13 Years of No BS Productivity Advice in 67 Mins

I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years during this time I've been able to complete medical school as well as work as a doctor and complete my masters while running two businesses full-time I now run a learning program at I can study where I have coached tens of thousands of people with these same methods to Triple their productivity and today I'm going to compress 13 years of NOS productivity advice into this one video number one don't trust your your brain this is probably the most important thing to help you do more while working

less I had this classmate back in medical school her name was Hannah and throughout medical school she was this very hardworking super diligent like role model student and so I was really surprised when recently she reached out to me for a consultation and she said that she'd been struggling for years because because she felt like she was always busy she had just bought a house and she was trying to start a family and she was trying to enter you know into this very very competitive surgical training program and there were all these pressures and all

these different goals and she felt she was getting further and further from being able to achieve them while being so busy that she had no more time to spare so I said what are you doing to be more productive and she was doing a lot of good things like she was making schedules she was making to-do list she was prioritizing her tasks very important so what was the problem the problem was that she trusted her brain too much she trusted that when she makes a plan her brain will follow through on that she trusted that

when there's a schedule her brain will follow it that when there is a priority that her brain will stick to it and not get distracted and the important thing that she had to realize is that your brain is not there to help you reach your productivity goals your brain is just there to keep you alive it's always looking for the energy efficient shortcut which your plans probably aren't your plans probably aren't easy they require hard work and consistency so you have to expect that if you're trying to be productive that that is not going to

be natural your brain is going to make errors and for Hannah she expected and trusted that her brain will be able to perform perfectly every single day and so you should have this week or two of like blistering productivity everything's going great and then something happens and she' beat herself up over it and should say like yet again this what she said is like I keep trying and trying and every time I try I keep failing and the reason why this is such an important one to start with is that it forces your perspective on

other things that might help your brain to perform a a little bit better so for example Hannah she never scheduled breaks for herself because there was so much she wanted to do and there was never enough time why would she take time off and as a result she was getting burnt out well guess what being burnt out is very unproductive so what I want to really help redefine and like if you take nothing away from this video other than this one message I think this is the one that makes it biggest difference is that productivity

is not about being busy productivity is anything that gets you closer to your goals anything and any goal your goal could be to live in isolation in the mountains like a Hermit totally fine I wish I could have such a goal cuz that sounds awesome if that's your goal then the things you do that get you closer to that goal that's productivity productivity is not about like being busy having 50 different apps of fully filled calendar that's not what productivity is in fact a lot of those things can take away from productivity productivity is understanding

what you need when you need it that gets you towards your goal and then committing to that action and sometimes that means getting more sleep that means taking a break that means reflecting spending time with your loved ones not working over a certain holiday and this is a this was a tough pill for me to swallow for myself cuz I'm kind of like a workaholic that's what true productivity is that's what allows you to have the longevity and the sustainability of just being able to day in and day out just do what you need to

do for so long that you inevitably reach your goals and by starting off not trusting our brain to be a perfect executor we switch from being on the back foot reacting to problems and errors and obstacles that come up because our brain wasn't perfect and we start thinking proactively okay what are the barriers what are the challenges I may face with following this plan with following this schedule realistically for my brain where is it going to struggle and where are where is it going to make mistakes let's plan for that and immediately that reduces the

amount of just stress and burden on a daily basis of trying to be productive and I truly believe that you cannot have sustained productivity without sustained self-compassion number two start small then nuclear once we start thinking about productivity and reaching our goals in a more sustainable way we start realizing that there are really a lot of things that we can start doing to improve our productivity and give our brain a better chance and so the real question question is where do you start anytime there's any error or issue with your productivity whether it's your scheduling

or your task management or your prioritization or your distractability or procrastinating whatever it is start with the thing that you feel is easy and obvious to fix where you have a pretty high certainty that doing this is going to help you and it doesn't really matter if it's the most important thing to start with just start with the ones that you feel confident to lock in because if there are a 100 things you need to work on the best position for you to be in is to then have 99 in my first few years of

University I used to experiment with like everything all at once like I was using different schedules different sleep schedules different task management apps I used I actually had a period of time where I was using like three or four different task management apps at the same time to see which one was better and the result was I wasted a lot of time unnecessarily the better approach is just lock in on one thing that you think you can get better at fix that thing and then move on to the next thing it just you're immediately getting

the value of having one less problem and it means that it's easier to think about the next problem if you try to fix all 100 things at the same time you're guaranteed to fix none of them so what does new nuclear mean nuclear means that if you weren't able to solve a problem by using the small strategies don't like just keep fluffing around with like more little things that may or may not work just throw the whole truck at it most common example for this is procrastination and distractions you might say hey I can install

an app blocker and that might stop me from Doom scrolling on Instagram and that's my like small immediate thing great give it a go start small let's say you do that and it doesn't work you're still getting distracted you found a way around your app Locker don't just keep piling on tiny little things that may or may not make a difference if you failed on that one then it means that the problem is bigger than that right it means that there's like a strong habit there's a strong force there that's bringing you back to that

problem just throw the whole truck at it delete the app on your phone completely block it on your computer so that you can't access it do absolutely everything that you can to just eradicate it and then just see how that works the reason say this is because it is much easier to go nuclear than scale back down to something that's more realistic than it is to figure out where that realistic point is through these tiny little steps one by one where it's very very frustrating it's very demotivating and you like never know whether you're going

