Have Your Most Productive Week Ever

Hi everyone, my name is Matt and welcome to a new episode of the Connect the Dots podcast. I'm so excited that you're here with me today. What I want to tell you about in this episode is the culmination of this concept of how you can assemble your own productivity kit. And the reason that I'm really excited about this concept, about this way of thinking, is because it's so easy to get overwhelmed. It's so easy to try and do all the productivity things every day. And I want to encourage you, I want to show you that A, you don't have to do all the productivity things every day. B, that you are fully capable of, you know, achieving the goals that you set for yourself. And C, that there are a specific set of productivity power-ups that you can develop in order to help you do all of those things that I just mentioned. To build confidence, to set goals, to achieve them, to set time aside for them, to protect that time because it matters to you, to be very intentional and proactive instead of reactive and like unintentional. Is that the way of putting it? You can reference back to a few recent episodes like Heroic Productivity and the Five Pillars of Productivity, but we're going to be covering in this episode is a way to like set these productivity roadmaps, to take a specific goal that you have or specific challenge that you're facing and apply these power-up principles to the thing that you want to do or to the problem that you are having. Because when you do that, when you start thinking in this kind of like roadmapping blueprint way of productivity, that's when you will quickly realize that especially at the beginning, you don't have to do Again, you don't have to do all the productivity things. But as you progress, depending on the problem, depending on the challenge, depending on the goal, you can add and remove different power-ups to your kit that help you face the challenge at hand without getting too distracted by what might happen eventually and what may have happened in the past. There are 3 questions that you'll need to ask yourself as you're starting to assemble a productivity kit for this goal challenge roadmap that you're setting out for yourself. And those 3 questions are: What is the goal or challenge that I have, or the challenge that I face right now? The second question is: What is my biggest blocker to achieving this goal or facing this challenge? And then the third question, it's more kind of like a step as well, but asking yourself: based on my answers to like, what is the goal? And what is the top challenge or like, you know, problem that I'm facing? Which power-ups do I need to assemble and combine together that will give me the greatest chance of consistency, confidence, and eventual success? Quick thing before we really get into the meat of the episode is if you would like for me to help you with this personally, I'm running a course starting April 12th, 2021. It's cohort 2. Of the Productivity Power-Up Masterclass. It's a 4-week, 8-lesson, with some bonus lessons thrown in there, power-up course that shows you how to do all of the things that we've been talking about over the last few episodes. So if you've been listening to these and it resonates with you and you feel like it would be a good fit and you want to understand Heroic Productivity, the 5 pillars, how to slay your procrastination dragon, and how to assemble these productivity kits and roadmaps, for your future work, this is probably going to be a really great fit for you. So if you want to know more about this, the best place to learn more and be on the list for enrollment is on my email list. And if you're already listening to this and are on my email list, then you know what I'm talking about. But if you haven't joined my newsletter yet, just go to mattrogland.com/daily and you will get the right— yeah, you will get the right emails that let you know how to enroll in Cohort 2 of the Productivity Power-Up. For the rest of this episode, I'm going to be giving you 7 common productivity roadmaps full of power-ups and steps that you can use to make progress on a new habit, a new goal, a challenge that you're facing. These are all things that I've learned about and have put together over the past couple of years of coaching and consulting and leading courses about productivity and how to help people do the work that matters most to them without getting stuck. And even if you are stuck, getting unstuck and becoming more consistent and confident. So, the very first one that I want to tell you about, and I'm going to have a YouTube video about this as well, so you can go to my main YouTube channel, just search youtube.com/mattraglan or Matt Raglan on YouTube, so you can see some visual examples of this. But what you're going to be doing, this very first one, it's very common, is you're trying to set up a new habit or routine. Okay? So, that is the goal. Remember those 3 questions. What's the goal? What's the biggest blocker? And then how do I assemble, what do I need in the power-ups to assemble my kit. So the very first roadmap or kit that we're going to assemble is with the goal of a new habit or routine that I want to establish. So the first, like, set of power-ups that I would use for this is to say how much time am I going to spend on that and when is it going to happen. I would also think about, you know, where can I, like, set the, like, consistency over the week. So am I going to do this once a week, 2 or 3 times a week, every day. So if we connect this back to the, you know, the productivity pillars episode, then we're focusing right here on what or when is the time that I'm going to be able to do this. Okay, so that's the first step. The second one