Productivity & Time Management: Mindsets and Tools

1. What Will You Learn?: Hi there. My name is TJ. Good terms. And since 2009, I've been lucky enough to work with thousands of people from all over the world. As a coach and educator. I worked with people ranging from high-performers such as Olympic gold medalist and billionaire CEOs to entrepreneurs, regularly employed parents, students, and more. In this course, I've gathered some of the most effective productivity mindsets and systems that I've learned and taught over all those years. And when all those people, in the first section of the course, you'll learn things like how to overcome the emotions that might hold you back from performing at your best. Maybe even at all. You'll learn how to increase your two types of motivation. How to build self loving self-discipline. That won't just make it easy for you to apply self-discipline when you need it. But that might even make it enjoyable to do so, you'll learn how to create a productive identity that will make more productive by default and lots more. In the section about optimizing yourself and your time, we'll talk about things like how to regulate your stress levels to perform at your best in situations where you're either feeling too lazy or too stressed out. How to find the right work speed for yourself. How to find and focus on the things that will make the biggest difference in your productivity. How to create more work rest, balance, and so on. And in the section for productivity systems, you will learn all about how to create an effective prioritized to-do list. How to use calendars in ways that most people haven't thought about. How to automate, outsource and exchange work. How to create the kind of support that will supercharge your productivity and lots more. In other words, this course is packed with knowledge and strategies that are sure to improve your productivity significantly. And I'm not just speaking on behalf of my many clients. I also use these techniques in my own life and they've helped me get through university degrees in six years, which includes a double-major bachelor's degree and advanced teaching degree, and a master's degree in education. They've let me travel the world while writing and publishing my books. They've helped me create online courses seen by tens of thousands of people. And they've enabled me to run my own successful coaching and speaking business while doing all of that, as well as explore hobbies like photography, becoming a TV actor, play sports and more. This stuff works. If you would like to make it work for you. All you have to do is finish the course and apply what you learned. So what do you say? Should we get started? 2. Mini Sprints To Get You Started: The first thing I want to share with you is a simple but very effective little technique that can help you get going on those days or with those tasks where you really don't feel like getting started with what you have to do. The technique is called misprints, and it's a universal technique that you can combine with basically everything else that you learn in this course. So just in case you're having a hard time actually practicing what you learned. I figured it would be a good idea to share it here at the very beginning. Misprints are very simple. Whenever you feel lazy, demotivated, or any of these other casual emotions that might keep you from doing what you should think of. Something simple that you can work on for just 15 minutes. Something where it doesn't matter much how well you do it, and that doesn't require too much energy or focus. So if, for example, you choose to work on catching up on your emails, well, focus on the emails that don't matter or that would be so easy to answer that you could do it in your sleep. The ones where you don't have to worry about typos and so on. Or maybe just focus on clearing out all the spam e-mails or the emails that don't require an answer at all. And if you go for the day is to clean your home, start with something like folding laundry or picking stuff up from the floor. Something that doesn't require a lot of preparations are thinking. During these 15 minutes though, even if the task you give yourself isn't very important, give it your all. Do as much as you have time for and try to make that as much as possible. The goal of the sprint isn't to make a huge dent in your to-do list. It isn't to do high-quality work. It's just to get your work juices flowing is to create a slight sense of accomplishment. Technically speaking, it's to get the reward system of your brain to activate and create a feeling of accomplishment. Even if it's just a very tiny one. Because that feeling of accomplishment will trigger your brain to release a small amount of, let's call them happy hormones. And when it has released enough, you'll often find that you're suddenly motivated enough to get started on your real work. We all know that it can be hard to motivate ourselves to do something that will take hours of our time and require lots of our energy and focus. But we are, after all, somewhat adults. So we should be able to engage enough self-discipline to do a measly 15 minutes of work, right? And when we use this technique, we tend to end up with one of two results. Either we end up working past those 15 minutes and get into our real work. Simply because those initial minutes was all we needed for our brain to release enough happy hormones to get us going. Or the 15 minutes end, and we still don't feel ready to do any of our more demanding work. In that case, pick up five to ten minute break and do something that you actually enjoy. This will usually be all you need to muster the self-discipline to start another 15 minutes sprint. And those five to ten minutes aren't long enough that you should lose all of the happy hormones that you've built up. At the absolute worst-case scenarios, mostly at least people end up having to do three or four such misprints over the first hour to hour and a half before the effect kicks in. But even then, they have at least gotten some work done. Just make sure you're well-hydrated, fed and if you can have gotten enough rest to get the full effect of this. And that goes for basically everything you learned in this course. Because if you're lacking in those departments, even the best productivity techniques in the world will lose some of their effectiveness. 3. Overcome Fear of Failure: The first thing we have to do if we want to create a productive mindset, overcome our mental blocks, and remove frustration, disappointment, and fear from our performance and productivity is to make sure our expectations of ourselves or realistic, if they aren't, will often experience a fear of failure, judgment, or humiliation. And that won't just keep us from being productive. It will often make us not even start or finish our tasks. Is the source of these emotions tend to be unrealistically high expectations of ourselves, our performance, a result. And when we don't live up to those expectations, we punish ourselves by thinking that we're not good enough, smart enough, skilled enough for whatever. Think of it this way. If neither Mike or Molly have ever played basketball before, and I challenged them to shoot 10 penalty shots. How they'll feel about the results afterwards will completely depend on how many shots they believe they should make before they start. In other words, on their expectations of themselves. If Mike thinks that he should probably be able to make most of their shots. And Molly thinks that she has no idea how many shots she might make. And that is perfectly realistic that she might not make any at all. Which one is most likely to feel good about the result at the end. Molly will probably feel fine even if she misses every single shot because that was her expectation. And if she makes one or two, she'll probably feel pretty good about it. While Mike is likely to feel frustrated, embarrassed, or something along those lines, even if he makes almost half of the shots he takes because he felt like he should be able to make the majority of them. And this comes into play in everything we do. Whether we've done it 1000 times before or it's our very first time. If we have unrealistically high expectations, we are likely to feel disappointed, frustrated, humiliated, and so on. So how do we set correct expectation for ourselves? Well, the only thing we should focus on is what we've proven to ourselves in the past that we can usually do basically the average performance and results that we've produced when we've done this thing in the past, that is what we can expect of ourselves today. And if we haven't done it in the past, we have to either set our expectations very low or try our best to not have any at all. As we get more experience and improve our skills, our usual result or performance is likely to improve little by little because we get better at it. And when it does our expectations of ourselves, we'll also start to improve while staying perfectly realistic. In addition to this, it's absolutely critical that we ignore any thought about what we want to be able to expect of ourselves. And that goes doubly for thoughts about what other people are able to do and what other people think we should be able to do. One of the main reasons people fear failure or poor results is that they're afraid that their effort or result will be judged by other people. And nothing is assure to create feelings of defeat, humiliation, and so on. Then to try to live up to unrealistically high expectations or that other people's expectations for us matter at all. When our expectations to ourselves or realistic. And we recognize that other people's expectations have nothing to do with our worth. We simply won't experience these emotions in these situations. If Molly is comfortable with the fact that it's perfectly OK and reasonable for her to not hit a single penalty shot. It shouldn't matter to her at all what Mike or anyone else thinks of her result. The fact that they set unrealistically high expectations for her is their problem and has nothing to do with her. 4. The 4 Levels of Excellence: A lot of people get caught up in making