Transcripts
1. Introduction - Making Productivity Work for You: I have a long-standing
relationship with productivity from working a full time ten hour
day job and making daily videos on YouTube
for multiple months. I know most of the
advice that people give, so I know most of the systems and I know most of the advice that a lot of people in
this field tend to offer. And in light of all of the productivity
advice and the systems that people offer
that allow us to squeeze more
business into a day. This class takes a step back and ask the very important question, how can we make
productivity work for us? And a lot of what this
is stemming out of is something that
happened in my own life, which you may be experiencing. That is where I would, I became very productive,
very efficient, and I got a lot of
work done which allowed me to fit even
more work into my day. So I got a little
bit more productive, so I fit more work in
and so on and so forth. And it became a hamster wheel of busy-ness that I
could never get out of. And God forbid, I take a day
off in a day where I'm not productive because then
all of that would just roll over to the next day and it'll be completely
overwhelming. And all of that momentum
would stop and stress would build up an add-on to the
next day and keep piling on. And it just kinda becomes
this hamster wheel of business that you
can't get out of. There is a fine line between you being a slave to productivity. You have to do it to survive making
productivity work for us. And out of that whole
experience that I had was born this
exercise of cutting through the noise and getting to the center
of it so that we can make all of this work
together and more importantly, make it work for us
because we don't want to remove the systems that
productivity offers, but we don't want to get
trapped inside of them. The process I'll be teaching
you in this class is a system of questions to ask ourselves that
refocus and kind of reset our productivity for
maximum effectiveness. And then once we figured
that out, once we, we kind of re-calibrate
and we make sure that productivity is working for us instead of the
other way around. Then at the end of this class, we will discuss a
way to streamline this whole process to
make it very efficient. And something that doesn't
cause friction in your day, something that just
becomes a part of their routine and it builds on itself, which will help you create
longer-lasting change and even more productivity. As for the project
of this class, I will discuss that later on. It's going to be some sort of a form of accountability
where you basically just take something
from this class and put it in the
comments and say, here's what I learned, here's how I'm going to implement it. Here's when I'm going
to implement it and then post the results of
whenever you accomplish that.
2. What is Productivity?: What is productivity
defining our terms? First, we need to define what
we mean by productivity. Because if we're not on
the same page with this, we are going to have
a very confusing time and you're gonna
have a hard time understanding what I mean. So the productivity definition
that I'm going to use is the rate at which
something is produced, especially output
per unit of labor. So for example, a kind of equation that we
can put with this is productivity plus two hours
of time equals four units. This is just
hypothetical example. So that's one set. Now, if we take
productivity there, we add more productivity, so we're more efficient,
more effective. Now we have productivity plus
two hours equals six units. So this is kind of a way of explaining the definition
of productivity. You increase your productivity
and then you have a greater output for the same
amount of time put into it. And it's very important
to distinguish this, that productivity is talking
specifically about output. What are you accomplishing? It's not what are you
doing or how busy you are. It's what are you
actually accomplishing. It's very, very important
and we'll discuss that a little bit later in
the class to make sure that we're actually
aligning ourselves with what is most important
to make sure we're accomplishing what we want to.
