Getting More Done - Ray Sidney-Smith

Good afternoon and welcome to another session of Productivity Summit. Today we are going to be talking getting more done with Raymond Sidney-Smith, Focus@Work. My name is Augusto Binot and I am from Productivity Voice. I am a bilingual coach, a writer, and a public speaker, and I will be leading this session. Raymond Sidney-Smith is a productivity technology management consultant focusing on small business. Evernote, the Evernote regional leader for North America, and as well as an Evernote Certified Consultant and one of the Google Small Business Advisors for productivity. On top of that, he is the host of Productivity Cast, Getting More Done with Evernote, Evernote, ProductPod, Productivity Book Group, among personal productivity activities and tutorials. Today, Ray Sidney-Smith is going to be presenting Getting More Done. One bit of housekeeping item, we will collecting the questions on the YouTube channel. Please leave them there and I will be interacting with the questions at the end so Ray can answer all of them. So without any further, further delay, here is Ray Sidney-Smith. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Augusto, and welcome everybody to Productivity Summit. And of course, thank you for being here today. I'm going to be talking about Getting More Done, the art and science of personal Productivity, and as any, uh, person who knows me knows, I am all about the agendas. So I'm just going to really quickly go over the agenda for our time together. As Augusto said, all questions will be held to the end, and I'll be happy to answer those questions either here or you can toss those questions into the Summit portal and I'll be happy to answer them there. However, I am a Twitter fan, so if you guys are interested in, uh, asking me questions or you need to contact me at any time outside of this session, go ahead and tweet at me, hashtag it the #PSMT19, P Summit 19 hashtag, and I'll be happy to answer questions. What I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna go over Getting More Done and the framework and where it really came from, and then I will give you just a couple of pointers on where to get started with Getting More Done, and then we'll go into Q&A at the 45-minute mark. So I have a lot of material to cover, so buckle in. Let's get started. What began as a hobby for me more than 20 years ago has now become my journey to getting more done. And what that really means is that more than 20 years ago, I started picking up self-help books. I just started diving into new material as I came to know myself as needing the ability to learn what it was like to truly be productive out in the real world. I left home at an early age, I graduated school early, you know, started work early, all of those things. And I really needed a way to understand how the world worked. And as a bookworm, as an avid reader, it was really for me a way to get to know the world. And so I started picking up all these books, and here we are now, 20-something-odd years later, 400 books in. And what I am distilling for you today is what I've learned in the course of that, in the course of that time. And they've pull together in 4 foundational elements. And I want to cover those 4 foundational elements, but there's a little bit of background that you need to understand as you approach it. First and foremost, what Getting More Done is not. Your system, a system, any system that is in the personal productivity space is not a static set of tools. You, you have a dynamic set of experiences, skills, strategies, and tools that change as circumstances do. You get a new job, you have a child, you lose a parent, you buy a new home, you move cross-country. All of those things are things that have to change and that by its nature changes your system as you grow and you go through life and the journey that is life. Getting More Done is a methodology, but Getting More Done is not for getting things done. Getting Things Done is the methodology for getting things done. It's an organization system. Uh, Getting More Done is really about getting better at getting things done. It's about getting to getting things done. And so I hope you really understand that function as we make our way through the discussion. And again, I'm happy to answer questions about that. What it really means though is that we understand two different archetypes for how we actually get things done, and how we then get to getting more done. So first and foremost, I use these two archetypes throughout the material, uh, and, and, and how I really position getting more done. One is the performer, and the other is the scientist. So here we see a dancer who is doing maybe an arabesque or a pirouette, a fondu or plié. I honestly don't know, but she's performing. She's on stage in front of you, and you know what it's like to step out in front of people and to perform. And that's one of the roles in life where we can actually get more done, when we learn how to do all the things that a performer does. A performer learns the material. They then learn the skills to be able to exact that material. They then practice the material, and then ultimately they perform that material. And we all go through those functions in life, but unfortunately, we don't actually do them consistently to get more done. So being a performer is really, really powerful, and, and as sort of embodying ourselves as a performer, putting on the mask, putting on the role of a performer when we have to perform at high levels throughout our lives. Then the other side to this is the role of the scientist, and the scientist is the person who does research and goes back and looks at things and helps to archetype the right pieces to make them fit until ultimately there is truth, there is veritas. Many times in life, what we do is we just presume that something's good enough is good enough, and satisfying is totally legit. But many times, for the optimal nature of getting more done, we need to be able to step back, run experiments, figure out what really works, and then be able to figure out what's best for us to be able to actually get more done. So these two archetypes are really important and powerful for being able to understand how to toggle between high performance in life. When do you need to perform? When do you need to practice? When do you need to learn new skills in order to be able to practice to get to performance, right? Knowing how to toggle between those modalities as a performer, knowing when you need to toggle between research, experimentation, finding truth, and then doubling back on that and iterating on the knowledge that you learn as a scientist. So keep those two roles in mind as we make our way through the journey of learning, getting more done today. Getting More Done itself has 4 tenets, as I talked about. The first is becoming productive from the center. We can