Give Me 12 Minutes and I’ll Give You 30 Years of Productivity Advice

If you want to get more done with less time, this video is for you. Give me just a few minutes and I'll give you decades of productivity advice. You know, I've probably read more productivity books than anyone you know. I'm an author. I study this stuff. And I realized they all offer the same 6 lessons. And now I'm going to reveal them to you. Lesson 1, do less ruthlessly. I can summarize the wisest productivity advice of all in 2 simple words. Just 2 words. Do less. Seriously, that's it. The people who get the most done don't do more things. They do fewer things, but they do them better. So be ruthless about what you do. Here are a few ideas. Limit your daily to-do list to no more than 5 items. It's tough. I know I struggle with this, but when I limit my list, I always accomplish more and have a more satisfying day. On your list of 5, choose one and designate it as your most important task, your MIT. Do your MIT first, no exceptions. Start it, finish it, and don't do anything else. And when you're done, you'll feel a sense of accomplishment and you'll have made progress toward your most important goal. Next, alongside your to-do list, make a to-don't list. List 3 things that steal your time, drain your energy, hijack your focus, and don't Do them. Things like checking email first thing in the morning, answering every phone call, attending meetings that are a waste, doom scrolling when you're stuck. Write them down, post them where you'll see them, and treat that list with the same reverence with which you treat your to-do list. Finally, for new requests that come in, make no your default answer. I know that's tough. We don't always have full control over every demand on our time or attention, but give it a try. If no is your starting position, you'll be forced to overcome the default by thinking hard about whether this next meeting, project, opportunity, or request is worth your time. Remember, getting more and better work done isn't about addition. It's often about subtraction. Here's a story to help you remember. It's in many of the books, including one of my own. The legendary investor Warren Buffett once had a conversation with his pilot. The pilot felt stymied, like he wasn't achieving enough. So Buffett told him, Write down your top 25 goals. The pilot did that. Then Buffett said, now circle the 5 most important goals. The pilot did that too. Then Buffett said, everything you didn't circle, goals 6 through 25, forget about them. Avoid them at all costs. That's doing less ruthlessly. The next tip shared in almost every productivity book, it's probably the most important. Protect your golden Everyone has a window of time in their day when their brain is sharpest. Protect that window like your life depends on it, because in some ways it does. Carve out a few hours, ideally early in the day for most of us, for what Cal Newport calls deep work— work that requires your full attention and complete focus. Before you begin, make sure your environment is free of distractions. No meetings, no messages, no open tabs. For me, when I have serious writing to do, I don't open my email. I leave my phone outside my office. But that's nothing compared to Maya Angelou, who rented a hotel room to do her writing, unbothered and uninterrupted from any other human being. Once you've eliminated those distractions, begin your Golden Hours with the hardest task, the one you're most likely to avoid. I feel like half these productivity books quote Mark Twain, who said, if it's your job to eat a frog, Do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat 2 frogs, eat the biggest one first. Science backs this up. Research from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management has found that we get more done and feel more accomplished not when we knock off a bunch of easy things, but when we tackle the hardest thing first. Another way to supercharge this principle? Know your chronotype. That's your natural biological relationship to time. Do you typically go to sleep early and wake up early? Or do you naturally go to sleep late and wake up late? If you're part of the 1 in 5 people who are night owls, carve out time much later in the day, even at night, for your deep work. The key for you is to work when you work best, not just when everyone else's schedule you should. But again, for 4 out of 5 of us, prime time is earlier, usually first thing in the day. Here's one more idea that comes up a lot. Timeboxing. That just means Setting a start and a stop time for a task. Say, I'll work on this report from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM. You give that task a container, and that structure can sharpen your focus and limit drift. You've got a plan for the big task, your MIT and your deep work, but you've still got other stuff to do. Pesky things, smaller tasks that always seem to clog the gears. What do you do with those? That's easy, and it's lesson 3, systematize the small stuff. Think less, automate more. Here are some ideas from these books on how to clear the clutter. 