The Ultimate Productivity and Time Management Class 2023

1. The Ultimate Productivity and Time Management Class: Hello and welcome to the ultimate productivity and time management course, where I'll be showing you how you can drastically increase your productivity and get more done was also saving time. My name is Josh with George and I'll be leading you through the course. I own and run free different multi six-figure businesses was also hosting over 15 workshops a year and managing over 20 online courses. In addition to this, I also manage a small property portfolio here in the UK. The reason I tell you all of this is to make you aware of just how busy I am on a day-to-day basis. Knowing how to be more productive and manage my time effectively has been a valuable life skill which has allowed me to grow and reach my full potential. And I want to help you reach your full potential to are you sick and tired of always falling short of your goals? Do you often feel like there isn't enough hours in the day? If you said yes to any of those questions, then you are not alone. And I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be this way. I'll share with you effective time management and productivity techniques that you can implement to prevent you from feeling this way. The strategies I'm going to share are all tried and tested techniques and also backed up by science and data to you can be confident than what you are learning does actually make a difference. Inside the course, you will learn what the most common productivity killers are that 99% of people are doing on a daily basis. Once you've identified those, I'll walk you through over a dozen techniques and strategies that you can use to become more productive. And then lastly, I'll walk you through some general lifestyle changes that you can make to give you that further edge. A whopping 82% of people say they don't manage their time successfully. Selecting this course reduces the chances of you being part of that statistic. So what are you waiting for? Take the calls, stop procrastinating, and I'll see you inside. 2. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Hello and welcome to the first section of the course called productivity killers. In this section, we'll take a deep dive into how the brain works at its core level is really important to understand that before you start moving through the later videos in the course. Then after that, we're going to be going through some of the most common productivity killers that people are doing on a day-to-day basis. The first one is related to e-mail. The second is to do with the feeling of overwhelm and getting stressed. We'll then go over how a lack of a plan can be a big killer when it comes to your productivity. Moving on, after that, we'll be covering the whole concept of the perfect time. Then we'll be moving on to multitask in time leaks and distractions. And lastly, we'll be covering emotional energy. So these are all things which are currently killing your productivity. So without further ado, let's jump into the first one. 3. Understanding How The Brain Is Wired: Welcome to the first video on productivity killers. And it only makes sense that we start off with how everyone's brain is wired as this has a massive impact on y. If you don't implement effective strategies like the ones you're going to learn later on in the course, you will end up being unproductive and wasting a lot of your precious time. Now, of course, your brain does not actually consist of wires. Those red and blue ones, the ones you see in the film. And if you cut the wrong wire, you die and blow up the world. It is not that dramatic wiring in this essence, what it refers to is how our brains biologically and naturally make subconscious decisions. To understand the logic behind all of this, we first need to understand the brain's ultimate goal. The brain's ultimate goal is to keep you safe from harm and to be fair, it's served us well for thousands and thousands of years, keeping our ancestors alive for long enough that you and I are here, live in today. But here's the thing. We are no longer fighting for survival, will no longer living in a jungle or plotting one. We're going to catch on next meal. We are living in the 21st century. However, the brain has still not caught onto that and still has a, I must keep you safe mentality wired into it. And it's not just physical harm that our brains are protecting us from. It's also emotional harm. Now, let's be honest. All of us, me included struggle with procrastination from time-to-time. And what a lot of people don't actually know is that procrastination is often a symptom of fear, whether it's fear of failure, fear of worrying. You're not going to live up to expectations. Fear of not producing good enough work. Or even if it's just a task that's out of your comfort zone, what will tend to do is rationalized reason after reason. But fair is almost always the root cause. You see, we are all biologically wired for fair and have a desire to stay within our comfort zones and keep us safe. That is just how our brains work. Unfortunately, this fair is a direct challenge on what our brains are taught to avoid. Which means we end up avoiding a lot of things in order to keep ourselves safe. To give this some more context of just how impactful this wildfire or keep me safe mentality can be. And there have been numerous studies that showed people fear public speaking more than deaf. And that's 75 per cent of people ranked public speaking as the number one fear. And the reason behind that is because our brains can't differentiate between physical or emotional harm. So what does it want to do? Well, it wants to avoid both. This is the foundational principle that you must understand before we move forward. Our brains are wired to keep us safe and away from harm. And it can't differentiate between physical or emotional harm. And that is why it tries to keep us from rejection or unpleasant experiences. The brain sees it as harm. And this all happens automatically deepen your brain on a subconscious level. But it's not all doom and gloom. As with the right strategies, you can take control and overcome those subconscious warning signals as you're about to find out later in the course. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 4. Email: Welcome back. The first productivity killer I want to mention is one that is becoming more and more of a problem. And that is email. Email is most likely the number one culprit when it comes to killing your productivity. There was a study done in the UK that showed a quarter of UK based employees are spending nearly one full working day each week managing the inbox. Which if you take a step back and look at that over the course of a month than that is pretty much almost one week that someone is not doing work. But instead they have the head in the Gmail or Hotmail managing the inbox. And that is a lot of time and it's a lot higher than anyone would have thought. Email interruptions increase employee's time on task by one third. So if you're always getting interrupted by your email and you don't have any good email practices, then your time to complete something is going to take one-third longer in comparison to someone who has good email practices to learn more about emo interruptions and emo addiction, researchers conducted a study on employees at a rental car company. And they found that when an employee was interrupted by email, it took them one-third longer to complete a task, meaning that employees that are on top of their email and have good practices already in place, complete tasks one port quicker than someone who does not. That is a lot of time you can save over the course of a week. In addition to this, this study showed that 12% of workers showed clinical signs of email addiction. That's when you literally keep opening your email nonstop. I'm refreshing it to see if you have a new email in your inbox. That is a form of addiction. And the crazy thing about all of this is that it's estimated that once we are distracted, it takes us approximately 23 min to refocus on a task. If you are working on something and then an email comes in, you then switch our focus to read what the e-mail says and then try to get back onto what he was doing? Yes, you can just get back into it. But on average is going to take 23 min to really regain your focus and pick up where you left off. It's actually amazing that we get any work done. The y is WB Brendan butchered. He put it best when he said, in many cases, your e-mail inbox is a convenient organizing system for other people's agenda. We are all guilty of checking our e-mail far, far too often, the majority of people will check the inbox the first thing in the morning till then, check it multiple times throughout the day and again at night before they go to sleep. I get it. It can be difficult as email is a great tool for communication, especially in working environments. But it's so important that you set up your own rules and restrictions on when you check your inbox. Everybody's situation is going to be different and unique. But I strongly encourage you to experiment with different constraints and to only allow yourself to check your email at designated times throughout the day. Another great strategy is to only check your emails when your energy levels are at their lowest. This will allow you to preserve your high-energy levels for those all important task. So before we end, ask yourself, do you check your email in the morning and at night? Do you check it non-stop all day long? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then it's time to start experimenting over the next week and allocate yourself time slots for when you're allowed to process and check your email, and then block of the rest of your time for your highest ROI unimportant task. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 5. Overwhelm - Get It Out Your Head: Welcome back. The next productivity killer I wanted to speak about is overwhelmed. Now whether you're an entrepreneur or a mother, a father, it does not matter. None of us are immune to feeling overwhelmed and getting stressed out. The problem with this is that when we get overwhelmed and stressed, our brains tend to switch off almost like a power switch. And when this happens, we tend to freeze. It paralyzes us, and then we're stuck in the mud. However, the problem is those tasks that got us stress in the first place do not go away. They are still there, which only makes the problem worse. The good news is that if you follow the right systems and processes, you can train yourself to learn how to deal with any situation that comes your way and drastically reduce that feeling of stress and overwhelm. In the next section, I'll be going through all of these systems and processes. But instead of leaving you hanging for now, I want to touch on one of the biggest causes for overwhelm, which is storing everything in your head. Now, let's imagine you have ten things that you want to do today. Your brain is going to subconsciously and constantly remind you about these ten things until you've done them all. It does this because it thinks it's doing you a favor. But more often than not, our brain chooses to remind us at the most inappropriate times, e.g. when you're trying to relax and above or when you're trying to go to sleep at night, your brain will bombard you with these things that you haven't done, all that you should be doing. So how do you deal with this? Well, as soon as you fill this stress and overwhelm coming on, what you need to do is perform what we call a brain dump. You want to move all this information from within your head onto a piece of paper. You can then start to categorize all of these tasks and figure out which ones are more urgent than others. But the main goal here is that you want to get it out of your head. And on a piece of paper, it is going to drastically free up your headspace and reduce that feeling of stress and overwhelm. The second biggest cause of overwhelm is related to the complexity of task. If we deem a project too complex or too large, our brain goes into overdrive as is unsure where to start. This overdrive then trigger the same response where we freeze and put it off for another day. And the key to fix this is to break down these tasks into smaller, bite-sized tasks, e.g. let's imagine that you have a presentation to do. The majority of people, which would be a bad example, would go on to the to-do list and write, prepare for presentation. However, you don't just want to write this. So if it was me, I would be doing is breaking this down into smaller, bite-sized tasks. And I'll be writing on my to-do list. Number one, prepare notes for Section one. Number two, create PowerPoint slides for section one. Number three, prepare notes for Section two. Number four, create PowerPoint slides for section two, I am literally breaking down the big talk of a presentation into smaller, bite-sized tasks. And this is tremendously helpful as I'm now defining exactly what I need to do. And I've got 100% clarity on what I need to do as, let's face it, looking at prepare for a presentation on your to-do list. Even though we know we need to prepare for a presentation, we'd know it's a big job. So we're going to start to feel overwhelmed as we don't even know where to start. I hope you enjoyed this one and I'll see you in the next one. 6. Lack of Plan: Our next productivity killer is lack of planning. If you do not plan your days, you are literally setting yourself up to fail. There are so many distractions that we all face on a day-to-day basis, that it's very, very easy to get sucked into doing something that doesn't even fulfill your objectives and goals. The majority of people just tend to wing it and plan out their day as they go along. But that is also why the majority of people are unproductive and wastes so much of their precious time. However, the fact that you have this course proves to me that you do not want it to be one of those people. So be honest with yourself and ask yourself, what does your plan look like on a daily basis? It's incredibly easy to feel busy or what I like to call unproductively busy, but leave the office or go to bed at night wondering what the flip did I actually accomplish today? And sometimes you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself those questions. There are quite a few options we have when it comes to planning your day and just staying organized. You've got your classics to-do list, you've got calendars, and you've got apps as well. However, the truth is, which one you use is less important than the fact that you are actually using something. As I said, the next section of this course is dedicated to strategies on how you can improve your productivity and time management. So I'm not going to dive into all of these right now. But the main thing that you need to be aware of right now is the benefits at planning can bring to your life. The most obvious benefit is going to be clarity. When you wake up, you will know exactly what your goals and Tosca for the day. So