call this the core, whatever you want to call it, but there, for me, it's the center, and I'll explain what that means momentarily. Then we talk about focus and the attentional faculties. So there's focus as being the thing that is the sort of goal orientation, and then attention is the mental faculty, the, the brain abilities that we all have. And I use those explicitly. Focus is goal orientation, you know, setting goals, planning, all those types of things. And then attention is the mental capacity. Then we get to building routines based on behaviors. I don't use the H word, which is habits. I like routines for a very good reason, and we'll talk about that. So we build routines based on habits. Then we get to increasing awareness of motivations, and this really comes down to one very important faculty that we all have as, as humans, and we will get to that very shortly. So those are the four tenets: becoming productive from the center, focus your attention, building routines based on behaviors, and increasing awareness of motivations. And so as I was reading all of this material out there in the world, I, I came across these nuggets that were embedded in these materials in the scientific literature. And ultimately, what I want to show you here today is where to get started based on that material. So let's talk about some of the inner parts of this so you can understand it a little bit better. Ultimately, you have to take action based on those 4 tenets. And really, I can't help you take action necessarily. Uh, there are really great materials and really great methodologies out there for taking action, but I can help you with the first 4 parts really well. So let's figure out those first 4 parts. To begin with. So becoming productive from the center for me really comes out in the work of the 2,000, 3,000-year-old ancient philosophy of the Ba Gua. Many of you may have seen this in discussions about feng shui, the art of arranging your physical space and your land on top of a map. The Ba Gua is a map, and you basically will have these places, these areas of your life that are located physically geophysically, and you then can optimize those areas, and those will then improve those particular, you know, non-physical areas of your life. So you might have a wealth center, you may have a family center, and you might have a relationship center, and so on and so forth, and those— and health, and so on and so forth. And those would go ahead and do that. And this, you know, again, like I said, 2,000-plus-year-old philosophy has been around with us, and it's just the idea of being able to break our lives up into a kind of a pie And, uh, and we've had others who have then come to us with new different types, new and different types of materials on this. So we had Dr. Stephen Covey, he gave us the four quadrants, and we talk about the idea of body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Then Tony Robbins— I read all of Tony Robbins' work most likely at this point— and he talked about this in the terms of life categories. And so he then I'm sorry, he calls them categories of improvement. I call them life categories. He calls them categories of improvement, and, and he in essence is looking at this from, let's look at each area of our life that we can break ourselves up into, uh, the constituent parts, and then see which ones need to be improved at any given time. And it's kind of the same point that I'm making here. Then we fast forward, fast forward to David Allen, and David Allen talks about this idea of having horizons. Different stages or levels of our world. And now he uses Horizon 1, 2, 3, ground level, kind of a building analogy. I still hearken back to the, to the flight analogy where you're flying at different altitudes. And there at the center is 20,000 feet. And you can see he has the areas of focus and accountability. And really what ends up happening is that in getting things done, you need to worry about the runway. What are the actions you're working on today, right now, to get things done? And to get more done, we actually need to step up a level to the center, and that's what I'm really talking about. What are the core things that we do all the time, that we do every day? Not the stuff that's arbitrary, because remember, most of the things that are single-action, single-project type things that you do every day are arbitrary. Writing that expense report, you know, emailing so-and-so, you actually don't need to do any of those things in life. And that's not to say that they're not meaningful. We apply meaning to the things that we do in life., but what you need to do is figuring out, okay, if I want to get more of that done, then I need to figure out what parts of the things that are arbitrary do I need to optimize, and what are the things that are non-arbitrary, that is what I'm going to talk about in a short bit, and optimize that space as well. We can't do that by optimizing on, on some other level. We have to optimize from the center. We have to optimize from the core things, the things that are going to be most optimal for us to optimize, right? We have to look at, we have to look at the core things that we can optimize as opposed to looking at the marginal things that we can optimize. So let's get into focus, and this will help kind of peel back the onion a little bit more on the research that I've been doing over these years. So focus really is about, like I said, trying to identify your core constituent parts of your life. Now I call them life categories. You can call them whatever you'd like, and I have this list in a template. You can ask me for it and I can send you a list of this in a written format, and I can share that to you somehow. And, and so you have, you have this list of parts of your life, and you need to come up with these parts of your life in order to really start to divide and conquer in those areas. You can't optimize, you can't be focused without being able to break up your life into constituent parts and optimize those parts individually. It's not that you're stopping all the rest of your life, right? You know, if you decide to, you know, get a, get another degree. You don't stop eating, you don't stop sleeping, you don't stop seeing your family if you plan to get a degree. You have to, though, prioritize some aspect of, of working on that area of your life in a way that is going to deprioritize some other areas of your life. So there's going to be diminished capacity in some of those areas, other areas of your life. But what I found is that with getting more done, it's actually it actually helps you to focus on one area of your life, do really well at optimizing it, and then when you step over to the next area of your life, you have all those skills that you've developed. You're doing less in that area and getting more out of it, and therefore it then continues to keep compounding benefits