by Roger Seip
At the end of your week then, take a few minutes to review. How did your plan work out? Did you get the results you wanted? Specifically, two questions are helpful here:
1. Was my plan effective?
2. How effective was I at sticking to my plan?
The good news is that when you answer these questions, you are guaranteed a positive outcome and you train positive momentum into your brain. If you got the results you were looking for, these questions will help you reproduce and improve upon those results. Even if your results were not what you hoped, you have the ability to determine where the problem occurred and decide how it's going to be different next week. Life is about learning, and structuring your weeks around the Two-Hour Solution will make you much more mindful of the lessons that you need to learn now.
Ready to take this structure and supercharge its effectiveness? Chapter 12 will give you some great strategies for making your time much more productive and fun!
Reinforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!
Chapter 12
Top Tips for Supercharging Your Productivity
To wrap up this section on dealing with time, here's a smorgasbord of ideas for making yourself more productive. None of them are theories, all of them are strategies that I have personally gotten great results with and seen my clients get equally good results. You'll find that implementing even one or two of these strategies will make you much more effective with your time. Most of them will also help to turn on your subconscious mind to start making magic happen. So don't feel like you need to implement all of these tips immediately—rather pick one or two that you can get started with right away.
These are laid out in no particular order, except that #1 is definitely #1.
Get Crystal Clear on Your Goals
I've heard it said that you'll never meet someone with a time management problem who doesn't also have a focus problem. You've heard me say (in this book) that if you're not clear on what you want to accomplish, then how you manage your time is irrelevant. If you're looking for a way to boost your productivity, there's no question that the most impactful thing you can do is to simply have energizing goals. Remember all the great stuff you learned in the section on energizing goals? There's a reason why we covered it before the time usage section.
When you are clear on what you want to accomplish and why you want to accomplish it, you're just naturally more prone to things that work. You automatically heighten both your focus and your energy level, and it becomes much clearer how to prioritize your activities. When your goals fire you up, you will naturally guard your green time better, you will naturally attract more of the right people, the right ideas, and the right circumstances to help things move more quickly. The universe loves speed, and that speed is turned on by your mind being focused on and excited by your goals.
Having really energizing goals also makes you naturally less prone to what doesn't work. With energizing goals, you'll naturally be less prone to wasting time on TV, video games, and the Internet. You'll also notice that you'll have a force field that just steers negative interruptions away from you. When interruptions do happen (as they will), your goals will automatically make you deal with them more efficiently so they suck up less of your precious time.
When you have done the things that you learned in the “Have Energizing Goals” section of this book, you'll also automatically steer yourself away from the greatest time waster of all.
Add by Subtraction
The greatest waste of time is to do perfectly what needn't be done at all. Not sure who said this first, but it's a quote I use all the time. Here's a good example of how cutting things out makes life better.
A while back my wife and kids were off on a little vacation, so I knew I'd have the entire weekend at my disposal. So what do you imagine I did? That's right, I worked on my yard! And I must say, I was stoked. For reasons I still can't fully understand, I couldn't have thought of a more enjoyable way to spend this time than cutting, mowing, pulling, mulching, and cleaning.
I wish I had taken before and after photos to show you what we're talking about, but suffice it to say that the place looked much better on Monday than it did on Friday. It almost wasn't the same home. Some of this was because of the mulch that got laid down to cover blemishes, some because my mom planted a few flowers, but most of the improvement came from the eight-foot high, 10-foot wide pile of branches, leaves, plants, and grass that simply got eliminated. The most effective improvement tools were the lawnmower, the pruning saw, and the hedge trimmer. The truly significant improvement came from what got cut out.
So what do you need to cut out?
What needs to be cut from your life? Some TV watching? Some snooze alarming? How about some operating without clear goals? Should you cut out starting the week without a plan? Are there any people you need to get away from so you can invest your time with a more inspiring crowd? Seriously, what patterns have you fallen into that would serve you best if you just took a scalpel to them?
At least as important as the to-do list is the stop-doing list—use it.
The Daily Big Six
In Chapter 11, we strongly emphasized the practice of weekly planning, as opposed to the more common practice of a daily to-do list. This does not mean that you shouldn't plan out your day as well. The Two-Hour Solution gives context to a daily plan, and a daily plan puts teeth into the weekly. However, when it comes to creating a set of objectives for a single day, most people put too much on their lists, and/or they put items on it for the wrong reason.
The game is not to see how many things you can cross off a list, and it certainly isn't to see how many things you can put on. The game is to be as effective and productive as possible, so here's the absolute best method I've found. It's called the Daily Big Six, and I am shocked at how simple it is.