it's much easier for you to stick to them and actually get them done. You'll find you have a lot less deadtime moments. We are wondering what to do next. And you'll also find yourself getting caught up in way less distractions to the second benefit is that it locks you in for the day when you're locked in, in what you want to achieve, all your energy is directed towards achieving that goal. The third benefit is accountability. As let's admit it, we all have that feeling we get when we take off our item on our to-do list. In fact, multiple studies that showed taken off items in your to-do list releases a chemical in our body, which we call dopamine. Dopamine is triggered by the human brain when we accomplish small tasks, such as ticking off items on our to-do list. It may sound like such a small thing to do, but it triggers dopamine. And when dopamine is released into our body, we feel better. We're more motivated and we're eager to repeat the actions that resulted in that success in the first place. Neuroscientists actually refer to this as self-directed learning, which is incredibly powerful. So there you have it. That is three reasons why you should not overlook planning. And as the wise Benjamin Franklin said, failure to plan is planning to fail. 7. The Perfect Time: Our next productivity killer is perfect timing. To many people are guilty of waiting for the perfect time before they get up and do something. Now this doesn't just apply to your work and business. It literally applies to all parts of life. And the reality is, is that they will rarely be a perfect time. And if there is indeed a perfect time, by the time that you wait for it, you will have already been parsed by those who took action. There's a crusading about this, which is the best time to do something was yesterday. And the second best time to do something is now, most people will plan to start their diets and goals on a Monday or the first of a month, or the star or the new year, you know the drill. It's rare that someone actually decided to chase their dreams right now in the middle of the week or some random day of the month. The same mindset applies to starting a business, going back to school, learning how to play the guitar, writing a book, or even having a difficult conversation. We believe that challenging things require some unrealistic, optimal set of conditions, which in reality always equal sometime later. However, what's really required to get started right now is just having some courage. Waiting is often just an excuse when we feel fearful or uncertain. Remember it all goes back to your brain's core wiring of trying to keep you safe. The idea that perfect conditions are necessary to start is seriously flawed. And on top of this, whilst you're waiting, you actually never learn anything. So you're inactive. You're not enhancing your skills or gaining any new experiences. That is why you need to make the most of each moment by taking action so that you can be better prepared for the future. It's interesting because getting started is often the hardest part about the toss you are avoiding. Once you've started the process, you'll be pretty much running on autopilot. In chemistry, there is a term called activation energy, which is basically the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction. And that energy required to start the reaction Always far exceeds the energy required to sustain the action. Which relates back to what I was saying about getting started is often the hardest part. Let's take a rocket, e.g. the amount of energy a rocket needs to take off for exceeds the amount of energy needed to keep the rocket in the air. Of rocket needs to reach the speed of 7 mi/s to escape the earth's pull of gravity. But almost all that energy that rocket needs is at the beginning when the rocket is first launched, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. The same applies to you and I. The hardest part of any task is just getting started. That's why it's so easy to keep putting something off, keep putting it off, and keep putting it off. All we need to do is get started and the rest will take care of itself. So I wanted to ask you, now, what is it that you're putting off right now? I'll see you in the next one. 8. Multi-tasking: Welcome back. The next productivity killer I want to go through is the concept of multitasking. Now, don't get me wrong. Multitasking can be great when you're working on to mindless simple task. I'm talking things you can do without any full and they're pretty much second nature. However, when it comes to managing your time and achieving ultimate productivity, multitasking is one of the biggest lies of the 21st century. Now, when I say multitasking, what I mean is doing multiple things at the same time. Although multitasking is rarely doing two things at the same time, is actually what we call multi switching. Your brain is switching from one thing to another, even if it's on a subconscious level and happens in an instant, this back-and-forth flickering in your brain comes at a minimal cost, which can be very draining and counter intuitive to your productivity. Studies have shown that the human brain can't handle more than one task at a time. As I like to backup everything I say with data and evidence. In fact, only 2.5 per cent of the population can actually process tasks simultaneously. And it actually takes more time to get things done when you try to multitask people who are interrupted and therefore have to switch their attention back and forth, take 50 per cent longer to accomplish a task. And the most interesting one is that almost 50 per cent of daily interruptions are self interruptions. So let's just summarize this for a second. Only to 0.5 per cent of people can actually multitask. And those who can actually use more time to get those things done than if they just do them individually. And those who can't, myself included, take 50% longer to accomplish a task when we try and multitask. Finally, for every ten interruption that we experienced on a day, five of them are self-inflicted and hopefully makes it really clear to you just how bad multitasking is of an idea when it comes to trying to be more productive unless you're in that small 2.5 per cent. Of course, if you do have important tasks that require you to really focus and solve a problem, even if it's just a general task that needs to be done, is absolutely crucial that you commit and focus on one task at a time. Block out time to focus on that task and give you all your energy and attention. And make sure you're also minimizing any distractions. So wherever you need to turn off your phone, put it in another room, do whatever you need to do to minimize the chance of you getting distracted. And if you do that, I can almost promise you that you will see absolutely amazing results in your productivity and your time management. But the main takeaway here is that if you think you are good at multitasking, you're most likely really not. And of course, I do not mean that in a horrible way whatsoever. I am definitely probably one of the worst people when it comes to multitasking. But we also need to be honest with ourselves if we really want to become more productive. That's it for this one. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. 9. Time Leaks / Distractions: Hello and welcome back. I hope you have already started to become more aware of some habits that are decreasing your productivity. But moving on to the next one, which is what I call time leaks. By definition, a time leak is an activity that we enjoy and do without thinking as a way to break up a tedious task. The keyword in that definition is without, which is why I highlighted in yellow. But it's pretty much all the things we do without thinking when we have a tedious task in front of us. There's nothing worse than when you have a tedious task and you're struggling to focus. And instead of focusing and getting that task done, you put it behind you and do something that you enjoy it. Instead, lots of people would tend to fall into these patterns and go back into their comfort zones. As remember, the brain's ultimate goal is to keep us safe from harm and we end up wasting time on distractions. Distractions we all face is going to be subjective and based on our environments. But to give you an idea where people tend to lose the majority of the time without even realizing it. Well, it's things like constantly checking your email inbox, constantly checking your Facebook feed, check into it's our check-in Instagram, or even gossiping with coworkers. You can see that three out of those five things are related to social media. That is, because it's a more consistent and more pressing problem for the future generations. I've lost count of how many times I've seen my little brother opened his phone, go into Instagram and just keep scrolling, scrolling and scrolling his phone away. And literally 5 min later, he's got his phone back out of his pocket and he scrolling on Instagram again. These are all things that a lot of us do on a daily basis without even thinking. And over the course of a week, they are eating into our time, breaking up periods of focus and ruining our concentration. So how do we fix this? The first step is to identify how much of your time is actually leaking out of your day. As a famous quote by Peter Drucker says, you can't improve what you don't measure. If you don't know how much time you are wasting, then how do you know how much time you can save? And you can get as fancy as you'd like when it comes to actually measuring your time. You can actually just write it down on a piece of paper and keep it very simple. So no matter what you do, you need to be keeping a manual log of how you're spending your time. And then at the end of the day, you can categorize all of those things such as social, work, business, leisure, and you can see how much time you're spending in each different category. Or if you'd rather use a tool to make things a little bit more automated, then you can use a tool such as Rescue Time. Rescue Time does pretty much what the piece of paper method does, but it does all of it for you automatically. And it automatically categorizes what you are spending your time on. And as you can see in this example, there was a 7 h and 1 min of work tract in total. And about 7 h and 1 min, 7% of it was spent on social networking sites. So you can pretty much see it very clearly. Just how much time you're actually spending on these social networks. Rescue Time is a premium tool. It's not free to use. I believe it's about $6 a month the last time I checked. However, you don't need to use this. The main purpose of me showing you this is to show you there are different options to sue all budgets and different needs. I personally just use a pen and paper. I'm old school. I like to keep things straight forward, but if you'd like things to be more automated, then definitely check out rescue time or just carry out a search for something like time tracker tool. And then Google will return a lots of different options that also do pretty much the same thing. But remember, the main focus is not to get too caught up on what tool you are using. You simply want to measure how you're spending your time, identify your productivity killers, and then start working towards reducing those distractions. 10. Emotional Energy: Welcome back. How productive are you when you're in a bad mood? Your mood is typically dictated by external circumstances. If you're having a great day, then you're likely to be in a good mood. If you're having a bad day, then you're likely to be in a bad mood. And how do you think you're going to perform if you're in a bad mood? Well, clearly not as good as if you were in a good mood, right? And if you did just believed that mood is only dictated by external circumstances, then pretty much your work output will be out of your control, right? As output is linked to mood, and your mood is linked to external circumstances which are out of your control. However, I am here to tell you that that is not entirely true. In fact, it's been proven multiple times in multiple studies. There are lots of strategies we have at our disposal that can drastically influence our mood and our emotional state, e.g. how we use our body, precisely how our body language can shape who we are. There's a really, really good TED talk by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and a professor at Harvard Business School, where she basically demonstrates the power of influence that we can have on ourselves by changing our bodies, dances, and positions. It's a really good watch. I'll link to it in the descriptions for those who want to watch it all. It's roughly about 20 min long. But pretty much what she did was she placed people in what we call high power poses or stances for 120 s. So these were the highest power poses. They will all poses and stances that made your human body wider. E.g. put your hand behind your heads, that creates a bigger surface area. Your hands on the hip. It's the same fairy or even just extending your arms wide out. What you are doing these poses is making your body wider and more dominant, which is why they're called high power poses. Now she plays people in these poses for 120 s. And she'd done exactly the same, but for people in low-power poses. So low-power poses are pretty much the opposite. Instead of making yourself wider and more dominant, these are more code up, smaller body poses that naturally have less authority. And just like the people in the high power poses, these people were in these positions for 120 s to. The results from this study was absolutely mind-blowing. The participants in the higher power pose saw a 20% increase in testosterone and a 25 decrease in cortisol, which is a hormone associated with stress. And on the flip side, the participants in the low-power pose only saw a 10% decrease in testosterone, and I saw a 15% increase in cortisol. These results are outstanding as these were not based on simply asking the participants how did they fill these findings were based on pure data by measuring the hormone levels. Later in the course, we'll be diving deeper into exactly how we can leverage this to be more productive. But for now, I just want you to be aware that we can indeed control our mood and how we feel and use that to our advantage. See you in the next one. 11. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Welcome to the next section of the course, which is all about techniques you can use to improve your productivity. In the last section, we covered the productivity killers. However, in this one, we're gonna be covering the core strategies and techniques that you can use to level up your game. The first thing we're going to cover is in relation to to-do list will then be covering planning and prioritization. After that, we'll be moving on to what I call challenge quick favors. After that, one will be discussing the importance of willpower when it comes to completing task. Then we'll be taking a deep dive into time management. I'll also be showing you how you can become more consistent. We'll be covering a really cool technique, which is called the Pomodoro Technique. This one has single-handedly helped me scale my business to multiple six figures. And then after that, we'll be moving onto meeting scheduling tools. I'll then be going through a really effective strategy called a day batching. I'll then show you how you can leverage Parkinson's law to become more productive. And a really cool one that not enough people are taking full advantage of. And that is how you can optimize your dead time. After that, I'll then be showing you how you can set up your work environment to ensure you achieve the optimal results and productivity every day. And lastly, I want to cover an incredibly effective strategy, which is what we call speed typing. This is going to be a very valuable section and I can't wait to get started. So without further ado, let's dive into the first one. 12. To-Do Lists Mastery: Welcome to the first video of this section on techniques that you can use to improve our productivity and time management. The first strategy I want to run through is one that I would not be able to operate without. And that's by using to-do-list. Now, let's start with the basics of what a to-do list. It's a to-do list is a list of tasks or items that you have to accomplish during a specific period of time. These lists often contain manageable tasks and help people to be more productive and avoid procrastination, to-do list or something that every single person should be using. They don't need to be anything complex at all, but you must have clarity on the task which you want to accomplish in any given day to-do list or not any revolutionary strategy. And a lot of people including yourself will 99 per cent have already heard of them. So you're probably thinking, Well, Josh, why are you telling me something that's so simple and basic? And that's because of two reasons. The first is, there's a big difference between knowing something and actually doing it. And number two, the majority of people that are already using to-do lists are using them wrong. So if you're in the first bracket, then this is your reminder to go ahead and start using them as your working memory is like a post-it note with disappearing ink. Or for a more visual representation, It's like parts of your brain that disappear. We have limited storage in our brains, and that storage only stays with you for about 15 s. So trying to remember everything you need to do and managing all of that in your head is not an effective tool to manage our task. In addition to this, you should also be using a to-do list as it allows you to get those tasks out of your head and free up some brain space, which is what I touched on in the previous section. Because hopefully by now you realize that store in and trying to organize all this information in your head, is it pretty much guaranteed method for you to start feeling stressed and overwhelmed? Our brains thing is doing us a reminder by reminding us over and over again of the tasks we need to do. But when you get it out on paper and account for it, it shows your brain that you are aware of it and that you are in control. So what tools can you use to create a to-do list? As I get a lot of questions when people are asking me, is this tool the best Josh shadow go for this one? Should I use pen and paper? And my response is always the same. Use whatever method works the best with your current setup. However, to give that some contexts, here are lots of different options you can use to create a to-do lists. You can go with the old, trusted classical, traditional pen and paper style. Or you can use the notes app on your phone, whereas Android or iPhone, whatever phone you have, nine times out of ten, it's going to have an app on their phone notes, and it's going to sync across all your devices as well. So I actually use the notes app on my iPhone as my dedicated to-do list that then syncs to my MacBook, it seems to my iPad. And no matter what device I pick up, I can see my to-do list. Another option you can use is Google Sheets. This is a free online spreadsheet tool by Google for those who don't know. But if you always find yourself using Google, Google Drive and stuff like that, then you can go ahead and create your to-do list on Google Sheets. As it's very easy to incorporate that in your current setup. E.g. this is a to-do list in Google Sheets I used to use ages ago. It's pretty much an old-fashioned one, but you can see I had a tab for each day of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I'll have my task in the first column. And then as I go ahead and complete that task, to simply go ahead and tick it off. It's a very straightforward and basic way, but Google Sheets is definitely another option. You can also use more premium options such as Evernote to do is omni focus. All of these have a lot more functionality, which is why they are premium options. However, they all do have free trial. So there's no reason why you can't sign up to all of them, give them a go and see how you get on. If you don't like it, just cancel the free trial. I personally use all of them and I still find myself just using the notes on my phone as it's the easiest, the quickest, it has less friction and it sinks to all of my devices automatically. But again, that's just my personal preference. Use whatever works best with your current setup. However, whatever you use to create and manage your to-do list, there are key things that you must abide to to ensure it's going to be an effective to do lists. As like I said, there are lots of people already out there who are using to-do list but are using them in the wrong way. So my first tip when it comes to creating a good to-do list is to make sure you write down task and not goals. You should have a separate list for your task and your goals. Whilst horse can typically help you lead to your goals, goals are, are larger desires and not something that you can achieve over the course of a day, e.g. let's imagine that you want to learn how to speak Spanish. A lot of people would go on the to-do list, which should be a bad example. Just write learned to speak Spanish. That is a goal, that is not a task. However, you can break down that go into bite-sized tasks. So a good example of a to-do list focusing on task and not goals. Using the same example would be read Spanish content for 15 min. Watch a movie in Spanish. These are tasks which push you towards that goal. This is how you should be using your to-do list. My second tip when it comes to to-do lists is to make sure you keep them brief. Don't make them long, just for the sake of it, I've seen so many to-do list where people have literally just wrote down, wake up, eat breakfast, have a shower. And these are all pretty much things people would do even if it didn't have a to-do list, right? They are second nature. So anything that you do without thinking, anything that is second nature does not need to be on your to-do list. I don't care what you read on Facebook or Twitter. At a nice things your to-do list is not going to increase your productivity. What is going to do is create a full sense of productivity and make you feel better. But at the end of the day, you wouldn't have accomplished that much. The second part to this tip is to keep the text on your to-do list short. Keeping the text brief allows you to quickly look over your to-do list and understand exactly what needs to be done. And how you can do this is by focusing on the keywords which are specific to that task. E.g. if you need to clean the garage, don't go and put on your to-do list, get the duster out the drawer, find the cloth, walked to the garage. You literally just want to put clean garage. With this strategy, you're spending less time actually writing down the task when making your initial to-do list. Furthermore, you're also relying on trigger words to get your mind to recall specific details for that task. The third and final tip is to batch a similar task. Batching similar task allows you to get through your to-do list faster, is similar to what we covered in the previous section when I spoke about multitasking. But pretty much when you batch tasks together, you have less moments of switching from one to another and then regaining your focus. So once you create your to-do list, what you should do is look at it and see if you can batch any similar task, e.g. one task that pretty much everyone can batch is going to be checking your email in batches rather than multiple times throughout the day. Allocate time slots from when you check your email, whether that's your business or your personal, do both of them at the same time in one go and then don't check them again until later on in the day. 13. Planning and Prioritization: Welcome back. In the last lecture, we spoke about using to-do list to free up some space in our heads and allow us to become more productive. In this one, we're going to go a little deeper into two core principles that you must consider when planning your to-do list to ensure you reached our ultimate level of efficiency when it comes to managing your time. So the first one is related to planning. Specifically planning your to-do list the night before. You should never be waking up and not knowing what tasks need to be done on that day. Never. Why as all that results in is you waking up and wasting the most important time of the day, which is the first 90 min, as that is when your energy stores are at the highest levels and figuring out how to spend your time using that energy is not that efficient. So before you get into bed and go to sleep, plan out what tasks that you want to achieve the next day. Write it down on a piece of paper, write in your notes app on your phone, on your to-do list software, whatever you use to take those tasks out of your head, free up some space, and mentally prepare for the next day. Figuring out what tasks to do is actually a low-energy task in itself. So doing it at the end of the day makes most logical sense. You'll be surprised at just how quickly and easily you can plan out your task for the next day. And the great thing about this is that when you wake up, you will have 100% clarity on what your goals are for that day. And you can get out of the gates running full steam ahead without wasting anytime whatsoever. The second point which I wanted to touch upon is prioritization. Once you plan that all your tasks for the day, you need to decide in which order you want to attack them. No matter what tasks you have planned out for the day, make sure you start off your day with the tasks that are most critical to your business or your goals for the day. I can't stress how important this one actually is. It's something I've implemented in all of my businesses a long time ago. And as soon as I've done this, the business started to perform better on all fronts. Start to generate more revenue, and we got way more done in way less time as well. Start off the day with the tasks that are most important to your business. We like to call these myths, which stands for most important task. And what I mean by that is, if you have ten things to do on your to-do list to figure out which one is a top priority. Ask yourself if you were to only do one of those things out of those ten on your list, which one would you be most happiest with? The answer to that is going to be the one you put at the top of your list. Then you ask yourself the same question for the next nine things. So now I want to ask you a question. What did you start your day with today? Was it the most important task or was it the thing that you found the most easiest and the less friction to do? What about yesterday? What did you start your day with yesterday? Again, with another easy task? Or was it something that was really important for you to accomplish? Asking yourself these questions allows you to become honest with yourself and really establish exactly where you are going wrong and allows you to pinpoint exactly how you can be more productive. Most people I speak to are guilty of this. They will wake up and the first thing they do is they will check their email inbox. That is how most people will start their day. And the biggest problem with this is that, yes, checking your email is easy, which is why everyone wants to do it at the start of the day. However, it's one of the worst things you can do as all you do is you get poured into other people's agendas and you spend the most productive time putting out other people's fires. As, let's be honest, your inbox is pretty much a to-do list for other people's agendas. And I'm here to tell you that you do not need to check your emails. The first thing in the morning, you should focus your first 90 min to power through the most important items on your to-do list and the ones that are most critical to your businesses results. Most people are already aware of what their top priority task, but they put them off as typically they're the most difficult task on the list. And what happens is these tiles stay with them throughout the day, in the back of their heads. And they keep nipping at them and ruining their concentration and focus on the avatars that they're actually doing. You know, the task is there and you know, you should be working on it, which comes out as psychological cost. If you're serious about common productive focus, your first 90 min to power through that essential tasks. And once you do that, you will then get your sense of accomplishment. You'll get your dopamine release that we spoke about earlier. And you'll find yourself powering through the remaining tasks with a lot less friction and determination to get them done. 14. Challenge “Quick Favours”: Welcome back. In the last lecture, we spoke about getting crystal clear on what your top priority items are for the day. And this lecture follows on from that. And that is challenged quick favors. One common trait that a lot of people are guilty of doing, which drastically kills her productivity and massively eat into their time, is saying yes to everything. I know you may want to be a good person and not really upset anyone, but saying yes to every single thing you get asked to do drastically kills your productivity. Now, I'm not saying you need to start saying no to everything. As let's be honest, that's not exactly feasible in the majority of scenarios. However, when it's a last-minute favor, you're being asked to do and you're saying yes to all of these requests, it's going to massively throw you off for the day. You see most individuals will always take the always say yes approach to new work and load up the day with more work than they can actually handle. They then look to blame others when they're feeling a little bit stressed. This lack of discipline around prioritization can be super, super infectious. There's actually a good quote from the famous Warren Buffett which says, the difference between successful people, I'm really successful people, is that really successful people say no to almost everything. And there is a lot of truth in that. That's because when you're saying yes