as we make our way forward around all the various categories of life. So what we have here on screen is two different things. One where we take this pie, right? You've developed your pie, you know what the pie of your life is, and you say, okay, well, I know the various parts of my life, and, um, and for some reason work takes up an inordinate amount of my life, but what I really want is all the parts to be equal. And I think that's absolutely rubbish, okay? Just straight up rubbish. Um, the reality is, is that your life can be unbalanced and still be balanced. So for example, Augusto could spend 30% of his, of his life taking care of his children and could spend 10 years of his life, 10% of his life at any given time on his love of productivity, uh, and then, and then another 40% in his career and professional life. And that will be completely different for me. And I bet you that over time, all of our Various parts of the pie will shrink or expand depending upon how much focus and time and attention we're giving them at any given time, and how well or poorly optimized you are in making those things happen. So ultimately, what I would like you to do is to be able to figure out what— how much energy you need to give to any part of your life, and then give and devote that amount of energy to getting more done in that space, optimizing that space, until you can then step back and say, oh, you know what, I'm good as golden here. Now I can move on to another area of my life and optimize that until it is in this great working order where I can just maintain the optimal levels that are, that are supposed to be there. And what most people do is they try to optimize everything all at once, or they say, well, you know what, I can't give up one thing for the other, so I'll just do nothing. And then they always stay mediocre. So how do we get to this point, right? Um, One is I just always make a general recommendation that everybody learn to focus, literally learn attentional faculties. Like meditation is one really strong way in order for you to be able to do this, or mindfulness exercises. But really, I don't really know any other way for us to be able to increase our powers of attention without learning to increase our powers of attention through either meditation or mindfulness exercises. Maybe there are new technologies that are out there that'll someday give us that ability to enhance our prefrontal cortex without us having to do the work, but I think of meditation like going to the gym. I go to the gym to make sure that my body operates properly, or I work out, I walk, I run. I do those things to make sure my body runs properly. Why would I not do the same thing for my mind? And meditation is that practice that we know is scientifically validated to help us become better at attention. Two is develop your life categories. I just explained a little bit about how the life categories work and why you want them. They're not supposed to be in balance, but it's a good idea just to know where you are with regard to them. Finally, we choose one life category at a time to improve. And once we choose that one life category to improve, we actually choose one ongoing project, one ongoing thing in our life category to actually optimize. And I call that focus mastery. So actually drill it down to, say I want to get better at nutrition. Well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to potentially take a course on how to I'm gonna learn how to cook dinner. I'm gonna learn how to, the functions of being able to cook good dinners. Maybe I'm gonna pick 4 or 5 entrees and go to culinary classes in the evenings and really learn how to use my knives, how to sauté a chicken, how to properly, you know, blanch leeks. I'm gonna really get into that part of my world. And that way, over the course of a couple of months, maybe a year, I'm gonna get really good at the functions that are going to allow me to come home to my family, make an amazing meal, and that is going to make me optimal from suboptimal. And that's the kind of focus mastery that I see people not doing every day. And when I see people who listen to me and do this, they see the compound benefits across their entire life. They say, you know what, I was taking cooking classes and I learned how to cook well, and that saved me so much time at home. I'm having a better relationship with my spouse because I'm no longer arguing about what we're going to make for dinner tonight. Because I'm so excited to go make dinner that we have this whole new dynamic in our relationship. I can open up a bottle of wine, I can cook dinner. It's a really great opportunity for us, and it becomes this, this productive and virtuous cycle for the relationship. So don't think about this, that because you're setting one thing aside that you're not going to get all these other tangential benefits from doing that. Next up, we have routine. Routine is a is a word that I use very carefully. I don't use the term ritual, which has more of a spiritual connotation. And so this is secular for a number of reasons. I think that there's more for us to think about when we think about routines, and it also fits the literature as it relates to how we do things. So what, what I talk about when I talk about the second function of build routines based on behavior, it's because of a little bit of habit development science that I think is really challenging for most people. You hear a lot about people talking about development of habits, and I can't fault productivity experts and scientists honestly for wanting to help us there, because we are— the constituent parts of our lives are habits. But habits are hard. Habits are hard to create, and habits are hard to change. We have behaviors though. And we use those behaviors throughout our life to be better, to do things. And the more good behaviors we have, the smoother our lives kind of run. And so what I, what I argue here is that when we, when we tie behaviors together, we create routines. And we know that because, you know, you go throughout a routine every day. You have actually probably 4 or 5 routines that you follow every day. You don't really notice that they are happening, but you, you do them every day. And these are built by habits. These are built by habitual behaviors. And routines are actually rather easy to manage because they're tied to one another and they make logical sequential sense in our daily lives. They've already fit themselves in and they help to break up your day. And so this is really what I want you to do. I want you to think about how habits work in your life and identify the behavior part. So in very simple language, we have habits that are structured by a trigger. Something triggers our environment, we behave in a particular way, we do something, and then we're rewarded by that thing. And we're rewarded in a number of different ways, and we can talk about that