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"You don't need more time in your day. You need to decide."
You can’t manage time, time continues on whether we like it or not, there is only self-management. Time is limited. No matter how rich or poor you are, you only have 24 hours in a day. The way we utilize these 24 hours is what makes us happy or sad, rich or poor. What’s important is learning how to make the most of those 24 hours.
There’s 168 hours in a week. The majority of people sleep about 6-8 hours a day. That means you only have around 112-126 hours each week to focus on your priorities. Those who manage to be the most productive each day don’t have special powers; they’ve just mastered the right habits and created a system to accomplish what they value most.
It isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting the right things done. A systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not. This allows you to make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
Your Life System will give you direction and tell you where to distribute your time, energy and focus each day. You are creating a precise blueprint to guide your steps, clarify your ideas, and prioritize the actions that will increase your chances of achieving what you want in life.
"Clarity about what matters, provides clarity about what does not."
In the article 100 Blocks A Day, Tim Urban, explains an exercise that can help you determine if you’re using your time wisely. You have to sleep. This leaves 16-18 hours every day, or about 100 “10” minute blocks. Throughout the day, you spend 10 minutes of your life on each block, until you eventually run out of blocks and it’s time to go back to sleep.
Imagine these blocks laid out and you had to fill out two 100 block grids—One being an ideal day while the other being your typical day.
Asses how you are using your blocks each day and ask yourself what is or isn’t worth your time. Are you following along your vision, goals, and priorities?
The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy levels throughout the day. High-performers are able to perform at a consistently high level for long periods of time because they can rapidly cycle between periods of full engagement, and complete disengagement.
The key is to develop rapid recovery rituals throughout the day. Executing those rituals in two scenarios:
1. After 90 minutes of continuous focus.
2. Anytime you start to feel irritable or on the verge of exhaustion.
The purpose of a recovery ritual is to restore your four energy sources. When these four energy sources are full, you can fully engage with a problem, project or person you’re talking with.
You won’t be able achieve to optimal concentration, focus, and energy without the mind & body operating at their highest. They need to work together to remember goals, focus attention, override impulses, manage stress and for you to be at your best.
1. Mental Energy By consciously not thinking what you’re working on, you’ll let that problem incubate in your subconscious. When you return to work 10-15 minutes later, you’ll have a flood of ideas and excitement to get working again.
2. Physical Energy By moving your body and breathing heavily, you oxygenate your cells and rejuvenate your brain. Exercise calms you down and also energizes you.
3. Emotional Energy a study of over 6,000 people showed that play leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity. Nothing fires up the brain like play. (social interactions, games, activities, sports etc) call or text a friend, make plans later that evening or week. Generates a sense of anticipation or excitement.
4. Spiritual Energy You don’t have to be religious to increase your spiritual energy. Spiritual thinking comes from things beyond yourself or bigger than yourself. Most spiritual energy comes from a sense of purpose. Meditation, yoga…etc…
Health isn’t a one sized fits all game. It’s incredibly personal and you need to figure out what works best for you. This can be your road map to becoming fully engaged—meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.
High-achievers often credit their daily routines to giving them an edge, and thriving in life. All those little actions you do daily add up to become habits. Routines add structure, improve self-discipline, and you create the habits that will help you accomplish the things you want to achieve in life.
Your daily routines don’t have to be complex. You have to consistently do the things you know you should be doing. When you do set tasks on a daily basis, they become natural, and automatic. You develop efficiency, and this allows you to get them done faster, which gives you more time to focus on the things that matter.
Building your personal routine is simple—figure out what you need to get done, and then figure out when to do it. You can create a step-by-step outline of your day. Designing and sticking to a personal daily routine is the path to freedom, productivity, happiness, and maxing out true potential.
Think about when you work best, and group your tasks into the time of day that makes the most sense for when you will best complete them. Do you get things done most effectively in the morning or evening?
The morning routine is about preparation, alignment and purpose. It is designed to build momentum, and set the tone for the day, allowing us to control our schedules, rather than our schedules controlling us.
The way you begin the day sets up the way the day unfolds, and consistently having great mornings, cascades into great days, builds great weeks, months, and years. Win the morning, win the day.
As we start each day fresh, we can better focus on what is in front of us, where to prioritize our time, and ultimately increase productivity.
Your power up routine will transition you from your morning routine, putting you in position to carry out daily tasks. Energy levels have likely dissipated, so you could focus on the boring, routine stuff that doesn’t take a lot of brainpower.
To ensure that we get adequate sleep and restore our energy reserves for the next day, create an evening shutdown routine. An evening shutdown ritual involves making a plan to complete any unfinished tasks, goals, planning and preparation for the next day.
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Cultivating a deep work ethic produces massive benefits, and is an indispensable guide to focused success in this world full of distractions.
