INSPIRING LIFE SCHOOL PODCAST
EPISODE 18
HOW TO BE PRODUCTIVE
INSPIRING LIFE SCHOOL PODCAST
EPISODE 18 TRANSCRIPT:
HOW TO BE PRODUCTIVE
WELCOME TO THIS EPISODE WHICH IS ALL ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY OR MORE SPECIFICALLY ALL THE TIPS AND TRICKS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE TO HELP DRAMATICALLY INCREASE MY PRODUCTIVITY
Now I don’t often like to toot my own horn but when it comes to productivity I really feel like I have now such a great grasp on this skill.
If they were giving grades out for productivity now I’m pretty sure I would get an A+ but I promise you it wasn’t always this way.
When I say it is a skill I should stress that it is a skill that can be learned by anyone.
Being productive isn’t a personality trait you are born with.
It is instead a skill you learn to develop, in the same way you learn to develop patience, discipline and other important skill sets that we aren’t born with but we learn to develop through practice and experience over time.
I myself spent ways too many years in the past procrastinating and wasting my time on things that didn’t matter.
I would have the perfect excuses for why I couldn’t do something.
I could waste days dreaming of doing things without actually taking action.
I was the perfect dreamer yet couldn’t work out how to translate that into becoming a doer.
But when it hit me that I was in total control of my time and days and the way I chose to view specific tasks as difficult versus easy to do when taking baby steps things completely shifted for me.
In one year I was productive and focused enough to write and publish 8 books.
I later got so good with my focus and time management skills that I was able to write 35,000 word books in 10 days or less.
And I didn’t do it just once I did it multiple times.
For my first 18 months of blogging I consistently wrote and published 20 articles a month, in addition to my other work tasks, even though there were bloggers out there struggling just to get one post out each week.
I was able to launch this podcast from scratch with zero experience at all in 10 days with 5 podcasts live.
In this episode I will be sharing with you my top 5 tips for productivity that help me get the most out of every day. And so what that goal in mind let’s start with tip 1:
1 – DECIDE IT ISN’T TOO HARD, DECIDE IT IS POSSIBLE
One of the reasons people procrastinate is because they secretly think that a task is too hard. Let’s take the task of writing a book.
I now have published over 20 books and when people ask me how I do it I say it’s because the process is easy when you take baby steps.
If you want to write a 40,000 word book and you write 1,000 words a day it will take you 40 days to finish that book.
If you double your output to 2000 words a day, which is a completely realistic goal when you set your mind to it, your book draft will be complete in 20 days.
If you are a writer who dreams about writing and you write just one page a day that will equal 365 pages by the end of the year.
On the outset writing a book might seem like a big goal but when you break it down into little steps it is completely doable.
You just have to decide it is possible and that it can be done.
That whatever it is that you are procrastinating over isn’t as scary as it seems.
This is a conscious decision you make in your head and you simply replace your old thought with a new thought.
Instead of thinking I CAN’T DO IT, you can choose to think OF COURSE I CAN DO IT.
Instead of thinking it is impossible you can choose to think anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
This is a conscious decision you make, whether your goal is business related goal where you are growing a new business or health-related goal where you want to get fit or lose weight.
The same rule always applies: you first must decide it is a doable goal, even if it seems big or scary.
If others have achieved this goal before you then there is no reason why you can’t too.
And you can shift your perception of this goal today to thinking of it as being POSSIBLE instead of sabotaging yourself before you even get up to try, with thoughts that it is IMPOSSIBLE.
2 – STOP MAKING EXCUSES
Now for tip number two – you need to stop making excuses.
The first thing we need to do to be more productive is to stop making excuses.
What you should be doing is making effort not another excuse that keeps you stuck.
Now I know all the excuses before I probably said a few to myself.