To mentally create a day, you only need to write down your answers to one question. The question is “What are the most impactful things I want to accomplish today?” You can answer however you like, and the only constraint is that you must limit yourself to a maximum of six answers for that day. Let me repeat that: no more than six significant objectives for any given day. If your answer is less than six, no problem. In fact, it's very common to have a Daily Big 3 or sometimes only a Daily Big 1. I promise you, if you write more than six, there are at least one or two things that simply aren't that important.
This method of approaching a day is actually so old that almost nobody even knows where it came from, but here's the value of this incredibly simple practice. The first known instance of it being taught was when an efficiency expert named Ivy Lee taught this technique to John D. Rockefeller in the early 1900s. Mr. Lee taught it to him and said, “Pay me whatever you believe this method to be worth.” A few weeks later, Rockefeller sent him a check for $25,000 (in today's dollars that's over $500,000), along with a note explaining that he was still “drastically underpaying.” When you shift the question from, “How many things can I cross off?” to “What are the six most important things I can accomplish?” your focus and your sense of urgency skyrocket. It makes the game a lot more fun.
Organize at the End of the Day
Most people who implement the Two-Hour Solution and then the Daily Big Six will do their daily plan in the morning, before starting the day. This is certainly better than not doing it at all, but if you want to also crank up your subconscious mind to start working magic, do your Daily Big Six the night before. Sometime between wrapping up your workday and going to bed, take the few minutes you need to decide on your Daily Big Six for the next day.
This small difference does a couple of things that can put rocket fuel on your next day. First off, you'll go to sleep easier and wake up with more energy. Writing does something to settle things in your mind. So when you make the decis
ion on your handful of most important objectives before going to bed, you remove some of the nagging questions that make it hard to rest. You also wake up without those questions and tend to hit the ground running in the morning. You'll learn more about how to maximize the first few minutes of your day in the Aggressive Mental Care section, but simply doing your Daily Big Six the night before can do wonders for getting your day off to a fast start.
Second, you actually flip your subconscious 180 degrees to start working for you while you sleep. Ever notice how if you have an argument or watch a stressful TV show right before falling asleep that it messes with your head? Crazy dreams, lots of tossing and turning, and so on? Guess what, you can make that tendency work for you just as easily as letting it work against you. Your brain is extremely active while you sleep, and it's doing some pretty big things. A lot of your brain's activity during sleep is to process what happened during the day, and then a lot of it is actually your subconscious getting you and your universe prepared for the next day. So by doing your Daily Big Six before bed, you actually plant thought seeds that your subconscious will go to work on while you're sleeping.
Ramp up Your Self-Discipline
You may have noticed that a significant amount of this book is devoted to helping you get where you want to go in the most efficient manner possible. I am a huge believer in the idea of working smarter rather than harder…and I've also found that in many cases, working harder IS working smarter. Sometimes your success boils down to you simply making the decision that you're going to do whatever is necessary, for as long as necessary, to accomplish your goals and dreams. Back in the 30's, Albert Gray said that the Common Denominator of Success is that:
“Successful people form the habit of doing what unsuccessful people don't like to do.”
A more modern translation comes from my friend Rory Vaden, author of the bestseller Take The Stairs. He calls it The Rent Axiom, and it's one of my all time favorites. He says that
“Success is never owned, it's rented—and the rent is due every day.”
Oddly enough, when you make that commitment—that you're going to pay the rent every day—it frees up an enormous amount of energy and time. Make that commitment, and you become much more efficient and magnetic.
For God's Sake, Stop Multitasking!!
Possibly the worst lie about time management is the one that says “If you can do more than one thing simultaneously, then clearly you can get more done in less time.” That sounds like it should be true. I mean, just do the math, right? Wrong! Turns out that the more you try to do two things at once, let alone three or more, the worse your performance becomes, and ironically the longer it all takes. Don't buy it? Just google “multitasking research” and you'll find so much research on the phenomenon that it will make your head swim. I stopped looking after the twentieth article I read, because they all said the same three things:
1. Multitasking is a fallacy to begin with and people who think they're good at multitasking are totally lying to themselves. According to Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review, doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40 percent. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.
2. Multitasking actually slows you down rather than speeding you up. According to Stanford University professor Anthony Wagner, “When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, [heavy multitaskers] are not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal…. That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information.”
3. Multitasking doesn't just make you slower, it actually makes you stupider! “Multitasking adversely affects how you learn,” said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology. “Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” The effect of multitasking is literally a drop in your IQ equal to an entire sleepless night—approximately twice the effect of smoking marijuana.
Too many people wear their excellent ability to multitask as a badge of honor. What they are actually doing is lying to themselves while making themselves both slower and stupider. If that's you, knock it off.