to reach it if you start nuclear the problem's gone done it's solved now you can slowly start reintroducing things bringing it back down to figure out where that line is don't let problem s linger for months or even years when you could just crush them in a week when I was a doctor one of the really interesting things about working in a healthcare system in New Zealand it's it's a public Healthcare System so we're always very wary about resource usage like you can't just have a patient come into the emergency room and you just give

them like every single scan and blood test that you know that's available to you like that's tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars of Investigations that we're doing which may not be necessary and so the idea is that you focus on where you think it's going to provide you the most value so let's say someone comes in with like a sore leg okay cool we're going to do an exray of the leg like that becomes the best thing to do now because that's probably the thing that provides us the most information and most value

to make a diagnosis and treat this person and if that's not enough then we think about it like okay well what's the next thing and so this is called su's law which was named after this guy called William suon who like 100 years ago was a train robber and he robbed this train which was full of gold and they asked him hey why did you rob this train and he said because that's where the money is at and so s's law became go for where the money is at and I'm not talking about money in

terms of like cash money I'm talking about go for the money in terms of where the value is in productivity remember I how I said that I used to use like four different task management apps at the same time to figure out which one was best that's not where the main value was at thinking back on it now the biggest thing for me would have been how do I just reduce my procrastination and if I think about how much of my time and effort and energy on figuring out productivity was spent on that removing procrastination

I would say very very little like less than 10% of my effort and attention was directed at that even though that's for me the biggest bottleneck that would have been where the money is at and so what I often find when I'm coaching people is that usually there may be a hundred different things that you could work on but there's only like one or two things that if you were to solve those you could double your productivity off the bat and they're usually big sticky problems that you don't know how to handle but that just

means that it's important to start trying to solve them as early as you can cuz it's going to take time and be very careful about getting really excited about things that feel like it's going to be really helpful for your productivity but it's not where the money is at like I used to go and open up the app store and like scroll through different productivity apps to see what new productivity app is on the App Store that might just magically solve my problem it's just it's not going to happen like and I've been doing this

for a long enough time to know that's just not how it works that app is not going to solve it that app is a distraction that app and that behavior of you trying to look for the easy solution that feels exciting is the thing that stopping you from being more productive so figure out what's holding you back the most that's where the value is focus there number four do more with less when you start thinking about where the value really is for improving your product ity you start realizing that a lot of solutions are actually

just more problems and the common example here is when people use a lot of different apps and a lot of different Frameworks and a lot of different like different types of kind of solutions like they'll download a template from here and they'll have this app for this and this app for this and I'm not saying that you shouldn't use apps but try to do as much as you can with as little as you can I have gone from using four different task management apps three different calendar apps one for my phone one for my laptop

and then one for my tablet because each app performs slightly differently across the three I've gone from that to now I have a task management app I have a notebook like a literal just sitting on my desk like you know that just has me writing on it with a with an actual pen uh I use Google Calendar and that's basically it that's that's all I need to maintain what I think is a pretty high level of productivity for a long time now as I've gotten deeper and deeper into understanding what makes productivity sustainable I've realized

that when you have a system of productivity that uses so many different components each one of those components introduces a chance of error or complication it increases the amount of friction if there's an update on one app we have to think about how that update might affect us if there's you know one app doesn't work like we have to think of another workflow around that and so again I'm not saying don't use apps there are a lot of apps that I don't use that I know are very effective and can help you be really productive

what I'm saying is that if you are in that mindset where you're constantly looking for more things that help you with your productivity you're probably going to get more value from learning to just do more with what you already have or even less of it number five prioritize deep flow I don't know if you know this already but there is no such thing as multitasking in fact trying to switch between multiple tasks constantly is very distracting and it reduces your overall productivity and for real productivity there are very few things more powerful than the ability

to just have a single task and lock in that feeling of flow when you don't even know time is passing you are on a roll your brain is just wired in and it's just high quality work that being able to take that like if you could you know bottle that into a pill and just take that every single time that probably is a drug and it's probably illegal don't do that but like if you could just like you know wave a magic wand and access flow anytime that you wanted so many of your problems would

be solved you would not get distracted as much your productivity would just go through the roof because you just get so much done when your brain is in that flow State and you can literally just use that as like you Universal question you ask yourself is this thing going to help or harm my ability to focus in and concentrate on a single task and again don't trust your brain don't trust that just because you want to enter into flow you will be able to enter into flow there are certain triggers that help you into flow

and there are certain things that pull you out of flow you're not going to know what all of those things are off the bat learn about those expect to fail expect to try to enter into flow and struggle and then document it what's stopping you what hinders you and harms you from entering into that flow State and when you're in that flow what's pulling you out of it start understanding your personal barriers and triggers and optimize your environment and your processes to add or remove them and once you can figure that out then you're in

a great position for the next one which is number six find flow times in your day I heavily underestimated this when I was in like halfway through University like fourth and fifth year of University I was entering into full-time Hospital placement so it's harder for me to find places to just sit down and just study for long periods of time during the day and so like I didn't think this would be a problem in my schedule I had this nice study block just after dinner and that was when I was meant to get all my

you know deep work and studying done unfortunately my hit rate on being able to have a good study session during that block was like 50% half the time I don't get any study done because something happens during dinner or like it goes longer than expected or I feel sleepy or tired or there's some other distraction or I just want to relax and you know I just let myself relax instead and what I realized is that that period after dinner and this is true to this day is that that period of like 2 3 hours after

