Turning Habits into Success: A Guide to Productivity

Okay, let's dive into this idea of peak productivity. And this is a subject that's really dear to my heart. It's something that I have been very focused on for over a couple of decades. And let me explain why.

So if I go back just over 20 years ago, 2002, 2003, I was in the process of. In the process, starting the process of selling my first business. My first business, which I started way back in 1996, was my accountancy practice. I was a sole practitioner and I started passing that across to my client managers in 2003, sold it a few years later to them. And that was partly because I also then went into business with my good friend Steve Pipe. And we ran for just over decade AVN in the UK, which was an organization helping UK accounting firms. And it was around that time, 2001 to 2001, 2002, 2003, I was becoming really obsessed with business success. What would make people really successful? I was doing a lot of business advisory work in my accounting firm. And so I started studying business success. I started studying people like Sir Richard Branson and starting to try and figure out, well, what do these people have in common? What do they do both in their business and their personal lives to create success? And I started to notice there were lots of common themes, things that kept dropping over and over again that people were doing both in their business and in their personal life. And I found this fascinating. And I started practicing many of these ideas myself and working towards success. Now, of course, success means something different to different people. Your definition of success might be different to mine, but I've been on this path now for over two decades. And what I'm going to share with you today is something that I think is, well, I know is one of the keys to the success that I have in life now. I'm very lucky. Some of you do know the story. We moved. Sarah and I moved to Portugal four years ago. We live in a wonderful place in Portugal by the coast. It's a fishing town. It's bright blue sky right now, pretty much every day, including today. We take an hour out to go into one of the local cafes, sit in the sun, have a coffee, something to eat. I go out pretty much every day on the bike or go running. Today was a running day. And we also go into town to the restaurants to see friends. Most evenings when we finish this session, I'll be going into town to meet a couple of our friends. We're having dinner tonight and I feel very lucky because also I Run a business, the Value Pricing Academy. I know many of you are Value Pricing Academy members, which I absolutely love. This is not work to me. I love the accounting profession. I've been an accountant since 1988. I think it's a fascinating profession. And I love helping accountants and bookkeepers through the Value Pricing Academy through live streams like this. And one of the things that drives me is when I hear about the amazing successes that people are having, like Catherine Hawke, who's here, we jumped on a little interview video a few months back and she shared her story of the extraordinary results she was getting in her business by starting to master value pricing. And that's what drives me on. I love helping other accountants just like me. And so it's not really, it doesn't feel like work to me. I have a business I love. I have a lifestyle that feels like I'm on vacation pretty much every day because of where we live, because of the amount of time that we take out of the business. We don't work Fridays anymore. We work a four day week. So we have a lovely long weekend. And I make more money than I know what to do with. I can't spend it. And so that's pretty much sums up my life. It's something that I'm very proud of. It's something that didn't happen overnight. It's taken two decades, it's taken a long time. Success doesn't happen overnight. It's about doing the things that, the things that lead towards success, consistently, consistent things. You have to keep doing the right things consistently. And if you keep doing the right things consistently, then success will come. So what I want to share with you is one of the things that for me has been a very key part of my story. And not just my story, but when I was studying two decades ago, successful people, I noticed this was a very, very common theme about how do we achieve peak productivity. And so today's session is more about, rather is more about things we can do in our personal life to be more successful rather than things in our business. I mean, we could talk about those things as well. But I want to focus on the personal side of things. And I want to start off by talking about this idea that if you want to be successful, then we want to get, we need to get more stuff done. I've always been obsessed with productivity. How do we get better results? And so that's partly by getting more stuff done, just being really, really effective with our time getting stuff done. And one of the things that I think it's something that has always been important to me. And it's also when I hire people, when I think of all the best people I've worked with over the years, including my amazing team, right now, the thing that I value in team members probably higher than anything else, is simply the ability to get shit done, to get stuff done. I just love it when you give somebody a task and you expect it done in a couple of days and a day later they say, I've done it, what shall I do next? That's one of the things that I think is so powerful. People who just do stuff, just get on with it and do stuff. And one of the things that helps us get stuff done and be more productive every single day is about energy. We want to make sure that we bring energy to our work every single day. The more energy that we bring, the more energy we bring, the more that we will be at peak performance. The more we get stuff done, the more