the things did you perfect or as close to it as possible before they stop working on them? Some say it's because they take pride in their work. While for others it has much more to do with gaining approval or avoiding judgment. But whatever the reason is, putting more work into something that necessary is one of the things that slow down or productivity the most. Get me wrong. I believe it's important to do our tasks well, but to invest time and effort, though, won't affect our results at all, is a waste of time and effort. So to avoid doing that while at the same time ensuring that our work has to quality, it should have to give us a result we want. We can label our tasks with the four levels of excellence. Because when we label them well, we'll spend less time worrying about whether our work is good enough and will stop wasting time by working harder on things. Then we need to. The four levels of excellence that we'll use to do this are unimportant, good, great, and perfect. The first level unimportant is when the quality of your work doesn't really matter at all. An example, it could be an email you write to a friend who won't care about typos, grammar, or really anything at all, as long as they get the information they need. The next level good is for when your work needs to not have any significant errors and do what it's supposed to. Such as maybe an e-mail you right to your new boss where you want to come off as professional and make sure they get what they need. The level of great is for when your work should be better than what people expected to be. At this level, you want to fulfill the requirements of the good level, as well as give them more than what they asked for or expected. In other words, on this level, you should over-deliver. In our email example, this could be to put extra work into it that solves a problem that your boss didn't expect you to solve. Or that delivers significantly more than what they asked for in such a way that their life becomes easier. And the level of perfect. Well, in most cases it's usually unobtainable. But theoretically, that should be work that is so well done that even the best professionals in the world couldn't do it any better. If you ever feel like putting a task in the perfect category, you should probably double-check your expectations for yourself. Because more often than not, you'll find that they are probably not very realistic. In my experience, the majority of our tasks fall into the good category. With the next big chunk in the unimportant category. The great category is usually reserved for situations where other people are dependent on the results we produce and or with their satisfaction is important for our own future results are opportunities. For example, I tried to make my online courses great because their success largely dependent on the ratings you guys give me. With great ratings, I will get enough people on it that it's worth it for me to keep producing courses. However, when I create the content for these courses, I start out by writing first drafts that fall into the unimportant category. These droughts or from my eyes only. And by the time that I'm ready to film, I will have made lots of edits, several complete rewrites, and even deleted some of them. And this is not because the initial work was too poorly done. That because that is a process that creates the best and result. This means that it would be a waste of my time to try to make them great from the very beginning. It's not until I'm just about ready to step into my studio to film the courses that I make sure the content is in the great category. Now, I can't tell you which of your tasks belong in which of these categories. But the more often you use this scale of excellence, the better you'll get at placing the right tasks in the right place. So as an exercise, start doing it right now. Think about what you need to do today or tomorrow and apply this skill to that. You'll quickly see which tasks you need to spend less time on. And that will instantly increase your productivity. 5. Create More Internal Motivation: Later in this course, we'll talk about why motivation isn't strictly necessary in order for us to do our work and be productive. But even so, we all know that feeling motivated is very helpful. So if we can be, we should be. Because when we actually want and even look forward to doing the things that we need to do. That work tends to feel easier and more fun. And it can even help us create better results too. So it's worth the time and effort to create a healthy supply of motivation for ourselves. So to help you do that in this video and the next, we'll talk about the two different types of motivation that we experience, which has internal and external motivation. And how we can generate more of each. Internal motivation is the motivation we experience when we enjoy or want to do something simply because we enjoy or want to do it. Well, we're not doing it for their awards that it will give us, but only because of our own internal desire to do it. This type of motivation tends to be both healthy and long-lasting. It doesn't rely on external factors which makes it more stable. And while it can dip at times when we're having a bad day or week. It can also last for an entire lifetime. Examples of internal motivation include things like going for a long walk because you enjoy the activity and the experience playing a sport just because it's fun and not because you're trying to win a trophy, cleaning your home because you prefer it when it's clean rather than messy. Exercising simply because you enjoy challenging yourself or learning a skill because it seems like a fun thing to do rather than to use it to make money or gain approval from others. For most people, internal motivation seems to kind of just appear on its own. They couldn't tell you when or why they started being internally motivated for the things they are. They just are. And that's perfectly fine. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't make an effort to create more internal motivation for ourselves, both for the things we already enjoy and those we don't. So let me share the three most common ways to increase our internal motivation. Just keep in mind that these won't work on all tasks all the time. But the more you do them, the more likely you are to increase your internal motivation. No matter how much you already enjoy a task. To make these strategies easy to understand, Let's apply them to the activity of cleaning your home. The first strategy is to find the fun, look for or create the fun in what you're doing. Even if cleaning the house isn't something you think is fun at all, there might be elements of it that you can make fun. If you're a competitive, for example, maybe you can time yourself or give yourself deadlines to beat on certain tasks. If you're creative, maybe you can find fun and creative ways to clean. Or maybe there's something you can include and the task to enjoy more such as if you'd like to sing, perhaps trying to make up songs about what you're doing while you're doing it. My hope, when we apply things we already enjoy doing to a task, our brain tends to transfer some of the positive emotions we have about those things to the task that we're doing. And that makes us enjoy the task more and increase our internal motivation for it. The second strategy is to look for the deeper meaning. How can cleaning your house be important to you as a person? Perhaps you feel a little proud of yourself if you become more organized. Or maybe you can turn cleaning your home into a meditation type of thing. Whatever meaning you can find in the activity, can help create more internal motivation. And the third strategy is to reframe your thinking, to change the motivating thoughts from your current ones that aren't motivating you much at all to something more inspiring. So if you're old reasoning for cleaning, for example, was so that your friends or family would approve of your home. Perhaps it will help to instead think about it as a way to practice being more responsible, organized, reliable, self-disciplined, or whatever else might make it feel like a more valuable activity. So to sum up, or internal motivation tends to increase when we find ways to do or think about an activity that are more interesting, fun, or inspiring than our old ways to do or think about it. Your exercise for this is to think about a task you can do after you finish this course that you generally don't enjoy very much. And then apply 12 or all three of these techniques to it. If it doesn't work the first time, keep at it. Come up with new ideas and do it again in a day or two. Once you find the right idea, Azar, that your motivation for the activity will start to improve noticeably. 