Work in Bursts, and Work during Primetimes
The antidote to the multitasking disease is to play to your brain's natural high-performance tendency: Work in bursts. You can focus intently on one thing for approximately 20 minutes at a time pretty easily, somewhat longer if what you're working on is important to you. After that, your brain just needs a break. So figure out a way to incorporate short breaks of three to five minutes into your day, once or twice per hour. Just simply stretching, taking a deep breath, or standing up for a brief period gives your brain the chance to hit the reset button in a way that keeps you productive and focused all day. In fact, that's how this book got written. The majority of the writing was done in a four-week stretch of time, and I did it about 25 minutes at a time. I've found that a day of work is best approached not as a marathon, but as a series of sprints.
The bonus tip in this area is to plan your bursts in accordance with your own natural primetimes. We all have a natural rhythm that our energy level follows. For example, I am a big-time early bird. I love being up before the sun, and I am highly motivated and creative at 5:30 in the morning. Some of my friends don't really get going until about 10 in the morning, and I know some people whose peak of energy happens somewhere around midnight. None of these are better or worse than another. If you can determine your natural energy high points, you can quite easily schedule the tasks that require your best thinking around those times.
Guard Your Green Time
In Chapter 11, we discussed the concept of green time—time set aside for the activities that directly generate your living. I briefly mentioned that you should guard this time, and it's so important that it gets a whole tip here. You must guard and protect your green time aggressively, or it will get stolen from you. If your green time gets stolen, it literally means that your money is being stolen. Bill Zizzi, an early sales mentor of mine put it this way. He said, “When I'm selling, I make about $100 per hour. So if someone wastes half an hour of my time, they literally stole 50 bucks from me. I'm not going to just let that happen.”
Of course nobody wants to let theft happen. If you aren't really mindful however, you will let green time get stolen from you. Who will steal it? You'll steal it from yourself. Why? The reason is that green time is often the toughest thing we have to do, so the two-year-old part of our brain can do a great job of finding excuses. For a salesperson, prospecting is emotionally challenging, so it's easy to somehow make “research” a higher priority. For a student, actually doing the science project is hard, so it becomes easy to just put it off one more day. For an executive, delivering a necessary piece of bad news is not fun, so their brains will come up with all kinds other projects to take precedence. Do not confuse activity with accomplishment—you're literally taking money out of your own pocket.
Schedule Interruptions (huh?)
When it's not you that's stealing green time from you, it certainly can be other people. Remember Quadrant 3, the quadrant of deceit? Other people will unquestionably steal a lot of time from you if you let them. Especially if you work from home, it often seems like people just think that you must not be doing much of anything! Don't get mad about it, just learn to deal. Two ways:
Proactively: When you do your weekly Two-Hour Solution, make sure to communicate your schedule to two groups of people—the people who mean the most to you and the people who most often interrupt you. My wife and I both do our own version of the Two-Hour Solution independently, and then we come together to mesh up our schedules (communication is key). For people I work with, my schedule gets shared o
n Google Calendar so they can see when it's okay to call me and when it's not.
Responsively: Even if people know when your “office hours” are, they will still show up and say, “Hey can you help me with _____ right now?” This instance is where the magic of flex time shows up. First off you must be firm and at least attempt to schedule an appointment to help this person with whatever he or she needs. Direct them to the fact that you have a schedule that you've thought through, and point out that you've actually set aside time to deal with situations like theirs—three hours here, an hour there, another significant block somewhere else. Often, they will simply deal with their own issue (usually a win for both of you); sometimes it will be important and they will in fact schedule an appointment (also a win for both of you). In the rare instance where you really do need to drop what you are doing, you still win, because you've set up Flex Time for yourself! You must, however, begin training people that you have a plan. It'll be tough at first, but you'll notice after about three weeks that the number of interruptions and distractions in your life has dropped considerably.
Set Boundaries on Technology
The last time thief is technology, specifically communications technology. Cell phone, text messaging, and e-mail can steal so much time and energy it's criminal, and it's not necessary. My friend Tom Weber says it best. Tom is big time into Facebook, Twitter, texting and social media, but his philosophy is that those technologies exist for him to communicate with clients and loved ones when he wants, not for them to have access to him all the time that they want. So just decide ahead of time when you'll respond to texts, e-mails, and voicemails and let people know. For me there's a lot of time each day where I am simply unavailable to anyone. If I'm speaking, coaching, or in a meeting, my phone is off. When I'm with my family, I choose to be with them fully. And sometimes I just know that I won't want to talk to anyone for a morning or an afternoon. So my outgoing voicemail changes every day to let people know when I will return calls, and nobody ever gets upset when they can't reach me immediately. E-mail autoresponders can accomplish the same thing. It's a two-minute investment each day that pays huge dividends in my own focus as well as my credibility with people who are important.