dinner for me is like not a good flow time anytime I try to do anything that requires deep concentration immediately after dinner doesn't work uh same for immediately after lunch just doesn't work and so I deliberately do not plan anything that requires deep flow during those times because it's a highrisk move and what I found is that for me deep flow either happens around 400 p.m. just before dinner and I think the urgency of of eating is like kind of helps me through that or earlier in the morning or later at night and so depending

on what my schedule looks looks like that's when I decide to do my most important tasks those are my Optimum flow times for the day and those times are going to be different for you so experiment a bit and figure it out now as you can see productivity is a very personalized thing and it's basically impossible to cover every single technique that you'll ever need that works for everyone but I still want to help you to build a personalized productivity system which is one of the reasons why I created my free Weekly Newsletter which goes

through even more productivity techniques and tips to help you build a system that works for you each email takes about 3 to 5 minutes to read but can save you 3 to 10 hours a week as I said it's completely free I'll leave a link in the description below if you want to sign up and back to the next productivity tip number seven use a distraction cheat sheet I talk about this a lot but a distraction cheat sheet is literally just a piece of paper right next to you on your desk that you can have

open while you're studying while you're working and anytime you get distracted you just write down what it is that distracted you and then you can try to remove it deal with the distraction get back to work but what it does is it means that over time as you start learning about the things that bring you in and out of focus you can start optimizing your environment deeper and in a more personalized way those distractions no longer affect you if you remove them in advance the problem is that we're often completely unaware of what those distractions

are and we let them bother us every single time we have a study session funny example of this is um years ago when I was uh coaching this University student for the studying and they were always getting distracted because their dog uh so their brother used to always walk the dog during the day when they were studying and the dog would just go barking and crazy like you know as it's walking outside um but her desk was facing the window so as soon as they walk past she sees her brother and the dog walking through

and because it's like barking and making a big scene that's the thing that pulls her out of focus and so when she gets pulled out of focus she really struggled with getting back into that flow and then by the time she's back into that flow Brothers back from the walk and then she gets broken out of flow again so it's kind of like this one two hours in between where it's like man this is really lowquality time being used I'm getting really really distracted uh and I feel like I've had a really good session that

got disrupted and she said this has been happening for months and so she's a smart person it's not like she doesn't know that she could do something about it but it never really occurred to her to be proactive about that distraction because she never made it a point she would get distracted and be like okay well that's something that happened and then just focus on getting back into the task as soon as we brought it to light and made it clear this is the thing that's actually distracting you it became obvious like oh okay I'm

just going to put headphones on turn my disc the other way away and literally overnight we solved it she just got like 1 to two hours of additional Focus per day just like that that's the power of just making the invisible visible it gives you the chance to do something about it and I can guarantee you that 70 80% of the things that distract you are things that you could easily solve that you just aren't aware of what the actual distraction is and the distraction cheat cheat helps with that number eight create Focus zones most

of the time when people talk about Focus zones they're talking about a workspace like a physical desk that is free of clutter it's organized it's clean free of distractions to help you focus and and enter into flow and those are really important uh and I agree that you should do that but that's not where a focus zone ends and sometimes you don't have the choice and sometimes it's actually beneficial like I have always found that I respond very very well and am able to enter into deep flow when I go and work at cafes and

I know this is not the same for everyone but I like to go to a cafe find a nice quiet table by a corner uh plug in some noise cancelling earphones listen some white noise uh and just focus in and I'm able to lock in very very very quickly if I work at a cafe every single day that effect actually disappears and I've tested that uh but that's not an optimized environment whatsoever you know like I've got a tomato sauce bottle like kind of like bumping against my elbow like it's not comfortable there's lots of

distractions so why is it that that becomes such a good focus zone and this is the important thing is that a focus zone is really just a mental head space your focus zone can be in any situation that you want as long as you know what criteria need to be met for your brain to enter into that mode of getting into deep flow and this is the thing that really allowed me to have really good productivity like when I'm TR traveling I'm on a plane I'm in a car I'm walking uh I'm like driving you

know I'm in a cafe wherever it is and for me what I realized is that number one noise is the biggest thing so if I've got noise cancelling headphones uh and I've got white noise playing 70% of that criteria for me is met the second thing is the state of mind when I'm entering into that environment if I am like watching a YouTube video I'm watching some Netflix on my laptop and I'm in that mode and I'm at my desk which is a perfect environment and then I'm like okay time for me to do some

study or work it's much much more difficult for me to enter into that flow because I didn't enter that environment with the purpose of working this is actually the reason why I don't do that at all anymore like this room that I'm in I am in this room only to work as soon as I'm done with work I actually leave the room I do not enter here unless it is intentionally for work work but it's the same thing for when I go to a cafe I go to a cafe not to drink coffee and like

have fun and then I like oh I may as well do some work here I'm going to a cafe explicitly for the intention of doing some work and it is that the entering of a space with the intention of doing something that helps prep my mind for flow and the interesting thing that I found is that this works in a lot of different scenarios like even getting on a plane sometimes and I've done a lot of traveling in the last couple years I'll get onto a plane and I'll think okay so I've got some time

here I could just crack out some work I'll get onto the plane I'll have my laptop there and I'll think okay well what's there to watch you know in terms of like the inflight entertainment I'll take out my laptop and I'll try to do some work but it doesn't feel very good other times I'm like all right I need to get this thing done I've got 2 hours on this plane that's when I'm going to do it as soon as I walk into the plane and take my seat I am already like prepped and primed