in a bit. But the idea here is that what I want you to do is to think about behaviors as being the thing you want to identify, and, and identifying the trigger based on that behavior is then the thing that's going to allow you to choose the behavior and then to do that before or after an existing habitual behavior in your routine. Give you an example. I want to drink more water in the morning. Well, my routine is that I get up in the morning, I get up out of bed, I have a night table next to my bed. And so if I want to drink more water, all I have to do is place a cup of water next to my bed. And now, because my routine is is set. There's, there's really almost no reason why I won't sit up from my bed in the morning and see the cup of water and then just drink it. It has reduced the barrier to entry for me to be able to institute that new behavior. I mean, it's almost stupidly too simple to have a glass of water on my table. All I need to do is put it out the night before, and now I have the cup of water sitting there, and I can just take the 8 ounces and throw it back., right? This gets much more complicated as you start to level it up and do other things, but that's the core component here is that identify the trigger. Okay, I sit up in bed and then you say, what's the thing that I want to be able to do? Make it ridiculously simple, right? So that's the, that's the mini habits or tiny habits paradigm that you've heard from Dr. BJ Fogg and others. And, you know, then proffered by Stephen Guise and by, by, um, James Clear and others. And then we want to make sure that we don't— we aren't rewarded until that thing happens. So for example, what I'll say then is, okay, implementation intention, right? Dr. Peter Gollwitzer's work. I'm going to say, if I get up from bed, I will not get out of bed until I drink that glass of water. So I'm going to sit up from bed, I'm going to drink the glass of water. My reward is I want to get out of bed, but I can't get out of bed. I will stay there until I drink that glass of water., and that's what keeps you from being able to say, okay, well, I'm just not going to do that thing. Now, you can override that at any time. I can't, I can't overcome that for you through this particular example, but we'll talk about how you can actually increase the levels of, of action in that regard in the motivation discussion that we're going to get to. Okay, so, so we have habit, we have the trigger, behavior, and reward, and in order to change behavior— so that's how you add a behavior. And now we're going to talk about changing behaviors. If you want to change a behavior, you just have to identify the trigger. You have to choose a different behavior that happens in, in place of the existing behavior, and then choose an appropriate reward. Now, what happens for most people is that what they do is that they try to reward themselves either inappropriately— that is, they take away a reward— or they try to punish themselves in order to be able to, to do that thing. And what I found is that positive behavioral interventions are always going to be better for people than not. I see that when people punish themselves through, you know, paying someone money for X and Y, or, you know, even though these devices that will go ahead and buzz you and shock you if you don't do these things, they work in the short term. I would imagine that they would stay and work as long as you keep the device that's shocking you on, but Ultimately, are you really going to be better off if you are, are causing yourself to not take risk and to remove risk completely from your life so that you do not want to think outside of the confines of a punishment-based system? I would argue no. You could argue the opposite side of that, and if it works for you, it works for you, right? Be the scientist here and experiment, and if it works for you, go for it. I just don't think that negative behavioral interventions are the right way. That's just how I work. And so choose the behavior that you want to change and then choose the appropriate reward. What I mean by appropriate reward is that you're going to take something that you want that's healthy and provide it to yourself for completing that particular behavior until it becomes habitual and you no longer need the reward necessarily. The reward becomes internal as opposed to external, and again, I'll talk to that, talk to that point in a minute. So you want to be able to change behaviors by identifying that trigger, choosing a different behavior. And again, this is all tied to that other thing that you're already doing, right? So if I want to take that example of— I want to take an example of I want to be able to empty my inbox at least once a day. Okay, so what I will do is I will say I will empty my inbox before I go to lunch. My reward is a healthy reward. I'm gonna go have lunch. Okay, it's already fixed in my day. The behavior is already fixed. I'm going to get up and go to lunch every day, and the reward is that I'm going to be sated. I'm going to eat my lunch and I'm going to feel nourished. So we already have a built-in mechanism there. So all I have to do is delay gratitude to get to lunch, and I can empty my email inbox. And it may be mundane, it may be tough the first few times to sit there and grumble to myself, great, I've got to answer more email from people. And then you finish it off, but you feel good once it's emptied., and then you go have lunch and you feel good about that. And notice that nothing, nothing grand took place. And that's really the other side of this is that we, we sometimes tend to make it too big. The whole concept of habit change becomes such a big discussion and becomes such a big deal that you actually become overwhelmed. And psychological safety is a really important aspect of all change that we do in life, change and performance. So if we can rehearse this, and it actually seems rather natural for us to do, then we're much more likely to do it. Okay, so I tend to think about the world and the idea of being able to change routines based on the things that are at our core. And our core is actually set up in these 7 different paradigms. And the 7 different paradigms are sleep/rest, nutrition, physical, mental, emotional, social, and rejuvenation. I call these the 7 fitnesses. And the 7 fitnesses are designed around the idea that if you can actually get more done in these 7 areas first, you are much more likely to get more done in all other areas of your life. In essence, this is like, uh, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Really, we vacillate through these particular needs throughout our days, throughout, and then throughout our lives. At each interval, we're kind of replicating and recursively moving through these all. But really, if you have poor mental health, you're not going to be able to get more done because you're going to be constantly struggling