6. How to Use External Movitators: Now let's talk about external motivation. External motivation is when we want to do something in order to gain an external reward or avoid a punishment, but it's worth keeping in mind that research over the last many years shows us that focusing on rewards rather than punishments is a much more effective motivator for most people. External motivators can work well in situations where we don't have much interest in doing a task at all. If we, for example, don't really want to help our friend move. But they promised to treat us to a nice dinner or pay us for our time. We might decide it's worth helping them after all. We might even be excited about. The drawback of external motivators, however, is that they can kill off any existing internal motivation we might already have for that task. And one experiment, researchers gathered a group of children who all enjoyed making drawings during their playtime. The researchers then started to reward the children heavily whenever they made a drawing, thereby introducing an external motivator for the kids to draw. Even though the kids didn't actually need it. When the kids later were offered the opportunity to make drawings, but not offered any reward for it. They suddenly showed much less interest in the activity. They had lost their internal motivation for drawing because their focus has shifted from what they liked about the activity to what they could get for doing it. While you and I are no longer young children. The same mechanisms still exist in our mind. You might have heard or said something along the lines of, you know, this used to be fun, but now it just feels like work. This is usually caused by external motivators becoming too big of a factor in something that we use to be internally motivated for. There's no shortage of professional athletes who never play their sport again. Now if this stopped making a living from it, or creatives who suddenly looser passion for their art after turning it into a full-time job. The money, social status, or whatever else that motivated them externally, out-competes their internal motivation and they start to lose interest in the activity. Don't get me wrong. It's a wonderful thing if we can turn our passion into a job and I can speak from experience on that one. But to hold onto our passion in those situations, we have to focus at least as much on our internal motivation for it as we do on our external rewards. And preferably more. Because if we forget why we love doing the things we love, we risk losing that love. That being said, if you need to do tasks that you aren't internally motivated for, or even just need an extra boost to do something you usually love on those odd days where you don't. External motivation can be very helpful. And these external motivators can be both tangible and psychological. So they can be money, food, trophies, and so on. Or they can be bragging rights, praise from others, social status, or whatever other psychological phenomenon you enjoy. Which of them will work best for you depends on your personality. So feel free to experiment. And a simple way to play with external motivation is to make little deals with yourself when you need to do a task that you don't really want to do. Things like telling yourself that if you finish this task on time, you're gonna get yourself ice cream for lunch or whatever else. Sounds like a nice self given reward. And if you have someone around you who wants to support you, whether that's just a friend and accountability buddy, euro success group. And we'll talk about those two a little bit later in the course. You can also ask them to help you out by providing rewards that you know you'll enjoy when you show them that you've finished the tasks that you needed to do. 7. Create a Productive Identity: Another way to improve our overall productivity, which also tends to raise our levels of internal motivation, is to create a more productive identity for ourselves. And no, I'm not talking about some kind of superhero alter ego. I'm talking about how you think of and describe yourself, your self-image, if you will. You see our default way of describing ourselves influences our actions more than most people realize. If our habitual way of thinking about ourselves is that we are, for example, lazy and unproductive or a procrastinator. These adjectives come into play every time we need to do something productive. If we think of ourselves as someone who always procrastinates, for example, it becomes very hard to start a task early. Because not only do we have to then do the task and break our habit of delaying it? But we also have to do something that goes against what we believe is our true nature. You see, your subconscious mind will believe that things you tell it over and over again. And when it believes something, it will always try to make that belief true. So if it believes that your Lacey and unproductive, it will try to hold you back from being as productive as you can be. Simply because if it doesn't, then what it believes in stops being true and your subconscious doesn't like that. The good news is, though we can update these beliefs to something more helpful. It might take a little time and it will definitely take some effort. But once it's done, our subconscious mind will start encouraging and pushing us to live up to those improved beliefs. And when it does, we'll experience a lot more internal motivation, trust, and belief in ourselves. So how do we do it? By making a conscious choice about what kind of identity, what kind of self-image we want to create for ourselves by changing our own unhelpful descriptions of ourselves to something more helpful. At the same time though, we have to be careful not to tell ourselves obvious lies, because those are much harder for our mind to accept. So if Nina wants to change her thinking from, I'm a lazy person too, I'm a productive person. It won't be ideal for her to just switch those words out with each other. Instead, she should tell herself something that is or at least easily can be true, while at the same time being much more helpful. So she might change, I'm a lazy person to, I'm becoming a more productive person. When her identity is that she is someone who is becoming more productive person. Her mind will more often encouraged her to be more productive today, then she was yesterday, simply because that will fit its beliefs. And it's not an impossibly huge step from one end of the scale to the other. And even if that's just 1% more productive every time she thinks this, it will be only a matter of time before she's built up enough experienced, becoming more productive than it used to be, before she can clearly see that she has become a fully productive person. So here's your exercise. Think about how you described yourself. Ideally, make a list of the most common words you use to label yourself. Don't censor the list at all at first, just write it. When you feel like the list is complete. Take a look at which of those words aren't serving you, which are holding you back from being more productive. Once you've identified them, replace them with something more helpful and positive. Something that tells you that you are becoming more of what you'd like to be. Then keep repeating that to yourself and challenge yourself to do something a little more like that than you used to. Every time you get the chance. It is not important that the steps you take our big, at least not at first, all that matters is that they take you in the right direction. And in case it wasn't already obvious, this technique won't just help improve your productivity. This can be applied to any part of your self-created identity that is not helpful to you. 8. Self-Loving Self-Discipline Makes It Easy: Okay, So we've talked about overcoming some of the fears that might hold us back are two types of motivation and how to create more of each and even on building a more helpful identity. And while these things are important and wonderful, The truth is that they won't always work every time we want them to. And when they don't, our productivity will usually depend on our self-discipline. But when I say self-discipline, what comes to mind for you? Does it have to do with forcing yourself to do things you don't want to do. Or maybe to be strict with yourself, to shame or mentally beat yourself up until you give in. Or maybe even to focus on all the bad stuff you'll suffer if you don't do what you know you should do. These are some of the most typical answers I get when I ask people what self-discipline means to them. And these tactics are not just wrong and potentially harmful. They're also usually very ineffective. At least in the long run. Self-discipline shouldn't be a negative or painful thing. And we definitely should not try to create it with threats or suffering. Doing so will only create negative associations with both the task we need to do. And we'd being self-disciplined. And that is likely to make us try to avoid both in the future. So instead, self-discipline should be about connecting to our big picture. Goals are higher desires are long-term plans. It should come from showing ourselves enough loved to be willing to do something we don't want to do right now, because we recognize that it will be good for us to do it either today or in the long run. You see, it's a lot easier to do the things we don't feel like doing. If we remember why we want to do them in the big picture, why we should do them for our own sake. Why they, or the act of choosing to do them is important to us. Because even if we don't want to right there and then bringing our thoughts that big picture goal is likely to make it a lot easier to do that. When we're feeling lazy and don't want to exercise. It will be a lot more motivating to focus on our big picture goal for working out. Then to try to make ourselves feel bad about not doing it. If we're feeling shy or anxious in a social setting, will likely start engaging with others more if we think about our desire to make friends or find a partner and the positive emotions that come along with that. Then if we beat ourselves up for not having those things now or not being good enough or whatever. When we don't feel like doing our dishes, tapping into our desires, be the kind of person that has a clean home. If we have that desire, will likely work better than shaming ourselves. That being said, we'll still sometimes not actually want to work out, talk to a stranger or clean our dishes or whatever else it is that we're trying to apply our self-discipline to. And that is the difference between generating motivation and generating self-discipline. Because with self-discipline, we can still do what we should do despite our disinterested or demotivation in doing it. And that will be a lot easier when we're generating what we call self loving self-discipline. Rather than try to use forceful or negative self-discipline. When you create self loving self-discipline, you show yourself appreciation. And it is significantly easier to do something we don't want to do when we know that it comes from a place of love for ourselves rather than a place of force, judgment, fear, or similar. This will also help you create more positive associations, both the activity and the concept of self-discipline. And that makes it more likely that you'll feel good about doing these things or using self-discipline in the future, because it increases your internal motivation for them. So here's your exercise to start practicing self loving, self-discipline. When