost to distraction and
misplaced retention. What's the point in
working long hours and overtime when you don't need to? Imagine how much more you could achieve if you could
double or even triple your productivity
and enhance this even further by making
sure that when you are on, your productivity reaches
its peak state more often. My name is Jack Brown and I'm
a performance psychologist. I worked with high
performance across the different
industries of sport, business and art, and I help individuals
optimize their attention, build healthy and
long-lasting habits, and ultimately get the most
out of their abilities. I'm also a self-confessed
productivity nerd. I practice what I preach and I absolutely hate wasting time. I've been obsessed
with this topic of productivity and
attention for years. I've done tons of research
and read loads of different books through the different lenses
of neuroscience, high-performance, cognitive,
and behavioral psychology. I feel like this is mass attentional problem
at the minute, where our screen time is soaring and our productivity
is diminishing. I wanted to make
this course to share some of my research
and insights of the high performance that I've
worked with so I can help more people get the most out of their time
and their ability. This class pulls together
some of the best laws, principles and
techniques in a simple, ready to use way that's
designed to help you maximize your
productivity and streamline your attention
so that you get more done and you can close the gap between your intentions
and actions; what lasts and produce more. In this class, you
will learn about you're distracted brain and why destruction often feels
good and it's rewarding. We're going to discuss
different strategies and principles around
protecting your attention, as well as the
underlying cause of distraction and how
to overcome it. We're going to
discuss about living intention name with
purpose whilst avoiding distraction
and the trap of being productive
be unproductive. We're going to look
at how to optimize your environment and then
enhance your work space. We're going to discuss
simple techniques to stand productive and
avoiding distraction. How to manage and plan
your time effectively. How to treat yourself
like a high performer, recharge and avoid
productivity overkill. Massively important,
how to create long-term consistent
productive behavior change. It's long-lasting and not
just a temporary boost that last two weeks before
you go back to normal. Finally, these lessons
will be summed up by 10 of my
productivity laws. They make these
principles easy to remember and ready to apply. I'm super excited to
have you on board with this class and can't
wait to hear how much more you achieve
with your time and your reclaimed attention and where this is going to
take you with your craft.
2. Class Project: The class project, so you're going to start
treating yourself like a high performer by measuring your productivity and
tracking your progress. This project has
been designed with clever behavior
or hacks in mind. You're going to stop turning
your productive days into a regular occurrence. What we're going to
do is download and fill in a ready to
use spreadsheet with a simple productivity
formula and behavioral tracker to
turn the process of productivity into
a clear outcome that makes you want to get
better and better each week. Here's an example of my
personal productivity tracker. More to come in later
lessons to figure out what great and good
work is but all you need to worry about
for now is filling out the amount of hours of great
work you've done in a day, the amount of hours of
good work you've done, how much time you've wasted, and then give yourself
a subjective rating out of ten for
your work quality. It looks really complicated, but it's actually really simple. I've left the last day of
February blank down here. What we're doing is we're
doubling the amount of great work we've done because we want to
encourage more of it. We want to do more great work. Let's say I've done three
hours of great work in a day, I'm going to double that
and put a six in there. Let us say I've done
four hours of good work, so it's just single
for the rest. Four for good work. Let's say I have
wasted half an hour to procrastination
and distraction. I'm going to put 0.5 in there and then I'm
going give myself a mediocre rating in over seven out of ten for
my work quality. That's going to spit out a
day success score down here, and it's going to change your
averages for the week here. What this is going to do
is it's then going to automatically populate
this table up here, which is your weekly
averages and then it's going to graph out your
progress down here. What we've got to do
for this is scroll down to the projects and
resources tab below, and you're going to click
on a link like this, and it's going to open
up this spreadsheet. This one is set up for you for the first six months from
the date this class was published and I'll update this resource again
in six months time, so it's still there and usable. As you can see, the first
two months are examples of what it should and then
what it's going to look like. As you can see, the rest looks a lot more plain as
nothing is filled in yet but once you start to fill in the daily numbers then the formulas are all
set up for you and it's going to produce
the weekly averages and start to populate
this graph down here. From this point, what you're
going to need to do is click on file in the
top-left corner, and then you're going
to need to click, make a copy and then save one
to your own Google Drive. This is going to create your own productivity
tracker for you. Then you're good to go
and start filling it in. Now make sure you're
signed into Google or it won't let you click on the
make a copy button here. I'm super excited to
have you on board with this class and can't
wait to hear how much more you achieve
with your time and your reclaimed attention and where this is going to
take you with your craft.
3. Your Distracted Brain: Your distracted brain. This might not come
as great news, but your brain is
hardwired for distraction. Distraction often feels good, and distraction can
sometimes be a positive. Your brain is set up to
work in short bursts of attention and while this isn't great for
your productivity, we're going to utilize this with some of the tools
and techniques in later lessons but your
brain is hardwired for distraction and this can be explained by
evolutionary psychology. We have this threat
system in our minds, this little thing in our brain that is called the amygdala, and it's always scanning
out for danger. It's looking around for
things that could harm us. Really useful.