to anything your colleagues asked you to do last minute, it reshuffled your to-do list and priorities, meaning everything you planned goes completely out the window. And the less tasks to complete in a day, the less closer you get to achieving your goals for the day and even goals for the week. We have this philosophy at clicked slice. And it's pretty much if you get a new task that you did not account for, one that was initially not on your to-do list, then you should challenge your manager and you should ask them, would you like me to remove one of the other task on my to-do list to accommodate this new one, this works really, really well As it then pushes your manager to think on what task is actually the most urgent. It also makes it very clear to them that you don't have the time to do both. So just by asking this simple thing, we turned the situation from adding another task on our to-do list. Too challenging if this new TA should even be on our to-do list for the day. Whereas if you don't challenge these things, you are always going to end up feeling overwhelmed and stressed and most likely even taking that stress home with you. The key to making the most of your time productive is to make sure that the number of things you have to do, not the amount of time you are awake in the day. So now we know this. How can we actually challenge these additional task? Well, of course, you don't just want it to turn around to your boss and say no, as you need to be professional and do over in the appropriate way. So what you can do instead is say something like That's a great idea if it actually is, of course, if I get time at the end of the day, I'll come back to it. Otherwise, I'll schedule it for later this week. Another option of what you can say is I have a full day of productive work plan, but I can plan this in for tomorrow. Again, you're making it very clear that you are busy today and you'll add this to your to do list, but it won't get done today. However, if you know that your manager is sending new needs to be done today, then what you can do is respond and say, which task would you like me to drop from today in order to accommodate this one? Again, you're passing it back to the manager for them to then prioritize, which is more important. This helps reduce the stress and overwhelm on you. If you're getting asked to do something by maybe one of your colleagues, so not your manager. What you could also do is say something like, I understand this may be pressing for you. However, this is not a priority for me today or this week. So what we're doing in this instance is we're not saying no, we can't help them or just communicating and letting them know that it's not a priority for us right now. And when we do have time, we'll go ahead and help them. Another option of something that you could say is, I'll need to escalate this to my manager to check is irrelevant priority compared to the other work we have on. Again, you're just assessing what is really a priority or not. I'm not suggesting you say these things every single time someone asks you for a favor, but it's important to be aware when you are busy. And by saying yes is going to result in you feeling overwhelmed, but possessing the ability to be able to re-prioritize at a moment's notice is also important. However, without a clear view of what needs to be done in your day, that tendency will always be to say yes to things that will probably ensure that you do six things to a lower level of quality rather than free things to the highest. In those scenarios, even though you are saying yes to everything, you end up delivering nothing. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 15. Willpower And Tasks: Welcome back. Next up we are going to be talking about willpower. When people are failing to hit their goals, a lot of people believe they just need more willpower. Unfortunately, that isn't true at all. To clarify, willpower is the ability to resist short-term gratification in pursuit of long-term goals or objectives. A lot of smart people have studied willpower, and they say willpower is like a muscle. Let's use a gym analogy to show you what I mean. Well, when you're in the gym, if you are lifting weights, the heavier the weight, the fewer reps will be able to do. The lighter the way the more reps will be able to do. However, regardless of the way, you will eventually get to a point. We'll muscles are fatigued and they need a rest before you're able to go again. And the same logic applies to willpower. This is why if you're on a diet and fancier cookie, it's quite easy to say no to the cookie. The first thing in the morning, as that is when your willpower is at its strongest, aka your muscles are not fatigued. However, as the day goes on and your willpower depletes just like a muscle when the gym, you become more fatigued and it's harder to fight. Their temptation. Willpower doesn't just affect our dietary choices. It also overlaps into your work-life and your professional decision-making to. There was a study done by a so-called psychologists called ROI in 1996. And what he did is he placed two bowls in front of a group of students. One bowl contains a bowl of cookies, and in the other one was a bowl of radishes. So basically vegetables. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a bowl of radishes that didn't look that great. So trust me, the boat on the right didn't look nowhere near as nice as the one you see on your screen. But still, it's still not a cookie, right? But anyway, getting back to the point, some of the students will allow to talk into the cookies, and the others were told they had to resist the temptation, only eat the radishes. All the students were then asked to trace a geometric shape using a pencil without retracing any lines, are lifting the pencil from the paper, unbeknown to them, this is actually an impossible task. And what they were being tested on was how long they stuck it. In other words, how much willpower they had left. On average, the cookie eaters lasted 18 min, whereas the radish eaters only lasted 8 min, which is absolutely insane. As what it shows is the pupil who use their willpower to resist the cookies had less willpower when it came to doing another task, which means they didn't have much patients or the will to continue. And this isn't just a standalone scientific study. There have been numerous studies done since which all show similar results. E.g. there was another one done by the same person boy, but instead of using cookies, it was based on prison guards and prisoners. So a little bit more extreme, and he took it up a notch. But basically, what happened in this one is psychologists monitored the decisions that judges were making in regards to this side and the fate of whether or not a prisoner will get parole. The judges, on average released about one in every three prisoners, which is a foot. But there was a really interesting twist. Prisoners who appeared in the morning got paroled about 65 per cent of the time. While prisoners who appeared late in the afternoon got paroled about just ten per cent of the time. Another interesting discovery was that after a meal break, the judges became more generous again for a short period of time and awarded Perotin most of the prisoners. Psychologists discussed the reasoning behind this and why they think it happened. And they labeled it decision fatigue, which of course is very much just the same concept of willpower. But it's the same as what we discussed. The prison guards, willpower was at its greatest early in the morning when parole was given 65% of the time. But as the day went on, the willpower got depleted. As yes, willpower is depleting and they gave her role to fewer and fewer prisoners. And then after mealtime or when they took a short break and came back, they replenish their willpower reservoirs a little bit. I'm more people would get parole. This concept doesn't only affect judges or students, it affects everyone. So now we know that decision fatigue and willpower fatigue are real. What can we do with this information to become more productive? Well, it's actually quite simple. And what productive people have been doing for years is schedule your most important or hardest task at the start of the day when your willpower levels are at the highest. If you do that, no matter how difficult that task is, you are giving yourself the best odds and the best chances that she'd go ahead and get it done. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 16. Time Management: Hello, and I hope you are enjoying the course so far. In the previous videos, we spoke about creating a to-do list, which contains a list of tasks that you want to achieve. And while. So to do this in itself is a solid strategy and a step in the right direction to becoming more productive. If you really want to crank up things another level, then what you want to do is optimized and plan your time management associated with those tasks. And the way to do that is to estimate how long a specific task is going to take you and then physically block out that time to 100% focused on that task. This will ally to not just manage your day-to-day list of tasks, but also give you an insight into how long each task is going to take. It might sound simple, but it works incredibly well. This is one of the strategies which helped me tremendously over the last five years. As I've always got a lot going on across all of the businesses I manage and run. Knowing how long things are going to take just helps reduce the overall stress and overwhelm when I look at my to-do list. So here are four reasons why you should assign time blocks to every single tasks on your to-do list. Number one, time estimates make a long to-do list less intimidating. It reduces overwhelmed, and it reduces procrastination. Now, forget my example. Imagine you are looking at your own to-do list and you see over 40 different tasks staring back at you, what do you think? Well, you instantly feel overwhelmed and you dread even starting. The longer your list, the more you want to avoid it. But loneliness can be deceiving because if you have a bunch of quick phone calls to make and lots of small little tasks that you've collected over the week. Then your to-do list can quickly become a mile long without actually requiring much time to complete. However, if you don't have time estimates on your to-do list, then you won't actually know that. Let's look at a real life example. Imagine you have on your to-do list ten things. You need to take Sam, your new phone number, make a dentist appointment, cool. The bank and order a new credit card or the LUMO are from Amazon. Pay your overdue phone bill, post your marketing front on Twitter, all the flowers for your mom's birthday. Print out directions for the event tonight, water the plants in the garden. And lastly, start a load of laundry. Now, that is a lot of things to do. And you might be thinking, Oh, my list is so long, I really cannot be bothered to start. However, if you actually assign a time to each task on your to-do list like this, then you can see that this is only going to take a total of 34 min as it let's be honest, texts in Sam, your new phone number as only going to take you a minute posting your thread on Twitter. That's only going to take you 2 min printing out directions, again, another 2 min payer overdue phone bill. Again, that's a free minute task. Making a dentist appointment is not a big thing to do. So once you add these times on your to-do list, you can very clearly and easily see exactly how long everything is going to take. And when you see the total time, you're going to be surprised, but it's going to make you more likely to actually go ahead and start cracking for your to-do list that don't underestimate this. This works incredibly, incredibly well. The second reason why you want to start adding times to your to-do list is time estimates help you get started sooner. And what this allows you to do is overcome that. I can do this later mentality. Many people have a warped sense of time. E.g. I. Used to believe that time magically expand the later it gets into the day. Somehow. I always thought the time left in the day seemed infinite. This always gave me absolutely no sense of urgency when it came to getting my task done. As I thought, hey, it's not dinner time yet, there's still plenty of time to get this done. However, of course, 1 h in the evening is the same length as 1 h in the morning. So the more you are aware of this, the better you can plan, and the more likely you are to get started sooner if you've got 3 h left until you eat your dinner and you see things on your to-do list, which take you 3 h, you are more likely to go ahead and get started now. And they allow you to overcome that. I can do this later today mentality. And the reason why is because time estimates gives you the facts. Having a time estimate for your entire to-do list lets you see how much time you need to get through all of the tasks in black and white. Wash or watch will tell you the time and how much hours are left in the day. It doesn't tell you how long your task we're going to take. If you can see that you have 3 h left of the day before you have dinner. And all the items on your to-do list take you exactly 3 h, then you're way more likely to go ahead and get started now, rather than putting things off for another 30 min, as you know, you simply do not have the time. So time estimates that gives you the facts. The same principle also applies to projects. Understanding how many hours it takes to complete an entire project will help you get started sooner. The third reason why you should be using time estimates is a help you become a better time estimator. If you are using time estimates in combination with time tracking, you'll start to notice patterns about which tasks you commonly underestimate and which tasks are actually much quicker than you think. Raising awareness about this discrepancy will make you a better time estimator and will help your overall planning going forward. This is obviously a super important skill for many people. E.g. if you're a freelancer, student, entrepreneur, office worker, it does not matter. Planning is a really key skill that everyone should have and using time estimates allows you to become better at planning. Lastly, moving on to our fourth and final point, time estimates prevent you from putting too much on your plate. I have a question for you, and that is, how often do you actually manage to complete your entire to-do list for the day? If you're like most people, the answer is rarely. The problem is that it's often not even possible to complete all the tasks on our to-do list, because people always underestimate how long things actually take. The negative thing about this is when you don't finish your to-do list, you feel unsatisfied and you can even spiral into a negative self. Talk about how unproductive and lazy you've been, which is not a good place to be in. Studies have shown that this negative self-talk leads to us being even less productive than next day. Whereas on the other hand, actually