Eric Siu shares his daily productivity system: plan the night before and pick one most-important task, batch similar work to avoid context-switching, block time in 30-minute windows for email and Slack, take meditation breaks, and wake early for workouts while listening to podcasts.
Hey there. So today we're gonna talk about how you can stay productive. Now, a little background around this. I get questions all the time on what tasks should I do for the day? How should I prioritize? How should I stay productive? And by the way, Kritesh, thank you so much for the question. And without further ado, let's get started. I am a productivity junkie and it's all about making myself more efficient, almost to the point where I sometimes people call me robotic and I certainly feel that way now. I'm becoming more optimized like a machine and who knows, maybe one day we'll, I'll just become a machine. Couple things I do that help me prime the day before, and some of the stuff is like woo-woo, but it does actually help. The way to get a best start to your next day is actually planning the day before. So always the night before, I'm always coming up with my number one. The number one is usually my number one thing that I wanna do. As long as I get that one thing done, so for example, today's like shooting a ton of videos, like walking around downtown LA, that is my number one. Like if I get that done, I'm happy. It's not about having a bunch of tasks, having a laundry list of things to do. Some people call them STDs, stuff to do. You can also call it, you can replace the S with— you don't wanna overwhelm yourself that way. You wanna make sure that you're focused and doing the one thing that matters. And I recommend reading that book, The One Thing by Gary Keller. So, the other thing that I do too is I batch my days, okay? So, video days I might shoot like 20 videos or 10 to 20 videos. Marketing School days where we're recording daily podcasts, we might do 20 to 30 at a time. But Thursdays are my content days. I do my podcast interviews for Growth Everywhere in the morning. And then in the afternoon, we'll aim for video. But the key thing is to make sure you batch out your days and block out your time too. You gotta be very intentional with your time, because everybody's gonna want your time. Even right now, I have people pinging me on Slack, and then if I don't respond in like 5 minutes, they start spamming me with a bunch of question marks. It's like, dude, you gotta block people out, because if you don't protect your time, somebody else is gonna dictate your time, and they're gonna be able to tell you what to do. Same thing with looking at email too. I try to block out email for blocks, and sometimes I struggle with that still. But if you're able to block out your emails into 30-minute time blocks, maybe 2 or 3 times a day, you're no longer doing other people's checklist because your inbox is literally other people asking you to fulfill their needs. You gotta control your time. It's the most important resource more than anything else. It's not renewable, and I think everyone knows that. Now, the other thing I'll say, it's like, you know, all these people talk about meditation. Oh, what meditation? Woo woo. I think I'm gonna go crazy if I meditate. Meditation, honestly, could be when you're just literally just sitting in the shower, okay? You're not doing anything. Your day is paused. Meditation is great because I'm go, go, go all the time, and just to be able to sit back for a second and say, hold on, 5, 10, 15 minutes a day, I can just sit there in peace. Nobody can tell me what to do. Speaking of nobody can tell me what to do, I like waking up at 5, 5:30, 6, sometimes later, 6:30 in the morning, where nobody can bother me. And I'll go straight to the gym, go for a run, go for a bike ride, whatever it is, do a bunch of kettlebell swings. That gets me going because when you train in the morning, you're able to release endorphins and you're able to— I just feel better. There's no moment in time where I'm just like, man, I really, really regret doing that workout. So those are just a couple ways to stay productive. I mean, obviously it goes without saying that when I go to the gym, I'm going to listen to podcasts, I'm going to listen to audiobooks. But there you should block out time to pause too. It's not just about feeding yourself because eventually you're going to cap out. Like today, I'm telling you, like we're recording all these videos. I have more work to do afterwards, but I'm gonna go take a break. I'm gonna watch Netflix. I'm gonna watch like World War II history or something like that. Who knows? I need to disconnect for a second and get perspective elsewhere. Same thing with travel too. If people are inviting you to go speak for free and they're paying for your expenses, go out there and do it because you're getting so much perspective. When I went to Turkey, when I went to Poland, when I went to Amsterdam, for example, it's just all this perspective that I otherwise would not have gotten. So the key thing is learning how you can be productive step by step by step. And once you get a little better at it, You're gonna explode. And by the way, don't forget to watch the next marketing video and let us know one thing you're gonna do in the comments to be more productive. One thing you're gonna pull from this to be more productive. Final thing, don't forget to subscribe and explode.
