Master Productivity FAST | How to Be More Organized

Good morning, Believe Nation!

Today we're gonna talk about 5 ways that you can stay organized and productive. Number 3 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for my thoughts on the matter too.

A lot of people ask, "How do you organize your life when you have so much to do and so little time? It seems to be chaotic, and the phone is ringing, and people are calling, and unexpected emergencies crop up, and things that you expected to happen don't happen, and things that do happen take much longer than you thought and cost much more, and so on." Well, I say, "Join the human race." The fact is that in our world today, there's so much good stuff going on that we are eager to take a piece of everything. We're constantly raising our hand, if you like, and say, "I'll do that, and I'll do this, and I'll get into that, and I'll add that to my schedule," and so on. So as I mentioned earlier, the starting point of getting your life under control is to sit down and think about two things: who you really are, which means what are your natural talents and abilities, what do you enjoy, what do you like doing. If you could wave a magic wand, if you were financially independent, what would you want to do with your life based on your own talents and abilities? Another question we ask is, if you could work at any job, or in any industry, or in any position, or in any part of the country, what would they be? And think them through. At Stanford University, they teach an exercise in the creative thinking part of the business faculty. It's called the 20/10 exercise. And that's, imagine that you have $20 million cash in the bank, just for fun, an inheritance, you won a lottery. But simultaneously, you have an incurable illness and you only have 10 years left to live. If you had $20 million in the bank and 10 years left to live, what choices and decisions would you make for your life? And that begins to clarify things. You start to become clear, well, if I had that money and only a limited time, there's certain things I would want to do and certain things that would not be that important. The second goal area is what do you really, really want from your life? If you had no limitations, if you had all the money and all the time and all the talents and all the abilities, if you could do or be or have anything, what would you really want in your life? And write them down. And then what I encourage people to do is make a list of 10 things, 10 goals that you'd like to accomplish in the next year or so, and ask this question: if I could only accomplish one goal on this list, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life? If you could only accomplish one goal in life, Which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life? Now for most people, especially when you're maturing in your career, when you're growing up, the biggest goal is money. If you had money, then you could buy a house, home, car, family lifestyle, and so on. So that's quite normal. For other people, it may be a health goal. For business owners, maybe a business goal. For people with relationship problems, maybe a relationship goal. But ask yourself, if you could achieve one goal or resolve one problem, and remember, a problem unsolved is merely a goal unachieved, which one would it be? And write that down and make it that the major definite purpose of your life. Make it the central organizing principle of your life. Now, Wolfgang von Goethe had a wonderful observation about life. He basically said that everything counts. Everything that we do helps or hurts. Everything adds up or takes away. So once you have a very clear goal, then you simply ask yourself, based on what I really, really want for my life, what's most important to me, is what I'm about to do helping or hurting? Is it going to move me toward my goal or move me away? And if it doesn't move you toward what is most important to you, then it's a very good candidate to be delegated, outsourced, downsized, or even eliminated. In the process of re-engineering in business, the whole process of re-engineering is based on what is called process simplification. And the way that you simplify a process is you stop doing things. You eliminate low-value tasks to free up more time for the things that are most important to you. You keep going through your life and saying, "What are the things that I could get rid of, that I could stop doing altogether, that I could delegate to someone else?" or that I could combine and do all together. You keep thinking, how can I simplify my life? How can I re-engineer my life so that it's simpler and more streamlined? And then you concentrate more and more time doing fewer and fewer things, which give you greater and greater results, financial and satisfaction, emotional, in your life.