we're on our A game, we get better results, we're more effective. And so the question is, how do we bring that energy every single day? How do we bring that energy? Because if we don't, if we start the day feeling tired, drained, perhaps didn't sleep very well, perhaps we're hungover and we feel drained and tired, then we're not going to get much done. So we have to bring that energy. So how can we do that? How do we bring energy every single day? So let me show you three things that particularly work for me. The first one is you need to find your rhythm. And what I mean by that is that there are certain times in the day when we are at our peak level of productivity, at our peak level of performance. There are other times of the day where we're not so and so we have to figure that out. And it's different for different people. For me, I'm an early morning person and I'm usually at my desk working by 7:30, certainly by 8:00'. Clock. And that's because that's when I'm at my best. And so a typical day for me is by 8 o', clock, I've planned my day and I'm diving into a big project. And I will typically spend two to three hours doing something when I'm at my peak productivity doing something really important, usually a big project, which then means by the time I get to 11 o' clock in the morning, I've done probably more work than most people have done in a day. And so I treat myself by going out on My bike, I'm a cyclist. And then I go for lunch with Sarah, down to the cafe. And then after my afternoons, I've never been an afternoon or an evening person when it comes to working. It's a morning person. I always used to, when I was an employee, I was always known as the nine to fiver because five o' clock I would go home. I'm no good. After 5 o', clock, I want to start winding down. And what's great about the business that we have today and what's great about having so many people over in North America right now is that I have to run these sessions at 4 o' clock UK time to accommodate. I know for some of you it's probably 8 o' clock in the morning right now, and that's great because this for me is not working. I'm not working. I'm having fun, talking with friends. So that's how I run my days. My peak productivity is in the morning. And that means, for example, if anybody wants to have a meeting with me, which of course these days is Zoom meetings. I live in Portugal, I never meet with anybody in the morning. If somebody wants a meeting with me, it's always in the afternoon. I keep my mornings free because that's peak productivity. That's when I have the most energy. That's when I'll get my best work done. So that's the first thing, the first tip about bringing energy every day. First of all, find out your. Find your rhythm, when is best for you, and work crazy hard during those three hours of your peak performance and then you can play hard. Second thing, second tip with bringing energy every day is very simply let go of stuff. And what I mean by that is that we all have stuff going on in our business and in our lives that we don't want to do that drains our energy. That could be. For example, we often talk in the value pricing academy about working with the right clients. And I often ask people, think about your client base right now. Have you got any clients that you don't like that you don't look forward to meeting with and you have to exit them from your business? Why? Because if you have people that you don't enjoy working with, then that just drains your energy. If you've got a meeting with George on Monday and you don't like George because he always moans and complains, then that's going to ruin your weekend. It's going to ruin the days leading up to that because you're thinking, I've got George on Monday. I don't want to talk to George. He's annoying, he's going to complain. And that brings our energy down and will affect you for several hours and days leading up to that meeting. So get George out of your practice. But this goes with anything that drains your energy, things that you don't love to do, whether it's people like clients, team members, whether it's specific projects you're working on, jobs you have to do, you have to let go of those things and that drain your energy and just focus on doing the stuff that you love, the things that you love. They're the things that you're going to do the best at. That's where you're going to bring the biggest value to your business and stuff that you don't enjoy, either don't do it or find somebody else to do it. So that's number two. And then number three is to bring the energy every day. We have to look after our health. Okay, I know it's obvious, but this is so, so important when you look at super successful people. One of my heroes is Brendon Burchard. If you've ever seen him on stage, he has got so much energy. Another of my heroes in the accounting profession is Paul Dunn. I don't know if you've seen Paul Dunn. I was privileged to first meet him way back in 1999 on his four day accountants boot camp. I do a lot of stuff with Paul Dunn and he now, along with his partner, they run B1G1. I mentioned earlier some of you have met him before. I've had him on my live streams before. If you ever see Paul, he is a bundle of energy. He really is. And I mean he's not young now, he's not a spring chicken, but he is a bundle of energy and he's one of my heroes. I always, when I first met Paul, I said to myself, I said I want to be like him when I'm that age. I want to be full of energy and passion for stuff. So how can we do that? Well, it's also about making sure that we look after ourselves. And there's these two dimensions of health that are really important. There's number one is diet. What we eat is really, really important. And I know you know that, but do we actually do anything about that? And I'm going to share with you later on in this session some stuff that's come out in the last few years that is absolutely mind blowing about.