is also kind of connected to that time element, that pillar of time management, and it's blocking out time, making a promise to myself to say when am I going to do this? You're blocking out time, you're protecting it. This third one is to look at it and say, what are the actions that I need to take to, like, establish this new habit? And one of the things that I always recommend, if you're a longtime listener or viewer, you'll know that the most important thing to do early on is just to start small. Like, if you want to establish a writing habit, just focus initially on writing for, you know, maybe 10 minutes, maybe even less time than that. You'll remember the one-tooth test that we've talked about before from Professor BJ Fogg. He's a researcher and professor at Stanford, and he had his students, like, he had his people in his study, some people would floss all their teeth, some people would say like, just floss one tooth to start. And over the course of 30 days, people who were told to only floss one tooth one tooth, period. Of course, flossed more teeth and did a lot more flossing than people that just said, yep, let me know how many times, how many nights you floss over the next 30 days. So start really small. You get over the hump of just starting, and it creates momentum in, in the, in the, you know, in the current moment. The next thing that you're going to do, so this is just for like new habit, is as you're building that like that tiny habit loop as you're being consistent, then give yourself a reward. Like, think about the goal that you want to set and just think about like, can I do this 10 times? We— you remember the episode we did on the 10-rep rule and like building mastery? That's a really important concept here. What I want you to do, what I would encourage you to do, like on this new habit roadmap, is think about, can I get to 10 times? Make that commitment to yourself. I'm going to try this 10 times. If you're doing something twice a week, that's basically about a month or 5 weeks of taking action on this new habit. So that's the mindset piece, building that confidence and consistency. And we're going to make a little bit of a transition here because let's say you were like, your new habit is a creative one, like writing or filming YouTube videos or whatever it might be. My friend Dickie Bush has this great like Ship 30 for 30 atomic essay habit. That he has like hundreds of people that sign up for now. And it's, you know, in essence, a lot of what we're talking about right here, because I think it's 250 words is the goal of what you write every day for 30 days. And so you can establish a habit that then morphs into something else. And this is where you kind of get more of those, those self-fulfilling loops, things that really build on each other. So this next one, let's go to the second, the second productivity roadmap full of power-ups that you can use. And it's a creative output. So just like we were talking about YouTube videos, podcasting, writing emails, being a consistent content creator, let's say question 1, that is the goal that I have. Well, let's just say what I want to do right here from an action standpoint is to really focus in on that mindset, on that action of I'm going to do this 10 times and see how it works for me. So we're not making some lifelong commitment at this point, but I'm going to set about a 6-week window because it takes more time to do something creative. Oftentimes, not always, but we're going to set a 6-week window. And the goal, the action that we want to take are those 10 reps. And you can use, say, at the beginning of each week, our like GAP weekly preview method. Say, what is my goal, you know, output of this new creative project? What are the actions that I need to take, and what am I going to protect the time to do that? Okay, so these are a lot of action steps early on. It does help that, like, let's say you've already built the habit like we talked about in that first roadmap, but then we're going to use those time power-ups again. Okay, so we're going to think about like, when do I need to block the time to do this? So we're using calendar blocking. And if you're not sure how long each like creative session is going to take, it'd be helpful to time track that early on just to make sure. Like, oh, I thought this would only take me 30 minutes. Turns out it takes me an hour. Some of you have heard me talk about that when I first started making YouTube videos. I thought each, each video would only take me 3 or 4 hours to make, but it turned out took me 6 to 8 hours to make. So always, you know, early on, give yourself a little bit more of a little bit more time than you think you need. Just to— it just feels so much better to be like, oh, I have extra time versus like, ah, I only block 30 minutes for this and I'm nowhere near done. I'm terrible. I can't do this. So give yourself, give yourself a break on that. So once we've done that, we need to be thinking again, like for a creative output, you know, more like how, how long is it going to take? How, when do I need to block time for this? And how many reps can I get in? Like how many like essays or videos can I create? Each, each week or each month. So the other thing that you'll do at this point, especially for something creative, is start to bring in that pillar of ideas and information. So you need to have a— it really helps to have a system, to have a system for taking notes or gathering research, ways that you could use your Bullet Journal or Notion or something like Roam Research because it really, really does help the creative process. And it doesn't even specifically have to be creative, but this is the roadmap we're on right now to never start at a blank