CHAPTER THREE
PRODUCTIVITY MADE SIMPLE
INTRODUCTION
Now that we’ve learned the character of a value-driven professional, how a business really works, and how to unite and align a team, it’s time to learn how to manage ourselves and our time so we get the most done in the least amount of time and don’t burden ourselves with undue stress and anxiety.
Many professionals work hard but get little done. Their frantic activity only serves to move them around in circles. There is one reason for this and it’s that their life lacks focus.
In all my years studying story, I came to believe that a human being’s life has the most meaning when they live it as though they are a hero on a mission. When we are a hero on a mission, we have little room for frantic activity. We know what we want, what opposes us, and what we must accomplish to solve some of the world’s problems.
A hero on a mission lives with purpose and intention. They do not waste their time because their time is important. A hero on a mission knows how to manage their time so they do not feel anxious but are focused, motivated, and inspired to do the work that matters.
One of the keys to accomplishing more of the right objectives is to know what those objectives are and then know what your highest return opportunities are and to prioritize those above all others.
Value-driven professionals are heroes on a mission. They know what they should be working on and do not get distracted.
For this reason, we created the Hero on a Mission Planner. Because you got this book, you can get one for free at HeroOnaMission.com. The planner will guide you through a morning ritual that will help you organize your mind and plan your day. You don’t have to wake up in a fog ever again.
For the next five days, I’ll take you through each section of the day planner.
The truth is, our brains do not like to be confused about how we are supposed to spend our time. Not being confused, though, takes discipline and focus.
If we don’t establish priorities and healthy routines, television, news, food, alcohol, and bad company are more than willing to occupy our time. Plenty of people make plenty of money by keeping us distracted. But their distractions profit you nothing.
To be a productive person, we need to give ourselves a mission and then we need to prioritize our time and objectives to accomplish our mission.
We need a framework for managing our priorities and our time.
If you want to be a value-driven professional, learn a daily routine that increases your output without increasing your anxiety. It’s a winning combination. And it’s not so hard to learn.
Again, this week, I will be guiding you through a daily planner page you can get for free at HeroOnaMission.com. Print out as many pages of the planner as you like, three-hole-punch them, and you’ve got a planner you can refill for free for life. You can continue to use the planner for decades to come. Read the daily entries this week and watch each video to learn how to fill in the planner as a morning ritual.
DAY SIXTEEN
How to Be Productive—Make Wise Daily Decisions
A productive professional starts the day with reflection.
Every morning I ask myself one simple question. This question ensures I will not let the day get away from me and that I will make progress on my goals.
The question is this: If this were the second time I were living this day, what would I do differently? (See Figure 3.1.)
At first it sounds like a crazy question. We don’t get to live each day over again. We get one chance at each day.
FIGURE 3.1
* From the free Hero on a Mission daily planner available at HeroOnAMission.com
But the question comes from Dr. Viktor Frankl and it’s quite profound. Dr. Frankl was a Viennese psychologist who helped his patients by guiding them toward a deeper sense of personal meaning in their lives.
In helping his patients live with more wisdom and discretion, he asked them to live as if they were already living that day for the second time, as if they had acted wrongly the first time and were about to relive the day having learned from that day the first time around.
In other words, Frankl said, “Pretend this is the second time you lived this day and don’t make the same mistakes.”
This momentary pause helps us think about our lives with careful consideration. If this were the second time you lived this day and you could learn from the first, what would you do differently? Would you be more considerate to your spouse? Would you spend some time in the hammock in the backyard reading a book? Would you exercise?
Another way to word Frankl’s question is this: At the end of the day, what will you have regretted doing or not doing?
Then, we need to live in such a way that we won’t have regret.
Few people reflect on their actions before they take them. Most of us are moving so quickly through life and have become so accustomed to interruptions that demand our response we are no longer really in control of our own experiences.
I’ve met very few high-impact people who do not journal or in some way take time to reflect. It’s by reflecting that we edit our actions and design our lives. Those who do not reflect neither edit nor design—they simply respond. The sad truth about this reality is their lives are still being designed—they’re just being designed by outside forces that do not have their best interests at heart. Most people’s life stories are dictated by friends, family, corporate commercials, or politicians with an agenda. It’s time to take control of your own story.
Is there a single question you answer at the beginning of each day that causes you to pause and reflect? Are you designing your life, or is somebody else designing it for you?
Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day
Create a routine of reflection by asking yourself the morning question: If I were living this day for the second time around, what would I do differently?
DAY SEVENTEEN
How to Be Productive—Prioritize Your Primary Tasks
A value-driven professional knows how to prioritize their highest return opportunity.
What’s the most important thing you can do today?
If you can answer that question, morning after morning, you are in an elite group of professionals.
Most professionals never even ask the question because they assume the ringing phone, frustrated customer, urgent message, or neglected email is the answer. But is it?
The reality is, not every unit of work gets the same return. If you spend a bunch of calories running around in a circle, you won’t get as much value from that energy as you would planning that important speech. The amount of calories you burn may be the same, but the return on your investment differs dramatically.