In the area of health and some of the new stuff coming out it's extraordinary. So I'm going to come back to the idea of diet. I just want to leave it there for now. That we have to be. If we want to bring peak energy and get more done in business, then what we eat makes a huge difference in our lives. The second aspect of health is exercise. We have to exercise. And so many of you know that. I'm a cyclist. I go on my road bike most days, typically four to five days a week. I cycle on average 160km every single week, on average throughout the year, which actually means because of vacations, I'm going to Canada soon. It means actually, in reality, most weeks it's over 200km on the bike. To make up for the odd weeks when I'm on vacation. I also go for a run at least once a week. I went today and did five and a half, six kilometer run because exercise is so important in bringing that energy every single day. And again, I'm going to talk about some new science around exercise that you're going to find fascinating. But let's talk about. We all know that we need to look after our bodies better. We know, we do know that we need to go to the gym, do exercise and do diet. But for whatever reason, it never seems to happen. And so one of the things I want to talk about is a amazing book that I came across a few years back, about four or five years ago. Fascinating book because actually when I read it, I thought that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years. But the guy who wrote the book said it in a far better way than I did. And he talked about creating daily rituals. You see, what I've learned over the years is that there's no such thing as overnight success when you look at all the most successful people. It didn't happen overnight. It was about doing the right things consistently. And if we keep doing the right things, success will come. It might take five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years, but success will come if we keep being consistent in doing the right things. I remember reading the book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. A really good book if you're looking to understand business and some of the things that successful businesses do. And I remember him talking about the flywheel effect, and he described it as the flywheel is that a flywheel is something that it's really hard to push it and nothing seems to happen as we push it. But if we keep pushing and pushing and pushing against this flywheel, eventually we get to a tipping point where suddenly it Goes like crazy. And he talked about the story of Sam Walton who founded Walmart. And it was fascinating that in the early part of last century, it was, if I remember right, it was five years before he opened his second Walmart store. So we think of a big company in the US it's everywhere as it's an overnight success. No, it wasn't for Sam. It took him five years to open a second one. I think it was year nine, he had seven Walmarts open. It certainly wasn't an overnight success. But if you read about his, what he did, he was consistently doing the right thing. And after about seven years of consistently doing the right things, as he got to shop number seven, it got to a stage where this flywheel effect suddenly took off and it exploded. So there's no such thing as overnight success. And a great book that I strongly recommend. I know some of you here have actually read the book, but some of you, if you've not, I strongly recommend you read Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a fantastic book and he says in it, habits are the compound interest of self improvement. So if you know, if you know you need to do more exercise or you need to eat better, but you're just struggling, this book's really going to help you. He talks about the four laws of behavior change. I just noticed, by the way, I caught my eye. Catherine Hawke says, yes, Paul is impressive. Paul Dunn, he is very impressive. And he is like that in real life as well. I have met him and he is just full of energy. Heinrich Grove. Hi there, Heinrich from South Africa. Atomic Habits is on his bedside table. Awesome. Hopefully because you're reading it, not because you're using it as a coffee mat or something. It's a great book. And in there he talks about the four laws of behavior change. And they are make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying. So let me share some examples of what he means by that and I'll share some of the things that I do in my life that really helps me to be consistent in doing the right things. So making it obvious is a fascinating part of the book where he talks about this idea of creating cues. And so a cue means that we create an association like for example, we do a particular thing at a particular time and or in a particular location. So that's one of the ideas of a cues where you attach something to either a particular time of the day that you do it or a particular location. Another way to create these cues, and he calls it the habit stacking formula is is where we create a new habit and relate it to an existing habit so we tie things together. So that's the idea of making it obvious. The second thing in these four laws of behavior change is make it attractive. And that's where you pair a habit that you want to start doing with an action that you want to do. So make it attractive. Then the third idea of the laws of behavior change is make it easy. Make it as easy as possible. So, for example, doing something in just a few minutes regularly is much easier than something big. Periodically, make it as simple as possible. Make it easy. And then also number four is find ways to make it satisfying. How can we make it so it's satisfying enjoyable? So that's what James Clear talks about as the four laws of behavior change. It's an amazing book. I strongly recommend you read it. If you haven't, it will definitely change your life. Practice some of the ideas and start doing stuff that's going to improve, whether it's your exercise, diet, improving your health. The more you improve your health, the more you'll bring energy every single day. The more energy you bring, the more effective you'll be. The more you'll get done, the more efficient you'll be, and your business will start to grow faster. Okay, next thing I want to talk about in terms of getting more stuff done is. Let me share with you quickly three ideas to stop your precious time being stolen. Okay? Yes, we have our time being stolen all the time. And sometimes people say to me.