page. Like, I have so many, like, ideas and notes that are saved for me that even when I get a little stuck with what I want to be creating, I can start searching through my notes. I can gather them together and create a little bit of a content cluster, content collection, and then I'm ready to go. Like, everything that I wrote about for this episode is all in this Field Notes notebook. So when you have a way to consistently gather and generate ideas and organize your information, it's going to make everything else about the content creation that you're doing a lot easier. So I want to recap— recap— I want to recap that one. A little bit of my Tennessee accent coming out. But when it comes to this creative output roadmap, it's really helpful to think in the progression of I want to know what kind of action that I'm going to take. So here are my action, you know, here are my action power-ups. What is the time that I need to protect the task, the time that it takes? So I'm using that time, kind of that time pillar power-up. And then you think about how can I build my mindset? How can I stay consistent so I'm becoming more confident? And, you know, kind of tagging along or adjacent to that is what are the notes, the ideas that I'm generating that make the content creation that much easier? So you can see how I've taken something that was a goal that maybe felt a little vague early on. The biggest blocker, it could be, could be a lot of things. It could be time, it could be ideas, it could be confidence. But identifying that and thinking like, okay, well, if this, if confidence is my, is my biggest blocker here, then how do I make sure that I'm doing things consistently enough and publishing consistently enough that I will naturally build confidence because I've shown, even just to myself, that this is something that I'm capable of doing. Now let's talk about a third productivity roadmap, and that is something that maybe isn't a new thing that you're starting, but an ongoing project or area of responsibility. Could be something that you're doing that's, you know, already running. Like a YouTube channel or a podcast. It could be a project that you're responsible for at work, or just like maybe work in general as an area of responsibility that you have. So how do you set up a roadmap or kind of a kit of power-ups to make sure that you can be really effective and on top of those things? Well, what I would start, what I would start with first is to create basically an organization of your ideas, of your responsibilities, responsibilities of kind of the state of the project. And you're going to use obviously that idea information pillar for that. And the most effective power-up that I have found for something like this is Tiago Forte's PARA method. Now you can go back and listen to the entire PARA framework episode that I did, but doing that will allow you to create basically a page or a folder or a collection of everything that you have gathered or done in the past for that particular project or area of responsibility. This relieves so much anxiety for me because now I know where all of these things are and it's easy for me to go find them. The next piece of that, and it is still kind of related to this, you know, ideas pillar of productivity, and it's connected back to like how do you take notes, How do you keep researching? How do you gather those ideas and then make sure that they are included in that like project or area folder collection page that you have? So those two things work really well together, but organizing your information and ideas around an ongoing project so that you can stay on top of things, incredibly important. The other thing, the, so the next, the next power-up that we're going to use is we're going to like make sure that we're spending the right amount of time each week and blocking enough time to make sure that we are focusing on the project for, you know, the proper amount of time. That we need to stay on top of these things because, you know, if you don't spend the time working on some of your most important projects or areas of responsibility or at least focusing on them, then, you know, usually great things don't happen if you're not giving enough time to the things that matter the most in your life. And that isn't even just a part of like work. That can go into relationships and friendships and like self, self-care, all the different, all the different parts of your life. Are you spending enough time on them? Okay. And then the, the final power-up for like staying focused on the projects and the areas of responsibility are the most important in your life is to fight distractions. So, and just before I was about to record this episode, I was spending— I noticed I had pulled up Twitter maybe a few too many times before I was actually getting into recording. I was like, hey, this podcast matters a lot more than being on Twitter for the second, third, fourth time already this morning. So let's put that away. Let's turn on Do Not Disturb. Let's block that site for an hour and let's get in. Let's fight the distractions and actually record this podcast. The next productivity roadmap that I want to lay out for you is in related kind of a merging of Roadmap 3 of organizing a particular project or area and really focusing and thinking about, am I spending the proper amount of time on these high-value areas of my life? And this is kind of tough to do, like surprisingly so, because if you just ask someone out of the blue or objectively that, you know, would you like to spend the proper amount of time on the things that bring you the most value, happiness, and and revenue in your life, most people would be like, yeah, that is something that I would like to