you know you should do something that's important to you in any way. But that you don't feel like doing at all. Think about the big picture. How does the activity move you closer to your core desired? Why will it help you get to where you want to be? How will it help you become more of the person you see yourself as in the future? Why is it important to find the right questions to ask yourself that will help you tap into how doing the task you don't want to do. We'll demonstrate self-love or create more of something good in your life. And once you find the answers, focus on them and go do the activity, whether you feel like it or not. Because always remember, you don't have to want to do something in order to do it. 9. Big Picture Thinking Helps Discipline: Okay. So you've tried all the things we've talked about, but nothing seems to be working because you're having one of those extra super slow lazy days went out. Well there's one more little trick, the many find useful. And it's to ask yourself the simple question, what's more important to me? The time it will take to do this task or the rest of my life? Now I'm sure this question is easy enough to answer correctly if we're talking about something major, such as, you should prepare for the job interview of your dreams or not. But most people don't realize that it's almost as important and more insignificant situations too. Because you see even the most mundane activity that it itself in an isolated incident won't have a direct impact on the rest of your life, can still have an indirect impact on it. Some examples again, are more obvious and others. So just the fact that if you choose not to exercise because you're feeling a little lazy, that choice is enforcing the habit of not exercising. And the more you don't exercise, the more likely you'll be to skip future workouts to. But what about something less obvious? Let's say, for example, that you don't feel like doing your dishes. Not doing your dishes today might affect you tomorrow when you don't have any clean ones. But odds are that he won't really matter at all even a couple of days after that, right? Well, only kind of the dirty dishes might no matter at all. But the choice you make to leave that task unfinished might matter more. Because every time we actively choose to not do something that would be good for us to do. We strengthen the part of our identity that believes that we are the kind of person that doesn't do that. Things that are good for us. If we do this often enough, it becomes a solid part of our identity. Whether we put it into words like we discussed earlier, are not that being said. I am not insisting that you always have to do everything you should. I certainly don't and I don't think I know anyone who does. Well, we want to tip the scale toward doing the things we should do the majority of the time. Because if we choose to do things more often than we choose not to, that majority is what will influence our future the most. And the more often we do this, the easier it will be to make that choice again and again in the future. So by suffering a little extra today, by doing that thing, you're setting your future self up to have a much easier and much more productive life. So as often as you can, when your motivation is gone and your self-discipline is struggling, ask yourself the question, what's more important to me? The time it will take to do this task or the rest of my life. 10. Optimize Your Performance: In this video, I'm going to say the word arousal a lot. So let's make sure we agree on what that means. So things don't get awkward. Most people use the word arousal for things sexual in nature. But to oversimplify a little psychology, it's used to describe how our emotions affect our energy levels. For example. And motions like nervousness, excitement, happiness, stress, anger, and so on give us higher arousal levels, more energy. It feels like while our arousal levels tend to be lower when we're bored, sad, apathetic or similar is enough, right? Also in psychology, there's something called the urine Dodson law, which says that increasing our arousal levels can improve our performance up to a certain point. But after that point, when our arousal levels get too high, our performance starts to suffer. Again. To put this in simpler terms, if you're a little stressed, nervous, excited, or any of these emotions, when you go to do something, you'll tend to perform better and be more productive than if you are completely relaxed, ward or in a very neutral emotional state. But if you get too nervous or stressed, you'll perform worse and be less productive. No simple graphical representation of this phenomenon looks like this. And this can help us improve our productivity. Because if we want to perform at our best, we don't want to be too relaxed and we don't want to be too worked up. We want it to be just but of course, we can't just decide to be the right level of arousal and have everything magically work out. Because as you might have noticed already in your life, are emotions usually don't change just because we want them to. We can however, influenced things like our surroundings and our actions. So when we realized that our arousal levels needs some adjusting, we can make choices that might help us do just that. If we are too relaxed, for example, to the point of being indifferent or board with what we're supposed to be working on. We can add things to what we're doing that might help increase our arousal. Personally. For example, I often put on music that I love and sing and dance along with it while I do boring physical tasks like cleaning the house. Or if the task is more mental one where I need to keep my brain focused, I might activate my body by bouncing my legs on the floor or whatever I can do though won't interfere with my work. Or since I'm a very competitive person, I might add some excitement to the situation by introducing an element of competition, such as trying to beat a difficult short-term deadline for my task. Or maybe competing against someone else who's doing a similar task. Activities like these tend to increase our pulse and release dopamine, adrenaline endorphins or any of the other hormones and neurotransmitters that get our brain and our body a little worked up. In other words, if our arousal is too low, we can often increase it by supplementing the work we're doing with something that might excite us. As long as that thing doesn't directly interfere with our ability to do the work we're supposed to be doing. And if our arousal is too high, if we're too nervous or stressed out or frustrated or whatever, we choose activities or stimuli, they usually help us feel more relaxed. For some people, this includes things like meditation, putting on classical music when they work and maybe go for a quiet walk or talk to someone they love on the phone or stuff like that. Others find that physical activities, such as strenuous exercise hops and burn off some of their worked up energy. Whether that's just about getting down on the floor to do push-ups until they collapse or doing a full on workout. Sometimes, if our arousal levels are way off, it can benefit us to take a break from the work we're doing. And instead focus on self-care for a little bit until we get our arousal levels to the level we want them on. In many cases, you'll find that even if you have to take a 15 minute break from what you're doing, you'll often finish it more effectively and with better results than if you force yourself to work at it while your arousal levels were too far to either end of the scale. What works for people varies depending on their likes, dislikes, experience, and habits. So you have to figure out what will work best for you to adjust your arousal levels. And your exercise for this is simple. Take a few minutes to come up with some ideas for things that might help you get your arousal levels up and some that might help you reduce them. Make sure to find things that you'll be able to do while working on the kinds of tasks that you often work on. And that won't just be distractions that help you procrastinate. And four days when things are really out of whack, it can be good to have a couple of ideas that force you to take a break from your work as well. Once you get good at this, you will be able to regulate your arousal levels fairly effectively most of the time. And that will improve your overall productivity on tasks that you either find too boring or too stressful. 11. Find Your Work-Rest Balance: A lot of people believe that if they want to be more productive, they just have to spend more time working. But both science and the experience of high-performers tell us that that's not necessarily true. Don't get me wrong. In most cases, someone who works for ten hours will get more done than someone who works for five. But that doesn't mean it's always the case. And it's definitely not the case that they'll always get twice as much done because it's not just a time we spend on something that matters. It's how much focus we have, an effort we're able to make in that time. If we don't let our mind and body rest and reset themselves regularly, our productivity will suffer. An odds are that a person who works hard for ten hours without taking care of himself at all, will be outperformed by the person who works smart for five hours. My course on productivity techniques goes more in depth into this if you'd like to have further down the rabbit hole. But the key to creating a good work rest balance is to listen to your body, take care of your basic needs. And by basic needs, I mean to get enough rest between your work session to stay well-hydrated and nourished. Make sure you drink more than enough water and no coffee or energy drinks are not good substitutes. Make sure you feed your body with nutrient rich meals instead of easily available junk food. And do what you can to get the sleep you need as well as fit other enjoyable things than your work into your day. And if you can try to get a good amount of fresh air and sunlight to all of these things influence our productivity more than most people are aware of. And when I say listen to