3. Misconceptions About Productivity: Let's discuss some misconceptions
about productivity. And the first thing
we want to look at is what is productivity not the Bayesian want to
grab here is that productivity is not
about or let me, let me rephrase
this a little bit. I believe that
productivity is more about what you do
versus how you do it. Strictly speaking,
from productivity, by definition, it's how
much output you have. And I think we would do well to categorize
productivity and how we use it off of what we're
doing with our productivity. Because productivity
is a tool for us to use it most effectively, not get stuck in it. We have to make sure that
we are using it correctly, using it on what is most important and what
is most needed. It's important that
we don't confuse simply doing lots and lots of things for being productive,
busy versus productive. And what this really
comes down to is efficiency versus
effectiveness. And this really changed my whole relationship
with productivity. Let me explain what I mean. So efficiency is
doing a given task, whether it's important or not, in the most economical
manner possible, means you do it very quickly. You get it done in a good amount of time for what it should take. Potassium normally takes six hours and you
do it in three, you were very efficient. That makes sense. Awesome. Effectiveness, on
the other hand, is when we do tasks, where we complete
tasks that take us closer towards our goals. And this is very, very important to remember that when you're dealing
with productivity, because productivity in and
of itself is not the goal. The goal is to use
productivity so that we are accomplishing things that take us in the correct direction. And most people get this
confused where they take productivity and they
make that the end goal, they make efficiency
the end goal. So they're doing
all of this stuff. They're being very busy, they're being very efficient. They're accomplishing
a lot of things. But what they are
accomplishing is not actually taking them closer
towards their goals. It can be very frustrating
for people because they will feel very accomplished and they are doing a lot of things, but they end up not
feeling fulfilled and that's kinda getting
off on it a little bit of a side, a side topics. I'm not going to go
there, but that is an aspect of productivity that can be very confusing
for people. Where they, they, they jump
into it and it's great. And then all of a sudden, it's not nearly as fulfilling. And so we don't want,
we don't want to get into that just yet, but let's, let's bring it
back here a little bit. Let's just understand that both of these are
very important. Efficiency is a huge
part of productivity, but this is part of
the focusing process. We do not want to
confuse the two, and we don't want to
use productivity to be efficient for things
that are not important. So being efficient, doing things in a very
economical manner, doing them rapidly is
completely useless if we're not attaching it to things that
are actually important. And most people tend
to get off into the weeds a little
bit where they they, they interpreted
busy-ness as productive and they end up not doing things that are
truly important to them. And so there may be
accomplishing a lot of things, but it's very few tile and it's very empty because it's not taking them closer to what
they want to be accomplishing. It's not taking them closer towards their goals
for their life, or for their business, or for their personal
life or whatever the case may be in that arena. It's not taking them
in that direction. So it can be, like I said,
it can be very confusing. Sometimes we want to clarify
that we want to make sure that we want to make
sure that we're using our ourselves
well in our time well, because we have limited
amount of this. And so if we're
going to do things, we want to make sure we're
doing the right things. And so that's what we're
going to cover here. In the remaining portion
of this class is the three questions
that we're going to use to refocus ourselves, re-center on what is most important and where should we be using
productivity at? Like, what should
we be using it for? As in like what is
most important to us and to make sure that
it's working for us. To make sure that
we don't get stuck in that hamster
wheel because it's a really scary place
to be like for me, that's very much what happened. And I completely burnt out. It was really
unfortunate because I could have gotten a lot more could've got a lot more done
if I hadn't burned out. So we want to prevent that. We want to make sure that
we're using ourselves as well.