prioritize. What's challenging is like in the moment, it is really tough to actually do that. The best like simple explanation of the difference between the two is Michael Hyatt's uphill versus downhill work analogy. And what I want you to think about is, are you spending the right amount of time on the pro— not just the projects, but the tasks within the projects and areas of your life that are those uphill work, things that are going to bring you to the summit of your achievement, to the goal that you want to achieve, versus spending too much time in things that maybe aren't validated yet, or the downhill work tasks, even in high-value projects that are like, you know, like for me, like I'm going to post this tweet storm about like this thing that I'm planning to do. And there is a place for that, but often, and I know for me, I have plenty of ideas and things that I already know need to get done before I'm like going out and doing a bunch of tweet storms and feeling super productive for the day. So to do this, we're going to use the power-up of PARA again. We need to organize those like area, those key projects and areas of responsibility, And then we— the next thing you need to do, instead of like time blocking, I want you to go in and I want you to do a lot of time tracking. Maybe not a lot of time tracking, but at least a week, if not 2 weeks, of pretty, pretty intense time tracking. And I'm not talking about like minute by minute, but in these 30-minute blocks that you've heard me talk about before. And that way you'll know, you'll have a better idea of accuracy for how much time you actually spend on those tasks. Because often, like we already— like we've already talked about in creative projects, that they— we often kind of misjudge the amount of time that something takes. And you might think something only takes you an hour, but it ends up taking 2 or 3. So track those tasks for accuracy, and then you can use the VET score, which we talked about some, you know, value, ease, and time, to rank those projects or tasks for priority. So, you know, these are the high priority tasks. These are the uphill tasks. These are the things that I need to focus on. And then you're going to use the power-up of attention allocation. This, like, remember we had the Google 70/20/10 and the Jim Collins 50/30/20 episode. So then you can look at it and start to better allocate your attention and the time that you spend on high-value projects to make sure that The things that bring you the most happiness, the most value, and the most revenue are the things that you're actually spending the most time on. And then we're going to go back to another time power-up and say, okay, this is how I can re-block my week to match the new, like, priorities and attention allocation that I have mapped out over the past couple of weeks. I want to take a quick break from the roadmaps right here because just explaining them to you. I know even this can sound like a lot. Hopefully you've picked up a couple of things already to understand, okay, there are a lot of these different tools that I'm using that are repeatable that I will use for a lot of different like goals or challenges that I'm facing. And a lot of times they do stack on top of each other, one comes after another, and then it can merge into something else, or it can be part— become part of another roadmap. Or goal that you have. I just want to put in another plug here because if this feels like really interesting and exciting, but also overwhelming, especially kind of explaining it on a podcast, then definitely go to mattreidner.com/daily. Make sure you're on the email list because if that is the way that you feel about this episode so far, like interested, excited, but a little overwhelmed, this is a lot of what we cover in the Power-Up Masterclass. So Just want to put that in there. It's probably, it's really normal, I'm guessing, to feel the way you're feeling right now about the roadmaps that I'm putting together for you. But this is where I can really help you a lot with the, you know, kind of with the feeling of overwhelm and going into a week thinking, okay, I've got a hold of this and I have the tools that I need to be productive. Speaking of having a really productive week, the next roadmap that I want to give you is how to have your most productive week ever. And it all starts with a good plan or preview of the week ahead. And so we're going to think about like, what's our action-oriented plan for this week? So we'll use GAP. We've talked about GAP, and I'm actually changing it to WRAP, which we'll get to in a minute. But start with what is my goal for the week? What are the action tasks associated with that, with that goal or goals? And then what am I going to protect the time that I need to do the tasks that are a part of achieving my goal. Okay, see how that kind of works back and forth. So that's going to be step 1, make a good plan, make sure that you are tracking and kind of blocking your time properly. So that's more of that time management pillar to ensure that you're spending the appropriate amount of time on those goals and the things that really matter to you. The time tracking piece really helps as well, because like we've talked about a few times, if you're unsure of how long a particular task or like set of tasks takes, then it's important to track that so that you can better block your time for it going forward. The next step in your most productive week ever is to really understand the difference between the system tasks and goals that you have and more of the outcome. Goals that you have. We've talked about that some in the podcast as well. But most people are surprised at the amount of time they spend each day and each