Thousands of years ago, when the threat to our
lives was very real, perhaps a tiger coming to kill us or another tribe
coming to attack us. Not useful when we've got a short deadline and really
need to get something done. But the environment has evolved at a far faster
rate than our brains. Our brains are like this
hardware that's lagging behind and trying
to catch up with the software that's
ever evolving. What I want you
to take from this is that when you
become distracted, when you lose your attention, it's not so much
you being faulty, you having a dysfunctional mind, but it's actually your brain
doing its number one job, which is to keep you alive even if it might
not feel like it. A big battle that
we have to face is that sustained attention and
productivity is difficult. It's often uncomfortable
and distraction feels good. We have this neuromodulator
in our minds called dopamine. I'm sure most of you
have heard of it, but dopamine is this feel-good
hormone that's released as a reward and as for motivation
to repeat the activity. Dopamine underpins
all addictions. You can't have an addiction
without the presence of dopamine and unfortunately, a lot of our distractions release these artificial
hits of dopamine. Think, what is your number
one cause of distraction? I can probably
guess because it's probably the same as mine, it's my phone, and these things are terrible for
our productivity. We're going to come onto
managing this a little bit better in a later
lesson but our phones, every time you go on these
cleverly designed apps, they release these little
artificial hits of dopamine. Dopamine makes us feel
good and it increases the likelihood of this
behavior to be repeated. We have to face this battle. What this means is that productivity and
attention is difficult, whereas distraction is good, it makes us feel good. While dopamine can be our enemy, it can also be our friend and we're going to come onto
this in later lessons. How can we leverage this? How can we utilize this powerful
chemical to make us more productive and to make our progress and our
productivity feel good? I know this is going
to sound contradicting to the title of this course
and the whole point of it, but sometimes distraction
isn't always bad. Distraction makes
us more creative. If you lift the hood of
creativity it's quite simple. You fuse together two
seemingly unrelated things to create this new idea
or this new concept. Something Matt Ridley
calls idea settings, but that's a conversation for another day and
perhaps another course. A lot of the time we know
what it is we need to do. We know what we need to
get done so it's just the case of getting on with
it and getting our head down. But to do this, we need
to sustain our attention.
4. Protecting your Attention: Your attention is limited
and it's precious, and it's about time you
started treating it this way. I want to introduce
you to a concept I absolutely love called
attention residue. Sophie Leroy discovered
this when she was analyzing people's
attention in the workplace and found that constantly
switching from one task to another actually makes
people less productive. Multitasking is a myth. She coined this carryover
from one task to another, something called
attention residue. You leave valuable
bits of attention on things that you have
done throughout the day, so you have less to
give on later tasks, on often important tasks. This brings us on to
productivity law number 1. Multitasking is a myth and
damages your attention. Not only are we guilty of killing our attention
while we're working, but I believe the
majority of people kill their attentional capacity and potential before the
day has even started. I want you to imagine your
attentional capacity a little like a battery that you always carry around by the side of you. But instead of it being
like a phone battery, it works at full capacity
until it gets to zero percent and then just dies. Your quality of work
and your output is only proportional to this
attentional capacity. If you have 80 percent capacity, you can only produce
80 percent of the quality or the potential
that you've got in you. Now, what's the first thing
you do when you wake up? For most people, they rollover, grab their phone,
switch off the alarm, and the they're hooked
by these notifications. They have a little look
about who's messaged them, they might jump on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you choose
and have a little scroll. Imagine that each message you reply to or each post that you scroll on steals one percent
of your precious attention. Then you get up, you
maybe watch the news, you get into work, you engage in some
workplace gossip and find out what Linda's daughter-in-law has been doing this year. By the time you get to work, you're on 80 percent
of your capacity, which means that you
can only produce 80 percent of your output
or 80 percent quality. You've diminished your
attention and you've limited your productivity before
the day has even started. With the same attentional
battery metaphor in mind, now imagine you get
to work and you have this really important
project that needs doing, but it's difficult. It makes you feel uncomfortable. Instead, you decide to
open up your emails. You reply to a few
different emails. You might read a few
different newsletters. Then again, you might talk
to some colleagues and start putting off and
avoiding this work. By the time you come to work
on this priority project, your attentional
battery is drained to 60 or 70 percent and the quality of your work
and output suffers. These behaviors feel good
in the short-term, I know, and they're even backed
by our dopamine system, which fuels our addiction
to distraction, but the ability to delay
gratification and resist these emotional impulses is absolutely critical
for long-term success. Make decisions with your
future self in mind, and start protecting
your attention, and stop dishing it out
to pointless things. This brings us on to
productivity law number 2, do the hard things first.
5. The Underlying Cause of Distraction: The underlying cause
of distraction. We already know that distracting ourselves often feels
good and we can actually get rewarded by it from these temporary hits of dopamine that makes
us feel really good. But we also get this
reward when we finish a big task or a project as well. There's another reason why we distract ourself or
become distracted. We distract ourself
to avoid discomfort. Real productivity
occurs when you're working at the brink
of your abilities, right on the edge of your
talents and your potential, and this can often
be uncomfortable. An underlying discomfort is the biggest paralyzer
of all action, fear. When you're working on
something in your comfort zone, it's normal, it's natural, you know what comes
up and as by name, it's comfortable but as soon
as we step it out of that, we step into this
uncharted territory, and naturally that brings
different fears with it. Rational or irrational, it doesn't really matter. But the thing is, if
you want to grow, if you want to
improve and develop, you have to go through this fear as this is
where growth occurs. Surface or symptom? With this last point in mind, think back to the last really difficult
piece of work that you had on, the one that you were
really putting off, you were avoiding doing, you were finding millions
of different ways to distract yourself,
and ask yourself, was it the actual work
that you were putting off, or was there a deeper running
fear that was making you avoid this situation and avoid
actually doing the work? For example, making
a slide deck. Was making the slides
really that difficult, or was there a deeper
running fear of perhaps public speaking you
are sometimes avoiding? Finishing off a big project. Again, were the
finishing touches of the project really
that difficult, or were you fearing the consequences of
the project after? Were you worrying about what important people might think about what you've just created? Handling fear and reframing. If we know we become
distracted to avoid discomfort and perhaps there's
an underlying fear that's driving it, then we need to learn
how to handle it. The underlying fear may cause us to deliberately
disrupt ourself, or maybe we just find
we've become distracted. It doesn't really matter, but the important thing is
that we need to learn to change our processes when we
encounter these scenarios. We need to get comfortable
being uncomfortable. My productivity soared as soon
as I stopped letting fear be the primary emotion behind
my decision and behaviors. We need to find
what scares us the most and stop doing it. This brings us onto
productivity law number 3. Reframe discomfort and fear as a signal to move towards
it, not away from it. If we jump back over to
the comfort zone diagram, we can see that before we
get to the growth zone, before any improvement occurs, we need to go through
this fear zone. Our fears never quite as bad
as we build up in our head. A lot of our fears are
irrational and most of what we worry about
doesn't actually come true. But we need to go through
that fear zone and step out our comfort zone to realize
this and when we can do this, this is where real
productivity and this is where real
growth can occur.