4. Productivity Question #1: Question number one is MI, inventing things to do
to avoid the important, There's an aspect within all of us that we'd like
to feel productive. We'd like to accomplish
things we like to. We like to feel as
though we are moving in a direction because
progress equals happiness. And so we deep down, we know that if we're, if we're moving in a direction, it makes us feel better than if we're sitting completely still. This is a little bit
of a different topic, but I found a study on this
that was really interesting. Just to prove my point here. They put people in a room with absolutely nothing to
do except one object. And that object was
something that they could administer a small shock to themselves,
something that hurt. And they found that like
something around 70 or 80% of the people would rather sit
there in shock themselves, then do absolutely
nothing because they would rather
do something than nothing because that's
something made them feel as though they were
at least doing something. And so we really like to feel
like we're doing things. And it's kind of a bizarre
study obviously like I don't know why someone
would would would do that. But it proves my point. We'd like to do things like
to be moving in a direction. And so our minds are really, really good at deceiving
us into thinking that we're moving when
in fact we're not, or when we're moving in
the wrong direction. Let me give you an example here. Let's say that you
have a project that needs your full attention. This is like
priority number one. Big, massive, very
important projects. Something that it needs to
happen, needs to be done. Now the task isn't necessarily something that you
want to be doing. And because you
are a disciplined, mature adult, you won't just blatantly procrastinate on it. And so what we'll do is
we'll find something else in our lives and our environment
that needs to be done. It does, in fact
needs to be done. But it is not as important. And so instead of
doing nothing and procrastinating which our brains would very clearly pick
up on and be like, Hey, you're lazy, do something. Instead of being that
we will choose to do something else that
is not as important. We will choose to
do that instead of the big important task, the priority number one, doing that little task that
it needs to be done anyway. It makes us feel as though we
are still being productive. It makes us feel as
though we're moving in the correct direction
when in reality, that task, its only job is to distract you from what
you actually need to do. And it's a form of
procrastination, even though you
don't realize it. And this goes back to the
previous video, I believe, where we talked about
busy versus productive, and that's where those
two are getting confused. Let me give you a
real-life example of something that happens
to me all the time. So I make YouTube videos, obviously, I make
videos for Skillshare. I do quite a bit of video work. And a huge part of
that is writing video scripts, writing out. And they're very detailed because my editor needs
to know what to do. Now, writing that
script is hard work. It's a solid three hours of very intense hard work and
I really, really enjoy it. It's pretty grueling. It's very wearing on my mind. Let's say I'm
sitting down and I'm like, I need to
write this script. Alright, cool. Usually I'll sit down and
about ten minutes later, I'll look out the window
and be like, You know what? The yard needs to be mode. I should go mow the yard and I'll sit there
and I'd be like, Okay, I know I'm not
going to move the yard. That'd be I don't
need to do that. But then I'll come up with
ideas to backup that idea. So like I'll be
like, Okay, well, but if I move the yard, then it will give me time
to think about this. I'll have time to process it, kinda build a picture in
my mind of what needs to happen for the video script, and they both need to be done. Anyway, the yard has to be mowed and the script
has to be done. And since they both
need to be done, I might as well go to the art, might as well go
mow it because that will at least be better
than what I'm doing here. And there's a couple of
things that just happened here with that situation. One, I'm absolutely right. I do need time to
think about it. That will probably actually helped me build a picture of it. So there is an aspect
of it that is true. And the other aspect of this that you've probably
picked up on is I placed both of them at
the same level of importance. And I did that by saying, well, they both have
to be done anyway. It's like it's like
I'm putting them both on the same same place. I've important when they're not. And when we do that, we trick our brains into
thinking that they're equal. And then we're like, Oh,
well, they're equal. So why don't I just go to
do that because that would be better than doing
this when in reality, that is our mind kind
of deceiving us by, by making us feel
as though doing this little thing is
still being productive. But in reality, it's a way of getting out of
this other task. Maybe both of these things
do need to be done. But most important tasks
come first, always. And by asking this question, am I doing things to
avoid the important, notice how it demands
that we place a level of importance
on each task. And you'll notice that
there's really cuts through the confusion when our
minds are trying to find ways to get us
out of doing what we don't want to do or what
we know that we should do. This question will clear
up a lot of that confusion and it'll help us hold
that picture of node. This is most important. I need to use my
productivity for this. And it's wave refocusing and recentering that not
only will this question and improve your clarity and
help you avoid confusion, it will also dramatically help your productivity in helping you stay focused
because it will, it always helps align you
with what is most important. And you will actually
be accomplishing things that are taking you
in the correct direction.