with the mental health issue. So if you can't focus, then you've got to deal with that mental health issue. If you are emotionally dealing with something, then that's also not really a good time to be getting more done. So focus on getting more done regarding that emotional issue, and you're likely going to be able to then optimize in that area and stabilize the rest of your world. If you're not getting good sleep, you're not going to be more productive. I mean, I think almost the number one rule of productivity is to focus on getting better sleep. I don't, I don't know why, why we give up a third of our lives to sleep, but what I do understand is that the science is bearing out that it's one of the most important things that we can do. So these are the 7 areas that we optimize first in getting more done, and for most people, they're going to stop at this point and say, Holy cow, Raymond, what are you talking about? How am I supposed to get my current projects done when you're asking me to upend and overhaul my entire life? And all I have to say to you is that there are a lot of methodologies out there that sell a big load of you-know-what. And as Demir mentioned in his presentation earlier today, it's, it's one of those things we put together all of this material and sell it to people as productivity experts when in reality it's not actually going to improve people's lives in the way in which is going to create sustainable, true growth. And what I'm telling you is, is that the long, hard road is the road that needs to be taken in order to become better. And getting more done is about getting better. Sure, again, like I said, you can go to Getting Things Done and you can get an action plan together and you can actually go get things done and get a lot of things done. But if you're actually trying to get more done and you're not investing in the, in the foundation, then it's just going to be more difficult for you heading down the road. So stage 1 for being able to get yourself up and running in dealing with behavioral change is to track your time and energy until you know reasonably how you are spending your time and energies. There's a really wonderful heat map that is available at productiveflourishing.com. Charlie Gilkey has created this heat map and you can actually track your energies throughout the day, and you could just print off a spreadsheet or just keep a tool at hand, whether that be a paper-based tool or an application, and track what you do and how you spend your time. This helps you to really understand your routines, really helps you understand how are you spending your day, what are the places in your day where you are actually doing the same thing every day, and how optimal or suboptimal are those things that you're doing. Could you really make your morning routine, your getting out the house routine, faster and better? I bet you you could. And by doing that, is that going to save you more time so you can actually spend that with your loved ones, spend that with your dog, and have a better relationship, better experience than hurriedly running out the house like a cyclone, you know, rushing to the car or rushing to the subway in order to get off to work? If you can do those things better, That's truly getting more done because you're getting the right things done in the right amount of time for the right reasons. And what most people are doing is just trying to get more done in less time, and that's a rat race that I don't want to live in, and I don't want you to live there either. Step 2 is to then figure out what fitness you plan to improve to get more done. So one of those 7 fitnesses is likely your biggest pain point. You struggle with sleep, You struggle with eating right, you struggle with being able to deal with your emotions, you struggle with being able to get to the gym. You don't have to go to the gym, you could take a walk every evening, whatever the physical fitness is. But in order to be able to be productive, you have to actually be able to physically move. And if you can't physically move, how are you going to, to do things outside of needing assistive technologies and so on and so forth if you happen to have a different ability? But the reality is, is that all of those fitnesses are important. One of those fitnesses is probably the, the area that hurts the most, uh, in your own ability to get more done. And if you can just focus on that, then you'll likely improve in all the other areas. I think I've seen dozens and dozens of people in exact this same framework, and ultimately what they do is they always get better in other areas when they just focus on one. And the moment they focus on one and another, they do worse. So focusing on one equates to getting more done. Focusing on one plus some equates to getting less done. That's, that's just how it works. Okay, let's move on over to accountability. Uh, if anybody knows me, they know that I love accountability, and that's for a very good reason. And I actually developed a project called the Team Accountability Project. You can find the materials at teamaccountabilityproject.org. I think you need the www. I think it's www.teamaccountabilityproject.org. And this is going back many, many years ago. And it was just a method for primarily Getting Things Done users or practitioners, GTD users, to be able to create an accountability program with another person so that they could be able to work through the process of learning GTD and, and keeping on top of goals and so on and so forth. And so I've been really fascinated with accountability for a very long time, especially the science of accountability. And so How do we actually use accountability in our own worlds? And this really comes down to motivation. So motivations are on, on one side and rewards are on the other. Motivation happens before we do something, actions in the center, and rewards are after we do something. So we have two different types of motivations. Both, uh, we have what we call intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, uh, and note that the terminology here I'm uh, de-scientificizing, uh, for these purposes because they actually use the same terminology, but I wanted them to be different. So in this case, I call them external and internal rewards as opposed to the other terms that they use, um, which is intrinsic and extrinsic. So we have intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and then we have external and internal rewards. Pretty simple, right? Stuff that makes us, uh, tick on the inside, right? Things that make us feel good, uh, and then Motivations on the outside, things that make us feel good from others. So what's your internal thing that motivates you versus what are those things from the outside that motivate you? And then the rewards on the outside and on the inside. So what are the things that are material goods that you get as rewards