week on like recurring tasks, things that, things that they have to do in their job or in their business that they just kind of do every week. And though that's okay, it could also be like bigger things like I aspire to have a system goal or have a system goal now of a podcast every single week. But the time that it takes to do that is something that I don't always do a really great job of accounting for every week. And so when I stack up like all of these ongoing commitments, goals, kind of recurring systems that I've put in place for myself, I realize that I don't have as much time for more of these like one-off outcome-specific goals like launching a course that I think I do at the beginning of a week, a month, or even like a planning cycle. The next power-up in your most productive week ever roadmap is to continue to fight those distractions. And, you know, use a distraction journal and write them down in the moment. It really kind of helps. It's— if you can treat it like a fun thing instead of a, like, judging, like, getting on to yourself kind of thing, then it is kind of funny to be like, here I am, you know. You see that you write down— like, for me, if I write down Twitter multiple times in say like an hour, it really helps me catch myself and be like, oh, well, I don't really need to be doing this, so I'm gonna like, you know, set this off to the side. So fighting distractions can be really improved by like listing them and having that distraction journal. Another thing is you could just improve and change your environment to improve your productivity and focus. Like I could just set my phone out of the room. Especially if I have a specific block of time that I've protected to do the actions so that I can reach my goal. Maybe it doesn't have to be all day that you set your phone outside of the office, but it could really help for that hour to 2 hours today that you should really focus on what is your biggest goal for the week. The next power-up that you can use in your most productive week ever roadmap is at the end of the week make sure that you do a weekly wrap-up and use the acronym Wins, Results, Aspirations, and Pivots. And I did a whole, I did a whole episode on this, so I won't go too deeply into it, but the wins are, you know, just that—things that were great that happened during the week. The results and aspirations kind of play together, and really what you're thinking about is kind of in the opposite way that I list them, just wrap sounds better. Shout out to Harsh for giving me the suggestion to make that change. But what you're thinking about is, what were the goals and tasks that I aspired to do this week? And then what were the results of me actually doing them or not doing them? So they're very tightly connected together. There is a subtle difference between the two because, you know, certainly aspirations are things that you intend to do and results are things that you actually did or didn't do. And again, it just What that does is it helps you go into that fourth, you know, question, that prompt of the wrap review, is to say like, okay, how do I need to pivot going into next week? And you want to look at it as, you know, like a reporter, an observer, not a judge and jury. Because when you see that and you're kind of gentle with yourself on it, you're still being very aspirational. But then in the review section, this is where I'm saying like, okay, here were the results, I didn't do all of the goals that I meant to do. So do one of those goals not really matter as much as I thought since I didn't do them, or does that just need to become my top priority, my top goal going into next week's preview? See how all those work together. So that is my most productive week ever roadmap that you can use with all the different assorted power-ups and how they combine together. Let's get a couple more roadmaps in, and some of these are just like different ways of looking at existing systems and frameworks that I've given you in the past. So the sixth one is, what can I do about long-term goals that I have? Not like just this week, but say over the month or 6 weeks or an entire quarter. How can I break those down? How can I use my different power-ups to make sure that I'm making progress on these long-term goals that I have? Well, this is kind of a breakdown of the QMWD framework that I've given you in the past, but what I want you to do is especially if this is a goal that you are just kind of testing out for the first time or you want to build some confidence in, is very first we want to do kind of a time-action combination and say, let's define a 6-week session that I'm really going to focus on this for 6 weeks. And then I'm going to break that 6-week span into these weekly deliverables. I say, if I want to achieve this outcome, in 6 weeks, what do I need to deliver and do every single week leading up to that? Because what's interesting to think about from this, especially talking about the most productive week ever, best week ever, is the best way to have a great month is to have basically 4 great weeks. And the best way to have a great quarter is to have 10 or 12 great weeks. And the best way to have a great year is to have 45 to 50, up to 52 great weeks. And if you can kind of reorient your mindset to, in order to have a great year, then I need to have a great week this week and just keep stacking those weeks on top of each other, it can really change the way that you approach your productivity. Now, it is very useful to kind of understand these different chunks of the year, whether that's a quarter or even a 6-week cycle that you're going through, because then you can, you know, put those milestones in front of you to say like, okay, I'm stacking