5. Productivity Question #2: If this is the only thing
I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Here we go back to the
effective versus efficient. We want to be effective in that we are doing things
that are important, that are taking us in the
direction we want to go. And so it's again, it's
taking productivity. It's saying, alright,
this is not the end goal. This is a tool. Let's use it correctly. And so this question helps us answer and define that It's not, it's not how would we do
something necessarily, it's about what we do. And if you study the, I mean, like all throughout our
culture and society, if you find people that
are top of the line, like the people at the
top of their fields. You'll notice that they always, they always focused on what
is the most important. They don't care about, like a productivity hack for their
calendar on their phone. They don't care because
that's not big picture. That is not important. Like if you're going
to spend an hour trying to find the
perfect calendar, okay, it might save you
a little bit of time, but take that hour and do some
big picture like dreaming, like figure out
where you want to be in the next five years, craft a goal in that hour. That'll take you in a
wildly better direction. Then finding the perfect hack or finding this certain
way to solve this time management issue
that's going to save you 30 minutes for the next over the next couple
of weeks like that, that's not important
and we miss that. We focus on the time and we try to manage it in a
way that's perfect, that we get everything
into the day. But we miss the fact
that we have enough to keep us busy for
multiple lifetimes. We will never be able to manage our time well enough to do that. We need to set that aside
for a little bit and say, alright, time
management is great. It's very important.
But what is like, what is the task that
is the most important? And top achievers, you will
see this over and over. They lock onto that
and they go for it. And that is what they use. All this productivity and
everything, all these, these tools for in order to
get them there to that spot. And we miss that
sometimes because the tools are easier to teach than deciding
what is most important. And I like to ask people, would you want to spend your day doing things that
are not important to you? Well know, no one
wants to do that like that's pretty obvious. But without defining that at the beginning of
each day and saying, this is most important, this is what I'm going
to use productivity for. We make things, we make the urgent,
unimportant important. And notice how I
didn't say that. Like would you want
to do things that are not enjoyable to you? Important does not always
mean an enjoyable. So there are things
that you will have to do that are very important, but are wildly unpleasant. For me. That's when
productivity is the, is the most effective
and the most critical. Because if something is very unpleasant and
painful for me to do, if I can chop that
time and a half, That's a big deal,
very big deal. But again, if I know what's most important and I know
what I'm going towards. It really helps me to find that. It helps me filter out
the things that don't matter to me and I don't
need to spend my time on. And so just like
the first question, this one demands that we, we place a important target on our day and say
This is where I'm going today, this direction. And so then when
something pops up that is unimportant or that is urgent and his demanding
our attention, then we we aren't pulled aside. We aren't distracted
by that because we know when that pops up. We say, okay, is this no, that's not important
compared to where I'm going. And so we can choose
to avoid that unless it is something that
is important to that pops up. But the majority
of things that pop up demanding our attention, they're not always that important and usually
they can wait. And the other amazing aspect of this question is that
at the end of the day, this ensures that hopefully you've accomplished or at least went in the correct direction of what you're trying
to accomplish. That That's a big deal. Like we yeah. Like, especially if
you went to live with fulfilled and happy life,
It's a really big deal. Like if you can look back
over your day and be like, Okay, I went in the
right direction here. Like I've moved closer
to what is going to bring me like the most happiness and fulfillment in my life, whether that'd be
with your family or whatever like that,
that's really important. And building that
satisfaction in your day. It's really, really powerful and it builds on itself and its, yeah, I just love it, It's cool.