6. Living with Purpose: Living with purpose. While a lot of our
behaviors and especially our distractions feel
somewhat out of our control, like we're locked into some
kind of dodgy autopilot that is driven by distraction
and addiction, it's important to remind
yourself you have a choice. Most moments, whatever
it is you are doing, you have often chosen to do it. Reminding yourself of
this choice and freedom shows that we have some
control over how we act. One of my favorite quotes is until you might be
unconscious conscious, it will direct your life
and you will call it fate. In the context of productivity, what this is saying
is that we need to become aware of the
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are driving our distraction that are taken
us down a negative root. Because once we
eventually get there, it might be blamed on fate, it might be blamed
on things like luck. But this has to
come back in and we need to be aware that
we have control, we have choice in how we act. If we can start to identify the positive thoughts that
we want to engage with, if we can get back onto a more positive direction
through productive action, then this is going
to take us closer to our goals and closer to
where we want to be. In the previous lesson, we looked at productivity
lower number 3. Reframe discomfort is a signal
to move towards, not away. But before we're
able to do this, we need to be really clear on what towards and away look back. We need to understand
what it is we want to be doing and what it is we really
don't want to be doing. I've got just the tool
for it, the choice point. The choice point is one of the most simple yet
effective tools that I've ever come across. It's really simple. It looks like a child
could have drawn it, but the beauty is
in the simplicity. It's one of the most
effective tools to help us engage in
productive action. The choice point looks a
little bit like an airplane, and I'm going to stick
with this metaphor because it makes it really
easy to remember. I want you to imagine that you're like a plane
at the minute, but currently your behaviors, your procrastinations, and your distractions represent
your autopilot. It's a dodgy autopilot at
the minute that's going to take you further away from your goals and what
you want to achieve. You wouldn't get on a plane with a dodgy autopilot because it's going to take you to
the wrong destination. The two key things I want
you to take away from this choice point are towards
moves and away moves, and these represent
the direction you're heading in in relation
to your goals. Away moves are the
things that you really don't want to be
doing; distractions, procrastinations, and negative behaviors
that are going to make it hard of you to get back
on track towards your goals. Towards moves are the
exact opposite of this, so they're the positive actions that you want to be
taken that are going to help you achieve your goals
that are going to get you back on track to
where you want to be. The baggage on the
plane represents the different thoughts and
feelings that you have. The choice point outlines are
really basic process that almost every action or
behavior we take goes through. A situation creates
different thoughts and feelings naturally, and we can either get hooked or unhooked to
these thoughts and feelings and make towards
or away moves of behaviors. What hooked and
unhooked means are how we respond to these
different thoughts and feelings. Hooked means we believe these thoughts and
feelings are true. We get really attached to them, and when we hooked, we're more likely to make an away move. Unhooked, on the other hand, means we see them as just
thoughts, not facts. We're able to let them go. When we can become unhooked, this increases the likelihood
of us making towards moves. An example here would be
trying to be productive. You might have some
negative thoughts. This is difficult, this
feels uncomfortable. This is going to be hard,
I'm going to mess up. You might have some feelings
of worry or frustration. If we get hooked to this, we might make some away moves. We go on our phone, we distract ourselves to avoid
the discomfort again. On the other hand, if we can unhook from this, if we can let that negative
thoughts and feelings go, we can enable ourselves to take place in productive action, things that are going
to again take us closer towards our goals
and where we want to be. In a second, I'd
like you to download the choice point PDF
or even just draw it out on a sheet of
A4 and start to fill in your towards
and away moves and figure out what it is
you really want to be doing and what it is you
want to avoid doing. But just before you do this, I'd like to introduce you to a towards move imposter , being productively
unproductive. Productively unproductive
is still doing work, but it's what that disguises
itself as a towards move. It may look like one, it may even feel like one, but deep down you know that it's just a distraction to avoid doing the thing that
you really need to do. This is often the biggest
killer of productivity, taking the easy option. How do we overcome this? We need to understand when we're being
productively unproductive, and because it looks
the same as being really productive and
making towards moves, we need to be clear on this
and we need to identify it. What I want you to do and
this is going to help with the class project in
defining your day success, I want you to define
your daily jobs and tasks and the work that you engage in into two categories. The first category
is great work. Great work is true productivity. It probably feels difficult
and uncomfortable at times, but it brings you closer to what you know you're
supposed to be doing. Good work, on the other
hand, is busy work. It's characterized
by comfort, ease, but the underlying feeling
there is a bit of a cop out. How I distinguish the two is I'd associate great work with producing and creating and good work with maintaining
and responding. Don't get me wrong, you need to do good work up
from time to time. You can't produce great work all day long because the
good work is important. You need to deal with bits of admin and other little bears. But if you can shift this to produce a more great
work than good work, then you're going to start
to become truly productive. This brings us on to
productivity law number 4, spot when you're
being productively unproductive and try
to produce great work. Combining this with
productivity law number 2, do the hard things first makes you a dangerous
individual. In a second, it's going to
be a good time to pause this video and start to fill
out your own choice point. It's entirely up
to you whether you wanted to do a general
one and start to identify what helps you
in general and similar way in towards moves
and what they might look like on a day-to-day basis. Or if you want, you could do an individual
choice point for each project or each situation that you
encounter in a working day. Entirely up to you. Start with this
situation and then start to write down
difficult thoughts and feelings that you might have
got hooked with in the past or that you anticipate coming
up for this situation. Then what I want you
to do is be really clear on what away moves and
towards moves look like. Away moves are going to be
things like distractions, procrastinations,
and they may also include when you're being
productively unproductive. Because remember, it looks
like a towards move, but you know deep
down it's a cop out of doing what you
really need to be doing. Towards move is
opposite of away. They're the things that you want to engage with and that are going to take you closer
towards your goals. If it helps with the