some good weeks. To get to this milestone. I know if I'm kind of around that milestone by 6, 8, 12 weeks, then I'm making really good progress to maybe a really big goal that I have. The other thing to do, the other like kind of action step that you could do at this point if we're starting in like a 6 to 12 week cycle is go ahead and list all of the tasks or different milestones that you can think of for this particular goal or project that you have. Have. You're creating a lot of clarity in this brainstorm. And something that I want you to guard against though is this feeling of, oh, I don't have everything that I need to start, or oh, I haven't thought of everything yet, or I'm sure there's some other tasks out there. If you want to give yourself maybe a week to brainstorm and research these other things, go ahead. But honestly, don't give it more than a week, maybe even just a few days, because what you'll find is that is a never-ending cycle of excuses that keep you from just starting. And we've talked about some other roadmaps and new habits and creative projects and ongoing projects. And the biggest thing that you can do, especially if it's something that you're just kind of really just kind of experimenting with, let's be honest, then giving yourself that kind of 6-week roadmap to break something down. And then you can just start stacking those weeks and those 6-week cycles on top of each other. The last 2 pieces of this particular productivity roadmap is to then, once you have all of the tasks that you can think of, go ahead and block time each week to work on this goal, to practice this goal. Gather any notes or research that you want. Let's take from that idea pillar as well. But at this point, you probably have everything you need to have a great week and have a great 6-week experiment cycle to decide, is this something that I'm going to continue with and start to build on with more weeks and more, like, you know, 6 to 12 week cycles in order to have a really great year and achieve a really big goal. So this final roadmap that I want to give you is a little bit different, and I wanted to include it because I do find it's one of the most challenging, like, barriers to our productivity and to doing really great big things, is this kind of limiting belief or mental block that you have around a goal that you want to achieve. So this is kind of like a sub— a sub-goal or a sub-challenge of something that is maybe a lot more visible. It's a more maybe subconscious thing, like, is what I'm doing— is what I'm doing like valuable? Does it matter? Is anyone going to care? I'm not good enough. I don't know enough things to be able to start this. These are all like mental blocks and limiting beliefs that that you have. So how do we work through that? How do we use some of the power-ups that we know we have in our kit that, you know, you've learned about as you've been following me over the past several weeks, months, or years? And the best, the best power-up that I know of to start with this is to, like, journal about it, like, as much as possible, to uncover the source of this limiting belief. Like, continue to ask yourself questions about, like, Where does this come from? Why does it bother me? Did anything happen in my past? Did I have any failure that's sticking with me? Because I can tell you, like, for me, one journaling session that I had for, you know, months was I didn't believe— I had a limiting belief and a mental block that I could earn enough money on a consistent enough basis in order to do the thing that I'm doing now full-time. And, you know, I got to be honest that this is still something that I journal about pretty regularly. Because I'm, you know, a few months in right now, and that still like comes back and, you know, knocks me around some days, some weeks. And I have to kind of journal my way through it and realize that I am doing the work, I am doing the things, you know, we're not broke, you know, we can, you know, we can keep doing this for another month or two or three or a year. So journaling about it is a really good way to uncover some of these limiting beliefs, the source of these limiting beliefs and mental blocks that we have. And then the next piece of it is to go back to that like habit loop and small starts. Like, what is a small start, a little step that I can take to make progress on this goal that I have? So now we've kind of inserted more of that like, you know, new habit, new— we've kind of joined in our new habit and like new project kind of, kind of roadmap in here. But what I want you to think about at this point is How can I consistently close the loop on something? And tiny habits, small starts, are really good ways to do that because then you can consistently close that loop. And every time you close the loop, like, you know, reward, celebrate, celebrate yourself, reward yourself a little bit because you want to realize, you need to realize that you are growing, that you are improving, that this thing that you had a limiting belief about in the past is something that you are slowly overcoming. You have to keep challenging yourself on it. It's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen with consistent effort and intentional recognition that you are improving and you are becoming a— you're becoming a different person in a really good way. The other piece of this is to pay attention to that time, time pillar that we've been talking about a lot. This is a good time to make sure that you are blocking minutes, hours, sections of your day, sections of your week, so that you can consistent so that you can keep closing that habit loop. And eventually you're going to, you know, just build confidence and build in like volume. So