LEARN MORE ABOUT THE RATIONALE BEHIND SOME OF THE EXERCISES

Table of Contents

EXERCISE NO 1 WHAT ARE MY VALUES

Productivity is about how much you accomplish. It is all about better management of one of the three categories: time, attention, and energy.

Today we have more demands than ever before on our time, an overwhelming number of distractions surrounding us, stress and pressure coming at us from every direction, work that comes home with us, beeps and notifications that follow us around all day and hijack our attention, and less time than ever before to cultivate our energy levels by doing things like exercising, eating well, or getting enough sleep.

In this new environment, the most productive people not only manage their time well—they also manage their attention and energy well.

How interconnected and important all three of the ingredients of productivity are:

For example, getting enough sleep requires more time, but it boosts your energy and ability to manage your attention. Eliminating noise and distractions also takes time, but helps you manage your attention better because it provides you with more focus and clarity throughout the day. Changing your mindset takes energy and attention, but will let you get more done in less time.

All three are vitally important. If you don’t spend your time wisely, it doesn’t matter how much energy and focus you have - you won’t accomplish a lot at the end of the day. If you can’t focus or bring a lot of attention to what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if you know what your smartest tasks are or have a ton of energy—you won’t be able to engage fully with your work and become more productive and if you can’t manage your energy well, it doesn’t matter how well you can manage your time or attention—you’re not going to have enough fuel in the tank to get everything done that you intend to.

Perhaps most important, if you can’t manage all three—time, attention, energy—well, it is next to impossible to work deliberately and with intention throughout the day.

When we waste time, we’re procrastinating. When we can’t manage our attention well, we’re distracted. And when we don’t cultivate our energy levels, we’re tired, or “burned out.”

Your effort toward taking control of your time, attention, and energy will be fruitless when you don’t first take stock of what tasks are the most valuable and meaningful to you. What are your productivity goals, why you want to become more productive?

Questioning why you want to make a change to your life can save you countless hours or even days of time, when you discover that you don’t really want to make the change in the first place.

EXERCISE NO 4 YOUR BIOLOGICAL PRIME TIME

What is biological prime time?

As you may already be aware from some of our trainings you already went through, your energy levels can fluctuate quite a bit over the course of the day.

If you’re an early bird, you have more energy early in the morning. If you’re a night owl, you have more energy late at night. After you drink a coffee, you may feel a sudden energy boost, and then an energy crash later on. And if you’re like many people, your energy levels may crash in the early afternoon, after your energy levels spike after a large lunch.

The time during which your energy is at its highest peaks is your biological prime time (Sam Carpenter, Work the System).

Taking the time to observe how your energy fluctuates over the course of the day, you can work on your highest-impact tasks during your BPT - when you are able to bring the most energy and focus to them—and work on your lower-impact tasks when your energy levels dip.

Research shows that your brain’s prefrontal cortex - the part of your brain responsible for creative thinking—is the most active immediately after you wake up. That means that even if you’re low on energy after you wake up (night owl), if you do a lot of creative work, you may want to consider working in the morning instead of when you have the most energy, focus, and motivation.

You may not have complete control over what you work on and when you work on it, but whenever you do, choosing the smartest time to work on high- and low-impact tasks can make a huge difference in your productivity. For example, if you have the most energy at noon, why would you break for lunch then, instead of waiting until you actually need to refuel?

Getting a handle on your body’s natural rhythm is one of the best ways to work smarter instead of just harder.

Of course, your energy is just one of the three ingredients of productivity. Becoming aware of how intelligently you spend your time and attention is just as important.

EXERCISE NO 5 FUTURE YOU

It’s so easy to commit your future self to things your current self wouldn’t want to do – the psychologists call it a ‘planning fallacy.’

The planning fallacy, first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.

Send a letter to your future self.

You can use FutureMe.org to send emails to yourself in the future, particularly when you see myself being unfair to future you.

Create a future memory.

Simply imagining a better, more productive version of yourself down the line has been shown to be enough to motivate you to act in ways that are helpful for your future self.

While it’s important to not be unfair to your future self, one of the awesome things you can do is treat your future self—whether that means saving for the future, saying no to eating pizza tonight, working out, learning calculus, putting on sunscreen, flossing, reading more—or leaving some money in your coat pocket to find six months later. You’ll feel incredible later on.

EXERCISE NO 6 THE HOT SPOTS EXERCISE

Where do you need to spend your time?