So no matter how late at night you go, before you wrap up, just take 4 minutes and really think through everything that you have to get done for the next day. So here's how I usually do it. First thing I do is I open up my calendar and I take a look at all the appointments that I have for the next day and the time that those appointments will take. Like this: 1 o'clock, I got a team call that lasts 30 minutes. 3:30, I have a MarieTV script review that'll take about an hour. And then I have a 6:30 spin class. Then I write down all the projects and the tasks that I need to get done, and I give myself a little bit of an estimate about how long I think each project or task will take. Of course, these are estimates. Sometimes I get things done faster and sometimes they take longer, but at least I give myself a baseline to work off of. 9:00 to 10:30 AM, I'm going to write a first draft of a sales video script. I'm going to give myself about 90 minutes. Then from 11:30 to 12:30, I'm going to review my social media schedule, give myself an hour for that. And from 2:30 to 3:00, I'll do a little email clearout. And finally, I make a new little section at the bottom of my notepad with personal things that I need to handle for that day. For example, get Nanny a birthday card and mail it. That'll take me about 30 minutes. Order more Kuma food, all of 10 minutes. And book a haircut for the next month, takes me about 5 minutes. Boom!

That is it.

Super simple. So when I do this, it informs exactly when I need to be at my desk and working, which tells me when I need to wake up to have enough time to do my little morning routine and get everything done without feeling rushed or stressed. The worst thing you can do is wake up in the morning and go straight to your computer and open up email, and then all of a sudden you're pretending to work all day, and at the end of the day nothing important ever got done. Nobody's perfect, and of course not every day goes as planned, but this system gives you the best chance possible at making sure that your most important projects get done, especially if you have an inconsistent schedule.

Almost everything you do from the time you get up in the morning is habit. So start to think about yourself, what would be the best habits to have? Now I have written a book called Million Dollar Habits. It has 12 chapters, 12 critical areas of life, and in each chapter there's 20 or 30 habits. So let me give you some of the best. Number 1, develop the habit of daily goal setting and goal orientation. What does this mean? This means when you go to sleep at night, think about your goals. Goals for the coming day. Make a list for each day of all the goals, the little goals you're going to accomplish that day. Keep a journal and write down your goals on a regular basis. When you're driving through the day, think about your goals. When you're talking to other people, think about your goals. You see, you do become what you think about most of the time. You do achieve what you think about most of the time. So all successful people and all wealthy people think about their goals most of the time. Second of all, be results-oriented. Now, results-oriented people are always thinking of the most important things that they can do right now to achieve their most important results. Successful people make a list of everything they have to do, and before they start working, they set priorities on the list. Here's a great way to become result-oriented. Actually, it's life-changing. Ask yourself, once you have your list for the day, If I could only do one thing on this list before I was called out of town for a month, what one activity would I want to be sure to get completed? And put a circle around that and start on that activity immediately, first thing. And then discipline yourself to work nonstop until you complete that one activity. This simple technique has to— taken people from rags to riches all over the world for at least 100 years. Pick your most important task and start on it immediately, and then discipline yourself to stay with it until it's complete. Another habit that you can establish is to become people-oriented. Recognize that everything that you achieve in life is going to be with the help or support or cooperation of other people. So always think, what is it that other people want and need from me? How can I help other people so they'll want to help me? Me back. If you're in sales, top salespeople think about their customers all the time. They think about who their customers are and what their customers want and how they can help them the most and how they can help them even more today. In their relationships, successful people are very focused on the most important people in their worlds, both personal and in business. Another habit you can have is to stay health-oriented. Think about your health most of the time. Think about eating less food and better food. Think about daily exercise. Think about getting lots of rest. Remember, to be successful in our competitive world, you need a lot of energy. To have a lot of energy, you've got to eat good foods, get lots of rest, and exercise all the time. One of the most important habits is that of character and honesty. Is Always tell the truth no matter what the price. And the final characteristic, the final habit is that of self-discipline. And I have written and spoken upon this for years and years and years, but self-discipline seems to be the foundation habit that makes everything else possible. And the best definition of self-discipline is that self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. You see, anybody can do it if they feel like it. It's when you don't feel like it and you do it anyway that you eventually develop the self-discipline that makes everything else possible.