to do work like that is the int ion almost of being on that plane in a way and it is so much easier for me to enter into that flow and so intention actually makes a huge difference which is why a ha tip for helping to create a focus zone is not only think about what are the distractions and limit the distractions but it's actually set clear intentions don't let yourself kind of like roll in to your focus activity make a clear boundary between what you were doing before and the focused task that you want

to do have a clear intention even you can even write it down especially I recommend this for my ADHD students is like write it down like on a Post-It note like stick it on your monitor or something like very clearly and enter the environment into the activity very actively with that clear intention and once that's done leave exit from that jump out of the plane pull the emergency it's like I'm done with my work send the email emergency exit open skydiving out you know that's uh make that entry and exit into your focus zone very

deliberate and very quickly you'll start realizing that it's much easier to to get into to Flow by the way don't jump out of a plane if I needed to say that for YouTube number nine use work rest timers you've probably heard of Pomodoro which is like a 25 minute uh work block followed by a 5 minute or 10 minute rest uh this is called a work rest timer do you have work and then you've got rest timed and there's lots of different variations Pomodoro flow modoro uh I've got my own uh called off optimize for

Focus work rest timing uh at the end of the day it doesn't really matter which one you use but if you really need to lock in then using a work rest timer can help you because it creates a sense of urgency when you're doing your focused work and it means that when you take your rest that's timed as well so it prevents you from getting distracted with something else there are a couple cavates though that I found make work rest timing much more effective first of all if you are in a really good Flow State

you can do work potentially for 1 2 3 hours without needing the break taking the break from a Pomodoro time and this is the main issue I have with like a fixed timer like the original Pomodoro is that you can have 25 minutes of great focus and then you break for no reason you don't need the rest you're in a great state and now when you try to get back into it it takes time take you 5 10 minutes just to get back into that sense of flow that you had before and pick up where

your thoughts left off don't do that start a timer figure out how long you generally tend to be able to enter into a flow state for before you feel like you're getting a little distracted you're losing your Edge you might need that break and just get a sense for how long that is and maybe that is only 20 25 minutes that's fine but maybe it's 45 minutes maybe it's an hour and get a general sense for how long you're able to stay in flow in different kind of energy levels usually if I sit down to

do some work I'll be able to tell okay I feel like I'll be able to have a really good 1 and a half hour focused flow session whereas sometimes I feel like I'm going to struggle getting through half an hour that's fine like that's life that's us understanding that our brain isn't perfect so make the work time roughly similar to where you expect your flow is going to end and again that takes a little bit of experimentation and then the rest time generally keep that to about a quarter to a third of how long you

did your work for and then monitor how long you're able to focus for later so if you take a rest and then you go back into another session but now you find that your second session is like half the amount of focus as the first one your rest was probably a little bit too short or you were getting distracted with other things during your rest instead of letting your brain recover number 10 hire the babysitter let's say you have a baby and you want to go on a holiday you would hopefully not leave the baby

just alone for like 3 days while you go on vacation you're not going to like just leave all the knives on the ground and just like the baby just crawling around like I'm sure the baby will be fine like you wouldn't do that you would hire a babysitter to look after the baby while you're you're gone the higher the babysitter is like this ridiculous concept that of course we wouldn't do that for a baby because we understand that a baby is like fragile and precious and the risk and the consequence if you were to do

that could be catastrophic and I think we should think about that for our time as well time is one of the most precious resources that we have and we do often very very little to protect our time here's an example back in the early days I always used to schedule like a like a planning prioritization session immediately as I got home from school or uni I think I probably managed to do it 5% of the time because every time I get home I just can't be bothered I'm just too tired when I enter through that

door a wave of uncontrollable relaxation envelops my body and I realized that I don't want to be productive uh I want to be a blob and so I just don't do anything hire the babysitter in this context means that we recognize again we're not trusting our brain to just follow through on it we recognize that there are these risks to our time and we deliberately take actions and steps to prevent that I call this time protection so let's say you get home at 5:00 p.m. and so between 5:00 to 5:30 you had scheduled some meditation

session great but every single time you get home you're too tired and you never do it all right so how could we protect that time well the reason we don't do it is because we feel tired so perhaps what we can do is immediately when we get home instead of trying to do the meditation we go for a 5 minute walk a stroll around the block that gives us a little bit of energy maybe we just do five push-ups just enough to give us a little bit of energy and by adding that additional task which

isn't the number one priority it actually helps us transition into the number one priority hiring the babysitter for your productivity means recognizing that your time is always under attack from other people uh that want your attention from unforeseen events life in general these are things that are going to rob that time that you have carved out for something that you know is important for your life and for you to progress towards your goals and if it is important to do it's important enough to hire the babysitter protect against those risks and if you cannot if

the babysitter is not available at that time don't just leave move it to a different time if you cannot do anything that helps you be more energized if you can't do anything that helps you be more concentrated to do your meditation or whatever it is that you are planning to do at 5:00 p.m. don't schedule it for 5:00 p.m. because by doing that you are saying I recognize the risk it's likely to happen and I'm willing to let it happen anyway and if it's important that's not wise number 11 plan for the real not the

ideal one of the things that Hannah used to do the classmate I told you about is that she would have these really packed schedules and if she was able to do all of the stuff in that day should be like achieving her goals like that's great but most of the time those schedules don't happen as planned most of the time she's reaching the end of the day feeling like a failure because she wasn't able to take off everything on that list but her rationale for having it on the list was well if I don't do