When we practice deep work, we upgrade our brains and allow specific brain circuits to fire more effortlessly and effectively. The brain upgrade we get from deep work allows you to rapidly connect ideas and uncover creative solutions.
Schedule your distraction periods at home and at work. Most of us allow ourselves at to check our phone whenever it buzzes, but doing so is training your brain to avoid deep work. A day full of unscheduled distraction is training your brain to give in to any and all distractions.
The easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple, regular habit. The goal is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to focus on a specific task.
“First understand the do-or-die importance of focus. If you don’t learn to focus, you will have a shallow and unrewarding life without any meaningful achievements. So make it a priority.”
To realize that we have the ability to choose, we need to recognize the trade-off inherent to every situation. We fall into the trap of making default decisions which are typically short-term comfort for long-term dissatisfaction.
We say yes just because it’s an easy reward, but we run the risk of having to later say no to a more meaningful one. We can either say no and regret it for a few minutes or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months or even years.
We are presented with hundreds of options a day. Look at those options and ask yourself:
You want to make sure everything you say yes to has a positive effect to your priorities and on your goals in life. If it doesn’t, say no. If you want to be highly disciplined and take on less, but do more, you need to say no to the majority of things and yes to only a few.
"For every 100 great opportunities that are brought to me, I say no to 99 of them."
Procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing a task or set of tasks. It is the force that prevents you from following through on what you set out to do. Procrastination is about the decisions we make. We manage to convince ourselves that we can always do it tomorrow and then tomorrow turns into never.
Your brain values long-term benefits when they are in the future (tomorrow), but it values immediate gratification when it comes to the present moment (today). Understand what’s going on inside the mind of procrastinators and it will help you break the habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done.
"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
The most important skill to learn is how to learn. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It is is a set of skills that enable people to become aware of how they learn and to evaluate and adapt these skills to become increasingly effective at learning. Metacognitive strategies, and techniques help you become a more successful learner.
There are illusions of competence in learning. You can study all day long and just be spinning your wheels because you’re not using effective study techniques. To master the ability to learn, you need to upgrade your ineffective learning techniques.
When learning a task or new skill, every minute counts. You don’t want to be wasting your time or effort on low return activities. Learn about the powerful techniques and keys to learn much more effectively—your productivity levels will sky rocket—and you will be much more efficitient with your time.
It’s extremely important to understand how willpower works. The people who understand this are much more effective in life than the ones who don’t. Spending time and energy on unimportant tasks will take away from your available energy and willpower reserves that could have been used on your main priorities.
1. You have a FINITE amount of willpower which gets depleted as you use it.
2. You use the SAME stock of willpower for ALL tasks.
The 80/20 Principle is one of the most helpful concepts for life, and can be applied to almost any situation. These two laws are synergistic: Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.
1. The Pareto Principle Majority (80%) of results come from a select few efforts (20% of actions). Identify and focus on the vital few actions that generate the most significant parts of the results you get. Completely eliminate or delegate all the rest. It only works when you avoid spending time on the meaningless activities, which is why elimination is a crucial part of this technique. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time.
2. Parkinson’s Law work expands to fill the time available for its completion—meaning that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and seem more difficult that week. It may not even mean fill the extra time with more work, but just the stress and tension about having to get it done.
The magic of the imminent deadline. We tend to respond very positively to deadlines. A deadline is so powerful that it gives people the energy and focus to complete a task in a single day, that they could not complete in weeks.
Constantly challenge yourself to finish a task in a shorter period of time—Setting new deadlines and reducing the time you have to complete the task. By assigning the right amount of time to a task, we gain back more time and the task will reduce in complexity to its natural state.
When you do work can be just as important as what you do and how you do it. Timing is a science. Research shows that the most unproductive time of the day is precisely 2:55 PM. Directly between 2-4PM. Daniel Pink calls this “The Bermuda Triangle of the day” In the two hours of the day (2-4PM) between the time most people wake up, 7AM, and fall asleep, 11PM, intelligence, sound judgement, productivity mysteriously vanish.
Be effective, not efficient don’t fool yourself you’re being productive, elimination is key. Decide what’s important and follow the 80/20 principle.
Outsourcing hiring a virtual assistant has a huge ROI, eliminate before you delegate. Try and find tasks in your life that you’d be better off outsourcing to save time. Get into the habit, even if you don’t need it. What is your time worth?
Cultivate Selective Ignorance ignore all information that is irrelevant, unimportant or unactionable because less is more. If you’re half-way through a shitty book, just stop reading it.
Interrupting Interruption — 3 things that interrupt us:
1. Time Wasters unimportant email, phone calls, meetings, etc. Turn off the notification on your email as well as the auto send/receive, and check email only twice per day, at noon and 4:00. Never check emails first thing in the morning and set up an auto-responder.
2. Time consumers selecting the important information that will be beneficial to you, repetitive tasks that could be done more efficiently by batch tasking.