A value-driven professional knows where to invest hard-earned calories and what work to avoid or delegate. And because they know these things, they do not feel anxiety about their work. They are good and calm managers of their time and energy.
A value-driven professional knows how to spend their time.
The secret to focusing on your highest return opportunities involves creating two task lists each day (see Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3). One of your task lists will be limited to three items. These three items are the most important tasks for the success of your important objectives. No matter what happens, these should be the three things you get done first.
FIGURE 3.2
FIGURE 3.3
The other task list will be the odds and ends that need to be accomplished before the day is done. These are tasks such as returning emails, picking up your dry cleaning, and such.
The reason you want to make two lists is because your mind will not know the difference between what is very important and the random tasks that need to be done at some point in the near future. A value-driven professional knows the difference between primary and secondary tasks.
Picking up your dry cleaning should not be considered as important as working on the important presentation you will be delivering at the upcoming staff event.
My priority tasks, for example, are normally about creating some form of content. I work on a book or a business course or presentation every day, and only after I finish that writing session will I begin to return calls and engage in meetings. Each morning I write down the three pieces of content I need to work on, then I write down the secondary items jostling for my attention, and I get started on the important three items first.
Separating my three priorities has helped me grow a successful company much faster than I would have had I lumped all my tasks together.
The reason we only want to list three prioritized tasks is because listing more than three will feel too burdensome and will likely make you want to quit before you begin. Most of my prioritized tasks are small parts of much larger projects. If I’m writing a book, for example, it will take me more than a year to finish, so I need to prioritize little pieces of that book every day.
When working on enormous projects that we cannot finish in a short period of time, we are especially susceptible to short-term wins. I’d much rather return ten emails than write ten paragraphs in a book because each email makes me feel like I accomplished something while those ten paragraphs feel like a drop in a bucket.
But don’t be fooled. It’s by taking small steps toward big goals that we accomplish our important objectives.
Beware. Many tasks will present themselves as important, but they are not. You may get word about something that feels urgent, but the truth is that it’s somebody else’s job to handle it. Somebody may be coercing you into a meeting, but the truth is that meeting doesn’t serve your highest priorities.
I like to call these temptations “urgent distractions” because they feel urgent but are truly just distractions.
Every day, we must always know what our three highest return opportunities are, or else low-return opportunities will feel more important.
So, how do you know what your highest return opportunities are? To know what our highest return opportunities are, we need to reverse engineer our overall objectives. Any work that moves us closer to our objectives is a high-return opportunity, and any work that does not is not. A value-driven professional knows the difference.
As it relates to being a good economic investment, what is the most important thing you need to do? What can you do that gets the company the greatest economic return? Prioritize those tasks, day after day, and you will move closer to your goals without falling into the trap of “urgent distractions.”
Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day
Every day make two task lists. List three items that are your highest return opportunities and then create a separate list of tasks that are not as important as your three highest priorities.
DAY EIGHTEEN
How to Be Productive—Maximize Your “Power Hours”
A value-driven professional knows to prioritize their important work for the morning.
Everybody’s brain works a little bit differently, but for most people, especially people over twenty-five, their best work gets done in the morning.
Your brain is like a smartphone battery. Specifically, your brain burns between six hundred and eight hundred calories each day processing the information necessary for your survival. While you sleep, your brain recharges and is ready to face the following day.
The mental energy you have in the morning is stronger and more alert than the energy you’ll have after lunch.
If you take a call or start responding to random emails before starting on your most pressing project, you’re giving valuable mental energy to low-return opportunities and likely wasting the most valuable hours of your day. Later, when you finally “have time” to get to the important stuff, your brain is already tired and you’re unable to do your best work (see Figure 3.4).
Not only this, but if you block time for your important projects in the morning, you get to spend the rest of the day knowing you’ve already completed the important tasks.
FIGURE 3.4
Most value-driven professionals get their important work done in the morning.
If meetings deplete your energy, schedule them in the afternoon. If processing invoices is the most important task you have, process them in the first two hours of the day before you check your email. If working on business strategy is the primary task, spend the first hour of the day refining your strategy and then start taking calls.
While the idea of prioritizing your important tasks for the morning may sound trivial, many value-driven professionals have discovered this single strategy to be a secret superpower. While their coworkers walk into the office and immediately fall into the trap of distraction, the value-driven professional has already been up for a couple of hours tackling their most important tasks. That sort of discipline and competency is going to result in trust being earned from both customers and coworkers. And that means more respect, more money, and a more enjoyable career.
Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day
Prioritize your highest-return opportunities for the morning, when your mind is fresh.
DAY NINETEEN
How to Be Productive—Say “No” to Distractions
A value-driven professional knows how to say no to distractions so they can say yes to priorities.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned about growing a company actually came from my career as an author. The advice was this: A great communicator knows what to leave out.
It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? You’d think a great communicator would know what to say, and of course they do, but the harder part is that once they say the right thing, they have to stop themselves from saying anything else.