it if I don't complete these tasks to this schedule then I'm never going to be able to reach my goal I'm like I'm not it's it's already not enough if I start taking things off it will definitely not be enough so I said Hannah there is no point making a fantasy schedule just because it's written down in your schedule obviously doesn't mean it's going to occur and if you know that it's not realistic and you have repeatedly seen that the schedules you make are ones that you're not able to consistently complete and you keep scheduling

in that same way you're living in a fantasy whether you like it or not you're getting less done than you planned the only difference now is that in one situation you recognize realistically how much you're getting done and you can now proactively plan for how you might mitigate that risk and still achieve your goals whereas on the other hand you are planning and imagining that you're going to have that that perfect brain that's able to do everything every single day for the next 3 months and nothing's going to go wrong and anytime something does go

wrong now you're reacting you're getting a spike in cortisol your stress is increasing it's decreasing your quality of life it's making you more anxious and every single day you are hitting yourself with the burden of having to replan reschedule and rep prioritize and constantly feeling like you're falling behind but the reason you're fall falling behind is because you are setting a goal where catching up is not realistic and so one of the most important First Steps before you start scheduling and using time blocking or time boxing is to do a Time Track when you're first

starting out don't create like an elaborate schedule just do things in your day that you think you need to do and retrospectively note down how long everything took you make your schedule in retrospect and what this will do is this will give you visibility on how much you're able to get done on different kinds of days like on a bad day this is what I get done on an average day this is what I get done on a good day this is what I get done and then start seeing how many good days versus average

days do you have what a fix that try to have more good days but have a realistic understanding of how much you're able to get done and when you make a plan you now have data you know how much you can get done on an average day and you know that maybe you can schedule in one or two good days per week because you know you can pull that off and if you do this and you realize man if I schedule things in this way I'm not going to be able to reach my goal you

only have two options there number one have more good days which is by the way really really hard to do is really hard to have consistently good days every single day for an extended period of time so if you're like just not going to make it maybe that's a viable option but if there's a big gap between what you need to do and what you've scheduled then that's probably not viable the second thing is you got to evaluate either your goal or your methods and it's a tough pill to swallow to say re-evaluate the goal

to say that hey like based on this realistic semi- optimistic schedule that you've made you still will not be able to reach that goal that may be the reality and if you put yourself in that position now you can at least plan okay this is likely what's going to happen I'm going to still try to have more good days but I have to expect that this is maybe the reality that I won't be able to meet this go but again when at first I fail re-evaluate ask myself why and then try it again differently next

time what will I do differently how will I hit the goal next time and it puts yourself in a much more productive mindset reality happens whether you like it or not so plan for the real not the ideal now we're only just over halfway through the video and I'm still just scratching the surface of the research and my experience at becoming more productive so if you're enjoying this format please let me know in the comments so that I know that I can keep making these types of videos for you 13 years is a very long

time to spend on learning about learning and productivity and I've picked up hundreds of these tips and pieces of advice that i' would love to share with you and your comments help me know what to focus on now onto the next game changer productivity tip number 12 or not and one of my uh coaching clients recently emailed me asking hey Justin I'm really interested in rolling in this new German course uh because they just want to learn how to speak German um and and they're currently going through and also doing a course on AI and

machine learning and so I said cool that's that's a great idea what do you want to give up to do that and they said what do you mean I I just want to do the German course I said well look you're already running your business you're already doing an AI ml course you're already taking my program and getting coaching from me you have a family uh and kids that already feel like you don't spend enough time with them uh and now you're saying that you want to pick up a German course I'm all for doing

more things that provide fulfillment but also I'm all for realizing that time is limited and we have to spend our time on the things that make the most impact and value to us remember productivity is not about being busy productivity is about doing the things that get us towards your goal and I know I was talking to him that for you your main goal is to provide for your family how is a German course helping with that goal is that productive or not what do you want to take away and this is the or not

and framework instead of saying I want to do this and this we make a much more strict prioritization by saying I want to do this or this we Face ourselves with the consequence of losing something we already have to justify whether we want to do something else or do something new and I think this is really valuable for people that just can't say no right is that like great you want to do something else awesome you can say yes you just have to know that you're saying or not and it's not yes you'll do this

and all your other stuff if you decide to do this what will you choose to discard from what you're already doing and if you can't look at anything you already doing and say yes I'm willing to discard that then you have to be very very honest with yourself do I already have enough time for all of that and time for myself with not trusting my brain and having enough room for error if the answer is yes cool maybe you can just do it your underc capacity feel free just do it it's an and situation most

of the time especially if you feel busy that's not going to be the case most of the time you barely have enough time for all of this stuff you almost never have time for yourself and your room for error is Raaz or thin as it is you already need to take one of those things that you're doing and then stop doing them that and is not going to happen that's an a situation so or not and now you might say okay well I understand that I meant to do less and focus on more things like

more deeply but I see all these other people that are way more productive than me that get way more stuffed done how do I become like them well there are a few strategies that I've picked up over the years that have actually allowed me to just literally do more stuff and have a greater capacity and these are my favorite ones number 13 use the two-minute rule the two-minute rule says that if you have a list of things that you need to do and it takes you 2 minutes or less to do it don't bother scheduling

it in or prioritizing it just do do it the time it takes for you to think about and consider and schedule and prioritize and and just having that as an item on your schedule that you need to like rejig with everything else is not worth the effort if you can just get it done within 2 minutes or less so often this will be things that are like emails messages taking out the bins um setting a la you setting up the laundry like household chores little things here and there like they take very short amount of