I'm too busy. I don't have the time to do that. Actually, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It's about priorities. It's about doing what's important in life. You can achieve anything in life that you want. That's my belief. We just have to be focused on doing the right things consistently that are going to take us there. Unfortunately, we get sidetracked by people stealing our time. So let me talk about three of those. One. One of them is email. Email steals your time all the time. And I know there's some. I know from looking at Facebook groups of accountants and bookkeepers. I sometimes see people having conversations about how you deal with email and people saying, every day I typically wake up to a thousand emails and I'm thinking, how on earth do you get anything meaningful done in terms of building your business, in terms of strategy, in terms of development, if you're dealing with that many emails every single day? Emails are just stealing your time. So you need to have some strategies for dealing with that. One of the things, there are two things I'm going to share with you that I do which work really well. Number one is I know that the first three hours of the day is my peak productive time. And so I don't deal with emails at that time of the day. And if you haven't got the discipline, turn your email off, stop looking at it. I don't answer emails when I'm spending my three hours of the most productive time. The other thing that I do is I don't give customers, in my case our members. I don't give out my personal email address. And you could do the same with your clients. When you take on a brand new client, you could explain to them if they want to reach out, this is the email they use and you can explain why. So we always tell people in the value pricing academy and I know all my wonderful members here watching today, they respect this totally. They send the email to support at. I never have to deal with emails from customers because Sarah does it. She's wonderful. Sarah's brilliant. She loves emails. She spends a day answering emails. And I know lots of people say it's amazing how she always answers emails really, really fast. Don't email me because I may not answer. Okay, email Sarah. And so I don't have that issue with emails. I don't let people email me in the first place. So think about some strategies. Think about how you can avoid email stealing your day. Next idea for protecting your precious time is another thing that I've done religiously for the last couple of decades is creating blocks of time for the important stuff you see when you deal with people's emails. For example, when you deal with emails, you are reacting to somebody else's agenda to what they want. And yes, for example, with clients you do have to answer clients questions, but you don't have to do it in your peak time and it may be you can have somebody else deal with it. There are things that are much more important if you want to build successful business, then really important things that you should be doing is working on your strategy, working on your growth plans, working on putting systems, processes, standard operating procedures in place in your business so that you can delegate more work to other people, developing your team of people so that they can perform at a higher level and doing stuff that you can scale through people. These are all much more important things and use of your time than answering emails. These things have to be done if you want to build a great business. So figure out your peak productive time and block out time for doing that. I remember in my firm as a sole practitioner way back in 1998, I first met my friend Steve Pike. I went on his three day accountants masterclass. And over those three days, and I know actually Jim Rayna is here, Jim was in the same room as me for three days. That's when I first met Jim Raynor. And over those three days, Steve just blew my mind with some of the things that we could do in accounting firms. He talked about how we can change our clients lives through business advisory. I think we called it consulting work at the time, but essentially how we could add value through advisory work. He talked about creative ways to grow our business through marketing. And I'm thinking I want to do all of these things. He talked about why we have to put systems in place in our business so we can then pass on things like compliance work to our team members. And I remember over the three days my action plan was huge. I was writing down all these ideas of things I wanted to do. And by day three, feeling overwhelmed. So what I decided to myself by the end of those three days is I decided that Fridays were going to be my day for working on the business. And back then in 1998, we didn't have digital calendars. I had a Filofax, you might remember the old Filofaxes. I had that with me. And I got a big red pen and I put a line through every Friday for the next few months. And I said to myself, I will never meet a client on a Friday. I will never take a call on a Friday, because Friday is my day for working on my business. And over the next couple of years, my business went from being. It was a mess for the first few years because I made every mistake in the book. But in the years 99, 2000, 2001, I started to really turn my business around and I had systems in place for everything. I was doing no compliance work by the year 2000 in my accounting firm because I created all the systems. I'd spend every Friday writing systems because I realized that if I wanted to build successful business, I couldn't do everything myself. I had to have systems in place and other people to follow the systems. So that was the second. That's the second idea of protecting your time. The first one is don't let email steal the day. Number two, block out time for the big projects, the important stuff. And number three is we all talk about having a to do list which is probably this long. But actually I think more important is a not to do list I talked about earlier about letting go of stuff of the things we don't enjoy. But it also goes to all these things that you think you have to do is you have to ask yourself.

Are these things on my action plan going to take me closer to my goal of building a great practice of success, whatever your definition of success is? Or are they just doing those things because a client asked for it or because you feel you need to do it?

Can you do something different? Can you? Rather than having on your to do list, can you delegate it? Or perhaps it's not important.

There should always be things that you take off your to do list. Otherwise you'll be if it's full of reacting to other people's requests and things, you'll never get time to work on the most important things. So there's three ideas to protect your time don't let emails steal your day. Create blocks of time for the important stuff and create a not to do list. Please do share in the comments. What is the best thing you've learned today? What's the best thing? And if you've enjoyed it as well, give it a thumbs up. Subscribe I would appreciate that. Can't wait to see you again very soon. Goodbye for now.