versus the things that you get on the inside, which are things like gratitude and appreciation and other kinds of feelings of loyalty and fulfillment? As you can see here, intrinsic motivation comes into this idea of mastery is a really great motivation. I believe focus mastery is the first thing you really want to champion in the Getting More Done methodology. And so we have to want to master something. We have to want to be able to master something. If we don't want that, then there's really no reason in getting more done, uh, you know, there's the— in, in implementing a system, I'm sorry, uh, implementing a methodology like Getting More Done, there's really no reason for it because you have a If you don't want to master something, then you just don't have it and you don't want it, and that's okay. But if you do want it and you do have that drive, then mastery is necessary. It's a necessary function within it. So let me go on to the extrinsic motivation. You could want fame and fortune, you could want praise, and you could want a gold star, and that's totally fine if you do. The ultimate understanding of yourself is to know which ones feed you more. Most people are fed more by intrinsic motivations and last longer in any particular focus mastery exercise when they have intrinsic motivations. But I've seen some people who are really extrinsically motivated and have done really well with them. Most of the time, some level of combination of the two can help. Same thing with external, internal, or rewards. So to get me to do something, you have to give me the motivation and then pair that up with a reward. The external rewards are those things that again are typically physical, tangible goods, things that give us things from the outside world, that, that bonus at work, you know, taking a vacation, and so on and so forth. Whereas the internal rewards tend to be those things that are of a feeling nature, right? A sense of belonging, psychological safety, competence, satisfaction. All of those things become the things that make us feel good on the inside as internal rewards. So How do we increase our motivation? And again, this comes from just a long-standing review of the literature that we have 4 different kinds of accountability. It's funny that Gretchen Rubin came up with the idea of 4 tendencies, and this is actually not the same thing, but she kind of comes up with the same types of things based on how we interact and deal with others regarding commitment. And so as hunter-gatherers, We really developed all of our abilities in how we keep ourselves accountable to one another. We are accountable to ourselves, that is self-accountability. We're accountable to one-to-one, that is we're accountable to each other in one-to-one environments. We're then just like a mother to a child, brother to brother, sister to sister, brother to sister, and so on and so forth, and friend to friend. If you're working with a tradesman, You know, it's you as a consumer and the tradesman as the business professional. We're typically good at being able to understand the accountability between one-to-one. Then there's group accountability. There's a reason why Weight Watchers— I think now they call themselves WW, can't remember— but they have that system. There's Alcoholics Anonymous and other types of 12-step programs that have groups that meet regularly, and there's a reason for how they structure their environment so that they have a sense of of group, a sense of belonging to that group, and how that accountability works. And then we step it up a level to public. Public accountability is when you post publicly on your Facebook page, "I'm going to go run a marathon in 6 months, and here I go," and then you document your public experience, your experience publicly about how you're getting to that finish line. What we understand about all of this, as I said before, intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation. But sometimes there's a combination. You really want to be able to minimize your focus on the extrinsic motivations, and that way you can know they're there, but you don't necessarily have to really pay much attention to them. And I just keep saying this over and over again to everyone that I meet, which is that stop your negative self-talk. I constantly hear people in the GTD meetups that I run in New York and DC, people have a frequency to self-flagellate, to have a negative a negative tone about themselves and say, "Oh gosh, I'm such an idiot," or, "Man, I really messed that up." And the reality is that there's a level of emotional self-regulation that we all need to do in order to understand that we can make mistakes, and we can make mistakes even in a social context and still save face because the other people want our best selves forward. The people want us to succeed. They don't want us to fail. Most people don't want you to fail, and I want you to succeed. And so stop speaking poorly to yourself and about yourself. And just that one little change can actually have a profound difference in your life. When I was younger, I always used to look down. I used to keep my head down, and I'm 6'1", 6'2" in height, and it was just how I saw the world. I looked down at everybody, not metaphorically speaking, just literally speaking, except that what happened was I started to actually feel bad about myself. I would always be looking down and walking around the world without making eye contact, with people. And one day someone said to me, why do you always look down? Why don't you look up? Chin up, you know, feel good about the world, put your chest out. And it changed my world, it changed my life, it gave me the ability to stand up straight and be more confident with the people that I was expressing and dealing with. And, uh, and, and so just these small interventions can be very, very powerful in the way in which you then are motivated to do things that are going to change your world. Okay, going to rewards now, very, very briefly as we, as we come down to time. Rewards should be tiered and appropriate. So if you want something, you want to be able to pair that external reward with accountability. And, uh, and so, uh, for example, I'm not gonna— maybe I'll give myself a little healthy treat, uh, for being able to do a small task, a small behavior that I want to change. And so if I build it into my routine and I properly reward myself, that I'm good. If I for some reason can't do that from a one-to-one perspective, that is, I personally can't make myself do something, then the next step up is to be able to pair that external reward with accountability. That could be one-to-one. I say to a friend, I need to go to the gym every day, can you come with me? And then, or a group, get a running group together so we can go running together every day so that it makes me get up and know that there's a larger accountability at stake than not. And that's