finishing your to-do list feels amazing. You see our self confidence increases when we complete our to-do lists and what that does, it creates a positive feedback loop. So to clarify, time estimates help you create a more realistic to do list that you can actually finish in a day. So now you know how important these time estimates are on your to-do list. It's over to you to review your to-do list. Go ahead and add some time estimates on. Don't be too worried about your first time doing this, you will get better at guesstimating how long everything is going to take, the more you do it. The key is starting now. 17. How To Become More Consistent: How to become more consistent. One of the most common challenges I hear from people who are looking to increase their productivity is make these new changes stick. And I'll be honest, without an effective strategy, making new behaviors stick can be tricky. E.g. by now, you know how important it is to plan out your next day, the night before. However, a lot of people still struggle to make that new behavior stick and get into the habit of putting the time aside every night to plan out the following day when it's something so new and so foreign to what you usually do, it can indeed be tricky to make it stick, which I get as behavior changes do indeed her, they need discipline. There are no shortcuts around them. However, the good news is that there are effective ways that you can use what's already wired into your brain. And the most effective strategy is one we call habit stacking. The term habit stacking was coined from a journalist named Steve Scott or S J Scott as he sometimes referred to. And the idea is that my cluster in these new habits, the ones you want to develop and sustain, will stand a better chance of remembering them by associating related tasks with each other. Hence the name clustering or stacking habit stacking allows you to organize these new habits in a way which makes logical sense for the way your day works, which makes it easier for you to incorporate them. So what you want to do is start by looking at all the things you want to include an organism in a sensible and logical order. If you find that easier, you can break your day into chunks such as your morning ritual, your commute, lunchtime, and then obviously you return home and then you have your evening. Then all you need to do is take the new behaviors that you want to introduce and stack them on top of an existing routine. There was some research done in 2007 at Oxford University, a university in the UK. And it was a study which analyze the brains of newborn babies and the brains of adults. And what they found from this study was that adult brains on average have 41% fewer neurons, the average newborn. And you might be thinking, well, that doesn't make any sense as if babies have more neurons than adults more skilled and smarter, right? And the answer to this is linked to building better habits. Allow me to explain. There is a phenomenon that happens as we age and is called synaptic pruning. It does sound a little scientific, I know, but essentially synapses or connections between neurons in your brain. And the basic idea is that your brain prunes away connections between neurons that don't get used. And it builds up connections that get used more frequently. E.g. if you practice playing the guitar for five years, then your brain will strengthen the connections between those musical guitar related neurons. And of course, the more you play, the stronger the specific connections become. And that's why the more you practice something, the better and more efficient you become at doing that exact thing. It's because your brain is building stronger and faster connections between the relevant neurons. This building process is the biological change that leads to skill development. Whereas on the flip side, if you never practice playing the guitar, and then all of a sudden you pick up one and try to play. You will struggle as the brain would have pruned away all of those connections and allocated all of its energy connections that you use on a day-to-day basis. And this explains the difference between newborns and adult brains. Babies are born with brains that are essentially like a blank piece of canvas. Everything is a possibility, as I don't have any strong connections yet. Whereas adults, however, have pruned away a good amount of their neurons to focus on building a stronger connections on the ones they use on a day-to-day basis. So let's discuss how this links the habit building. You see synaptic pruning occurs with every habit you build. As we've already covered in the previous slides, your brain builds a strong connection of neurons to support whatever current behaviors you do on a daily basis. The more you do those behaviors, the stronger and more efficient the connection becomes. You. Yes, you watching this video right now, you already have very strong habits and connections that you are literally taken for granted each day. E.g. your brain is very, very efficient at remembering to take a shower each morning or even eat your breakfast in the morning. We all have thousands of habits we do daily on autopilot and we can leverage those existing connections to help build new habits. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit that you already do every day and then start your new behavior on top of it. This is what I mean when I describe habit stacking. Let's take a look at how it actually works now. So the core idea is that straight after or before you do a current habit, you want to innocently do the new habit that you are trying to build. E.g. imagine you want to get into the habit of meditating every morning. Your morning could look like after I drink my cup of coffee, I will meditate for 10 min. Or you could go for something like after I eat my breakfast, I will meditate for 10 min. You're adding your new habit straight after something that you already do everyday without thinking. And by linking your new habits to a cycle that is already built in your brain, you make it more likely that you're going to stick to this new behavior. It's incredibly simple, but it's also incredibly powerful and effective. Once you've mastered this basic structure, you can then begin to create larger chains by stacking more and more habits. Again, let's look at another example. Your morning routine habits that might look something like after I drink my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 10 min. After I meditate for 10 min, I will put my phone on. Do not disturb. Author I put my phone on, do not disturb. I will immediately begin the first task on my to-do list. And the great thing about habit stacking is you can also incorporate habits into the middle of existing routines. E.g. let's imagine your current morning routine. Looks like this. You wake up, you brush your teeth, and you take a shower, and you want to get into the habit of reading before you go to bed. You can then change your habit to wake up, brush your teeth, place a book on my pillow, and then take a shower. And then when you get into bed each night, a book will be sitting there waiting for you to read, making the whole process of sticking to your habit a lot easier. The trick to forming a good habit stack is using the right cue to start the process. E.g. if you want to meditate every morning, but your mornings are really hectic, then that's most likely the wrong time to try and incorporate meditation in your daily life. So definitely be careful and give this some full as the left friction you have when inserting these new habits, the easier it is to stick to them. I hope you enjoyed this one and got a lot of value from it. And I'll see you in the next one. 18. Pomodoro Technique: Welcome back. The next strategy is one of my favorites, and it's one of the most impactful strategies that has transformed my business for the better. That strategy is called the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro technique was developed in the late 1980s by Francesco Cirillo. If you are Italian and you're watching this video, please give me some forgiveness if I pronounced that wrong. But essentially how it came about was Francesco was struggling to focus on his studies at university. So instead of dedicated in large chunks of time, hours upon hours of focus, he decided to only allocate just 10 min of focused study time to encourage them to stick to the challenge. He found a tomato shape timer, hence the name pomodoro, as that is what tomato means in Italian. And from there onwards, the Pomodoro technique was born. The technique in a nutshell involves getting a to-do list and a timer. You then set your timer for 25 min and you focus on a single task. Once your session ends, you can mark off one Pomodoro and then you can enjoy a five-minute break. And then after you complete four pomodoros, you take a longer break of 15 to 30 min just to ensure you have enough time to recharge. But pretty much the 25-minute work springs are at the core of the technique. So what are the benefits of this Pomodoro Technique? Well, the biggest benefit is you break the habit of multitasking or as you would at an earlier on in the course, multi switching. And that's because when you follow the Pomodoro Technique, you're more likely to break the habit of multitasking as you literally don't have the time to be doing multiple things in one Pomodoro session. The Pomodoro Technique also helps reduce the feelings of burnout. I've been super guilty of this in the past when I first launched my business, I was doing so much and I just thought if I take no break, I'll work harder than a competition. I'll achieve more. And little did I know back then it was counter intuitive to my productivity. I ended up doing less, getting fatigued and feeling burnout all the time. However, the Pomodoro technique encourages breaks. It allows you to recharge and go again. Another benefit is it also reduces procrastination. Let's be honest, we all procrastinate from time-to-time, but the Pomodoro Technique ignites a sense of urgency. We only have a limited amount of time to complete the task, so there's no time to waste. So how do we actually implement this and put it into use? Well, we have a couple of options. When it comes to practice in the Pomodoro technique, you can pretty much just use your phones alarm sets in. So set an alarm for 25 min and manually make a log of how many Pomodoro sessions you're completing a day. Or you can use a free online tool like kaizen flow.co. This is actually what I use on a day-to-day basis. I absolutely love it, is completely free to use and it also keeps a tally of how many sessions you're doing a day as well. I will include a link to it in the resources, but it's this website right here, Kaizen float.co. You can see once you go over to the website, you can first of all, select how long do you want your Pomodoro session to be. So by default is set to the correct 25 min. But if you find that it's too short few, you can then increase it to 30, 35, even all the way up to 50 min. On the same flip side, you can make it a lot shorter if you want to. Once you've selected how long you'd like your Pomodoro session to be. You can go ahead and click Start session. However, there's also another really good feature. If you click the drop-down menu, you actually have a option to play background music as well. So if you find you work best when listening to music, go ahead and select some music which suits your particular work style. Then hit Start session and go and start your Pomodoro. So this is a really good tool I found. So when it comes to using Pomodoro techniques, here's a couple of tips I recommend. The first is to experiment with the length of your pomodoros. Not everyone is going to work best to 25 min. So definitely play around with that. My second tip, which took me quite a while to realize, is when you are on your brakes, make sure you avoid screen time. Don't take a five-minute break and then pick up your phone and scroll through Instagram. Take a break from all screens and really use that time to recharge. So there you have it. That is one of my favorite techniques to use to increase my productivity. And now you know about the Pomodoro Technique is over to you to implement and take that step to becoming more productive. I'll see you in the next one. 19. Meeting Scheduling: Welcome back. The next strategy is another one of my favorites when it comes to time management and saving those crucial, crucial minutes. And that is by using a meeting scheduling tool, ask yourself, how much time have you wasted going back-and-forth with a client or a team member to find out when they are free. For our core, typically the email exchange starts off with you saying, Hey, are you free for a call on Friday. They then reply and say, No, can't do Friday, but I can do Monday. Does that work for you? You then reply and say, Yes, Monday also works. If you offer, this is the best-case scenario. How about 03:00 P.M. they then respondents a note busy at 3PM. Can you do 10:00 A.M. you then reply and say Yes, I can also do 10:00 A.M. I will send you an invite now. So that's a total of five emails just to get a core arranged. This is not an efficient way to be spending your time. And each e-mail that comes in is also another distraction in your inbox to what I want to do is show you a few different tools you can use to make the whole book or cool or book a meeting process. So much more easier and way more efficient. And that's by using a meeting scheduling tool like candy. Now, there are lots of different options out there which are run through in the next few slides. But calendar is one I use personally across all of my businesses. And as you can see from the image right here, once you send a link to someone, they can pretty much see your whole calendar, see what days and times you are available. In fact, let me give you a real-time walk through of that right now. So this is actually my life calendar book in form. I send this to clients when they come on board at our agency, click Slice. And it's pretty much a link for them to book an onboarding cool. So I literally send them the link. They can see what days I am available, e.g. the 30th. They could then click that and it will show them all the times I am available on the 30th for that onboarding. Cool. All they have to do is pick a day and time that suits them. And then the COO is booked and add it to both of our calendars. I literally had an email come in the other day for one of our clients who wanted a catch-up. The lady's name was Caroline. She sent me an email saying, hi Joseph, hope you're all well, wondered if we could have a cool to chat through their SEO report. I currently look off to the website and the socials. She then also said another line below which isn't really that relevant. I then reply to her email and said, hey Caroline, I'm great. Thanks. Hope it's the same. Your end too. Sure. Please use the link below to book in a call at a date and a time that suits you. I then put in a link to my private calendar form, which of course I blurred out for privacy