Popular excuses include:
- I haven’t got the time
- Or it isn’t the right time yet
- I’m too old
- Or I’m too young
- I’m too busy doing this instead
- Or I need to plan more
- I’m not sure if that’s what I really want to do
- Or I don’t have the right connections
- I don’t feel ready
- Or my priority is something else right now
- It’s too risky
- Or I can’t afford it
- It’s not even that important
- Or I’m worried about what could go wrong
- I need to do more research
- Or I’m actually not smart enough
- I haven’t found my motivation yet
- Or I can’t help it, I’m easily distracted
- So and so says it isn’t a good idea
- Or I need more feedback
- And here’s my favorite: I WILL DO IT TOMORROW
Now to you these might sound like totally valid reasons why you can’t chase a dream or spend your days more productively but I want you to recognise that these reasons could actually be thinly disguised excuses.
And here’s the thing about those excuses.
They don’t help you in any way.
In fact these excuses are holding you back.
I’m sure you have heard all the popular quotes about excuses like:
If it is important to you, you will find a way. If it’s not, you will find an excuse.
Or it’s not about HAVING time, it’s about making time and if it truly matters to you, then you will make the time.
In order to become more productive in my life and start actually taking action, I needed to give myself a tough talking to.
I needed to stop making those excuses and the first step was to start by recognising these excuses for what they were.
As something that was keeping me stuck, something that was causing me to lose confidence in my abilities, something that was keeping my dreams away from me for yet another day but then those days turned into months and years.
I started to realise I wasn’t doing myself any favors by holding tight to these excuses.
Rather than being a floating device they were like a heavy anchor, sinking me to the bottom of the ocean and keeping me stuck.
I had to cut those ties and swim away from them. I started to see them as lies.
Because as Arnold Schwarzenegger once so wisely said: you can have results or excuses but not both.
You need to be stronger than your excuses.
You need to understand that even though we all say we don’t have time, time is actually the only thing we do have right now and we get to decide what to do with it.
Not everything is created equal in this world but when it comes to time, we all get the same 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and we get to choose how to spend that time.
That’s right.
We get to make a choice.
You are in charge of your timetable even though you might feel like you are at the beck and call of it.
Many of us think we are controlled by our diaries but we forget that we consciously added things to that diary ourselves.
Even those things like a job we might not like because at one point you decided it was a good way to help provide an income for your family.
Remember you could choose to leave your job.
You could choose to ditch all extracurricular activities for your kids.
You could choose to ditch cooking time-consuming meals for your family and cook microwave meals instead if you wanted to.
You are in control of your timetable and once you take out the hours spent sleeping or working, you get to decide what you want to do with that spare recreational time.
Remember we all have the same 24 hours a day, – whether we are Oprah, or the president or some little kids playing with his friends on the street.
What really matters is how you use that time you have that our disposal, especially your free time left-over after all the most important obligations that you have consciously chosen to commit to in your life.
3 – GET CLEAR ON YOUR GOALS
Now for tip 3: getting clear on your goals.
After you decide that your goals are in fact possible, that you are in charge of your own time and you stop making excuses, you need to get really clear on what you want to achieve in life.
What do you actually want to achieve each day that will make you feel productive?
For one person the feeling of productivity might come from cleaning their home, doing some laundry and getting the quick chance to sit down and read a new book.
For another person it might be to tick 5 things off their business to-do list and it doesn’t matter if the house around them is a mess.
The cool thing is neither option is right or wrong.
It all depends on how YOU define the term productivity to mean.
So just to share with you my own experiences with productivity: when I first started blogging, I decided my month would be a very productive one if I simply wrote 20 blog posts, created 100 fresh new graphics to promote my posts on Pinterest and emailed my list once a week.
Nowadays I still like to set big monthly goals – which are always stretch goals.
They take me outside my comfort zone and scare me a little to think about the effort that will be achieve those goals but at the same time I know they are feasible if I work hard consistently on these goals.
Like the goal of writing and launching a book in a month – is it feasible?
Yes because I have done it quite a few times already.
Will it be easy?
Absolutely no freaking way.
But once I have these big stretch goals clearly defined it’s easier to break it down into little steps and work consistently on it as often as I can.
Now I know that a lot of people seem to think that their everyday jobs seem to get in the way of them achieving their dreams so I thought I would point out that in my early days of writing I had a newborn and toddler.
I was a totally sleep-deprived mom who could only squeeze in 90 minutes of writing each day.