your body, I mean, take breaks when it needs it. If your mind, for example, starts feeling sluggish, That is your brain telling you that it needs to recharge, rest, or reset a few of its processes. And it can't do that if you keep using those processes. So take a break and focus on something that is very different from the type of work that you're doing. Because except for sleep, that's about the best way we have to maximize the chance that our brain can recharge and reset the tired parts of itself. But it's not just your brain that needs this. If, for example, parts of your body starts hurting after sitting for a long time, that's your muscles telling you that they need to be moved or put into different angles. So get up and move your body. Or if it's the other way around and you've been moving a lot and your body is telling you that it needs some rest, sit or lay down and rest, and preferably give it some fuel, some nourishment. Ideally though, you should try to beat your body and brain to the punch and give them what they need before they start to complain. And research shows us is that about 50 minutes of work followed by ten to 15 minute breaks is the best way to do that for most people. As I've found that this type of worker them makes it a lot easier for people to stay fully focus on their work for those 50 minutes of work. And those who follow such a routine through their workday tend to get more done than those who don't take breaks regularly. In other words, even though you might work fewer minutes, then someone who isn't taking any breaks, odds are that you'll get more done than them. In the big picture. Your body and brain needs variety to function at their best. So as you go through your day, make sure you give it to them. If you sit all day I work, please don't sit all day at home. If you do a lot of repetitive motions, our work, make sure you do different kinds of motions as well as rest during your breaks and afterward. Work smarter, not harder, and take care of the things that help you stay productive. When you do, your productivity will increase more or less immediately. 12. The 80-20 Rule in Productivity: The 80 20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, was discovered by Italian Vilfredo Pareto in 1906. When he discovered that at the time, 20% of the population of Italy owned 80 percent of its resources. It has since been applied to business economics, farming, even personal relationships, and yes, productivity as well. The concept of the 80 20 rule is that most of our output comes from a small part of our input. Or to put it a little more simply, about 20 percent of the effort we make creates 80 percent of the results we get. But please don't get hung up in those exact numbers. It isn't actually true that 20 percent of our effort always creates 80 percent of the results. But it is true that some of the things we do matter a lot more than many of the other things. If you, for example, need to clean your house before guests come over for dinner, it's far more important that you clean the rooms. The guest will actually be n, such as dining room or bathroom, then that you clean the garage and your bedroom. But for each such obvious example, there are lots less obvious ones to. Most people don't apply the 80 20 rule to the things that actually matter simply because they don't have the information that they need in order to do that. A lot of small business owners that I helped with their business, for example, have little to no idea where most of their customers actually come from or what specifically it is a makes most of their customers choose them over their competitors. So they end up spending on equal amount of time on things like their Instagram, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, mailing lists, sales websites, or wherever else they market to and find their clients, but have no idea which one is actually making them the most money. And this leads them to spend a lot of time on things that don't actually generate any results. If they instead spent most of that time on the things that do, they would likely increase their income significantly. Most of the things we do can be broken down to a series of smaller tasks. Cleaning the house, for example, can be broken down into which rooms we have to clean or into things such as dusting, vacuuming, cleaning, washing. Once we know which of these specific tasks make the largest impact on our overall result. We should prioritize those tasks and focus most of our time and energy on them. When we do, we'll often find that we can even remove some of the less important tasks or just in them once in a while instead of every time, either of these things will save us time and energy, boost our productivity, and do that without reducing our results noticeably. Now, since I don't know what you do and what you'd like to be more productive add, I can't really tell you which of your tasks are more important than the others. But the good news is that it isn't too hard to figure out most of these things on your own. In fact, there's a very simple three-step method that will help you do just that. Step one, make a list of the things that you regularly need to do that take a significant amount of time. Step to break those things into their smaller tasks. Step 3, determine which of these smaller tasks have the greatest impact on your result. In some cases, you might have to experiment to figure this out. And in that case, try doing one thing and not the other, and see how much progress you've made toward your overall goal. Take a close look at which results each of the smaller tasks create, or simply make notes as you go to see which of them seem to have the most effect. Once you have that information, you can start focusing your time and energy on the things that will create the biggest results and save lots of time on the things that hardly matter. This will also make it clear to you which tasks should be placed at which level of required excellence, like we talked about. And it can even make it easier for you to place tasks in the right place and your prioritize to-do list, which you'll learn about soon. 13. Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast: The US Navy Seals have a saying that goes slowest, smooth, smooth as fast. And this saying isn't just applicable to warfare. Slowest mood, smooth as fast, alludes to the concept that it is much better to do something right the first time, then to rush it and make a mistake. For a Navy seal, that mistake might mean bodily harm for you and me. It usually means so we either have to go back and work on the same tasks again to fix our mistake, which is very bad for our productivity, or that our results suffer. A lot of people rush things when they have a lot to do, feel stressed, pressured by others to finish a task quickly or similar. And while that might work well enough, sometimes if the task is something they're particularly good at. The truth is that in almost all aspects of human psychology and behavior are precision suffers. When our speed increases. It is, for example, much easier to accurately hit a target with a rock. If you throw the rock with just enough force for it to reach the target, then if you throw it as hard as you can, perhaps unless you happen to be a baseball player or similar, I guess. You'll remember far more of what you've read. If you take the time to read every word and consider every paragraph, then if you rush through the tax as fast as you can, you'll even experience more of the taste of your food if you eat it slowly, then if you drop it down like a hungry, hungry hippo. So when you work on something, find the paste and let's you give it the time that particular task needs to be done right? The first time. When you do, you'll not just find that your results improved and that you save time in the big picture because you won't have to go back and redo work you've already done. But you'll also notice that the more you do that task at the right speed, the faster you can do it. And that will improve your productivity over time drastically. This is why athletes and musicians, and basically anyone learning a new technical skill, do things slowly at first. They practice the technique over and over again at lower speed than they ideally want to do it. That way. Their body and brain have a chance to learn how to do it correctly much more efficiently. It creates muscle memory or a thorough understanding of the technique much faster than if they were going too fast and making more mistakes. And as our body or brains understanding of how to do the task correctly improves, we can do the task faster and faster without making mistakes. So whether you're doing something you've done thousands of times before or something you are doing for the first time ever, go at the pace that allows you to get it right more or less every time you do it. When you do that, your pace will increase gradually until you reach the maximum or necessary speed for that particular task. So remember, slowest, smooth, smooth as fast. 14. How to Avoid Parkinson's Law: Parkinson's Law actually started as a cheeky comment in a comedic essay back in 1955, but it quickly rose to fame and has proven to be very accurate. The law states that a task will expand to fill the time set aside to do it. And most students can attest to this often being true. Many students are across the world. Find that if they start working on your term paper three months before it's due, they tend to need those three months and maybe a day or two extra. But curiously enough, those who start a week before it's due usually only need a weekend, maybe a day or two extra. Now, that doesn't mean that if two people work on the same project and one spends two months on it, while the other strands two days on it, that the results will be of equal quality. This is not a video about giving yourself less time to do things to do them better. It is a video about not spending more time on something than you actually need to. Because when you do, you'll often find that the task itself just seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes. And this happens simply because we tend to