motivational process, what you can do is write down the end destination at
each one of these arrows, so where the towards moves are going to take you
and where you're going to end up if you engage too much with the away moves. Then I want you to stick it up in front of your works by so it acts as a daily reminder of
what you need to be doing. I want you to become
the conscious pilot. I want you to feel
like you're in control and you have choice of the daily behaviors
you've taken part in and you have a choice of where this is going to end up taking you. From your away moves, I want you to start to develop your own
distraction red list. A distraction red
list is a list of things to avoid doing at all
costs when you're working. This might include endlessly
scrolling on Instagram. It might include reading through your emails and checking
out the latest newsletters, or it might even include playing
solitaire on your phone. I'd love to hear some of the way the wonderful things on
your distraction red list, so please share them
in the comments below. I want you to stick this
distraction red list up again in front
of your workspace, so it's a reminder of when
you're going off course. Things on your distraction
red list are prohibited on your flight because
it's going to take you in the wrong direction. In Lesson 11, we're
going to come onto some useful
tips and techniques to avoid the lure of this
distraction red list. But for now, let's look at how we can protect our attention and have a look at the role of our environment and how
that plays into things.
7. Optimise your Environment: Optimize your
environment to enhance your productivity and especially
to avoid distraction, is absolutely
essential to optimize your environment and consider your workspace and what you're
surrounding yourself with. Kurt Lewin came up with a
neat equation, B equals FPE. Behavior is a function of the person in their environment. What this means in the
context of productivity is that your output is
affected by two things. Number 1, you the person. Number 2, your environment
where you surround yourself. Now, think back to different social settings for
your different occasions. Your environment
changes your behavior. Now, this is true depending on the different people you
surround yourself with, so perhaps friends
versus work colleagues. It's also true for the different environment that
you surround yourself in. You act differently
when you're dining at a restaurant versus when you're playing
sport, for example. It's absolutely
essential if we know the environment
shapes our behavior, it's key to optimize this and consider this for
our productivity. This brings us onto
productivity law number 5. Optimize your environment to supercharge your productivity. Priming. Priming is when exposure to something changes
the way that you think, feel, and act. It's an absolutely
fascinating phenomenon and it can actually occur without
us even realizing. Products apps and advertisers
are very aware of this and they use it to hook you in and make you
buy their product. Now, there's been
tons of research around this and they found that just by reading words
associated with elderly people, makes you walk slower
down a corridor, and having a screensaver
with a pinch of $ bills on, made people less generous when a charity bucket came round. Now, the small things can have a massive impact on
our behavior and well, they can work against us, why don't we make
them work for us? In this case, how about having your choice point and your
distraction red list, clear to see on the
wall in front of you. It acts as prompts that
you want to be productive. For me, I've optimized
my environment. Houseplants, for example, research has shown they make adults more productive
and happier. I've also got this sun time
here with goal dust in it to remind me that time is
limited and very precious. It helps me be productive. It acts as a prompt that
primes me into working better. Minimalism and
attention grabbers. How you might be
wondering what does Japanese interior design has
to do with productivity. But a cluttered workspace
equals a cluttered mind. Remember back to discussing
attention we have this limited
attentional capacity and going back to
attention residue, the more things you
give your attention to, the less you have for important tasks
later on in the day. Ask yourself, what
does your work space looked like and what are
you trying to achieve? If you are trying
to produce clear, analytical, concise thinking, then does have a
cluttered workspace with lots of things competing and grabbing your attention
help this, probably not. Try strapping back your
workspace you have less things competing for your attention and less excuses
to distract you. Lighting. Different
types of lighting have been shown to prime
different types of thinking. Bright light primes clear
analytical thinking, and dim light improves
creativity and problem-solving. I know this is small, but every little bit helps. If you do this over
a period of time, the advantage is at one percent as they're only
going to compound. Then there's other people. Now this one's
probably a bit more obvious than some words making you walk slower or a screensaver making you less generous. But this is a tough one because
it's out of our control. Even when we've
mastered our minds, we switched off our phones, we've limited all
the distractions around us and optimized
our environment, we have other people
to contend with. Now, other people can come in with pointless conversation. Someone might want to call all the time pointless
meeting and workplace gossip. All of a sudden without us
knowing it was sucked into that conversation and
we've lost our attention. Sticking with the
airplane theme, I want to introduce something
that I read about actually in a fantastic book on productivity and
distraction called, Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Now, he introduces the concept called the sterile cockpit rule. This is a rule in the
airline industry that says when flying under 10,000 feet so the most dangerous
part of the flight, takeoff landing when
things might go wrong, that they're not
allowed to discuss non-essential duties
and they're not allowed to be disturbed by
other members of the crew. Now, I really liked
this for applying this to your own workspace. What would a sterile
cockpit look like to you? When you were hit on big important tasks that you really don't want
to be disturbed on, how about putting up a sign. How about letting
other people know around you that between
these times or today, you're not allowed to
come and talk to me unless it's an emergency only. This brings us on to
productivity law number 6. Sterilize your workspace for intense periods of great work. Last one on the airplane
theme I promise, but this is taken from another fantastic book
called Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed and
it's an approach to performance which is
the ultimate form of a growth mindset. The reason the airline
industry has so few accidents is because they don't
bury the head in the sand when it
comes to mistakes, they analyze them
under intense detail, they analyze the black box. A similar thing that teenagers have in their car when
they're learning to drive. It's this thing
and applying that records the operations
of the plane, the malfunctions, and
the conversations that happened in the buildup
to an accident. They analyze this to prevent the same mistake
happening again. Matthew Syed proposes applying this same type of thinking you're learning in
your development. What would Black Box
Thinking look like to you? How could you learn
from your mistakes and your distractions to prevent the same one occurring
over and over again.