time it's better to have them off your plate and checked off than to even spend the time to think about it once you've done all of your two-minute tasks number 14 book The scan a lot of the time I spent as a junior doctor was in surgical rotations and in a surgical Ward round we're seeing like 100 150 patients in the morning and then we have to rush off into the operating theater and so you have very very little time to see each patient like literally with spinning like 10 to 20 seconds per patient we

have and during that time we have to write up an entire set of notes uh figure out what the plan is and as a junior you're just like following along trying to desperately keep up with with what's going on and one of the things that we were taught to do is just to book the scans right there on the spot don't wait until we've seen all the patients to then look at your list of patients and be like okay so this one needs a CT scan this one needs an X-ray this one needs whatever and

then at that point go and make the request for like this patient needs a CT scan for this thing why why should we not do that and why should we book The scan immediately on the spot because once you send the request to book a scan it takes time for that request to be received and then approved maybe they've got questions and then an orderly will come and collect the bed they get taken off and so that will takes time by the time we are done with our round we need to get into operating theater

and start operating so if patients haven't had their scans yet all of these things create delays and so that might mean that someone that could have been operated on today gets operated on tomorrow or next week because of a four five 10 20 minute delay and requesting a scan in productivity there are certain tasks that don't take that long for you to do but there is a delay in someone else having to receive it having to think about it asking questions it's being sent out to someone else so for you it may not be like

that important of a task for you to do right now and it may not be that urgent for you right now but it's understanding that by booking the scan first sending that message sending that email to someone sending that thing for them to review now early on you are unblocking your future self Because by the time you need to do something about that it's already come back to you because the worst thing is for you to do all the stuff that you need to do you're like in this really good State and then you've got

all these things that now just waiting for other people and now you have nothing it's just like cool just twiddle my thumbs now waiting for other people to get back to me and then if you're in a team environment where like other people are depending on your work and they're waiting for updates or feedback or they're waiting for you to send them something then they're blocked as well while until you send it to them so book The scan first send things that depend on other people and take time for them do that early and then

move on to your other stuff number 15 batch tasks together this might be an obvious one for some of you but let's say that you've got a bunch of like admin tasks that are not very difficult uh but there's just lots of little miscellaneous things to do take all of those things and instead of letting them distract you here and there throughout the day and then like it's interrupting your Flow State for the things you really need to focus and concentrate on and then you're just building up this backlog of stuff that you're kind of

anxious about schedule a time of day like 1 hour where you get all of those tasks and you do all of them together you're trying to take your relatively low effort non-urgent things that aren't too important put them all together and get them done in One Sweep and we do this to keep the rest of our day relatively focused and clutter free free because number 16 eat the Frog if I hold up a frog to you and I say eat it uh your immediate reaction is probably going to be like hm I'd rather not eat

that living frog you're giving me uh and so that's what e the Frog means it means look at the thing that you don't want to do and do it because that thing that you don't want to do the frog is probably the task that is the biggest the most overwhelming is the most complicated and therefore is probably the most substantial and most meaningful not all of the time but often the bigger media tasks are the ones that are the most important they're the ones we procrastinate on so eat the Frog means that becomes task number

one you do all of your two-minute tasks you book your scans you set aside a time for doing the batch tasks later and then your first main area of concentration and flow is the Frog task and the main reason that people don't eat the frog is because eating the frog is overwhelming you need to write an essay that's a lot of steps you need to do a big round of studying on a massive topic that's going to be a lot of work remember you can't trust your brain your brain is trying to keep you alive

and that sounds like a lot of energy what if we die so we can trick our brain and make eating the Frog a a little bit easier because we don't have to eat the Frog we can just nibble the Frog which is number 17 leave tasks unfinished this is leveraging something called the zyonik effect which is named after a Russian psychologist and the zyonik effect says that it is more motivating for us to finish a task when it is already left unfinished and so this makes it really interesting because now to be more productive our

main goal is not to finish a task if we understand the zonic effect and we understand that overwhelming tasks become easier to finish and we're more motivated to finish them if we started and left them incomplete our goal becomes leave tasks incomplete nibble the Frog take that huge overwhelming task make a start on it and with the clear intention that you're not going to finish just start see where you get to see what you're able to do and then just stop it is a liberating freeing feeling suddenly your productivity goes through the roof because you're

not procrastinating anymore because nothing is overwhelming because every frog can just be nibbled that's the zonic effect now all of the stuff is basically trying to keep you in that flow State like I said that deep flow is super super important one of the things that pulls us out of flow is something called decision fatigue so number 18 is delete decision fatigue with pre-planned choices I want you to imagine your productivity is like a bow and arrow when you are shooting a bow and arrow you're spending the effort and energy up front to aim pick

the trajectory and then fire and when you release the arrow that arrow is just traveling it's just going it's not soaring through the air thinking about where it needs to land it's just going and landing and when it lands you can pick it up aim and then shoot it somewhere else but decision fatigue happens when we don't do that we don't spend the effort up front to figure out the trajectory of where we're going to shoot towards and we are the arrow midair trying to figure out how to fly decision fatigue happens when we are

trying to figure out throughout the day what to do next and it's incredibly detrimental to staying in flow and using your C nitive energy effectively you want to do that planning upfront with those pre-planned choices you look at what you need to do you set aside a schedule for the day or for the week you prioritize a task you think about what the two-minute tasks are you do those you think about what the scans are that you need to book you do those book The scan style tasks you think about your focus zones you think