just for difficult, you know, goals and actions. All right, so getting into action requires us to then think about the methodologies associated with getting things done. And so once you understand the, the components of the Getting More Done methodology, you do have to organize them in some way, shape, or form. And there are some really great formats for being able to do that. Dr. Covey's First Things First with the Their names are escaping me now. The Merrills, Mr. and Mrs. Merrill. So First Things First is a great methodology, Getting Things Done. We have the Bullet Journal from Ryder Carroll. We have Personal Kanban from Jim Benson and Tony Ann DeMaria Barry. And we have all kinds of ways in which we can organize things and create an ability to generate action from our management of those things. But remember that management of those things is not mindset, and it's not about getting more done. It's about just getting those things done. Those individual things are important to me, and I believe in them. But remember that finding a productivity model methodology is really about matching your work style. It's not about actually getting more done in the world. Okay, so it's a different kind of getting more done when it's just about getting things done. Getting more done is about that, like I said, that faculty of getting better at it. So you need to be able to do some things no matter what system you invest in. One, you need to be able to capture things. You need to be able to reference things, and you need to be able to put things on off until some other later point in time. All of those need their own systems, so you're going to need your own tools, skills, experience with those pieces in order to make that happen. You're also going to need to be able to organize projects and actions, no matter what you call them— tasks, to-dos, goals, you name it. Projects and actions on some fundamental level need to be put in place, and they need to have appropriate friction. Now, this is one of those principles that people constantly scratch their head with me about, but, uh, the reality is that if you are not having the appropriate amount of difficulty associated with something, then it's mundane, and then it becomes undoable because your brain turns off in terms of wanting to do it. So for example, if I needed to make a phone call with Sally about something and I don't really want to call Sally, then it's just not enough friction. There's not enough there there. But if I say, hey, you know what, Sally's a talker, I really want to, you know, just get this thing off my list, how about I try to make it a game. I try to get off the phone with Sally in 5 minutes or less, right? And just that little bit of friction, that little bit of gamification, if we want to call it that, game design in the methodology, can basically help us go ahead and say, okay, I'm going to call Sally and, you know, 4 minutes and 30 seconds, I'm going to start to wind her up and I'm going to get off that phone call. And now something that could have been punted to tomorrow and then a week from now and a week from now and a week from now gets done in 5 minutes and gets off your list. All by about— all about creating the right amount of friction. And then the next step is about overcoming your productivity mercury, as I like to call it. Mercury is a, uh, is a substance. And, um, and so I tend to think of mercury as a substance because it's poisonous to us. It can kill us in the right amount of dosage. It causes us— our brains to stop functioning. It then shuts down our internal organs at some point. And so Mercury is just the right term, and it's mercurial, it's dangerous, it's mysterious. And that's what all these things are to us in terms of the productivity space— procrastination, overwhelm, indecision, you name it. They're all mercurial to us. They're all kind of mysterious to us in some way, shape, or form. We don't know why they happen, but they happen, and we have different interventions to be able to deal with them. And so you really do need to come up with understanding your productivity Mercury and then dealing with those pieces. Okay, so in the last few minutes, I want to just be able to walk you through very quickly what it is that you can do to get started with getting more done. And so I just condensed multiple hours of content into just those— these 40-odd minutes. And, and I know that you can't understand it all in one sitting like this, but I hope you got a better understanding about how getting more done works. And these are the things that you can do to get started. Make an outline of your life categories and then choose a specific life category and And you'll be, you'll be, you know, 80% better than everybody else, Pareto principle style. Next, you're going to choose a few behaviors that fit your daily routines and that you want to improve in that particular category. So what is your daily routine in that space, or routines that you have in your space? And figure out what those few behaviors are that can improve that particular life category. And it could just be in one particular vein inside of that category. And then just determine how you'll be kept accountable to that particular behavior. So if you— or the behaviors that you're adding into your routine. And again, if you can keep yourself accountable to it, I'm going to drink water, I'm going to do it by myself, and I'm good to go, I don't need anything other than the internal reward to say I'm not going to get out of bed until I get it done, you're as good as golden. But if you need more and more accountability to be able to make those things happen, keep bringing people in and more people in, right? Keep stepping up that ladder of accountability until you are ready to be able to deal with it with the right amount of motivation and the right amount of reward. And finally, identify your productivity Mercury. What are the things that stick you, right? What are the things that make you just unwind and not get things done? Just by, by giving it a name and saying that's procrastination— not that I'm a procrastinator, don't label yourself, but just label the problem, label the challenge— and that tends to help you start to overcome those issues. There's lots of material out there to be able to overcome those points, but really you need to identify, you need to name the demons before you can actually deal with them. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Augusto for Q&A. I'm happy to answer any questions, and I'm happy to provide clarification on any of the points as well as we make our way through the rest of the session.

Well, thank you very much for, for that. So, well, there is obviously a lot of Great, thank you. Hello. But the first question came from Linda. Can you talk a bit more about rejuvenation, specifically how it differs from rest, such as— from the rest, such as rest and sleep?