8. Managing Tech: We've looked at how to
optimize our environment and enhance our workspace to help us with
our productivity. How about a different type of
environment that hooks us, a virtual one, possibly the most dangerous and disruptive distraction
of them all. Don't get me wrong. I like my phone. I have a bit of an addiction
to my phone as well, and they are incredibly useful. They save us tons of time. The truth is, we have a mass collective addiction to this number one source
of distraction. Research shows just how
bad this problem's gone. In the US, screen
times have increased 25 percent every year from 2010, jumping from an
average of 24 minutes a day to 4 hours and 23 minutes, a whopping 800 percent increase. Now, increased phone
time likely means decreased productivity
and you're not going to avoid using them, but it's absolutely
essential that is us using the phones rather than
the phones using us. Apple recently brought
in a fantastic and a quite scary feature actually where it displays
your screen time for you. There is no getting
away from it anymore. Now, I'm not asking you
to jump back to 2010 and go back to using your
phone for 24 minutes a day, because the world
has changed and a lot of things have
shifted online. What I would advise
is that you set a balanced number for yourself and manage your screen time. I set up my phone with a little widget in
the top hand corner, which displays the
daily minutes or hours that I've
been on my phone. Figure out a balanced
time for you, especially in your
working hours, so you can understand and
realize when you've gone over the top of your screen time and when is it that you've
become distracted. Another reason feature
from Apple is the ability to set app locks on
limits on certain apps. Now, I know you use your
phone for productivity. You probably use your
phone for health and staying in
touch with people, this is really important. Setting app limits and app
locks on my social media has massively helped me eliminate my number 1 source
of distraction. Have a try with
the 1:00 PM rule. No social media until 01:00 PM. If you are already hardcore, you might shift this
to the 5:00 PM rule, or if you want to ease
yourself into it, maybe try a 10:00 AM
rule and 11:00 AM rule, and try to increase
the number of hours in a day that you go before
you go on social media. Remember back to our point
about attention residue. The more things you
give your attention to, the less you have for
important tasks later on. Imagine if you jump on your phone in the morning,
you're scrolling, you're leaving like one percent
of your attention battery on unimportant things that aren't going to help
your productivity, so I would strongly
advise giving this a go. Focus modes and do
not disturb are also handy features to
limit notification, stealing your attention
and diverting you away. There are also great apps
on your phone and computer, such as the self-control
app and the Forest app. Now this one's really cool, as it rewards you
with virtual trees by staying on the app
and staying focused, but leaving the app
causes your tree to die. If you were to jump onto your social media
when you're trying to work and trying to stay
focused, your tree dies. Absolutely fantastic idea and even team with a partner that allows you to use virtual coins for planting real
trees, in real life. Your productivity could actually contribute to saving the planet. What more could you want? App blocks and focus modes limit the dangerous and discreet
push notifications. Now app design is
a very aware of how distracting push
notifications are, and they take advantage of this. They take advantage
of our impulse to pick up our
phone, to check it. We have phones so we
don't want to miss out on the news article or the
social media posts, and it benefits them too. The longer you
spend on their app, probably the more money
they're going to get, so they want these to work, they want these to
grab your attention. The problem is, once we
get these notifications, we get sucked into what I
call the black hole scroll. Twenty minutes later we realize we've jumped from
app to app and we've completely lost our focus
and our productivity drops. Take back control of
these notifications. Jump onto your phone and edit
the notification settings. Out of sight equals out of mind. Hearing a notification is just as distracting as
going onto your phone. Put your phone in another room. Put your phone on silent mode when you
really want to work. This brings us onto
productivity law number 7; manage screen time and avoid
the black hole scroll.