6. Productivity Question #3: Question number three is, what are the top three
activities that I use to fill time to feel as though
I've been productive. In the last question
that we had, we defined where we are going. We laid that out clearly of the aspects of what
am I moving towards? What am I going to use
this productivity for? This question helps us define the snags in the
obstacles in our way. And helps to remove
them out of, helps, helps declutter the pathway
to accomplishing that. These are the things that trip us up on our way to our goals and we have an uncanny ability
to do this in our lives. And like, yeah,
everybody does it. Shame in admitting that we have this tendency is just
an aspect of life. So try to be honest with
yourself and nail this down. And this again is another aspect of the first question
where we tried to find something else to
do that's a little bit better than this other task
that we should be doing. But I'll give you a few examples here to show you
what I mean by this. And then you'll,
you'll begin to see what I mean with this one. This is one of the
most important ones because these things can
slide under our radar. The filler tasks,
the things that we turn to to fill our time, like I said, to feel
as though we're being productive when in reality
we probably aren't. So I'd encourage you
to get a piece of paper and write some stuff down, put it on your phone, whatever, put it somewhere
where you can see it. Just like make a
list. We all do this. These things tend to
fly under the radar, the things that we are
filler activities. And so let's, let's define now let's figure
out what these are. Because yeah, they can
eat a lot of your time. And again, the worst part
is that it deceives us into thinking that we are moving in the right direction or that
we are being productive. And so it's kind of a
double whammy yet actually, just like the first
question, these are tasks that we probably like. We could be doing them
like they should be done. But they're just not the best
use of our time or they're just not the most important
or the top priority for me. I'll just give you
an example from my own life because I
don't know what yours are. But for me, it would
be video editing. Because with video editing, There's so many
different aspects of it. And there's so many
things you can do that you can never
quite make a video. Perfect. You can
never quite make it exactly how you
envisioned it. And so there are always
things to be adding. There's always tutorials
will be watching. What about that? I'm going to add
this new transition. It's going to be great. And it can be a huge
time suck for me. I, I can just tinker
around and just doodle and just work on this
tiny little thing for hours and it's really not good. But the problem is, it's editing is editing my video and it's taking me the
right it is, right. This is important. It's like no, Austin, you're wasting your time. You could have
accomplished this already. This video can be done. But instead, you've just been feeling the last day and a half with these little
meandering tasks on this thing that are
not that important. You know, nobody's going to
notice it doesn't matter. Yeah, For example, I shared this with my audience over there. But for example,
it's easier to spend 40 hours editing a
video than it is to spend 15 hours editing a video. And that's because
it's way harder to be disciplined and
actually get it done in a short timeframe than
it is to just kinda meander through it at your own pace and just kinda
do whatever you feel like. And so yeah, that's just
one example for me. Another one is
YouTube Analytics. So a lot of my audience is calibrated into the
analytics and a lot of that factors into how I
make videos and what, what types of videos I make and who I target with my videos. All that stuff is
very important. And just kind of a
killer time waster for me is like I just hop on the analytics and just
spend a fair amount of time just looking around and seeing all this stuff that
I what about this? Is this changing? Again, it's things that I
should probably be doing, but I need to do it consciously. This, this unconscious just kinda meandering along through. That's not what we want. And it's a time suck
it sucks in my time. And at the end of it, I'm like, man, yeah, got
some stuff done there. I've got some when in
reality, I didn't. I was just using it to fill time that I should
have been reading or researching a video or
doing things like that. And the way I combat
this, and again, I don't know how you're
going to approach this, but I have to make it conscious. Because like I said,
these contents to be unconscious things that
we kind of slide into. But we need to make a conscious. And the way I do
that for myself is I said infuriatingly
short deadlines. And it keeps me hop in. It always makes me,
it keeps me running, and it makes me
stay conscious and work hard to get it done in a certain amount of time because that timeframe is
very important. Otherwise, it will just extend, it will just keep growing. The project will grow in size
the more time you give it. It's called the Parkinson's Law, where the task you have will expand to fill the amount of
time that you give it. And it's very frustrating. But yeah, for me, that's what I have to do. And it really it's really, really helped remove those. But first you have to identify what those
three things are. And so for me, those are
my two biggest ones. There's another one,
but you kinda get the idea of what
this looks like. So we're going to keep
moving on to the next video, which is about how to
streamline all of this. How do we actually implement these things that it's not just, Oh, that's cool information
and we move on. How do we actually use this?
