Super Mario & Productivity

Hi, and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan, and in each episode, I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now, here's today's lesson. Think of your productivity skills and strategies as video game power-ups that you get to use in everyday life. Growing up as a kid in the '90s, my favorite video game was Super Mario 3. The updated graphics, at least for 1990, new worlds, challenges, and especially the power-ups. As Mario embarked on his daily adventure, there were baddies to fight, coins to collect, challenges to face, and bosses to battle. There was a purpose to each and every level, and even if it took more times than you thought, you had a clear path to follow. Did I mention these power-ups? I love the idea of power-ups in everyday life. The fact that you can gain a new piece of knowledge or skill or strategy, and you can use that to literally power up your life, power up your brain, the work that you can do because you have this new thing that you're capable of. Now, life isn't quite as straightforward as a video game, but there are similarities we can draw. Every day you have a project or a goal to work on. You could think of this as the level. Coins to collect. This is your pay. Internal challenges. Thinking to yourself, can I really do this thing? Can I scale this? Metaphorical mountain, and sometimes even, yes, bosses to battle. As humans, we love clarity, but life often doesn't give us that. You have to fight for clarity. You have to remind yourself and others to hold you accountable on the journey. Clarity is one of the most powerful tools in our productivity kit. I like to think of this because obviously Mario was a plumber by trade. And so like Mario, you need to call on your power-up kit to win the day. Mario had his fireball flower, frog suit for water, and tanooki suit for flying, to name just a few. You get to select from goal setting, time management, personal knowledge management, and more. The value in our productivity power-ups is not only using them, but in the right combination for the right outcome. This is what I call a kit builder mindset. A kit builder mindset looks at the goal ahead and assembles a special productivity kit for success. What kind of action do I need to take? When will I work on the goal and what's the deadline? How will I organize my ideas and information? Which tools are most effective? These are the questions a kit builder answers with ease. As you gain experience and inner confidence, you'll start to understand how you can combine different power-ups together to create a master plan for how you're going to do the things that matter to you over time, or even just in the moment. Independent planning, time management, goal setting, and execution are highly valued power-ups, and they're only going to become more important in the coming years. One of my goals for this podcast and all the work that I'm doing around productivity is to help you assemble your own personal productivity kit. With the knowledge and confidence that you can put together the right combination of skills and strategies to face any challenge or achieve any goal that you have. One of the things that I also like to do is pre-assemble productivity kits for you. The productivity kit that you need for a productive week is using the GAP and WRAP methods. So with that, you're making a plan and a preview for the week ahead, and then you're using WRAP to review the week so that you can better preview the week going forward. I've said this before in other shows, but this is how you create a nice little virtuous cycle of getting things done and reviewing them so that you know you're on the right path going forward. How do I use the productivity skills and strategies that I already possess to make a mindful, intentional decision about what kind of work that I'm going to do, when I'm going to do it, and how I'm going to organize the information that I have for a successful outcome? Thanks for listening to The Daily Dot. I really appreciate it. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram. You can find me @MattRagland. I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode, so thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.