1, use the 2-minute rule. If something takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately. Don't put it on a list. Don't overthink it. Just get it done. I learned this from David Allen, and no joke, it changed my life. Another idea, stop multitasking. You can't do it well. Nobody can do it well. It doesn't work. Multitasking makes you slower, sloppier, And more stressed. So for the love of all that is holy, just stop. Stop. Do one thing at a time, finish it, then move on. A third idea for clearing the clutter: batch like a boss. Stack similar tasks together— email, phone calls, errands, admin. For example, I try to answer email just a few times a day in a single focus burst. No tab switching, no notifications, just execution. Every time you switch contexts, you You lose time. Batching gives you that time back. A final way to clear the clutter: limit your choices. We think more choices leads to more happiness and better outcomes, but as with the first principle in this video, less is more. And if you want to remember this point, here's a super short anecdote that's in a lot of these books. It's about Barack Obama when he was president. Back then, he wore only gray suits or navy suits. That's all he had in his closet. Why? Fewer decisions. I don't wanna waste brainpower on what to wear, he said. Even the most powerful people automate the small stuff. Number 4, track your progress. Research from Harvard's Teresa Amabile has found that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work. Not praise, not pay, not pressure, just knowing that you moved something forward. Progress. But here's the challenge. We often don't see the progress that we're making. We need a way to notice it, to memorialize it, to appreciate it. Here's the best, simplest technique. At the end of each day, take 1 minute to write down 3 ways you made progress. Big or small, it doesn't matter. The point is to see the movement, because if you see it, you're more likely to keep going. These books also tend to recommend 2 regular reviews. Not every day, but every week. On Mondays, ask yourself, what's ahead? What matters most? What are my priorities? On Fridays, ask, how'd it go? Where did I make progress? Where could I have done better? That weekly rhythm, just 5 minutes for each review, adds up to something powerful: momentum. And if you need a story to lock in this principle, several of these books mention Pixar, the studio behind Toy Story, Inside Out and The Incredibles. At Pixar, animators show their unfinished work every day in what they call dailies. Not to impress, just to show progress. That steady feedback loop builds accountability, a sense of progress, and better work. Progress matters, but you can't go nonstop all day. That's why we have Principle 5: Take strategic breaks. Let's move from animators to violinists. In 1993, the late Anders Ericsson studied elite violin players to find out what separated them from their less accomplished peers. These musical superstars practiced a lot. I mean, that makes sense. But the big surprise was that they also rested a lot. They practiced in intense sessions, often 90 minutes, and then they took lots of breaks. A secret to their peak performance wasn't that they grinded it out all the time. It was the exact opposite. They rested, they recovered. So here's another key finding in these productivity books. Breaks aren't a sign of laziness. They're a tool of excellence. Breaks aren't a deviation from performance. They're a component of high performance. If you want to get more and better work done, start being hardheaded and ruthless— there's that word again— about taking breaks. We weren't built for 8 hours of nonstop effort. We were built for cycles: effort, recovery, effort, recovery. And we know the best, most restorative breaks That you can take. The design principles, which I wrote about in my own book called When, are simple. 1, something beats nothing. Even a short break is better than no break at all. 2, moving beats stationary. Breaks when we're in motion, say taking a walk, are more effective than breaks when we stay put. 3, outside beats inside. The restorative effects of being in nature, even in a city where you're just seeing a few trees, are substantial. 4, social beats solitary. Solo breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own, and that's true even for introverts. And finally, fully detached beats semi-detached. And breaks, as in deep work, leave your phone behind. Taking more breaks and better breaks helps you refocus, reset, and return stronger. These 5 tips all lead us to the most powerful principle of all. Number 6, go for consistency instead of intensity. Habits Instead of heroics. If there's one thing these productivity books quietly agree on, it's this: the people who accomplish the most aren't off-the-hook, 24/7 maniacs. No, they're people who do something quieter and less dramatic. They show up. They show up every day on time, in the chair, doing the work. That means shifting your mindset. Don't try to be a hero. The person who pulls an all-nighter, powers through an 18-hour workday, or finishes a week-long project in one day. That's not sustainable, and it usually produces worse work, not better. Instead, build habits. Design simple routines that make it easy to do the important stuff without overthinking or overexerting. James Clear calls this casting votes for the kind of person you want to become. I love that. Every day you sit down and write, you cast a vote for being a writer. Every time you close your inbox and focus, you cast a vote for being disciplined. And the research backs this up. A 2020 study from USC looked at how people build habits that last. The biggest predictor of long-term success? Not motivation, not willpower, not even rewards. It was repetition, especially early on. The people who stuck with their habits weren't the ones who worked hardest. They were the ones who simply showed up most often in the first few weeks, even if it was just for a few minutes every day. Small actions repeated consistently outperform big efforts done sporadically. Because intensity exhausts and consistency compounds. Don't burn bright and burn out. Just keep going. No drama. Quietly, deliberately, every day. So let's put this all together. Want to get more meaningful work done? Do less ruthlessly. Protect your peak hours. Be a machine with the small stuff. Track your progress every day and every week. Treat breaks as performance fuel. And go for consistency instead of intensity, habits instead of heroics. That's it. 30 years of productivity advice distilled to its essence. It's not fancy, it's not complicated, but it works.