7. Putting it All Together: Putting it into practice. So now we're gonna take
these three questions and the aspects of efficiency and effectiveness
and all of that. And making productivity
work for us. And we're going to
streamline this process so that we can create even greater, longer-lasting
productivity. And something that
will turn into a habit that'll just,
it just happens. And so if you're curious
about how to do that, stick around for just
a hair longer, right? So our goal is not to be asking these three questions for
the rest of our lives. The goal is to consciously
ask them for a period of time until they become a
piece of our behavior, until they simply
become a habit. We begin acting
out of that habit. And then all we have to do is revisit them every now and then. And then they take very
little conscious effort and they just happen. And
that's what we're going for. And this is, again, this is the beauty of
productivity where you learn something and it
just becomes a piece of you. It just becomes a part of who you are and you act out of that. It's not like you
have to think, okay, what was this hack
thing that I learned? Like No, it's just like
you've implemented it long enough that
it just happens. And that's kinda
what we're going for with these three questions. And it's kinda, it's kinda building your
mindset the way we're gonna do that or the best
way for me that I did that was I grabbed
my phone and set three reminders
for me throughout the day so that they would
go off every single day, just spaced out evenly
throughout the day. And we want to do that for
an entire week and you can reword the question to make it fit for your circumstances. But for me, one of them is, am I being productive or just active, busy versus productive? It's kinda where
that's coming from or am I inventing things to do instead of
doing the important, I catch myself so many times doing that it just by
asking this question, it makes us aware
of these things so that when they
start doing them, we notice, for example,
like just before this, before I sat down
to record this, I was digging around
behind my bed trying to find something that I had
lost a long time ago, completely unimportant,
but I was just curious like if it
was still down there. Like like I just halfway
through that process, I was like, Why am I doing this? This is not important. I can be recording a
video right now like it, just like we notice. We notice it then it makes
us aware of those aspects of our lives and
we catch ourselves in those moments and
that's really important. And they again, had
happens automatically. And that's what we want
to train ourselves to do. So again, this is going to take a little
bit of setup to get your, get it all to do this, get
your phone to do this, or put sticky notes somewhere. But it won't take long and these things will start
happening naturally. So that's what we're gonna
do for the first question. After about a week, you can cut back maybe once a
day or every other day and then once a
week, once a month, like at that point, after a couple of
months and you've cut back to maybe one or
once or twice a month, you won't even need to ask
that question anymore. It will be a piece
of your identity, a piece of your behavior. And that's really awesome. No more mental, consciously thinking
through this question. It just happens. And that's when you take
your life to the next level, when you see something and it just it happens and you
just bang, you do it. There is no questioning, there is no, should
I be doing this? Like is this a good use?
It's just like bang. You just do it. And
that is the yeah, that's when that's when this stuff is really,
it gets really awesome. For the second
question, what we wanna do is we want to write out our tasks that we want to
accomplish in our day. Preferably, we would do this in the evening before we go to bed, planning out the day beforehand, or get up early, do it before the day begins so you have
time to think about it. You're not rushed,
that sort of thing. And what we wanna do is
when we have a list there, we want to go down
through that list and ask ourselves that question
of on this list, if I accomplish it only this,
maybe one or two things, but if I accomplish this, will I be satisfied with my day? No. Okay. Move to the next one. If I accomplish this, will I be satisfied with my
day and move down through there and star one or two that fit into that category. And then those become your
primary target for that day. And something that Tim
Ferriss says about this. He says you should never have
more than two that fit into that category because he says If they're actually
mission-critical, they're actually that important, then you shouldn't
have more than two. And so if you find yourself
accomplishing four or five, maybe it's time to step up the difficulty level a little bit or tackle bigger, bigger goals. And so for me, like for example, one of the things that