keep adding things to our tasks. When we notice that will be done way ahead of the time that we're allotted for it or thought we were going to need. Let's say, for example, that you are put in charge of planning a weekend retreat for your workplace. And you give yourself two months to do this. Even though all you really need to do is book a hotel conference room and maybe a team-building coach from somewhere. Now if you get those things done in the first three days, and then stop thinking about the task altogether because it's finished. That's great. And you are correctly avoiding Parkinson's Law, which is our goal here. But for a lot of people, in a lot of cases, that's not how things tend to play out. Instead, they keep thinking about and tinkering with the plans for the retreat. They talked to their colleagues about it. And suddenly one of their colleagues has an idea for the retreat that they themselves haven't thought of. And they feel now that they should add it. Because after all, they have time to or perhaps they think that spending three days and the preparations can possibly be enough because the cytosol two months for it. So they figure they forgot something or it's not gonna be any good. And they start brainstorming new ideas. And over time, the retreat grows in complexity, becoming unnecessarily large and complex, until they're hosting an event so difficult and busy that they need to get help with it to get it all done. If we aren't able to let go of a task simply because it took less time than WE or other people think that it should take. Parkinson's law come into effect and we're likely to make up more work to do. Student who thought her term paper would take a month to write, but who skillfully finished at it in a week can easily experienced this and start to obsess over it. She might edit and edit it again. Delta t can be any good because you wrote it so fast. Maybe even end up starting over rather than turn it in early or just forget about it for the next few weeks. Someone who believed it would take eight hours to clean the house will often be convinced that they must have forgotten to do something if it only takes them four. And then they keep plucking away or things that don't matter. Instead of getting some well-deserved rest. It is, of course, perfectly fine to start a task early and with more time to finish it, then you need, in fact, when you can, That is a great way to do things. But when you do finish it early, what do you expect it to or not? Remind yourself or Parkinson's Law? A task will expand to fill the time set aside to do it. If you let it. And that will slow down your productivity significantly. So don't let it. When the task is finished, it's finished. Put it aside and focus on the things that aren't. 15. About The Next Videos: In this section of the course, I'm going to share a few overarching systems that will help keep you on track with the things you need to do. Not all of these are about improving your productivity in the moment. In fact, a couple of them add a little bit of work to your schedule. But by using them, you will discover that your overall big picture productivity and results improve. These systems will help you never forget about important tasks. They'll make it easy for you to plan out your workflow. So you always know which tasks should be done next. And you'll be more in control of everything that you have to do. You'll also learn a couple of ways to create mutually beneficial agreements with other people that will help everybody get things done more efficiently or receive helpful support, motivation or inspiration. So please take the time to set up the systems that I'm going to share with you. If you're not already using them. Once they're set up, they will stop requiring more than a few seconds of your time here and there. And they will increase your productivity. 16. Your Prioritized To-Do List: If you don't already have a prioritized to-do list, It's high time you make one for yourself. And the basic version of that should look something like this. And you don't need to scramble, by the way, to copy this down in the resources for this chapter, you'll find a downloadable version of all the types of lists that I'm about to talk about and show you. Over the years, I've found that three columns or three levels of priority, is the best way to go for the vast majority of people. But if you do have an extraordinarily busy life, you can add more if you need to. And those who have daily repeating tasks that they might need to be reminded to stay on top of, might find it useful to add a fourth column for those tasks that they get into the habit of checking every day. Now, the numbers over each of these columns represent how high of a priority a task is. So column one is for tasks that are important and urgent. These are the tasks that you have to do and that have to be done before anything else. Column two is for tasks that are important but not urgent. The things that have to be done, but it's okay if they have to wait a little while before you get to them. Column three is with things that are unimportant, but still great if you can do there your extra credit work where life will be fine if they don't get done, but a little better if they do. Some people also like to prioritize tasks within each column. So they'll put their number one most important and most urgent thing at the top of column one, followed by the second most important and urgent thing under it and so on. For some people, it also makes sense to segment each column. So they might, for example, have a top segment for work, a middle segment for chores around the house and so on. Once this kind of prioritize to-do list is created, all you have to do is start working on your column 1 tasks. Whenever you start your work, once I column is empty, you move on to column two and so on. It's also smart to create the habit of spending a couple of minutes at the start of each day to look at your entire list. If you have an everyday column, make sure to check that off to begin with. Then check all the other tasks and see if any of them should be moved to another column. Or if you've forgotten to remove any that you've already finished. Once you get into the habit of doing this stuff, it will usually take you less than a minute to do. And most people find that it saves them a lot more time than not throughout their day. Whether you use the attached files or not, I recommend you put your list online so that you can access it from all your devices wherever you are. Google Docs, for example, is a great way to do this. I have my list set up so that I can open it in two clicks, more or less from anywhere on my phone, on my computer, my tablet. So whenever I think of a new task to do, I can immediately attitude list almost no matter where I am and what I'm doing. And that helps me not forget it. A list like this will help you stay on top of what you need to do. And when you need to do it, it will help you work on the tasks that are actually important and that will have the most to say for your results. Rather than to get distracted by unimportant ones. It will ensure that you don't forget to do things that are important to do. And it will even help you get rid of useless and unimportant tasks and reduce feelings of overwhelm by giving you basically a simple step-by-step work path to follow. And if you work with other people and everyone uses this type of list, it will also help everyone be on the same page when exchanging tasks. I've shared this with many companies over the years. And now it's common practice for them to label work tasks with a 1, 2, or 3 when sending them to other people so that everyone involved instantly know exactly how important and urgent task is. And on a personal note, I am ADD, forgetful, easily distracted, and I always have lots and lots of things to work on at the same time. But this list has kept me on track for years. And no doubt being a key tool for me while I was building my career and my life. 17. Productive Ways to Use a Calendar: Another digital tool you should have a habit of using is an online calendar. And not just because it will help you keep track of your appointments. But there are a couple of other very hopeful things it can do for you too. Again, there are simple three options online, such as Google calendars. And we'll let you keep an eye on your schedule from any device at any time. These calendars also have the option of sending you alerts to remind you of things. The alerts can be set to send anywhere from several days or weeks before an event to the second the event starts. And if you're like me, who might very well forget your appointments and are not in the habit of manually checking your calendars several times a day. Please use these alerts. You can also set up different types of events in one calendar. And that will both color-coded the entries and give you various options for alerts. It will also let you automatically share only certain types of events with others, which can be helpful if you work with a team or for personal appointments that you might want to share with your partner or family or friends? Personally. I have a work calendar, a private life calendar, a couple of calendar and more, all in the same Google Calendar. So it's right there on my screen. Now, most people who use calendars use it to schedule their appointments. That's great and we should definitely do that. But in addition to those one-off appointments, we can use a calendar to remind ourselves of repeating tasks that are spread out in time. Is he, There's something you only need to do. Let's say once every two weeks, it can be easy to forget about it once in awhile. And even if you put it into your prioritize to-do list, your brain might start ignoring it, since it's something you've read every day, but you don't do every day. But if you haven't in your calendar and your calendars and your notification about it at the appropriate time. You're all set. Personally, I have such entries in my calendar for things like cleaning my fish tanks, which I do every two weeks for when to send out my newsletter and when to put the trash out on the curb