9. Techniques for Productivity: The last couple of lessons
have been about removing distractions and taking things away that capture our attention, whereas these next few
lessons are going to be around some handy tips and techniques to help us optimize and increase
our productivity. So, the first one is setting a daily goal or a
non-negotiable, one thing you absolutely
must get done that day. Having a clear plan
helps you prioritize your tasks and sets out a
clear vision for all the day. Another technique is an
implementation intention. It sounds really good, but it's basically
just a posh term about when and
where we will act. We'll come onto how we can plan our time a bit better
in the next lesson. But for now, just know
that simply planning out when and where we will
carry out certain behavior, doubles our chance of
actually doing it. Surfing the edge. This is a technique to resist an initial thought or impulse
to carry out an away move. For example, you get
this impulse to pick up your phone or start scanning your e-mails or
distract yourself. Challenge yourself and see
if you can surf the edge. See if you can
resist this impulse for five or even 10 minutes. Then if you still
really want to do it after that, then do it. But I can almost
guarantee if you resist that initial impulse, then it will pass
and go away and you probably won't want
to do it after that. Labels and language. Be really careful how you speak about yourself
and speak about the type of work
that you're doing to other people and to yourself. Labels are cognitive shortcuts
to make sense of complex, vast amounts of information. While they can
save lots of time, they carry a lot of weight
and associations with them. If you label some of your
work as boring or repetitive, or if you label yourself
as lazy and unproductive, then it will probably come true. You act out the stories
that you tell yourself. So, jump back to our
previous lesson. Label some of your
work as great work. Start talking about yourself as a productive individual and your behavior will follow suit and become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Re-framing. Re-framing
simply means changing the way you are
viewing a situation, changing your thinking
about a certain situation. If we lose our
productivity by avoiding discomfort then we need to change how we view
in that discomfort. Discomfort is just a
negative interpretation of a neutral situation. Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Good quote there from our
boy, William Shakespeare, but it's very true and we need to use that
to our advantage. We have the power of thought, we have the power of
autonomy over the situation. So, we need to start
exercising it, stop flipping around
the situation that you're struggling with, challenge instead of fret, exciting instead of scary, psychological self-development, instead of psychological
self-harm.
10. Managing Time: Managing time. Now, you can't be productive without managing your time effectively. When we don't have a clear plan or clear timings in place, then precious hours slip away to seemingly simple tasks and we lose so much time
to procrastination, avoidance, and distraction. In line with our previous lesson about shaping our environment, I keep this hourglass here as a constant reminder
that time is short, time is limited, time is gold, thus time is running out. However you want to say, it just primes me to act. Now, I find nothing more motivating than the fact
that we have a limited time and there's not much more we
can do about it other than choosing to spend it wisely and with care,
planning your day. Now I was really cautious
designing this course, I didn't want it to be all
about time management, but if we want to get more done in less time then we simply cannot avoid the topic of
managing your time effectively. It may be boring but it's
absolutely essential. "For every minute organizing, an hour is earned",
Benjamin Franklin. A boy Benji has a point here. The fact that if we spend a
little bit of time planning, it actually saves us
so much time with our work because we have
a clear instruction of what we need to do. Now, I'm a really
indecisive person so if I start the
day without a plan, then I lose so much time to procrastination
thou doing things that I don't want to do. Having a clear plan at the start of the
day or at the start of the week gives me a
structure of what I need to do. I just get on and do it and it takes the decision out of it. It takes all the
doubt out of it. It also doesn't allow me to
be productively unproductive. Our brains will do this as they are tuned to coordinate events. Plan your week. Every
week on a Sunday, I take 10 minutes out of
my day to give myself a massive head-start
for the upcoming week. I engage in something
that I call SYLOS; sort your life out Sundays. Now, you can call it something else if you were a
bit sensitive but I find this really helps me get into gear for
the week ahead. What I'll do is I'll figure
out what I've got going on in that week with the
tasks that I really need to get done
and how many hours, each of the tasks are going
to take and I'll box them into my calendar and book them in like I would do a meeting. Now, yes, things change throughout the week
and you need to adapt, but by booking them
into like a meeting, you figure out what you
need to be doing and when, and you wouldn't cancel
on an important meeting. You're not going
to cancel when you book in these important tasks as well even if they are
small tasks and sometimes, especially if they
are small tasks so they don't stay on
your to-do list forever. Timeboxing simply means boxing in blocks of work
into your calendar. A little like you book a
meeting in for an hour, you might book a block of
working for half an hour, an hour, two hours. Giving yourself a set time
to get something done actually drives
you into action to get it done and stops
you messing about. This utilizes something
called Parkinson's law. Your work expands
to the amount of time you give yourself to do it. If you give yourself
too long on a project, you'll find unnecessary
things to do and you will distract yourself
and end up wasting that time. Elon Musk, someone I'm
sure no one could argue is a productive man illustrates
this point really nicely. "If you give yourself 30
days to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give
yourself three hours, it will take three hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions, and potentials." He also comes through with
another brilliant quote on this, really similar, that "Stop being patient
and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my
10-year plan in six months?" You'll probably fail, but you'll be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going
to take 10 years." These are such brilliant quotes and it's such a good point. Stop giving yourself
forever to do something, stop allowing something
to take the whole weight, the whole day, the whole month
when it doesn't need to. Book in how much time
it's going to take, and then get it done
in that period. I've included a couple
of resources including weekly and monthly planners when you can write
down your goals, track your progress, and plan out your week if you're someone who prefers it the
old-fashioned way and write it down on a bit of paper. But now what to do when you
have planned your hours in, and how to get the
most out of them? Productivity equals
quantity times quality. How do we hone in
on the quality part of this equation and score big without having to compromise on the quantity part and
work silly hours? Now your brains are not
designed to work eight hours a day non-stop with no
breaks in-between them. Our brains fall in and out of attention at an
incredibly fast rate. Rather than fight and
then fatiguing our brain, let's use this
principle of intensity. Treat yourself more like a sprinter rather than
a marathon runner. Now sprinters need
intensity and recovery. Let's focus on the
intensity part first and go through a few
different tip techniques. I'd like you to start trialing out and find which one
works best for you. Power hours; 100
percent for one hour, it seems a much
better proposition to me than 50 percent
for two hours. Same output half the time. Now start to play around
with different ratios of intense periods of
work to short breaks. For example, try out
the 60 to 10 rule; 60minutes on, 10 minutes off. Then maybe you want to drop
this to the 45 to 15 rule, or even the famous
Pomodoro Technique; 25 to 5 rule. Your attentional capacity
drains throughout the day so maybe aim each day to do
a couple of each of these. In the morning, you
might want to do two 60 to 10 rules, a couple of 45 to 15s, and then some Pomodoro
techniques of 25 minutes on and five minutes off in the afternoon to
finish off your day. It makes you work knowing
you have a short break that you deserve after
intense focus periods. Also, acknowledge
Pareto's law in this. Twenty percent of efforts
bring 80 percent of outputs. You get most of your achievements
from intense bouts at max capacity rather than long bouts of split
and poor attention. This brings us on to
productivity law number 8. When you're on, you're on.