All ideas don't work unless you do the work. And some of the best work you can do is getting really good at creating a one-page plan. Have your Big Five, 5 things that need to happen this year for this to be your best year yet on a one-page plan. Your top 5 values, put them on that same plan. Your top 5 sub-goals sequenced into each quarter of this year on that one-page plan. And every morning while your competition or the rest of the world is asleep, get up at 5 AM. I'll teach you how to do that in future videos. But look at your one-page plan. Spend 20 minutes on that so it becomes a brain tattoo, a burning obsession, so it lights you with inspiration so you go out in the world and you understand that clarity is power and you so intimately know what has to happen during this day, this week, this month, this quarter, this year to get you closer to your mountaintop. Because the ordinary— the hours that ordinary people waste, extraordinary people do. Because they're not bored like most people. Most people need to medicate themselves with too much TV, too much Facebook, too much video, too much chitchat, too much busyness because they don't know their goals, because they don't have a one-page plan, because they don't have a one-page schedule. I mean, I've got my schedule for every 7 days. Almost everything I need to do goes on it. And you might say, Robin, well, that's a very rigid way to live. No, it's a very free way to live because then I have the power to live life on my own terms. I feel inspired. I'm not wasting each day. I'm leveraging each day.

Number 4: use a planner or a diary. Just as useful as using a calendar, but I find that this one's a bit more specific, especially if you have specific appointments or specific things that you have to do on a daily basis. It does help just jotting them down in your diary as well as your calendar, and then you can refer to it when you're on the go as well, not just in a place in your house, but you can actually look at it when you're on your way to work, when you're at school, or just before for a meeting, or maybe you just wanna refer to it just anytime during the day. So it is worth having a planner or a diary.