for pickup, which I do once a week each and of course, every important anniversary with my wife. So I never forget one. And I also use it to remind me to do my monthly checklist, which we'll talk about in the next video. If you don't know how to use online calendars or do the things that I've talked about in this video. All the providers have simple tutorials for you. Usually all you have to do is Google, how to use Google Calendar or something like that. And you'll find plenty of step-by-step instructions that will teach you all about it. 18. This Checklist Keeps You On Track: Many people, myself included also find it incredibly useful to have a checklist for things they only need to do every now done. For most people, a monthly checklist will be the way to go. But some of my clients have used anywhere between two weeks and two months Aster interval. You'll have to figure out how often you're important. Once in awhile, tasks need to be done and decide what's best for you. To make this checklist easy to understand. I'll use my own as an example. On the first Monday of every month, my calendar reminds me to complete my checklist. I pull up the checklist and it shows me things like sure, updated discount codes for my courses with my Facebook group, update my accounting for the previous month, check that my websites are up-to-date, clean my mailing list, and so on. And I also keep monthly non-work tasks on their things such as checking the tire pressure and oil in my car, charging the security cameras on her house, pay bills and so on. Stuff that I only need to do once in a while. Some people keep two different checklists, one for work and for home, and a repeating calendar alert for both. While others do just as well with one list. Since all of these things are things that I only need to do once a month. I don't want them to take up any space and my prioritize to-do list, which I check every day. And this checklist, combined with a repeating monthly alert in my calendar, helps me not forget them and not waste time by giving them any of my attention when they don't need it. Now it's fairly important that all of these tasks can be done more or less on the same day so that you don't have to keep going back to this list every few days. Because if you do, it will often just end up being a second to-do list. And that can create a lot of confusion, make you miss things, or require extra time for you when you have to keep switching back and forth between your to do list and your checklist to find what you're looking for. So figure out what the best timing for these tasks are for you. So they only actually have to go through this list once every month or two weeks, or at whichever interval you need it for. Once you have created this, setup, a repeating alert in your calendar that will remind you to finish the checklist at the right time from now on. And again, if you don't know how to do that, just Google something like how to set up repeating alerts in Google calendars. And you'll find plenty of guys. It is for most people less important to have this available on all devices. But since you're already setting up the other systems, we talked about that way, you might as well do it with this one too. So this checklist will ensure that you stay on top of those tasks that are easy to forget because you do them so rarely. And staying on top of your tasks is the best way to ensure that you get them done when they need to be done. Because if we fail to do our tasks when they need to be done, they'll often end up taking up more of our time. We're at the very least, a lot more of our energy when we have to scramble to correct our mistake later. 19. Automation And Speed-Ups: Automation is a tricky topic to make a video about, because what people can automate and how they should do it vary a lot depending on what their tasks and circumstances are. So I'll have to give you a general description of how this can work and let you do the work of adapting it to your own situation. That being said, if you need any help with it, feel free to reach out to me and ask or better yet, post a question about it in my Facebook group where you can get both my help and the hope of others who might be in the same situation as you and have a little more experience. Anyway, technically speaking, some of what I'm about to tell you wouldn't be considered automation by those who write dictionary. But we're not going to be that pedantic RE, the kind of automation I'm referring to is about creating something that will help you not have to repeat the same tasks over and over again. Or at least cut down the amount of time and energy that you have to spend on those repeating tasks significantly. Let me give you a couple of simple and hopefully fairly obvious examples of how this can work. If your job, for example, includes answering a lot of questions via text. Automation can be to create a document that contains all the most common answers you give. So that instead of having to write the same answers over and over again, you can simply copy and paste texts that you've already written, and if necessary, adopt it slightly to that particular person. Of course. Automation can also be to setup tools to help take things off your plate completely. So if you, for example, have a mailing list, you might want to use software that automatically adds people's emails to that list from your website, your Facebook page, or wherever else people sign up for it, instead of you having to do it manually. It might also be to get a new piece of equipment that might take tasks off your hand. An example would be self-driving vacuums, those little circular robots, which are increasing in popularity because they save people a lot of time. And if your budget allows, it might just be worth the time you'll save to get something that will do tasks for you, whether it's machine or software or whatever else. In other words, there are lots of ways ranging from free, too expensive, that we can automate, where at least speed up many of our repeating tasks. To figure out which of your tasks you can automate, in which ways are you have to do is make a list of the tasks are you repeat regularly? Then spend a little time to figure out how you can automate or speed up each one of them. Use your creativity, search online. Talk to the people you know, who might do the same kind of tasks or asked for suggestions in my group or anywhere else. And you'll likely come up with a few ideas for systems or habits that can help you. Because almost all of us have at least a couple of things. We can do this with. An every minute we save on repeating tasks is an extra minute of productivity earned. 20. Social Outsourcing of Work: Outsourcing is a popular term in business, and in most cases it usually means to pay someone else to do part of your job for you. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about here. Well, at least is not the only thing that I'm talking about here. Because hiring someone to do your tasks for you can be a very good way to improve your productivity if your budget allows for it. There are, for example, lots of online personal assistance called virtual assistants, who don't charge a whole lot for their time. And there are plenty of services in most places that will do things for you if you just pay them. So there's cook for you and deliver your food. But these kind of things aren't for everyone, especially when it costs more money than it makes. Which makes a lot of people preferred to do the work themselves. So what I'd like to talk about is more of a social type of outsourcing where you seek out help and assistance from people in your life and exchange work for work. We just have to make sure to do it in the right way so that it actually reduces the time or effort was spent on our work. Rather than increase it. We should never be afraid to ask for help when we need it, when we're stuck on a task or when we simply don't have the time or energy to get something done. But there's also nothing wrong with asking for help, even on the things we can get done well enough on her own, but that we might not want to do or that we know that we won't do very well or efficiently. The only thing that's important is that we exchange the right kind of work with the right kind of work. And of course, though we ask the right people for help and in the right way, we should of course, not expect or demand that others will do our work for us just because we asked nicely or where's the boss? But if we can create a win-win situation, most people will be more than happy to help. And in most cases, this will be to exchange work that we're not particularly good or efficient ad with the work that we are. An example of this is when I asked my friend who is great with cars if he would be willing to come make a to him simple repair on my car for me. And in exchange, I'll do a professional edit on the next video for his YouTube channel for him. Or when I ask my colleague who enjoys writing sales pages to write the landing page for my new course. And in exchange, I'll use my photography skills to get a new professional level headshots. Or even a stranger in my Facebook group who's a graphic designer. And he would love to create graphics for me and exchange for a coaching session or two. When we can exchange work that we're not very good or efficient at. With work we both enjoy. Hand master will not just reduce the time and effort we have to put in to get something done. All US, they get better results and enjoy our efforts more too. So take a minute to think about which upcoming tasks you have. That it might be good to outsource or someone you know, and figure out if there's anything you can offer them in return. If it feels like a win-win for both of you. Azar, that you've now created a new collaborative relationship, which will benefit both of you, both this time and whenever you have similar tasks to do in the future. 