I wrote down recently was I was recording a video. I was like, alright, I will be very satisfied
with Monday. If I record this video
and then I wrote, I would be ecstatic. I would be unbelievably
ecstatic with my day. If on top of that, I was able to edit a
piece of that video. And I would've been perfectly satisfied
with the first one. And then I was like,
If I can take you to the next level, I will. So I have that goal and then
I broke that gold down. So you know, setup studio tests, camera quality Mike,
audio, things like that. Record the video, transfer the files, do sound engineering. Then you can break
that goal down, but it's still one, one goal. Hopefully
that makes sense. So you have one goal, but then you can
break it down into subset goals that
you can work on it, accomplish it a little
bit more bite-size. And I personally really like
that the two aspects of it are satisfied and ecstatic. And when you get the second one, man, like it's
just it's awesome. Sometimes. Sometimes I'll write down like, if I take two hours of solitude, then I'll be satisfied
with my day. Or sometimes like if I read for an hour straight in my day,
then I'll be satisfied. Like it doesn't have to be
these big, massive things. It can be something
small, it just something that makes you
satisfied and like, like you've
accomplished something that took you closer
to your goals. And that satisfaction
will help you attack more and take on more. Very, very cool. And here again, the aspect of not
doing more than two. You don't want to push
yourself too hard. You don't want to burn out. You want to find that
sweet spot between challenging and too easy. You want to find a
middle there where it stretches you but it
doesn't snap you. So for me I never do more
than two. Sometimes. Usually. Usually it's only one. And for the third question, we're going to set a reminder on our phone somewhere,
whatever, sticking out. Do something to remind
yourself at the beginning of the week to write down this
question and answer it. And the question for
number three was, what are the top three
activities that I use to fill my time to feel as
though I'm being productive. And this only needs to be
answered maybe once a week. And it's kinda attempting
to answer it the same way that you did the
week before or whatever. But approach it with a new
a new look each time a new, a new perspective as you go, those filler activities
will change. And so if you don't recognize
that and change with them, then you'll have to play
catch up a little bit. So usually once a week or maybe once a month or
something like that. It's good to just sit down,
kinda reanalyze, okay? Alright, what's
happening in my life? What are tasks that maybe
they should be done, but I'm maybe making
them a little too important, that,
that sort of thing. And like I said, it's very important
to keep this current. It's gonna be very
tempting to sit down and just write,
like I said, right, the things that you
did from last week or last month or whatever, it's like, Oh, well,
they're the same. Move on. But take a little
bit of time with it. Because my analogy for this
is if you don't change, like if you don't
keep focused and change and notice the
change that you're, that you're doing
because human beings are very good at
being lazy and we'll change it all kinds of different ways to try to get
back to what's comfortable. And if we don't notice that the analogy I like to
use is it's gonna be kinda like driving a car while staring in the
rear-view mirror. And you're going to crash and you're not going
to be effective or efficient or
productive or any of these other things if
you're doing that. So current information, it's very important that kind of streamlines the
whole process, gets it all in one place
into a system that will work automatically so you don't
have to hold it in your mind. It just notification pops up, you recognize it,
take 30 seconds, ten seconds, whatever
to think about it. And then you move on, and
then it becomes a piece of your life and pretty
severe behavior. And it's just who you are,
you move out of that. You have now taken your quality
of life to the next step. And as you need to come back, revisit and maybe
re-watch this course, download it, whatever, take notes and just put
them up somewhere. Revisit it if you feel
like you need to. I usually look over
these things about yeah, like once a month or
so just to just to keep refresh to like this, this system has changed so
much for me in my area of productivity that like to not revisit it is really
dangerous because of just, just because I see how
far it has brought me. Again, the coolest
part about all of this is that it will help take you in the correct direction of what are you accomplishing, what are you moving towards? It will help you
define that, but yeah, just analyze where you're
at and where you're going. Yeah, these questions
have helped me a lot.