about which frogs need to be nibbled on or eaten throughout that week uh and during the day all you're doing is is executing you've got a plan you've got a list and you're just going to execute all you're doing is you're flying through the air trying to stay in flow that's the number one priority and the most common thing that pulls people out from that flow that makes it so that you have that decision fatigue is when you don't plan for the real and you're planning for the ideal cuz when you have a fantasy schedule

where you imagine like you're going to get all the stuff done and everything's going to go perfectly according to plan and you give yourself no room for error as soon as one thing goes wrong it affects every other event for the rest of the day so now you have to replan in the middle of your day that adds decision fatigue it makes it harder to stay in flow it reduces your overall productivity if you have a better plan at with more room for error and more flexibility then if something goes wrong it's not a big

deal it's like liquid it just fills itself you can stay in flow and you know what you need to do next once you start making pre-planned Cho choices to reduce this decision fatigue life just gets easier and I think a really underrated part of selfcare is taking the time to properly plan and prioritize your week take the time for yourself so that the future version of you has a better week number 19 stay on the pulse sometimes it's not possible to schedule everything in advance because you don't know when things are happening or you're waiting

on other information from someone else uh so you need to be nimble you need to be on your feet and adaptable to changing that schedule as it happens that's life that's fine this is where staying on the pulse helps back when I was working in the hospital uh one of my first rotations in general surgery I remember it was around 1100 a.m. and my senior consultant he comes up to me and he goes hey Justin have you seen the blood test results for this patient you can see that this result is abnormal and I was

like oh yeah I was just going to check that like straight after this um and he said no you need to stay on the post when that blood test result comes out you need to be immediately on that and checking that and you need to tell us straight away if there's something wrong with it because that patient is scheduled for surgery later that day and that means that if this patient is unwell they're not fit for surgery that changes the entire surgical schedule so that result came out around 10:00 a.m. so for 1 hour I

hadn't checked it now for most people that may not seem like a big deal but in the hospital in a surgical environment that 1 hour is a big deal and the advice that he gave to me that day Shout Out Mr T uh sticks with me stay on the pulse figure out what is the pulse rate of the thing that you're trying to track or that you're worried about what the post rate means is how quickly are things changing in a meaningful enough way for it to make a difference for example the blood test result

it comes out like the post rate on that is hourly like 30 minutely so I need to be checking that 30 minutely to make sure that I'm able to get that information and then relay that information because that is important it makes a difference so the information has an impact on what I might do how I might prioritize my other tasks how I might schedule my other task how I might execute my other tasks how quickly does that tend to change that's your post rate and that's how often you should be checking or adjusting your

schedule so if you are in a situation where you know that there are lots of things that tend to change every single day that could impact your schedule or the importance of the task you need to do but you're making a schedule for your entire week you're missing the post if that's the daily change that you expect you need to be making a daily schedule and rep prioritizing every single day let's say you're trying to learn how to increase your focus zones and how to enter into deep flow you should be reflecting on that every

single day maybe twice a day because every time you try to enter into deep flow you're getting new information that changes how you may try to enter into deep flow the next time one of the things I see all the time with people learning to learn is that they'll use a bunch of new techniques and they won't spend the time to reflect on how those techniques are going and make adjustments and change their experiment for like 1 2 3 weeks and so by the time they realize it's not really working they've already spent two three

weeks basically wasting that time just making the same mistake over and over and over again and so by keeping your situation and context in mind that tells you how often you should be creating schedules and how often you should be reflecting and how often you should be reexamining your priorities I can remember like certain periods of my life where things were really really busy like uh a couple years ago when I was going through India and traveling India I was managing my team in Australia full-time while also doing workshops and traveling around in India fulltime

so I was working like 19h hour days and things were changing for me like every 2 to 3 hours so I would be re prioritizing and resched in my day like three four times a day because it was just a very very hectic month it was very challenging definitely not sustainable but I was able to stay on top of things because I changed my frequency of prioritization and scheduling based on my post of how quickly things are changing number 20 learn time blocking versus time boxing if you go and watch like anyone's video on like

their top 10 in productivity hacks time blocking is going to make it onto that list and it may even be number one in fact some people this is the only productivity advice that they have to give is to do time blocking I have it very very late into this video and that's for a good reason time blocking will not work for you to make you more productive if you don't do all the other things that I've already talked about that's not where the money is at for most people most people who struggle with their productivity

don't struggle because of a lack of time blocking or time boxing but if you can do all the other things correct then this becomes really valuable so what is time boxing and time blocking it's very simple time blocking is literally taking a schedule putting a block of time in your day where you say I'm going to do something there that's it it could be studying like study block boom one p.m. to 300 p.m. studying that's my time block that's it it's just organizing your day into blocks of time when people say make a schedule they're

basically saying do time blocking what's time boxing time boxing is almost the exact same thing you're still creating these blocks of time throughout the day the difference is the Box never changes a block is flexible so if you said I'm going to study between 1: to 300 p.m. but you just just kind of not finished at 30000 p.m. and you've got like 20 30 minutes more to go it's a good idea if you can to just stretch it out to 30 more minutes because you can finish it off like that task is done like you're

getting more value out of that so time blocking inherently has a level of flexibility built into it time boxing does not time boxing means 1 to 3 p.m. at 3 p.m. you stop so there are certain tasks and this is the key where time boxing is actually better for than time blocking so what kind of time asks would it be better for you to just immediately stop as soon as a Time runs out even if you haven't made as much progress as you initially plann to why would you ever want to do that number 21