I would work 7pm to 8:30am before turning off the computer and going straight to sleep because I was scared by the knowledge that I would be waking up to breastfeed at least twice during the night and if I didn’t get enough sleep I wouldn’t be able to function during the day.
So my books took a lot longer to complete back then but that’s okay.
There is a time and season in our life for everything.
Then when I started my first blog a parenting website called InspiringLifeDreams.com at the end of 2017, I was still working in a busy job that consumed my time from the moment the kids were dropped off at school until school pickup.
After that I had all the typical kid and household stuff to attend to.
But I still made sure to wake up early every morning and work from 5-7am and then another 2 hours later that night from 8pm-10pm.
But this was easier for me to do when I had my goals clearly defined for me.
It is so much easier to be productive when you know exactly what you want to achieve each week or month.
So take the time to think about how this might apply to you.
If you were being truly productive in your life, how would you be spending your time differently?
What do you keep hoping to make a priority in your day but you keep fobbing off?
Write down a list of those things whether it includes some daily exercise or working on a specific goal or taking action?
Come up with a realistic daily list of tasks that equal a productive day for you – list them all out and then you can begin working on how to incorporate these tasks into your day.
4 – ELIMINATE THE TIME WASTERS
Now we move onto the fourth tip which is eliminating the time wasters.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the fact that the reason we aren’t doing specific tasks in our day is because we have given priority to different things which often eat up our time.
These things are called time wasters and include tasks like:
- Time on social media
- Unnecessary interruptions
- Unnecessary chatting or phone calls
- Constantly checking emails
- Distractions
- A lack of motivation
- Inability to say no to others
- Meetings we don’t really need to attend
- A lack of systems
- Trying to please everyone
- Indecision
- Netflix and other forms of mindless entertainment
- Constant attention to new urgent but unnecessary tasks
- Doing things that aren’t really necessary
So these time-wasters are often things we hold tight onto and we justify in our heads as really important.
But if you are familiar with Stephen Covey’s book 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE then you will know that all tasks really fall into four groups which he identified using a quadrant.
In this quadrant Stephen Covey postulated that all tasks are either:
- URGENT AND IMPORTANT
- URGENT AND NOT IMPORTANT
- IMPORTANT YET NOT URGENT and
- NOT IMPORTANT AND NOT URGENT.
Now you can probably work out which of these quadrant tasks we can comfortably aim to give less attention to first – it’s those that are NON IMPORTANT and NOT URGENT.
In an ideal world we would be attending to those IMPORTANT AND URGENT tasks first and then making sure to make time for our IMPORTANT AND YET URGENT TASKS over those which are URGENT AND YET NOT IMPORTANT.
So take the time for figure out which group YOUR daily tasks fall into.
You only have a limited time each day to focus on and it’s vital that you make the time for the things that are really important.
One example is exercise which falls into the IMPORTANT AND NOT URGENT category.
Of course it’s important that we take care of our health and that time spent moving and energizing our bodies is always time well spent in the long run.
But because it isn’t truly urgent it often checked kicked to the wayside as we turn our attention to tasks that our URGENT AND YET NOT IMPORTANT.
Things like answering emails, accepting a call from a friend, attending a meeting that doesn’t really matter in the long run.
So we need to learn to work out how to give priority to the things that are truly important in our life.
Here’s one scary thing I discovered during my work on productivity.
Did you know that wasting just 15 minutes a day (whether that is scrolling through social media or running to the shops to get some more bread even though it could really want until tomorrow) – wasting just 15 minutes every day accumulates to a total of 5475 minutes wasted every year which equals 91 hours or 3.8 days?
That’s almost four days a year we waste on completely unnecessary tasks.
I remember when I consciously decided to work on this because I was non-stop running to the shops to get essentials that needed topping up throughout the week.
And if I am totally honest with you it was taking more like 45 minutes out of my day so that almost 12 days out of the year, just running around getting things that should have been included in my weekly grocery shop.
If you are spending even just 30 minutes of your day on social media that is almost 8 days over the course of the year.
If you spend 1 hour on wasteful tasks that’s closer to 15 days.
Just imagine the fact that two weeks of our life are wasted on things we don’t really need to do and that we could avoid doing if we better managed our time.