[Speaker:EVAN_CARMICHAEL] The reason so many people aren't productive throughout the day is not only because they don't have their purpose and their psychology and their physiology supporting them, but also because they're going through the day in an ignorant way. You know, they're going through the day focused solely on responding to everybody else's emergencies. You know, here's what most people do. They wake up, they get ready for the day, they go through the— they go to work. They're not really thinking about anything yet. They're just kind of going through the motions. They get to work and what do they do? They open up their email inbox, which is the worst thing you could ever do to be productive. Your inbox is a nice organizing system of other people's agendas. That's what an inbox really is. It's a nice organizing system of other— every email in there is someone needing something from you or pulling from you. That's what most of them are, isn't it true? And so what most people do is they open up their inbox and they start responding to other people's emergencies, or they start, they start looking through all their emails to see, well, what am I supposed to do today? Or what's the biggest fire I have to fight today? In other words, they're living their life in reaction versus living their life in intention, in intelligence, in direction. They're not focused on what to do throughout the day. They're just saying, well, I'll do this because that's what popped up today. You know, so for personally, I never even check email until 10 AM. When I get up and I'm looking at everything, I sit down and I strategize my day before I ever even think about checking my email. And then I might only check my email once or twice a day because I set up all other systems to support my ability to be productive. Because in your life, I'm guessing that you're only really making money if you're producing. And in my industry, I live in the experts industry, that's the sort of the self-help, spirituality, business growth world where we offer advice to other people about how they can improve their life or build their business. That's the expert industry. In the expert industry, most people are really struggling to be productive because we're creatives, right? We have so many great ideas and so many great intentions throughout the day and we have so many ideas 'cause we can never actually accomplish them. Maybe you're the same. Maybe at base, you're really a creator, and you have all these ideas of so many things you wanna do, but you've never really been able to organize them and get them done because you haven't set up systems to support your levels of productivity. Let's start with the beginning of your day. I'm gonna just jump into one little thing that I do at the beginning of the day. It's not the very beginning, but I think it will help you, and it's a way of organizing my day. And I call this one-page productivity. It's just a simple sheet of paper that I have that I fill in when the morning after I've gone out and I've exercised, that's a piece of my morning activity is mastering my physiology so I can become a high performer. Starts with me drinking lots of water in the morning, eating the right things, going for a little quick run or workout or even just a brisk walk to energize my body and my mind so that I can be creative and think. And when I get back to my office and it's time time to actually work, I do this one-page productivity sheet. And this one-page productivity sheet helps me really think through what I need to do throughout the day. So here's the three elements of this. And by the way, below this video you can download this sheet and you can use it on your daily life. Let me walk you through how to use it. Basically there's three elements of the one-page productivity. The first element is major projects. These major projects usually, if you, any given person probably has, oh, I don't know, you know, like 3 big buckets of projects that they're working on. So I might be working on, you know, writing a new book. I might be working on doing a new seminar. I might be working on, you know, reinvigorating my online marketing. Those are big, big, these are big bucket projects that aren't necessarily, they're not the priorities for the day, These are the big vision, these connect me to the— what are the big things I'm doing? And any given person, if they're well organized, they're probably only working on 3, maybe 5 main projects. So what I want you to do when you start out in the morning, to keep you thinking big and thinking outside of just the day, to focus is, you know, and in High Performance Academy we've already talked about purpose, so we're already engaged there, okay? This is just a little snippet. I want you to think about the big picture of your projects. And I want you to think about what are the 5 things that you would have to do to move these projects forward. This is not 5 things that you need to move them forward today. That's your priorities. Your projects are just in general. What are the big things that you need to do? The big 5 things that you would have to do. So for example, if online marketing is one of my big projects in reinvigorating— One of the things I might have to do is learn to code a web page, right, or learn to design a web page. Now that's a project. It doesn't mean that today I'm going to learn how to do it. It just means in general that's one of the things I will have to do. So these are— what are the 5 big things you would have to do to actually make that project come into fruition? What would you have to learn? What would you have to go out and master? What would you have to— who would you have to contact? What are the things you would have to do for your big project? Projects. Next is people category. In this people category, I want you to think of two things in the people category. The people category is really important for high performers because high performers really get ahead not just because of who they know, but how they're engaging who they know, right? What they're asking for, what they're doing. So the people category that I want you to think of each morning on this one-page productivity is two categories. One, I want you to sit down and think of who do you need to reach out to today? Who do you need to reach out to? So if I want to learn coding, as an example, in general, I might want to schedule some time with a coder or a web designer. So I'm like, I'm gonna have to reach out to a coder or a web designer today. And this is important because most people, when they open up their inbox, they just start replying to all these things. When I open my inbox, the first thing I do is I send out these emails, people I need to reach out to. It's the first thing that I do when I open my inbox, as an example. Very first thing is send out all the emails of people I need to reach out to. The second category here is the people that you are waiting on, right? Given any person's real schedule, you're waiting on somebody to give you some information or a decision to move forward in your day. Isn't it true? You're waiting on something from somebody so that you can move forward. And most people, they just sit there and they wait for the email to pop up. They, they hope that it's going to come. They don't do anything about it. The second thing I do when I open my inbox, after I reach out to the people, I reach out to the people who I'm waiting on and I say something specific to them. So let me give you an example of how this actually might operationalize in the the day. When I open my inbox, I'll look in my emails for these people first and foremost. It's the first thing I'll do after I send out the ones I need to reach out to strategically. I'll say, who am I waiting on? I'll look at and I'll open up their inbox or open up their email to see if I got what I needed. If I didn't, I send an email right back to them to make sure I get what I need as fast as possible. So yes, there's an element of you hounding people to become productive. Most people are just sitting around waiting for other people to help their dreams come true. For me, I'm chasing people down, right? For high performers, there's a level of impatience there. If you wanna become a high performer, you gotta have this level of impatience that says, "I need to accomplish this, I need to do this. Let's go, let's go, let's go!" You need to be on a faster path in life. Not stressed out more, but more focused on achieving what you need to do to become happy, to become successful, not just because someday that's gonna happen for you, but in the moment, in the moment, being happy and successful so that you can be happy and successful. Hope that makes sense. Ultimately, that's the people category. Then the next category is the priority category, okay? Your priority category is what are the 10 things that you've gotta accomplish today. These are the 10 must-do items. This is sort of like your to-do list, but it's ranked in order of most importance. It's very simple, right? Because to-do lists are great, I'm all for them, all, I'm all for day planners because it helps you achieve some of these things. But at the end of the day, you got to think about, okay, what are my real priorities today? And here's what I'll often do depending on how big these are and how important they are. When I get to my— when I've written all these out, here's how my day works. Here's the order of things that I'll achieve throughout the day. First, I'll do whatever it takes to achieve these priorities, whether it is sending an email or whether it is, you know, running an errand or whether it's calling somebody. These priorities in my day happen first, often before I even open my inbox, or if I have to open my inbox, I'll wait, but priorities first. Accomplish these first. No matter what, these get done first, before I respond to anybody else's emergency or go through all my inbox, these first. Then I move up. Second, I'll go, okay, who am I waiting on and who do I need to reach out to? The people category. I'll do that. Now often this will take most of the entire day. And then I'll say, if there's any given time left in the day, I'll focus back on the bigger projects, thinking about what it's going to take to accomplish them.