11. Cognitive Enhancers: Now let's hit the
recovery part of our equation equally
as important. Sprint is neat,
breaks to rest up, to recover and refill, but it's really important
in these critical periods we don't open ourselves up
to our destruction redlist. In this five, 10 or 15 minute period that you have
off, what do you do? My number 1 tip would be to
avoid the black hole scroll. Avoid the thing that's
going to most capture your precious
attentional resources and do something natural. Maybe you could go outside, try some breathing exercises, or even go and grab
a drink or a snack, just something that's going to make you feel like you've had a reset and then you're ready to go again for your next period. Productivity overkill. There's this weird brag amongst entrepreneurs and
it's romanticized on social media about working 16 hours a day and then
coming back and sleeping for four hours and not
getting up at 5:00 AM again and you start the
process all over again. Looks great from the outside, but it's just not
sustainable and doing this may actually
damage your productivity, the one thing that
you're doing it for. Now, I used to be one of these people who bragged about how many
hours they worked. I'd say, look at me, I
work all these long hours. I work harder than
you and you have more free time to do what you enjoy and do what
makes you happy. Look at me, I'm
superior. I'm winning. Stupid. Now, I've actually
found there's a limit, and once you exceed this limit, you kill your productivity. Researchers found
that once you exceed 55 hours in a working week, you actually become
less productive. You're more open to distraction and the quality of
your work goes down. Now the real brag is getting
more done in less time. You work to live, you don't live to
work so it's so important to work
on the quality, but also make sure that the
time that you have off, you've rested and ready
to go again and you're not damaging the quality
aspect of your productivity. Refueling. Now refueling may be another topic,
another conversation, perhaps even another lesson for another day but I
simply cannot skip past these points as you're not
going to be able to get the most out of these techniques or the most out of your ability, unless you get the basics right. Do things that boost your
energy, not drain it. Time in nature,
regular exercise, healthy foods, meditation. Then the biggest magic
pillar of them all, you can take all
the new tropics in the world and facial
tablets to enhance your brainpower but you're
not going to get the most out of them or the
most out of yourself, unless you get a good
amount of sleep. Now this is something
that's often overload and not
seen as essential, something we can skip
past if we're too busy. But sleep produces BDNF and HGH, things that develop, repair, and protect our brain cells. Put really simply, they
make us more intelligent, they make us think clever. Exercise has a really
similar effect. Now your physical health goes hand-in-hand with your mental health and
cognitive ability. What you do away from work has a massive influence on who you are and how you perform in work. This brings us on to
productivity law number 9. Treat yourself like
a high performer. When you're off, you're off.
12. Behaviour Change: In its simplest form, when you strip everything back, the goal of this course and
all the tools, techniques, and acts within it is to
create behavior change. A whole lot of
intentions without any action will not
close the gap between what you say you
will do and what you actually will do so I cannot emphasize this point enough
you need to take action. Now you would likely take
action in the short term. This is based off motivation, and motivation is great
to get you started, but it's temporary
and it fades away. The reason I made
this course is to create long-term productivity, and if you want to be
productive in the long run, you need to be consistent. Sorry for throwing all these
different equations at you. But it turns out in my
world of productivity mass, quite a few things add up or multiply to equal productivity. My final one for you is productivity equals
intensity times consistency. The goal is to turn your new behavior into a
habit, so it's automatic, so it's the new norm, and you've replaced your
dodgy autopilot with a new one that's
going to take you in the right direction
more times than not. Positive reinforcement, reward yourself for carrying
out certain behavior. This is going back to Psychology
101 here with Pavlov and his dogs associate in a certain behavior with
a reward therefore, you're going to be
more likely and more motivated to carry out
that certain behavior. For example, you might want to reward yourself
with a nice meal or a Netflix episode every time you carry out your daily
plan productively. Now a word of warning, external motivation
and reward are fantastic to get
a behavior go in, but it can lose its power if that reward is taken away
because you might have only been motivated to do the behavior to seek the reward. Now how to get around this is to try to seek pleasure and reward intrinsically from feeling good about yourself for carrying
out your intended plan. Intrinsic motivation is the most powerful form
for long-term commitment. Here's a couple of positive reinforcement
techniques that aren't going to get
you too hooked on the reward and allow
you to fall into that extrinsic
motivation trap where it takes away from long-term
consistent behavior change. The first one is box-ticking. It's so simple but taken
a box after you've completed an
activity feels good. Our dopamine levels go up, as does our
motivation to want to repeat the activity again, and then really similar to
this is habit tracking. This is something I got from the ultimate book on habits
and behavior change, James Claire's Atomic Habits. Habit tracking simply means
we track our behavior and tracking our behavior makes us more likely to stick to it. Which is why I want
everyone to get involved in the class project
who's really serious about long-term consistent productivity behavior
change because put simply tracking
your behavior makes you more likely
to stick to it. Now the other end of
reinforcement, punishment. So loss aversion tells
us that we're more motivated to avoid losses
than we are to seek gains. We'd rather avoid losing 10 pounds than have the
chance of gaining 10, even though they're both
way out to be the same. Now winning something feels good but losing something