I needed to work really hard on consciously identifying my own time-wasters and working out a strategy to ensure I could minimise or altogether get rid of these time-waster activities so I had more time to focus on the things that really matter.
5 – UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING BUSY AND BEING PRODUCTIVE
And this brings us to my final point – understanding the difference between being busy and being productive.
So I have to be honest, it took way too long for this penny to drop!
For ages I personally confused being busy as being productive when they are not the same thing. Instead these are two distinctly different modes of behaviour.
Let me explain how feeling productive is not the same as being productive.
For starters productive people have a mission for their life and few priorities while busy people have lots on their plate with many priorities.
Busy people always jump to say yes whereas productive people are slow to jump and they think a lot before they agree to do something.
They want to make sure it is aligned with their long term goals.
Busy people are always moving where productive people think before they act.
Busy people complain about how much they are doing whereas productive people don’t need to talk about it. They let their results prove or show everything.
Productive people make time for what is important while busy people don’t have time for anything.
Productive people are focused and instead of just talking about how they can make a change, they MAKE those changes happen.
Being busy is often an excuse to not get the important things done.
People use it to justify why they are late, why they can’t do something, and ironically why they are getting so little done.
Being busy is when you fill up time with tasks rather than prioritising the important stuff.
It’s when you work without a system and tackle random tasks without giving thought to urgency.
It’s when you spend a lot of time doing things that don’t really matter. You think “doing” something and keeping yourself busy means you are accomplishing something special.
Productive people on the other hand know exactly what they want and they go for it.
They use systems to track their progress and they work on the most important things first.
They are selective with the use of their time and resources and figure out how to spend less time on getting the work done.
Being productive means you are accomplishing tasks that will get you closer to meeting your goals. It means you have clear goals to work on.
Running around like a headless chook without focus or a clear direction does not necessarily mean you are being productive!
Ernest Hemingway once said: “never mistake motion for action.”
If you must be busy, let it be fuelled by ambition and drive.
Take control of your situation instead of letting it control you.
Don’t just do stuff – get the important stuff done.
This has required me to get really clear on my goals, reduce the time spent on indecision – I have become so good with just trusting my gut instinct and making a definitive decision quickly.
I have also mastered the art of batching and prioritising the tasks in my day.
I choose to view time as a precious commodity that I don’t want to waste.
I don’t want to waste my time because in the end it means I am wasting my life.
I have been forced to step up and become more intentional with my time, the time I spend with my family.
I try to make it count, the time I spend on my work, I try to make it count and I always think in terms of my end goal, what do I want to produce.
When it comes to writing, I don’t just want to spend two hours writing.
I want to write 2000 words in that time.
When it comes to spending time with my family, I don’t want to just want to be in the presence, while feeling distracted by my phone or other work tasks.
I clear my mind and try to be there in the moment, listening to them, engaging with them, doing something special like going out for a walk or doing something fun with that precious time I have at my disposal.
To be honest I could go on and on about the importance of living life intentionally because how we spend our minutes is how we spend our days and how we spend our days is how we spend our months and years.
And I always try to keep that end goal in mind and work backwards, taking all the baby steps I need to achieve what I want to achieve in my life.
I do this by being productive with my time and making the best use of it, which also includes my time for rest and play which is balanced out by my need to take action and produce results and have something to show for my time.
These five steps:
- Deciding it isn’t too hard, it is in fact possible
- My ability to stop making excuses
- Getting clear on my goals
- Eliminating the time wasters
- And understanding the difference between being busy and being productive
These five steps have dramatically increased the results I have in my life.
It all comes down to being more intentional and taking action on what is important to you and most importantly respecting time because it truly is our most valuable resource.
I hope these ideas will encourage you too to be more productive with your time and I will you the best of luck with this endeavour.
As always thank you so much for being here with you on this podcast.
I love and appreciate you all and look forward to catching you on the next podcast episode.
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Hey, I’m Frances Vidakovic! I help you live a richer, lighter life while pursuing dreamy goals – without sacrificing your soul, sanity or family life. 🫶🏻 Author. Coach. Course Creator. DON’T DIE UNHAPPY! → Wake up. Do what matters. Savour it all 🌷