For me, being organized and productive is all about having a schedule that best fits my needs and what I'm going through. So I live and die by my Google Calendar, and every day of the week I have assigned to different things that I'm working on. So Monday is my content day. It's where I'm spending good chunks of time reviewing the videos that need to go up on the YouTube channel, giving my feedback, improvements where we need to make changes. And it's also my book day, so if we need to make changes to the website, write more copy from the book, anything about the book, I take care of that on Monday. Tuesday is all about my mentorship day, and so I'll watch videos in the morning to help me be a better mentor. So I'll be mentoring the people on my team, I'll be mentoring Alex from Toronto Dance Salsa, who I'm trying to grow to be an even bigger leader than he is now. And I also take time, I leave at 2:45 to go pick up Hayden, and I spend the rest of the day and evening mentoring him as well, and with the intent of trying to be a good role model and mentor to him and not just play together. And so I turn Tuesday for mentorship day. Wednesday is my video production day, recording day. I'm in, you know, now my home studio or the Toronto Dance Salsa recording videos for you guys for the YouTube channel. Thursday's my public-facing day, doing interviews, media, radio, meetings, phone calls, hangouts, as always on a Thursday. And Friday is my CEO day that I split between my Business and Toronto Dance Salsa. And anytime that I find that my schedule is out of whack, that I'm not able to get something done that I really need to get done, or, you know, if I have to work late into the night because there's this new project that popped up that doesn't fit into my current schedule, if that happens for too many days or too consistently, then I need to change up my schedule. So for example, when I took over Toronto Dance Salsa, I needed to make time for it. It wouldn't fit into my already packed schedule, so I had to adjust and to take away other things that weren't as high priority and focus more on Toronto Dance Salsa. So Tuesday I'm spending time with Alex, Friday I'm spending time doing CEO work for Toronto Dance Salsa. And so I think in your life, if you figure out what are the key areas that you need to focus on in both business and life, like what are the main things that have to get done consistently on a weekly basis, and then assign time in your calendar to deal with those things, I find that helps me stay organized, it helps me stay energized, Helps me know that the things that I need to get done are going to get done. And I've lived by my Google Calendar for years and probably will continue to do so because, at least for me, I find it highly effective. So I'd love to know what you guys think of this video. Which of the clips meant the most to you? How are you gonna apply it to your schedule and your life? I'd love to know how you stay organized and how you stay prepared and how you stay motivated. Leave it in the comments below and I will join in the discussion. I also want to give a quick shout out to Louis Trahan from Last Minute Training. Louis bought 2 copies of my book. Thank you so much, Louis. It really means a lot to me. For those of you watching, if you want a chance at a shout out in a future video, make sure to pick up a copy of the book and then email in your receipt so we can keep track. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.