feels way worse, and although this
isn't very rational, what this means
in our context is the punishments are more
effective than rewards. Let's look at a couple of
simple techniques we can use. Commitment device, a way
to lock yourself into a plan to avoid doing something you really
don't want to do. If I don't do x, then I will do y. Now this punishment wants to be something that you don't
really want to do, but it's not going to kill you. For example, if you have
an unproductive day, how about finding yourself
into an investment fund? Yes, you lose money
in the short term, but it might benefit you in
the long run from saving more money and hit another
one of your goals there. Or if you have an
unproductive day, the next day you have to wake up and go for a run in the morning. What it'll do is
it'll feel rough, it's hard work going for a run, but it boosts your BDNF
and other hormones and indirectly makes
you more productive. It even makes you look
and feel better at the same time. Price pact. One of my favorites here and certainly not for
the fainthearted, but if you're really serious and hardcore about your
behavior change, then use the burn and money trick that I got from
the book Indistractable. Nir Eyal talks about his want to exercise more regularly
and consistently. What he did is he got $100
bill and kept a lighter next to it that he said
he was going to burn if he missed
his daily workout, barring any emergency or if
he was actually too busy. Three years later and the
bill still remains intact. Make your punishment worse
than the actual behavior, and you're going to be more
motivated to avoid losing. Identity and language, so a bit of a repeat from
our previous lesson here, but this is so powerful
and it's so important. We're intrinsically
motivated to carry out behavior that aligns
with our identity. We behave accordingly
to what we are, and that depends on
how we see ourselves. If we label ourselves as
productive, as focused, as someone who gets things done, what do we think our behavior
is going to look like? What are the negative
labels holding you back? What's your new positive
desired identity story? Label it and then act like
it, it's that simple. Habits and routines. These tools, techniques, and reinforcements applied
over time will eventually turn your new behaviors into a
habit so they become easy, they become automatic,
they become the norm. This is the goal of
creating a habit. It takes the
decision-making out of your behavior so you just get on and do it and your output becomes a direct result
of your daily input. "We first make our habits then our habits make
us." John Dryden. This is going to be
difficult at first, I won't lie because it's outside the norm and we often
avoid discomfort. This is new, so it's going
to be challenging at first, and I can't tell you
exactly how long it's going to be until you
turn it into a habit. On average, it takes 66 days, but it can be as
little as two weeks or it could take
as long as a year. Everyone's different so
they respond differently. But what I challenge
you to do is try and stick out
this for two months, and if your productivity
hasn't even increased by a
little bit by then, then you can come
and find me for 100 an apology and an explanation. But I'm confident that
if you act and apply on some of these lessons that we've taught throughout this course, then your productivity is going
to change for the better. This brings us onto
productivity law Number 10. Create habits and an identity
for long-term consistency.
13. Productivity Laws: I wanted to finish off
this course by summarizing the key takeaways and the productivity laws
in a concise manner. They're easy to remember and they're easy for you to apply. But I can't emphasize
this point enough. All these laws,
all these lessons, all these tools, techniques, and hacks are all
going to be pointless unless you take action on them. I really didn't
need to state this, you need to take action now. Too many people say
they're going to do something or
say they're going to start tomorrow and they never actually get
around to doing it. Great ideas without
execution is pointless. Be a doer, not a sayer. Now, if you can start
applying some of these laws and lessons
into your life on a productive daily basis and make them part
of your routine, then your output and
the opportunities that are going to come with it
are going to increase. Now here's a quick recap
of the productivity laws, the commandments for
productive life. Productivity law number 1, multitasking is a myth and
damages your attention. Productivity law number 2, do the hard things first. Productivity law number 3, reframe discomfort and fear is a signal to move
towards not away. Productivity law number 4, spot when you're being
productively unproductive. Productivity law number 5, optimize your environment to supercharge your productivity. Productivity law number 6, sterilize your workspace for intense periods of deep work. Productivity law number 7, manage screen time and avoid
the black holes scroll. Productivity law number 8, when you're on your on. Productivity law number 9, treat yourself like
a high performer. When you're off, you're off. Productivity law number 10, create habits and an identity
for long-term consistency. Thanks so much for
granting me one of your most precious
resources, your time, and spending it
on this course in these lessons and
listening to some of these laws and techniques around the all important
topic, productivity. I really hope you've enjoyed the course and found it useful. I really hope that time
is going to pay back so many times over
for enhanced output, productivity, attention, and hopefully increased
creativity as well. Now, I'm super excited to hear your feedback
on the course, how your getting on
with the class project, and also to see how these
laws and lessons have been applied to different niches
in different industries. Please do let me
know in the comments below and keep me updated
with how you're getting on. If you want to catch up with me after this Skillshare lesson, then check out my Instagram at mindframeperformance
where I post regular tips on mindfulness, attention, high performance
and productivity, and also check out my website,
mindframeperformance.com. I'm super excited to hear
how you get on with this, how your output is changed
day-to-day for the better, so please do let
me know and get in touch and I hope
to see you soon. I've been Jack Brown,
thank you very much.
Jake Brown, Performance Psychologist