What do you need to focus on?

You have limited time and energy to spend. You have to spend it wisely.

Hot spots are a simple metaphor for thinking about what’s important. Imagine your life as a heat map with Hot Spots. Hot Spots are the key investment areas or choice points that need your attention. Hot Spots are a lens and each Hot Spot can represent pain or opportunity or pleasure.

Why hot spots

Provides a simple way to invest your time and energy across significant areas of your life
By looking at your life in terms of a heat map, pleasure and opportunity, you can better invest your time and energy to improve your results.

Key benefits

They give you a simple lens for looking at your life
They help you set boundaries
They help you focus and prioritize
They help you balance your life

How to use hot spots

You can use hot spot several ways

Achieve work-life balance – set boundaries in terms how of much time or energy you spend in a given area of your life. You can set minimums or maximums
Ask better questions – ask key questions about significant areas of your life using hotspots as a lens
Focal point for improvement – for example you can find and test the best practices for a given area of your life
Analyze your time and energy – analyze your investment of time and energy across your hot spots

EXERCISE NO 7 SINGLE TASKING EXERCISE

Single tasking is one of the best ways to tame a wandering mind, because it helps you build up your “attention muscle” and carve out more attentional space around the task you are tackling in the moment. It is also a powerful tool for improving your memory. Just as working out in the gym builds the muscles in your body, continually drawing your attention back to your chosen task has been shown to build your attention muscle.

Do not forget that:

Busyness is no different from laziness when it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.
Productivity isn’t about how busy or efficient you are—it’s about how much you accomplish.
Just because you feel productive doesn’t mean you are—and the opposite is often true.

Because here’s the oddest thing about multitasking: although pretty much every study has shown that it’s disastrous for your productivity, we all still strive to do it. Why? Because multitasking feels amazing. Work is simply more fun and stimulating when you multitask—even though when you multitask you invariably accomplish less.

Habits

Learn more about habits in the relevant section of our workshop!

Every habit was made up of three simple parts: a cue, routine, and a reward.

There’s the cue, which is the trigger for an automatic behavior to start, and then the routine, which is the behavior itself, and then finally a reward.

For example, when you wake up (cue), you might immediately pick up your smartphone to bounce between a bunch of different apps (routine), which lets you feel caught up and connected with the world (reward). Or when you’re trying to focus on an ugly task (cue), you might habitually open up your email (routine) to continue to feel productive even though you’re really procrastinating (reward).

The more often you do a habit, the stronger the habit becomes. On a neurological level, a habit is simply a pathway in your brain that fires in response to a cue in your environment.

“[W]hen a cue and a behavior and a reward become neurologically intertwined, what’s actually happening is a neural pathway is developing that links those three things together in our head.”

Cues that trigger habits fall into one of five categories: a specific time of day, a place, a feeling, the presence of certain people, or a preceding behavior that you have ritualized.

The reason habits are so powerful—and so difficult to break—is that your brain releases dopamine, a pleasure chemical, along with the reward at the end of each neurological pathway. Over time, the more often you fire up these neurological pathways, the stronger you link the cues, routines, and rewards that make up your habits because you reinforce the pathway that links them with that dopamine your brain loves so much. Much like repeatedly walking down a desire path, this makes your neurological pathways deeper, wider, and stronger.

Since habits are, in their most basic form, a neurological pathway embedded in your brain, they’re pretty much impossible to break overnight.

Studies show that your brain releases steady hits of dopamine when you work on more than one thing at once.

Daniel Levitin puts it in The Organized Mind, “Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus for constantly searching for external stimulation.

In fact, your brain can’t focus on two things simultaneously—instead it rapidly switches between them, which creates the illusion that you’re doing more than one thing at a time.

Multitasking makes you less productive because it makes you more prone to errors, adds stress to your work, takes longer because it costs you time and attention to switch between tasks, and even affects your memory;

Multitasking even makes you more prone to experiencing boredom, anxiety, and depression.

If you think back to when you accomplished the most in a single sitting, you probably weren’t tending to a million things at once. Chances are you were working with a crazy amount of focus and directing it all at just one thing.

When you multitask, you only skim the surface of your work because you scatter your attention in a million different directions. This prevents you from really getting into any one thing you have to get done. It’s no wonder our brains wander 47 percent of the time.

MY VALUES

PRIME TIME

FUTURE YOU

HOT SPOTS

SINGLE TASKING

Time and Energy Log

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