reasons. I then had an email come in 5 min later, and it was a confirmation e-mail from calendar saying that Caroline has booked in a core. And you can see the date and the time right here. So you can see it makes the process is so much more easier. Calendar isn't the only option you have when it comes to meeting scheduling tools. You also have other options such as you can book me schedule 1s, set more, and drift is also a very solid option to calendar is just the one that I personally use. All of these tools are premium solutions. However, if you do have the budget for it, I definitely recommend checking them out. E.g. calendar is just $8 per month, which is pretty much the same price as a Netflix subscription. It's going to save you so much time. So that is it for this one. I hope you enjoyed it, and I also hope you are enjoying the course so far, and I'll see you in the next one. 20. Day Batching: Welcome back. The next lecture is a strategy inspired by the co-founder of Twitter and the CEO of Square, which is Jack Dorsey. Jack uses this strategy on a daily basis and religiously whilst he was building Twitter and Square. So we all know what Twitter is. But for those of you who don't know what a square is, square essentially produces those portable little credit card readers for mobile devices. And that company was recently valued at a massive $110 billion. So as you can imagine, Jack is going to be a very, very busy person and those who have a lot on a daily basis. So how does someone managed to run two massive companies at the same time? Well, he's secret is a strategy called De batching. Batching in essence, is given each day of the week or theme. So you can be assured that you're not just putting out fires all day long and you're only working on the urgent task. And these tasks are the ones that are typically very important and critical to your business. So here's an example of how Jack use to plan out his week using de batching. You can see on Monday he literally dedicated all the day it just to anything related to sales and marketing. So if there was an admin query that came in or something to do with accounting invoices or finance, he would not touch it. He will spend the whole day dedicated to sales and marketing related activities. On Tuesday, it was dedicated to staff development. On Wednesday, it was all about accounting and finance. So only on Wednesday would he deal with invoices and any accounting issues. On Thursday it was dedicated to customer support. Friday was branding and then on Saturday was all about spending time with his family and his friends, just having some general fund. And then Sunday was recharging and rejuvenating ready for the next week to come. So to clarify, batching is the act of batching similar tasks together and doing them all at once, rather than addressing them sporadically throughout the week. And the sentence, Jack was managing to large businesses. He found it a lot more easier and more time-efficient if you spend one day to focus on branding for both different businesses. And this is because when you batch, you minimize distractions because it keeps your focus narrow. You're only working on a specific set of tasks. You're not going back from one to another. An article in the Harvard Business Review by Peter Bergman noted that our productivity goes down by 40 per cent when we try to focus on several things at once. This is what we covered earlier on in the course, in the multitask and video. And it's exactly the same principle here. When you focus on similar unrelated task, you drastically reduce the need to refocus as you're working on similar task. To clarify, the main benefits of day batching is number one, it minimizes distractions. It also allows you to focus on one item or a theme at a time. Lastly, setting a theme also makes you aware and allows you to allocate time to important task like investing in yourself or learning. This is a really, really important one, especially if you are a small business owner or even a freelancer. If you are not investing in your self-development, then these are crucial skills that you won't have, which you can use to grow your business fervor. And even if you're not running multiple businesses like Jack, you can still leverage the same strategy and tweak it to suit your lifestyle. E.g. if you are a freelancer and you're just working in your business, then you can plan out your day, something like this. You could have a Monday to deal with customers and clients. Tuesday is dedicated to personal development and training. Wednesday can be all related to cells and client acquisitions. Thursday could be branding. Friday can be financed and invoicing. And of course, you'd have the same structure for the weekend if you wish. But pretty much it doesn't matter what you do. You can follow the same strategy here and plan similar tasks. On similar days, everyone is going to have their own unique setup, but I encourage you to tweak it and play around so it suits. But the main takeaway here is that you want to batch similar tasks together on the same day or breakout days in the week. Two specific activity related task, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 21. Leveraging Parkinson Law: Cyril Parkinson was a famous British historian. And what he did was he made an observation that work expands to fill the time available for completion. Now, what that means is, regardless of the importance or complexity of the task, if you give yourself 6 h to complete that task, then you'll get it done in 6 h. And on the flip side, if you give yourself 4 h to complete a task, you will complete it within 4 h. And the logic behind this observation is the pressure of that short deadline will force you to focus on the execution and the bare necessities, instead of Baffin around and wasting so much time, you will get so laser-focused and block out all distractions that you'll become incredibly productive. Now, of course, you do need to be realistic with the timeframes you set. E.g. if you have 2 h worth of work to do and you only give yourself 5 min to complete it, then it doesn't really matter as that's obviously not fair as it is very unrealistic. But the main theory behind this logic is that if you had a week to complete a task, so you seven days, you will spend five days to make a bigger deal. And there is a lot of truth in that too many people are guilty of over analyzing absolutely everything, procrastinating the liberating, you name it. There is no sense of urgency. You see, when you set aggressive deadlines, you literally do not have time to be deliberating and procrastinating. Ask yourself, when was the last time you had handed a really tight deadline by your manager? It was one that push you up against the wall and you initially for now, there's no way I'm going to get this done. But then you put your head down and you smashed it out of the park. And that's because a lot of us are really good at meeting deadlines when we put our minds to it. However, that is other people deadlines when it comes to our own things, on our own to-do lists, we don't have that sense of urgency. If you change your outlook and really get that sense of urgency for your own items on your to-do list, I can almost guarantee you that you will naturally find yourself becoming more productive to ensure you are really taking full advantage of Parkinson's law. I want to give you this rule of thumb that everyone at colliculus uses. And it's pretty much a formula you can use to estimate how long it should be allocated into a specific task. So the first thing you need to do is estimate how long you think it will take. Then we need to do is that dark one-third of that time. So let's look at an example. If you think something is going to take 30 min to complete, you need to then deduct 10 min from 30 min as that is one third, and then that will leave you with 20 min left. To complete that task, I have found one-third to be a really good metric to follow as its ambitious, but it's also realistic. Sometimes if you go too far and try to cut things in half, that can trigger the feeling of overwhelm, which defeats the main objective of Parkinson's law. So now you have this knowledge. I now challenge you to estimate how long you think it will take to complete your next day. And then the dot one-third of that time, put your head down and go out and do it and see how you get on. I'm confident you're going to be surprised. The more you do this, the better you understand of how long each task truly take, and the more productive you will be when it comes to doing this going forward. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 22. Leverage Dead Time: Welcome back. The next strategy is one I believe not enough people are taking full advantage of, and that is making the most of your dead time. E.g. your commute to work wherever you catch the bus, get the train, or even walk to work, you're most likely sitting there scrolling through social media, listening to music or watching something unproductive on YouTube. Now, it doesn't matter which one you are doing. The main principle of your activity remains the same throughout the more you are literally just killing time. Killing time to make your commute go faster. Now, for the average person, there's nothing wrong with that. However, the fact that you have this course proves to me that you don't just want it to be average. You want to be more productive than the average person and make the most out of your time. Did you know that the average commute time is just under 1 h. So it's just under 28 min each way, which if you add that up both ways, that is just five-minutes short of an hour in the UK is just a tiny bit higher than this, but this is an average commute time. A lot of people watching this course, we'll actually spend more time each way commute into the office. And that is a lot of time we can save the day. However, let's just stick with the average, which is an hour a day. So that is an extra hour every day that you can take full advantage of to get more things done. Now, your commute isn't just the only place where you can leverage dead time. You've also got different opportunities such as when you're waiting in a line, when you're attending unnecessary conference calls that you don't really need to be on or even when you're taking a shower. Now, I don't expect you to sit in your bath, get your laptop out, and start crunching some emails. But there's no harm in using that time to plan out how you're going to tackle your first task. Everyone's situation is going to be different and unique. But ask yourself, what do you typically do to kill your dead-time? Is it checking your social media feeds? Are you surfing on the web or are you using other nonproductive items? I encourage you to monitor this and just be aware over the next few days of exactly how you're spending your dead-time. I'm quite confident that you'll be surprised. It's interesting as a lot of people say they would like to read more books, but then complain they don't have enough time yet. They're sitting there on the hour commute every day on the phone, scrolling through their Facebook feed to see what everyone's up to. Why not convert your commute and make it productive instead of unproductive? And if you are looking to get into reading, well, did you know that a typical book usually contains about 400 pages and the average person can read 30-40 pages in an hour. And depending on the number of hours you read in a day, it can take you only about five to ten days to finish reading a book. If you are on the lower end of this average, maybe you are a slower reader and you can only read 30 pages in an hour, then that's still means you can complete one book on average every 14 days. So every two weeks, you should be able to get through another book. If you commute to the office five days a week, then literally in less than one month, you can complete a new book. Imagine that 12 new books a year, and you don't even have to book out any extra time in your day. If you're an active Jim person, then you can also choose to listen to audio books while she work out, whether that's weight training or cardio. I typically do 10 min of cardio every day before I do my weight session. And I'm always listening to either number one, an interview of someone on YouTube. You I can learn from. Number two, I'm listening to an audio book. This is something I've been doing for the last four years of my life. And it's worked out incredibly well as it saves me so much time to help get your cogs turning. Here are some other things you can do in your dead time. You can listen to an audio book. You can focus on mindset prime in reviewing your priorities. Deep breathe in goal planning. Idea planning, literally, anything that you can do that doesn't require you to be physically sitting down and looking at the screen, literally anything Q1, get creative as we're all going to have different durations and different types of deadtime. But the key is to making sure that you're leveraging your dead-time to become more productive and to more efficiently manage your time. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 23. Environment Productivity: Employee productivity in most cases is synonymous with employee engagement. And that's because when employees are engaged actively, they offer the best ability to organization. The workplace Research Foundation actually carried out some research into this. And they revealed that engaged teams show 24% to 59 per cent less turnover, but they get 10% higher consumer ratings. The 21% more profitable, and they're also almost 20% higher productive. So these are some astonishing facts. And they all backup and support that the more engaged you are, the more productive you are. What's one factor to become more engaged while it's working in and engage in work environment, which is an environment that makes work more enjoyable and is also a place you'd like to be in Amby around e.g. if you turn up to your office or your works out every day and has a big hole in the ceiling, the light to hanging out. This is not going to be a productive work environment as all this is going to do is distract you. It's going to make you not want to be there. And he's going to have a negative impact on your productivity when you're in a situation like this. This is what we call absenteeism. Absenteeism is the practice of regularly staying away from work or school without good reason. You're not avoiding work because you don't directly like your work. It's a bunch of other things that make you foster these feelings, such as your environment. Companies and individuals like entrepreneurs must take this information on board if they want to get the best out of the team. It's also the reason why some of the biggest companies out there have gone above and beyond in making the officers the best environment. E.g. we have this office right here, which is a office of innocent, innocent, this movie company. If you look closely at the image, you can see this is all grass on the floor and they've got benches which you typically have outdoors in the garden. So they've tried to make the office feel more of an outdoor environment, so they're not stuck within a building. They've also got a table football there as well for a bit more pleasure and enjoyment. Overall, it's a nice open plan environment. It encourages people to communicate with each other and make the work environment more social. Another example is Google's office in Zurich. You can see they have this massive slide going down. I kid you not. This is exactly how the office is. And again, this is just another thing to make the work environment more enjoyable and encouraged people to actually work out the best ability. And we have another example from YouTube, which is also owned by Google. I think Google had this big fascination with slides in the office. I mean, to be fair, if I did work in that office, I'll be more likely to go in. I'd also enjoy working in that environment. And of course, go down a slide on my lunch break. These are all things which some big, big companies are doing. And it's because they understand just how important their environment is when it comes to achieve an optimal levels of productivity. Now of course, not all of us have these luxuries and lots of space available where you can put a big slide in our office or even in our home setups. But here are a few things you can do to make your work environment a little bit more enjoyable. The first thing is ensuring that your setup is comfortable, that relates to your chair and your desk. I actually only invested in a proper chair and not too long ago. So what I'll do is I'll put an image on the screen now of my new work setup. It's a chair called the secret lab. It is quite expensive to be honest with you. But as I'm sitting down at my desk or probably 10 h a day is definitely something I wanted to make sure I didn't hold back on. But you don't need to get any fancy chair like this whatsoever. But you should have a comfortable sets up that doesn't cause unnecessary strain on your body? The chair I had before was causing a lot of back pains for me, which is why I invested in this one. The next thing you can do is to ensure you have a proper lighting. If you are working in a dark environment and you're having to squint at the screen, that is not good for your eyes and that is not a comfortable or enjoyable working environment. Another thing you could also do, which unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of doing in my new setup is try and sit next to a window. Sitting next to a window is great as you get a lot of natural light comment on your skin and both your work environment to both of those are proven to boost your mood and thus increase your productivity. Another thing you could do is make sure your desk and your workspace is nice and organized. There's nothing worse than having a messy desk and you can't find anything. It's pretty much the same of having all those things in your head where you feel stressed and overwhelmed. It's exactly the same on your desk, your debt should be organized and allow you to think. The next one is something I used to do for years, but when I started making these courses, I then had to take it off. But it's adding a plant to your desk so that I'm speaking right now for this course, this is unfortunately taken the spot of my plants. But pretty much having a plant on your desk is also a really good thing to do, is a really useful thing to do as it helps you bring the outdoors, indoors and make you feel like you're working in a more natural environment. Not to mention all the oxygen is given out right there in front of you. Again, this one is quite similar to sitting next to a window. They both help to boost your mood. And finally, the last one is personalized your work area. So this just helps you to make your work environment feel a little bit more personalized and not just like a generic work environment. And the more personal it is, the more attached you are going to fall to that environment, to the more likely it is that you want to be in that environment and work at the best of your ability. So one thing I did to my new work environment when I recently moved out to my girlfriend's house, is I put a picture on the wall of my dog, Milo. So I'm very attached to my dog. And if you can't see that picture properly on the wall, then what I'll do is I'll put another image up right now on the screen. This is my dog, Milo, on his birthday. But anyway, let's not get too distracted from the course. Let's go back onto the point of this video. And that is that you basically just want you to make your work environment more enjoyable as it's going to lead to you being more productive. So get creative with it, do whatever you need to do to make her environment better and more personalized. But now you know these things, I want to challenge you to implement at least four of them in your current setup. Trust me, you're going to be quite surprised at just how effective these things are. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 24. Speed Typing: Something that pretty much all of us do on a daily basis is typing. Typing is how we communicate with the world, is how we express ourselves in this digital age, is how we write blog posts, how we tell stories, and is also a part of how we get hired. With that being said, is crazy that not enough people are taking the typing skills seriously. And when I say seriously, I'm talking about the ability to be able to type faster and increasing your typing speed. There was actually a study done by the Cambridge University, which I'll link to in the resources. And it basically found that when people type faster, they become more productive because they complete more task and they also make fewer errors too. Did you know that the average person spends 3 h per day using the keyboard, which is quite crazy, right? And if you can improve your typing speed even just a little bit, just imagine how much time you could save. So let's do the maps and crunched the numbers. The average person uses a keyboard for free hours a day, which means the average person spends 1,095 h a year typing on the keyboard. So if we can just increase the speed by 30%, then that will reduce the number of hours to roughly 767. That's a massive saving of 328 h. So if you can type faster, you can save over 300 h a year to convert that back into days to give you some contexts. Thus 144 days that you will save every year. So every year you can save a for 14 days if you can increase your typing speed, which is absolutely insane, right? It just goes to show how effective increasing your typing speed can actually be. So before I get into the strategies you can use to achieve these results, let me just say that no one should ever feel ashamed of the lack of speed while typing. And that's because this stuff is not taught in school. It should be, but unfortunately it's not. Most people aren't even aware of the precious time they're wasting, or just how long something takes them to do, even if it's a shorter searching for something on Google. Imagine you're looking for a new job and you start applying to five new jobs every day. If you can type faster, you'll be able to apply it to more jobs in the same space of time, increasing your probability. I'm reducing the time it takes to land a new job. Before you start working on increasing your typing speed, you first need to know what your current typing speed is, right? As that's going to be your benchmark. So you can use a tool like this one, which is on live chat. So what I'll do is I'll include a link to this in the resources, but pretty much it gives you 60 s. You can see a countdown timer right here. And all you need to do is start typing the word that you see. As you type more words will come across the screen and you need to take them as fast and as accurately as you can. So I actually done this test again before I made this video. And you can see I got a typing speed of a octopus, which is what they called me. And that's the speed of 89 words per minute, which is pretty decent. Accuracy, on the other hand, wasn't that great at just 92%. But I'm currently wearing a font sprint due to an injury. Now to see how that actually matches up against other people who are using the tool. You've got your global histogram scores right here. And you can see the majority of people are averaging about 30 words per minute. So being in the 90s is definitely in the higher end of the score. So once you've got your ballpark figure of what you're typing speed is, I recommend doing it at least three times and then taking your average. Once you've got your average figure, if we are word per minute, you can then start working towards increasing your typing speed. So one technique you can use is using hotkeys, which is pretty much color-coded parts on your keyboard. This can be quite helpful as what it does is it groups similar letters together. So when you are looking down at your keyboard and you're trying to find the key to type, it sends a psychological signal to your brain and it increases the chances of you selecting the right key and also finding it faster. Another tip you can use to increase your speed is to actively try and type fast. When you completed that speed benchmark tests, you as most likely typing as fast as you can. That's me that he was typing it. You need to implement that in your day-to-day habits. When you're sending an email, don't just sit back and type it as you'd usually type it actively try and type as fast as you can, as frequently as you can. The third strategy you can use to improve your speed is just practice, practice, practice. I can't stress this enough. Links to the second point. But if you're not practicing your speech typing skills every day, then you're missing out on a big opportunity to save some time. You can actually use the same website I showed earlier to test your typing skills to actually practice on as well. Or you can also use another site like this one, call it type Raisa. It's quite similar to this one, but instead of just typing texts and it comes across your screen as you type in words and get them correct, you're actually move your car along in this race. So it's pretty much a competitive typing speed race. You can see I've currently in a race I haven't actually started, but the people I'm competing with are actually overtaken me. So if I want to catch them up, I then need to go ahead and type these words and you can see my car moves along the ray. So this is another really cool tool you can use. Again, I will link to this in the resources. So now you know how important your typing speed is and you know how to improve it. It's over to you to implement and save those precious minutes. Thanks for watching. 25. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Welcome to the last section of the course. I hope you are enjoying it so far and getting lots of value from it. So far, we've covered the common productivity killers that people are doing on a day-to-day basis. We've also covered over a dozen effective productivity strategies you can use on a day-to-day basis. Lastly, what I want to do is go over some lifestyle productivity hacks that you can incorporate on a daily basis to take you up to that next level. The first thing I'm going to be speaking about is meditation. After that, we'll then be talking about sleep. And lastly, it, we're going to be covering hydration. These three things may sound simple, but do not underestimate the effectiveness and the impact they can have on your day-to-day productivity. As you're about to learn in the next few videos, I think you're going to be surprised when I show you that data. So without further ado, let's jump into the first one. 26. Meditation: I have to admit I was personally very skeptical about meditation when I first heard about it, which is why I never really considered it as an effective strategy. I thought, you know what, I'm not really into all of this facade around meditation, but as I'm always eager to grow and learn new things, I always find myself watching interviews and research in high performance individuals who are absolutely killing it in life, whether that's in business, in sport, or just general life. And one common trait that I noticed that all of them do was meditation. Now, this was back in 2017 when I first quit my job. So I feel okay. I'll give this a shot and see how it goes. I'll see what all their phos is about as why are all these successful people preaching about meditation every day? Surely I can learn a thing or two. And I kid you not after literally meditating every day consistently for just a couple of months, I noticed a big difference within me. Not only do our basis video on my personal experiences with meditation, but also on hundreds and hundreds of studies that have proven that incredible benefits of meditation, which by the way, range from lower stress levels all the way up to improved memory. But I want to focus on one element of the benefits of meditation and that is of course, how it influences productivity. So how does meditation actually improved productivity? To understand this, you first need to understand what the prefrontal cortex is. So our brains have a part within them are called the prefrontal cortex is this part right here is at the front of your brain, typically behind your forehead. And what their prefrontal cortex is responsible for or is responsible for all the decision-making you make, is responsible for your focus, your judgment, how you behave, how you plan things, and even your self-discipline to all of these things. And decisions happen in the front of your brains in the prefrontal cortex. And research has shown that when we meditate, we strengthen the prefrontal cortex, which basically means all of these things become easier to do. The stronger our prefrontal cortex, the easier we can do all of the above things. I don't need to go through just how beneficial all of these things are when it comes to being more productive. If you can make better decisions, you'll be able to better prioritize what should be above what on your to-do list. If you can focus better, you'll be able to get more done. If you're planning skills increase, you'll be able to plan more efficiently and save time. So hopefully you can see just how important this cortex area actually is. I've done so much research into this part of the brain. All my findings come from the National Library of Medicine. I will link to both of these studies in the resources too. But pretty much everything I'm saying is backed up by science and data. Meditation really does do wonders when it comes to increasing your brain productivity, as you can see in this particular study right here, meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. Again, they're thicker and stronger that part of the brain, the easier it is to do all of those things. Here's another one. Mindful practice leads to increase in regional brain gray matter density. So what this is essentially saying is that those who practice meditation have a larger gray matter density in the brain. So what this is essentially saying is that those who practice meditation have a larger prefrontal cortex than those who don't practice meditation. Studies have also shown that people who don't meditate have brain activity associated with high distraction, racing thoughts, more mind-wandering and poor concentration. Whereas on the flip side, people who do meditate have more present moment focus. They can concentrate for longer and they have more self-awareness and self-control. These are all incredible findings and has a big impact on your personal productivity. So now you know the benefits of meditation and how it links to personal productivity. You're probably wondering, well, Josh, how do we actually practice meditation? So what I've got here is a seven step list, which pretty much covers how to meditate. Number one is you want to take a C in somewhere in a quiet and closed-off environment. You didn't want to go ahead and close your eyes and set a time limit ideally for 10 min. If you're completely brand new to meditation, then I recommend starting off with just five-minutes. And then once your eyes are closed, you want to notice your body and focus on your breath. Of course, your mind is naturally going to wonder, but when that does happen, all you need to do is be aware of this. Don't be too harsh on yourself and be kind to your wandering mind. And then finally, when your timer goes off, you can close your meditation with a kind fault. That's pretty much the process from start to finish. However, if you are starting from scratch, then I highly recommend you look into guided meditation techniques. What I will do is I will include a link to a video on YouTube in the resources is a really good link for beginners, which pretty much walks you through all of those seven steps and allows you to become a better meditator. Another option is the one I use every single day is using meditation apps. My personal favorite is Headspace, but another good option is calm as well. Both of these apps have free trials, so feel free to sign up to them, give them a trial and see how you feel. But the key is, do not be too judgmental. Meditation takes time. It does not happen overnight. My biggest regret is not starting sooner. So I hope this has inspired you to get into meditation because the benefits on your productivity or ten-fold. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 27. Hacking Your Sleep: Welcome back. In this one, I want to go over the importance of sleep. So sleep and productivity go hand in hand. And the reason behind this is because sleep actually promotes and lots of different things. Sleep promotes physical recovery and the body. As you sleep, your tissues naturally repair and strengthen themselves. Your heart risks and your blood pressure changes throughout the night, which also helps promote cardiovascular health. When you have a great night sleep, you also wake up feeling energized and recharged. And that's because while you're sleeping, your brain is creating and maintaining these past that are critical for memory formation and memory retention. All of these things enhance your learning and your problem-solving skills which are essential for your productivity. So let me ask you a question. How much sleep did you get last night? If it's more than 7 h is more than likely having a negative impact on your productivity. I actually track my sleep every night using this app here called sleep cycle, which I highly recommend as it allows you to track and analyze your sleep patterns. If you have an Apple Watch or Android watch, you were able to track, fell asleep using that to and at present, I am averaging about 7 h and 45 min of sleep each night. However, over 35 per cent of people in the US have reported sleeping less than 7 h a day on average. It's even worse in my home country as in the UK, it's been reported that men and women only get around 6 h of sleep at night, which is just not enough for you to perform at your best. The problem is if you're not giving your body enough time to rest and sleep, you're not giving it enough time to create those path for memory formation and skill enhancement. The National Sleep Foundation recommends that the average adult should get 7-9 h of sleep per night. If you're a young adult 18-25, that recommendation is still the same of seven to 9 h. If you're in your teenage years, then you're going to need a little bit more 8-10 h. But how old you are depends on how much sleep you need. And that's because you're at different stages in your life and you're doing different things on a day-to-day basis, losing just an hour or even 2 h of sleep at night. This can greatly impair your ability to function. Sleep experts have carried out multiple studies, and they say, This way of losing sleep is the equivalent of functioning without an entire night sleep. A lack of sleep leads to a lack of cognitive function. With your cognitive abilities lowered, it doesn't matter how good you think you are. You're going to be less alert. You're going to be slower to respond to pretty much everything. You're also going to struggle more to make decisions. You're also more likely to make mistakes, all of which have a dramatic negative impact on your productivity. And it was actually reported that people who have insomnia, so struggle to sleep at night, they have decreased level of concentrations and find it difficult to perform the duties on the job. So now we know why sleep is so important and just how it affects your productivity. Let's talk about how you can get a good night's sleep. The first thing you want to do is set an alarm. Setting an alarm and making sure you wake up at the same time every day is so important to creating a good routine. However, most people just set an alarm in the morning. Well, you should also consider doing is setting an alarm at nighttime too. You know when to go to bed. I would say that setting an alarm at nighttime is just as important as setting an alarm in the morning. My second tip is to make sure that the room is dark. Light can make sleeping very, very difficult. So try using asleep and mask if you can't block out the light in your room. And you also want to consider eliminating any noise as well. A great way to do this on a budget is just by using earplugs or noise cancellation headphones. My girlfriend actually bought a white noise machine not too long ago and she puts that on every night. It did used to annoy me at first, but after a couple of nights, I've got completely used to it and it really does help you sleep better. My fourth tip is to try and call the room before you sleep. And the reason behind this is because your body temperature decreases as you sleep. You want to find the temperature that doesn't make you wake up feeling too hot or too cold. You can experiment with this by leaving your window open. Although if you do live on a busy road, you can find it just generates more noise or you can put a fan in front of your bed. That is what I've been doing for the last four years. My fifth and final point is use your bed for sleep. Only. A lot of people have a bad habit of getting into bed, watching TV, watching something on Netflix. And all that does is confused your brain. What the bed is actually four. If you only sleep in your bed, then what you're doing is broadening habit, which is wired into the brain and makes it clear to your brain that every time you get into bed, you are trying to sleep, which results in you falling asleep quicker to, but if no matter what, you are still struggling to get at least 7 h of sleep a night, then what you can also consider is power naps. Now, the trick to power naps is to keep them less than 30 min. There has been lots of research studies done into naps. And the reason why they need to be less than 30 min is because any longer starts to interfere with your normal sleep schedule and your circadian rhythm. In fact, there was one study that took two groups of participants. They had one group take a quick nap and the other group stay awake. And the ones you took a nap performed at 85% and retention rates compared to the 60% of the other ones that didn't. So there seems to be something related to sleep and solidifying your memories, which might be useful for any students out there. However, I could talk about sleep for hours, but I know you guys didn't get this course just to learn more about sleep, but please do be aware of just how important sleep actually is. So in closing, making sure you're getting at least 7 h of sleep every night if he wants to be performing at your optimal productivity levels. 28. Hydration: Welcome back. In this one we're going to be talking about hydration. Everything we do begins with the brain. So looking after it could not be more important. A healthy diet, exercise, and good sleep are all essential for having a healthy brain. However, one of the simplest ways to improve brain function is simply by staying hydrated. To understand why, let's take a look at how the brain uses water. Water is essential in delivering blood, nutrients and oxygen to the brain, all of which are needed for brain cells to function. And water also actually helps to get rid of harmful toxins to. So when we're dehydrated, what this means is that the brain cells are not receiving what they need to operate properly. And in the long term, this can have a lot of problems such as the brain cells start to shrink and we start the process of premature in the aging of our brains. And unfortunately, our brains on what like camels, we have no way of storing water, so it's really important to stay hydrated throughout the day. Research recommends that we drink 6-8 glasses of water per day, which equates to about two liters a day. The average person in the UK drinks less than one liter a day, but the average person also loses about 2.4 liters a day. Just renewable activities am I making you firstly yet you see your body is made up of 70% water. Wash your brain is made up of almost 80 per cent water. When your brain is fully hydrated, it works more efficiently. You'll be able to think faster. You're more focused and you can tap into your prefrontal cortex way more easier to, which is what we discussed in the previous videos. But most importantly, when you're hydrated, you're going to be more productive. What's actually interesting is your brain only accounts for roughly 3% of your body mass. However, even whilst being this small in comparison to the rest of your body, it uses up to 20% of the water and nutrients that you take in and even just small amounts of dehydration can lead to big effects. In fact, just 1% of dehydration can lead to a five per cent cognitive decline. So it's really important that we stay hydrated. If we're serious about performing our best levels, hierarchy to best practices you can follow to ensure you're giving your brain the water it needs. Number one, is drink half a liter of water within the first hour of waking up. And the reason behind this is though even though you're sleeping, your brain is still working to keep your body alive. Your brain needs water to work efficiently. So once you finished sleeping and you've had a nice, hopefully at least 7 h sleep, you're going to wake up and your brain is going to need some recharging. The best way to do that is by drinking lots of water straight away in the morning. So I recommend drinking at least half a liter within the first hour of waking up. The second tip I recommend is to carry a water bottle around with you, literally everywhere you go. Even whilst I'm making this video right now, I'll take a screenshot of my setup. You can see I've got my bottle right here in front of me while I'm creating these hydration tip PowerPoint slides, I always take this bottle out with me and it's just a reminder to me that I need to go ahead and drink some water. It might sound a little bit silly, but this bottle does come everywhere with me. This is a 750 mil bottle. However, you can get smaller ones if you don't want to carry a big thing, you know, 500 mil or even go up to one liter. But I drink two of these everyday, which is one-and-a-half liters. And I get the rest of my water up through my T and the coffee I have. So I highly recommend that you carry a bottle around with you, as is really going to help remind you that you should be drinking more water. And the crazy thing about this is that if you are feeling a little bit dehydrated, then once you drink lots of water, literally within 10 min, you'll start to feel so much better. And you'll notice that difference. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and give this a try. So now you know this and just how important hydration is, it's over to you to actually implement this now and take that next step in becoming more productive. So in closing, my final words to you are stay hydrated. Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed it. 29. Goodbye for now..: Hello Now productive individuals. Well, I certainly hope this isn't a goodbye forever, and it's just a goodbye for now. I thank you so much for making it to the end of the course of me. And really taking the time to understand exactly what's killing your productivity on a daily basis, along with over a dozen different strategies that you can use to become more productive and better manage your time. Understanding how to work at your optimal levels is going to give you a massive unfair advantage in life. Too many people are wasting precious time in their lives, time that they do not get back to. Many people are not working efficiently enough and I'll take them way longer than required to complete simple things. However, the fact that you yes, you literally watching this video, I am calling you out. The fact that you have this course proves to me that you are not going to be one of those people. So what I want to do is do a quick cheers to you and say a massive congratulations to you. As once you put all these strategies into place, your life is going to be way less stressful. You're going to save time. You're going to get way more done. Everything you've learned in this course is a same strategies that I've been using myself to scale multiple businesses into the multiple six-figure sales revenues. So I can confidently say with conviction that if that is your goal to, then you have the core fundamentals and the framework to go ahead and do the same too. But lastly, I just wanted to say, thank you for choosing me to be the person who teaches you all about productivity and time management. I am really grateful and humbled for your support. I wish you tons and tons of success on your journey. And I truly sincerely hope this course has given you everything come more that you're expected to gain from it. I hope you found the course valuable. So please be sure to leave me a review and share your feedback. I worked really, really hard on it and I read every single review that comes in. If you'd love to make my day, then feel free to go ahead and share this on social media to as sharing is caring. But once again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you loved the course. I had a great time making it and hopefully I'll be seeing you in another one soon. Goodbye for now.