Matthew Hussey explains why adding scheduled commitments actually boosts productivity. Instead of clearing your whole day, he argues that blocking time with obligations forces you to work faster and smarter during the gaps between them.
Are you liking the color of this T shirt? I look like a YouTuber for once, do you know what I mean? Like one of the sort of 21 year old video bloggers. Hello everyone, Matthew Hussey here. I wanted to give you a little tip for your productivity today that is so blindingly simple and obvious and yet it runs so counter to the wisdom that we've heard so much. Many times when people have an enormous amount to do in their day, you know that day where you're really overwhelmed and, and you have so much to do and you can't fathom how you're going to get all of it done. People's instinct there is to clear the whole schedule, let me clear the schedule so that I have nothing to do today apart from the one thing that I really need to do. But there's a problem with this. It's faulty wisdom. The moment you have the entire day laid out before you, all of a sudden you have an expanse of time that becomes daunting and overwhelming and you don't know what to do with it, you don't know how to structure it. So now you end up wasting half the day, especially because you tell yourself, well, I have the rest of the day, so I also have the second half of the day to with. But what if all of a sudden there was something in your day that meant you were going to be distracted from the thing you really had to do and that focused you on a much shorter amount of time to do the thing that you had to do? The time I was most recently reminded of this lesson was last week. I had an enormous amount to do and I had a friend coming into town in New York who I hadn't seen in a long time that I wanted to have breakfast with. There was only one day for us to do it and in fact he couldn't do lunch or dinner, he had to do breakfast. And so I said, you know what, I'll make it work. I'll see him at 9am But I woke up at 6am knowing that I was going to have that breakfast and I was going to have to make the most of the day before breakfast, just in case it took long. So I Woke up at 6am I did two and a half hours work before I then went to meet him at breakfast. That was much more than I'd normally get done during that period of the day because I knew there was a deadline and not a deadline, which was 11 o' clock tonight when I go to sleep. It was a deadline that was immediate it was coming in two and a half hours and I had a certain list of things I wanted to do in those next couple of hours. So if, if you want to get things done, the key is not clearing your schedule so that you have nothing in it. The key is actually adding little things to your schedule that set checkpoints that mean I know between now and the next thing that I have to go to, the next meeting, the next haircut, the next moment I'm meeting a friend for lunch or dinner. I know that I only have a couple of hours because it's much easier to answer the question of how I'm going to use the next couple of hours than it is to answer the question question of how am I going to utilize the rest of my day. Contrary to what we hear from people all of the time, the key to productivity is not clearing your schedule. The key can actually be to add things to your schedule that force you to get things done in a certain short time frame. Leave us a comment today. Jameson, we haven't been asking for these enough. We have to have a comment from you today. Something that shows us that you are there, that you are living, that you are breathing. Tell me something that you've been putting off that you want to use this little technique for today to give yourself one hour or two hours of really focus time on something and then as I said, book in something to focus that and I will see you in next week's video. Thank you, guys. Oh, and if you're one of those lovely people out there who enjoys when I talk about something other than dating advice, then you'll really love this video, which I guarantee will leave you feeling the most motivated you've felt all year. It also features me in a bathtub, which is weird. I'll see you there.