distinguish urgent from important again our brain sabotages us a little bit because when you think of an important task to do often what you're thinking of is actually an urgent task to do so our brain is very very bad at assessing importance of anything that's long-term and it places a heavy bias of importance on things that have short-term consequences even if those consequences aren't particularly substantial uh the bigest example that I give to my school students is homework homework is due the next day I have to do it today it's urgent so when I say

what's the most important thing for you to do today it's like I need to do do my homework here's a way to check whether it's really important what happens if you don't do it now different schools different rules but for some students it's like if I don't do my homework my teacher gets upset at me that's it it's like you know it seems like there could be worse things in life uh it doesn't seem like a huge consequence it's like but then I'll feel bad it's like but can you just deal with that just try

to feel better like it's not a really big problem uh but there are certain things where there is no urgency but it could be lifechanging important but we absolutely cannot feel it emotionally it doesn't feel important and actually I've got a great story for this so one of my students um is a marine biologist and she for a very long time was interested in learning French because she always wanted to do Marine biology work around France and she obviously she needs to speak French to do that and so she started learning French 2 years in

advance she didn't have any job opportunities lined up but she knew that that's where she wanted to go and that at some point someone's going to ask her can you speak French and at that point it becomes urgent so if she decides to be like uh I can learn how to speak French that opportunity is gone so she before it was urgent decided to make the lifechanging decision to spend a little bit of time every single day learning French and then after two years she developed a very high level of fluency and yes she did

manage to get us a position as a marine biologist working in France because of that that's a great example and there are a lot of these things where it's not urgent right now if you did this thing it doesn't make a difference to you right now but at some point it's going to matter at some point you're going to need this skill or attribute that takes months or years to develop and you have either developed it or you haven't and if you have an opportunity is available to you and if you haven't then it's not

and that is the type of thing that you can't get through working an urgency so it's very important that we actively learn to separate something that is urgent versus something that is important because the consequences and the impact that has on our lives are significant and then the ones that are really really like the peak of importance which is they're both urgent and important if this is sounding familiar to you this is from the Eisenhower Matrix which uh breaks up task into the quadrants of urgent versus important you can look up the Eisenhower Matrix a

little bit more and ironically like learning to be more productive in this video is one of those things where it's going to take you time to learn to be more productive and so the time it takes for you to learn to be more productive is actually taking away from your immediate current urgent productivity but learning to be more productive can be life-changing and that is exactly the type of task that you want to time box an important but not urgent task is perfect for time boxing this is where you have on your schedule so let's

say a Saturday afternoon is a good time for you Saturday afternoon 1: to 2:30 p.m. you block out an hour and a half to work on something that is important potentially life-changing but not urgent this is going to shift the needle for you in the future and you're going to just do a little bit of the work now every single week you just put aside a little bit of time now whether you do one hour a week versus 1 and a half hours a week does that really matter not really the most important thing is

that the ball is rolling you're spending time week after week to work on this thing and that's where time boxing comes in it's it's not eating away into anything that might be urgent that you do need to get done or like urgent and important but it's also reserving time that you can protect for the things that you know are going to be life-changing like learning to be productive or learning to learn and the counterintuitive tip here is that when you're scheduling your week you should actually be scheduling the important nonurgent time box first you actually

protect and block knock out that time first on the thing that you know is going to be life-changing for you eventually before you fill the rest of your time with the things that are a little bit more urgent because if you do it in reverse you'll find you never have time for that thing you want to learn French you never have time to learn French right but if you block it out first and you protect it now You' have made time and everything else you have to make it fit but we realize that this is

a thing that changes things for us massively for a lot of people uh like in University or that are studying learning to learn is that you block out couple hours a week learning to learn but you might say I'm so busy with studying I don't have time for that if you're so busy with studying that you don't have 2 hours a week you need to spend 2 hours a week to learn to study more efficiently which brings me to point number 22 sharpen the axe often here's how the old saying goes you've got two people

cutting down trees one person cuts down trees for 10 hours they make a pile of logs the second person cuts down trees for 6 hours and makes a pile of logs bigger than the first person the first person is shocked they say hey what did you do in those 4 hours where you weren't cutting down trees to be able to cut down more than I did and the second person says sharpening the Axe by sharpening the axe it means you get more done and less here's the tricky part when do you know that you need

to sharpen the axe and what axe do you need to sharpen because there's so many things that you can work on well you got to look for where you're spending the most amount of time to get the least predictable least consistent returns if you're using a blunt ax what can you expect you're going to be swinging for hours and hours at a tree making incremental tiny progress calluses on your hands bleeding everywhere thumbs broken you know like shoulder dislocated you know your Blood Sweat and Tears into this thing for medium returns for a lot of

people that thing is studying hours and hours and hours every single day studying just to fall behind even more these are the things where it's an indicator like it's telling you like you can see I am doing a lot for not very very much that's the ax that needs to be sharpened that's where the money is going to be at that's su's law so if you want to dive a little deeper into some of the more nuanced productivity tips then I do have a free Weekly Newsletter that you can sign up to the links in

the description I'll send you a email every single week into your inbox with more of this quite practical advice on the other hand if you really serious about leveling up your productivity and learning skills without the years of trial and error that it took me then you might want to check out my learning program at I can study.com and unlike on YouTube where every video kind of sits by itself on my program I'm able to really go deep and create a stepbystep framework for building a entire learning and productivity system so all of those links

are in the description below thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one