3. Empowerment Failure cases where your approval is required in order for something to happen. When someone has to come to you before they can take the next step in their task. Or, in the case where you have to go to someone else before you can proceed with a task.
“If you have a 10 year plan, how can you do it in 6 months?” Peter Thiel says Bigger and better questions, demand bigger and better answers.
Doing Is Everything how do you know what will work for you? Just pick a few things that actually resonate with you and just start doing.
Follow Your Own Advice Because if you can’t follow your own advice, no advice will work. Simple, but powerful.
The Death Countdown Clock taking the actuarial tables on estimated age of death—how many days you have estimated left? Nothing concentrates your time more than knowing how many days or how much time you might have left. Do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life.
The Morning Pages Technique Write down 3 pages of absolute garbage without stopping every single morning. It gets rid of writers block, and frees your mind to do anything it likes. Try this and see if it boosts your creativity.
Fall in Love with Systems Create systems in your life that you constantly look for ways to improve.
Write 10 Ideas Each Morning James Altucher recommends writing down 10 ideas each morning to develop your idea muscle and if you can’t come up with 10, come up with 20. Perfectionism is the enemy of the idea muscle.
Improve Tools At The Top Of The Funnel Basically you optimize the one thing that affects all the other things below it. For example, the speed of your mouse, or router you use effects every task you do on your computer. You could double the speed of your mouse or get a faster router. Use dual monitors if you spend lots of time on your computers, you won’t have to constantly toggle between two windows
Multipliers Most people make decisions off urgency and importance, multipliers are making a third calculation which is significant. How long is it going to matter? What’s the most important thing I can do TODAY/RIGHT NOW that will make the future better?
You multiply your time by spending time on things TODAY, that will give you more time TOMORROW. The focus funnel is the unconscious thought process that Multipliers go through when they are evaluating which tasks to spend time on.
Eliminate—Can I eliminate this? Is it worth doing? Multipliers realize it’s much more of what you don’t do than what you do, do. Perfection is achieved when nothing can be added, but also nothing can be taken away.
Automate—Can I automate the task? Anything that I create a process for today, saves me time tomorrow. (think online bill pay) ROTI return on time investment. 2 hours spent automating bills online saves you 30 minutes/month paying bills which after 4 months you’ll be saving time. Automation to your time is exactly what compounding interest is to money. Automation takes time and makes it into more time.
Delegate—Can it be delegated? Can I teach someone else to do this? You can delegate anything. They just can’t do it as well as I can. If you think longer term, they’ll be able to master the task just like you. Significant changes everything.
Imperfect Is Better Than Perfect It’s not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel, but the ones we think we have. If you think you’re good at something, whether or not you are, you will do it. If you think you aren’t good at something, you won’t do it. The world rewards productivity, not perfection. The first version of whatever it is you’re doing most always sucks. Don’t let this discourage you.
Decide When and Where If we don’t decide when and where we do something, it rarely gets done. Instead of wasting time and not doing something, decide when and where you will.
What Not To Do It’s just as important as what you need to do. Find the things that might interrupt you while you are doing something productive and put them on the “Not To Do” list. Like turning off your phone while reading.
Create An Environment That Compels You To Do What You Want Take conscious control of your decisions and cultivate an environment that will naturally lead you to better decisions. Make your office a place where you want to work.
Single Task concentrate on one task at a time. The brain is not wired to do two things that require effort simultaneously at a time. Single task and see a significant increase in mental productivity. “Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does.”
Identify Your Most Important Task Your most important task will depend on your goals and values. What task can you do today that will bring you closer to achieving your biggest goal. It’s extremely important that you write this down.
Stop Making To-Do Lists Many successful people don’t have to-do lists, but have a well organized calendar. They schedule time for their tasks. To-do lists don’t distinguish between tasks that take a few minutes and items that take a few hours. So most people end up doing the quick tasks first rather than the most important tasks. They also cause unnecessary stress. Carrying around a list, reminds you that you have so much to do. If you’ve scheduled it on your calendar, you won’t have to worry.
Touch It Once take instant action on almost every task that takes less than 5 minutes. You want to expend the least amount of time and mental energy processing things. Use a touch it once mentality in all areas of life.
There Will Always Be More To Do This is why it’s important to stop prioritizing insignificant things, so you can free up time for your family and friends without feeling guilty. Remember to prioritize what’s really important because you can always be doing more and it’s easy to get lost in it all.
Pomodoro Technique set a timer for 25 minutes and make sure everything else is turned off. Work with focused attention for 25 minutes and when you’re done, reward yourself. You’re enhancing and practicing your ability to have focused attention and ability to relax. Relaxation is an important part of the learning process. (Not get everything done in 25 minutes, just sit with focused attention).
Dig into the Productivity & Time Sources to get a better understanding of these core concepts, create off your Time and Productivity System, and learn about the different tools, tricks, and strategies you can apply to your daily life.