If you’re writing a book about a hero disarming a bomb, you can’t include a few interesting scenes about how the hero also wants to run a marathon and marry their sweetheart and perhaps adopt a cat. If you included all that stuff in the story, you’d lose the plot. A good story can’t be about too many things. Otherwise, the audience would be confused and lose interest.
That, by the way, is how most people feel about their lives. They feel like they’ve lost the plot. Why? Because their lives lack focus. They’ve said yes to so many things that they’ve become confused about what their story is about. And many of them are losing interest in their lives—and, for that matter, in life itself. Heroes on a mission, however, are focused.
In a good story, the writer focuses the plot on a single defined objective. The team must win the championship. The woman must get the promotion. The lawyer must win the court battle. And as tempting as other ideas may be, a good writer will say “no.”
Of course, in real life, it’s not that easy. As mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, friends, managers, coaches, and leaders, we really do juggle a great many subplots. There are friends who want to get together and opportunities that, while not in line with our goals, are truly exciting.
But if we say yes to too many things, we are saying no to the deep and focused attention it takes to do a few things well.
Early in my career, I made my money through public speaking. I would be paid a decent amount every time I flew somewhere and gave a speech. Soon I realized that the more I spoke, the less I was able to write. And without releasing a book every couple years, fewer people would think of me when they were choosing a speaker.
I had to make a strategic decision to turn down good money speaking in order to stay home and write more books. It was a scary decision, but that’s what I did. Within two years, though, I had another bestseller and was able to charge four times my initial speaking fee whenever I left town. The result was more time at home to write, less time onstage, but a larger income.
It turns out I’m not alone. Stephen King hardly takes any speaking events at all. This is the primary reason he’s been able to write so many books. King has sold tens of millions of books and could fill his schedule with lucrative meetings and speaking events, but he doesn’t. Each morning he shows up at his desk, turns on his computer, and writes his daily quota of words. And because of this discipline, and the thousands of times he’s said “no” to terrific opportunities, millions of readers know and love his work.
Few people realize that one of the keys to Stephen King’s success is his disciplined ability to reject distracting opportunities in exchange for accomplishing his priorities.
If we don’t know what our priorities are, we will say yes to everything and delude our stories so much that our lives and work no longer make sense.
What are you saying no to in order to say yes to a focused and meaningful life?
Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day
Say no to distractions so you have the freedom to say yes to your priorities.
DAY TWENTY
How to Be Productive—Block Your Time and Get More Done
A value-driven professional knows how to block their time.
Bill Gates is never late to a meeting. When asked why, he said, “Because time is the one finite resource I can’t buy more of.”
The old proverb “time is money” isn’t exactly correct. Time is worth much more than money. Time is, literally, life. And what we do with our time determines the quality of our life.
Sadly, most people do not give much thought to managing their time. That doesn’t mean their time isn’t managed. It’s certainly managed. It’s managed by television, school schedules, coercive relationships, commercialism, and work.
We would never let other people manage the money in our wallet, so why would we let other people manage our time—which, as pointed out, is worth so much more than money?
A value-driven professional knows time is their most precious commodity, and so they manage their time to bring the greatest return on their time investment. And because life is not all about work, a value-driven professional knows how to block their work time to get the most done so they can spend more of their precious time with friends, family, and enjoying hobbies.
So, how do we manage our time?
I view time like the multiple lanes of a freeway. Some lanes really do move faster than others. For the most part, if we can get all the way over on the left side of the freeway, we will move more quickly. The constant entrances and exits on the right side of the freeway mean traffic has to move more slowly.
Blocking periods of time in which you cannot be distracted is the equivalent of getting into the fast lane and pressing the gas pedal.
After your morning ritual of reflection and committing to your highest priorities, continue to block your time for the rest of the day (see Figure 3.5). In one-, two-, and three-hour chunks, you can accomplish a great deal. Multitasking, however, or simply letting the day’s distractions dictate your direction, results in less productivity.
Your entire career is based on increasing output as it relates to your activity. A value-driven professional can get twice as much done in the same period of time as a professional who does not use time strategically.
High-performance professionals block their time weeks in advance. For me, all day Monday, Tuesday until noon, and Wednesday until noon are reserved for writing. Early afternoons on Tuesday and Wednesday are reserved for meetings, and Thursdays and half of Fridays are reserved for podcast and video recordings. I also block out Friday afternoon for personal time and evenings and weekends for friends and family.
FIGURE 3.5
Blocking my time in advance allows me to say no to distractions because, well, I’m already booked. There is somewhere I have to be and something I need to do well in advance of that day getting started.
The idea is to create a rhythm of productivity. Once you know what your highest return opportunities are, you can block your week into chunks, allowing you to get those things done.
What important tasks do you need to do each week? Consider assigning those tasks to a specific block of time you decide in advance. Also, block personal time so you don’t accidentally book a business meeting during the time block you’ve allotted for friends and family. Blocking your time ensures that you get more of it, while trusting your time to fate is akin to giving it away.
Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day
Value-driven professionals know how to block their time and create a rhythm of productivity.