21. Accountabilibuddies & Success Circles: Even the most self-motivated and discipline people out there will usually benefit from having an accountability buddy or a success circle. Simply put, most of us benefit from having someone in our life that keeps us accountable for doing the things we should do in the time. We should do them. When this is just one person that checks in with us regularly. I like to call that person and accountability buddy. You know, it's my buddy who keeps me accountable. When it's several people all checking in on each other. It's often called a success circle or a mastermind group. Workplace. Our boss is usually supposed to be her accountability buddy, and our colleagues are supposed to be R successors. But for many, unfortunately, the boss only shows up to check in when something is wrong. And their colleagues are too focused on themselves to be of much support. So unless you are one of the lucky ones who already has an amazing workplace or private life where this already happens automatically, you should consider creating it yourself. All you have to do is find someone who would like to exchange mutual support and encouragement, motivation and accountability. Someone you can set up agreements with for when and how you check in on each other. Someone you will regularly exchange information with about what you're working on and give each other whatever support is needed. In most cases, it's a good idea to have a set time every week, or maybe every two weeks if you'd prefer. Where you talk about what you've done since the last time and what you'll be doing between now and the next conversation. This conversation can just as easily take place over the phone or video chat as in-person. How you do it is completely up to you and the people you do a width, of course. In addition to that appointment, and it often also helps to have habits for how we check in with each other to make sure everyone's on track. This can range from an occasional text message or phone call to things like having to send each other proof of work every few days or so. It really is up to you and the people you do this with to decide what your routines for this should be there or no one size fits all rules are that matters, is that everyone involved feel like the value they get from this is more than worth the time it takes to do it. Because being held accountable for doing what we should do by someone who is there to support and encourage is a sure-fire way to feel more inspired and more motivated. And I'm sure you can see how that will elevate your overall productivity. The point here is to have one or more people in your life that actively support you. Someone who keeps you on track, someone who keeps you accountable. Someone you have to explain yourself too, if you don't do what you're supposed to do. But without the fear of getting fired or yell dot, someone who can give you the type of encouragement you need to be at your best as often as possible. And of course, an exchange, you give them the same things back. I have had many successful goals and accountability buddies over the years. And I am 100% sure that I would not be where I am today, if not for them. 22. Work Marathons - Not For Everyone: All right, so the first thing I have to say about work marathons is that they're not for everyone. Some people simply don't like them. Others have a hard time getting the full effect from them. And many have lives that make it more or less impossible to do them. So consider this chapter a bonus suggestion, something you can use if you decide that it might work for you. And when you see that he won't have a significant negative impact on other things in your life when you do it. The great work marathon is a significant amount of time. And by that I mean days, not hours, set aside to basically only do one. The goal is not just to get a lot done in that time, but to block out everything that can distract us from it. In addition to actually having a life that makes this possible, it requires two more things. Self-discipline and the opportunity to more or less isolate ourselves from distractions and most of the outside world. When I wrote my first book, for example, I was about 80 percent done for several months. And I couldn't quite seem to get the last bit done. So I borrowed my uncle's cabin in the middle of nowhere where there's very little cell reception, no Wi-Fi, no TV, and no friends or family to distract me. I went there for four days and except for sleeping, eating, and going for the occasional walk, I did basically nothing but work on the book. And after those four days, it was ready to be sent to the publisher. And recently, the last time a wife went out of town for a few days, I cleared my schedule, unplugged the TVs, logged out of all social media, unplugged our Wi-Fi and made sure I had all the supplies I need it so I wouldn't have to go to the store. Then I buckled down and spent those days doing basically nothing but work on one of my courses. In both of these examples, I got more done in those days than I had in several weeks combined before them. Now, it is important of course, that you do a lot of self-care during these marathons. If you force yourself to work every minute of the day and just eat whatever junk food is quick to make and easily available. And you don't get enough sleep and you replace water with coffee and energy drinks. Well, even if you are able to do the work every minute of your waking day, the results will almost always be very much worse than it should be. And most people will also end up getting easily distracted and not be very productive after all, when they don't take well enough care of their basic needs. So to get the most out of a work marathon, it's important that you get enough sleep. You take frequent breaks to clear your mind that you eat well, drink lots of water. And if your work involves a lot of sitting still and you move your body often. If you take care of your body and mind, your productivity will increase. Whether you're doing a work marathon were just working on extra hours. So at the end of a busy day. 23. Reflections For Increased Productivity: As you keep improving your productivity step-by-step, there's one very simple and even enjoyable habit you should create for yourself. In the evening. When you're done with everything you're going to do that day, take some time to reflect on the things you did and the choices you made. What helped you be productive? Did you use self loving, self-discipline, optimize your stress level or any of the other things that we talked about. How did it help you? What did you get done? What was important about the things you got done? In short, search through your day to find the activities. Thoughts are choices that helped you be more productive today then you might have been in the past. Doing this will usually have two effects. It will reinforce and improve the productive self-image that you're creating of yourself. And show you if there are any things that you could have done better today and that you should focus more on tomorrow. And over time, it will give you a clear idea of what works for you. It will show you which techniques, mindsets, systems, and so on, tend to work for you the most often. And that we'll help you with things such as applying the 80 20 rule to the productivity techniques you're using. And ensure that you can be even more productive with less effort in the future. While we can increase our productivity instantly with the help of many of the techniques from both this course and my other course about practical productivity techniques. Becoming genuinely automatically productive is something we do over time. And taking just a few minutes every day to map out how you're improving your productivity will shorten that time significantly. 24. Two More Helpful Tips: All right, Lastly, I want to share two more things that will help you speed up your journey to become more productive. The first one is to check out my course about personal productivity techniques and habits, which you'll get at a significantly discounted price if you go to productive dot TJ good turnitin.com. While the course you're now watching focuses on optimizing your thinking and your time. And as you know, putting in place systems that will help you stay on track and get the right things done at the right time. The course about personal productivity techniques and habits is a very practical course that will teach you techniques that will help you work more efficiently, overcome procrastination, and create productivity increasing habits. These two courses have been designed to compliment and support each other and improve on what you've learned in each. So go check it out if you really want to maximize your productivity. The second thing I'd like to suggest, if you haven't done it already, is that you come join my Facebook group centered communication by typing FB dot TGA or Thompson.com into your browser. While the name suggests that it's a group about communication, the truth is that it has grown into a community of people who help and support each other with all kinds of personal growth related topics, productivity being among our favorites. I also post free content in the group several times a week. And of course I answer every question that the members have for me. Also, if communication or social influence is something that interests you, you might want to check out some of my other courses too. If you go to courses dot json.com, you'll find a complete list of my courses and the links there will automatically apply the largest discount I'm able to offer. So go check those out. Finally, if you enjoyed this course and haven't already left a review for it, I would greatly appreciate it if you did that. When asked after this video, the review, you leave will influence whether other people sign up for this course or not. And that is a critical part of me being able to continue doing my job and produce more courses like these. Okay. I guess all that's left for me to say is thank you so much for watching. I absolutely love what I do and I'm honored and excited that you let me be a small part of your improved productivity. And if you have any questions for me, well, there's about productivity might availability for coaching or seminars or whatever else. Please don't hesitate to reach out via my Facebook group or my website at TJ go Tarzan.com.