8. Class Project: For the project
portion of this class, it's going to mostly be, are you going to
take action on this? Or is this gonna be
just another cool piece of information that you
learn and you move on. And it's just like,
okay, cool, whatever by because that's not, that you're not going
to actually upgrade your life until you begin
doing these things. And massive amounts of
action need to happen right away in order to
get that momentum moving. If you wait a week, is just not going to happen
like, you know yourself. If you wait a week
to try these things, It's just probably
not going to happen. So for the project, either,
there's two options. Either take one of
the three questions, write it down in the comments and say This is what
I'm going to implement. I'm going to focus on this. Here's how I'm going
to implement it. And here's when today, tomorrow, this evening, five o'clock PM, whatever. It doesn't matter. Just something to put
it in there to cement this process in a permanent
place where you say, alright, this is
what I'm gonna do. The other option is to take the last question, the
filler activities, the three activities that
you feel time with and write that down in the comments
and then expound on that. What is your answer for that? What are those three
activities for you? So actually take that
and do it right away. And then yet people can
comment on it and be like, Hey, how did you do on this? You said you were gonna do this, implement this over here. How did it go? What
did you learn? And then if you would like
to, this will be awesome. You don't have to do
this if you want, but if you'd like
to come back later after you implement
some of these things and write in the
comments were like, hey, here's what happened. Reply to your original comment. Like this is what worked,
what didn't work? Offer advice to other
people trying it out.
9. Final Message: And this kinda get a
thread through the whole, the whole class here. But what these do is they create clarity,
but they really, really helped create a
filter of what gets through. What gets through this filter
that you actually apply productivity to.
A lot of people. They just, this is
a level deeper, like just a little bit
deeper than productivity. But it's really
important because productivity is a tool and
your time is valuable. You don't want to just
use that on anything. And so these questions create a little bit of that filter. They help refocus, re-center. Say, alright, am I, am I doing the fundamental base, core of productivity of what is effectiveness
at its core? And so like I said in
the project portion of this take action now, like this is something
you like seriously, if you stop right now and do all of these things is
going to take you what, five-minutes like, it's not
going to take you along. You can answer these
questions in no time and like to setup all that system of notifications or reminders that or take maybe ten minutes. Like it's not hard. Like I'd encourage you to
take action because I see how much it's changed my life and helped me refocus at times when I really,
really needed it. When I when I thought I was
doing what was the best. When I went, I thought that I was all good and then
I didn't need any of this. That's kind of when I
needed it the most. And yeah, it was really, really impactful for me. Yeah, I just really want
to encourage you in that like keep moving in that
direction, keep pursuing this, like get, make productivity
work for you to take you in the direction you
want to go instead of you simply just running after it. It's really, really fun. Like it's, yeah,
it's a good time. So just keep pursuing that. And if you feel caught up
in that hamster wheel, send me an email or something because I've
definitely been there. I'm getting out of that. It's processed, but
it can be done. And if you have any questions
or anything like that, feel free to comment
down below and just ask. We're here to build
each other up. We're building a
community here of people to help each other move
in the correct direction, to help each other go towards
what is most important. And an aspect of this too, is like if you don't know what
is most important to you, what, what, what are
you moving towards? If you don't know what that is? Then check out some
of my other courses, specifically the one on goals, that video series. It. It just goes so deep and
it gives the, I mean, it is complete
step-by-step guide of exactly how to
accomplish your goals, how to move in that
correct direction. How do you define your goals
like it covers everything. It's the most in-depth
course I've ever done. It helps me a lot because
I refer back to it. It's the first time I actually
took all of this stuff, consolidated it down into a very clear laid out
step-by-step guide. And I would really encourage
you to check that out. It's some good stuff over there. It completely the goal is process completely
changed my life. Completely changed
everything about the direction I was
going for the better, very oh, wow, yeah, good stuff. It was really excited about to share that
with other people. And I get plenty of
examples of finding a goal, hypothetical examples of
what if this was my goal, how would I, how
would I do this? So it's very easy to follow. So anyway, thank
you for watching this course and engaging
with this content. And like I said, we're
building a community here. So follow along and comment. Yeah, engage with the people around you, build each other up. Let's learn how to
support each other in being creative and being efficient and effective
and being productive. So that's it for me. I'll probably try to post another course here
in a couple of weeks. I'm just loving the
community here and yeah, working with you guys
is it's awesome. So yeah, thanks
for engaging with us and giving us your
time. Appreciate it a lot.
Austin Schrock, Building a better brain