maybe it was something with a writing habit, and at first you're just like, okay, I'm going to write 100 words, and then it's like, okay, I'm feeling, you know, feeling pretty good about this. I'm actually, without realizing it, I'm writing like 200 to 200 or 300 words. Now I'm gonna like try and push myself a little bit and get to 500 words while, while still realizing that if I only get a few hundred words in one day or one session, that's okay too, because we want to focus on closing that loop. Okay, don't think as much for like these particular things about like the total output, say like 500 words, as you do working consistently in the time that you've blocked to do it. Okay, so like for example, give yourself 30 minutes or an hour to write no matter how many words you get in, versus saying I have to write 1,000 words no matter how long it it takes. Do you see the difference between those two? If you just write for time, then you can truthfully tell yourself that you closed the loop for that day, for that session. And again, you know, remember to recognize the milestones that you're at when you get to 10, when you get to 20, 30, 50, 100. Anytime you get to 100, like, rounds completed of a particular, like, habit or routine, something that challenges you, I can guarantee you the confidence you feel between like, you know, round number 1, round 10, 50, and then 100. If you hit 100, like when you publish 100 emails, when you publish 100 YouTube videos or 100 podcast episodes, you are going to be a completely different person. Like all those things that you were worried about right now, publishing, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 are going to be gone. Now you might have entirely different concerns as I do. At video 230 or whatever I'm at, or, you know, podcast episode 16, 17, 18, 20, whichever one this ends up being. So it is okay, and you should like recognize and appreciate the milestones you're at while transferring that confidence, understanding that, okay, I made it to 100, I can probably make it to 200, I can probably make it to 1,000 over time. So that is a really good like mindset roadmap for getting over some limiting beliefs that you may have initially, journaling your way through them, starting small, blocking that time, being consistent with it, and celebrating the milestones as you hit them. Okay, I know that was a lot. Even as I was talking through it, I'm thinking to myself like, this is kind of a lot. And I know I had that little, little mini break in the middle, but I just want to encourage you and affirm you that as you're like working through recognizing these productivity power-ups that you have, that you are developing, and how they are situated in these pillars of productivity that, you know, you can see and recognize, then just ask yourself those 3 questions that we said at the beginning as you start to like make your plan out, your roadmap. And what is the goal that I have? Question number 1. Number 2, what is my biggest blocker or challenge to achieving that goal? And And think about it in the context of the productivity pillars. So like, is it time? Is it ideas? Is it the action that I'm taking? Is it the mindset that I have? Is it the tools that I'm using? So that's kind of question number 2. And then question 3 is just like, okay, now knowing this block that I have and knowing this like goal that I have, what, what are the productivity power-ups that I need to assemble and combine together in order to be able to overcome those obstacles, meet those challenges, and achieve the goal that I've set for myself. Do you see how those work together? Now, I believe that you could listen to these last few episodes and take action and be more confident and, you know, make those plans and roadmaps for yourself. But if you want to be a part of a great community, if you want to learn from me directly in like a live Zoom meeting format, not like a webinar, and then not like, uh, here, watch these videos and like email me if you have any questions sort of thing, the Productivity Power-Up Masterclass is going to be a really great fit for you. Because if this episode, if the last few episodes have like excited you, interested you, but also overwhelmed you a little bit, you'd be a really good fit for it. So if you're already on my email list, you already know about this, but if you're not, just go to mattrogland.com/daily and you can be on the list to make sure that you have all of the best information and enrollment dates and times for the new round of the Productivity Power-Up. Starts on April 12th. It'll go Mondays and Thursdays for live calls. All the replays are posted afterwards, but it's a really great community. We had 30 people in it last time. I think we'll have probably 30, 40, maybe 50 in it again this round. And just the community aspect of it is great too. We have breakout rooms during the live calls, so we take like what seems like kind of a big Zoom call and we shrink it down into like these like groups of 4 or 5 so that everyone can like have a voice and kind of talk through some of their problems and challenges and get a lot of really great encouragement and advice. I'm always blown away by the quality and candor of people who join these classes, and I would love to have you join it as well. So again, just go to mattreigland.com/daily. You'll get the emails about when everything is happening and how it's happening. I'd love to have you be a part of it. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots Podcast. I forgot the name of my podcast there for a second, but we're gonna have a new episode for you next week. I'm excited to share some more ideas with you, and I'll talk to you then. Thanks so much, everybody. Bye.