Yeah, that's a really great question. Sleep and rest is where we rest the body, and so we give our body the ability to go into either default mode network, which is the brain's ability to start doing pattern recognition, cleaning up, cellular repair, all of those things. We do some cellular repair while we're awake, but our body in sleep actually— rejuvenation is a personal, internal, mental cleaning. It's what we do for the sake of it. And many of us call these passions, hobbies, what have you. So I say typically to people, you know, I'm a reader, that rejuvenates me. I mean, there's nothing, nothing more that I could love to do than to sit down with a book and fully invest in learning that material. Different than, say, someone who might be a gym bunny who loves to go to the gym, loves to socialize, loves to work on their physical fitness, and really embrace that whole— let's call it gym culture. Some people might love knitting, and so they have a knitting club, or they just knit themselves personally. There's nothing wrong about a rejuvenative activity that is singular and personal and solitary. Like for me, reading is a solitary function, but it's what restores you. It's work that you do for the sake of it, and yet it does something for you. It helps recharge you in some way, shape, or form. And what most people don't have is that kind of thing in their life. And so they work on all the other areas of being fit, including having good sleep hygiene, but their life is mundane because they hate their job or they're just late, they're just okay with their job. And I don't believe you have to have a job that's a, that's a passion. And for many people, their job isn't their passion. But if you have something that you're passionate about, even if it means nothing— like I said, most things that we do that are single project, single action type things are really arbitrary. So who cares? We provide meaning to the things that we do in our world. Find that thing that is rejuvenation and embrace it and do that thing.. And what you'll see is that if you get better at doing that thing, you're going to learn all kinds of skills. And even more so, I get my best ideas from reading, right? Because I'm already investing in other people's thoughts, so that's kind of a cheat. But say I go and decide that I'm going to become a long-distance runner. Actually, Francis Wade, who's one of our session leaders, you've probably met him along the way, he's a long-distance cyclist. Well, he learns all kinds of things that he shares with us on a frequent basis about about all kinds of interesting things, because he's learning the mechanisms for being able to keep his bike maintained and to be able to keep, you know, nourished and, and, you know, fit for these long-distance bike rides, right? I mean, really, he's biking back to the point he started. Talk about arbitrary and unnecessary. But it feeds him. I mean, it gives him something that I don't think anything else, because he's found his thing, that could, that could feed him any better. That's, that's true rejuvenation.

That's really powerful. That is awesome. So Julian says, can you repeat the site that you mentioned for the heat map for tracking time and energy?

Sure. So I can actually type it into it for you all here. It's productiveflourishing.com. Productiveflourishing.com. And so yeah, I'll, I'll paste that into the chat for you and you can find it there.

That would be an amazing idea. And Andrew is asking if there is an overview right now of the productivity methodologies, an article or something on those lines.

Yeah, so Todoist actually put one together some time ago and they did a really good job. And so you can just type in to-do list and productivity methodologies, and it will show up in Google, I think, is like the number one option. And they did a pretty good job of providing that there.

Perfect. Uh, Darkest Serenity as trigger example: I won't go to bed until I brush my teeth. The problem is I procrastinate on the habit and I just stay up all night because I can't go to bed because I can't do the habit. Do you have any ideas that you can share as a solution?

Sure. Step up the accountability. It could be something as simple as having a friend or spouse or colleague ask you to do that thing right then and there, literally stand with you until you get it done. They could call you and FaceTime you or Google Duo or whatever the voice and video chat options that are available to you. I know it sounds ridiculous. But it is not ridiculous if it truly helps you learn how to focus and master something. There's something really powerful about doing that thing that's hard and achieving that thing, no matter how much ridiculousness is necessary to get to that end. But what you, what you do realize is that once you got there, how brutally simple it is to do the things that you sometimes can't do because of emotional reasons. And remember, we're emotional creatures. We do everything emotionally, we rationalize them then logically. And so that's just the way our brains are designed, and, uh, and, and the neuroscience bears the truth out. So the scientific research shows it. So do the things necessary in terms of creating stronger accountability and stronger feedback in real time, and that will help produce that. There's no reason why you should be giving up sleep for not brushing your teeth, right? And you know that sounds ludicrous, but if you can step it back and say, okay, well What's, what's just as ludicrous, but will help me make that thing happen, right? And that's bringing somebody else involved, even to the extent that I would say, maybe you hire a coach to call you and stay on the phone. You're going to pay that person until you brush your teeth. And I bet you there's a pain point high enough that it will get to until you do that thing. And then you'll do it over and over and over again until it becomes a true behavior that then becomes a part of your routine. And yes, out— by outgrowth, it'll be a habit, but really we just care about the routine being intact and continuing to operate in our lives and not necessarily the behavior. So good luck. Augusto, if you're—

I think you're muted. Yes, I am. Sorry, I was saying, I can't— is saying I have a different opinion about getting more done is less time. I don't see it as a rat race, but as a way to identify the high-value items to work on, eliminating wasteful activities so you can make more space for the other areas in your life— family, rest, rejuvenation, etc. I see it as a necessary activity to help achieve what you are suggesting. Can you comment a little bit on this point of view?

I would just say that I disagree. Um, the, the point is, is that, um, the way in which we see getting things done, for me as an organizational, uh, faculty, it's— it fits into that final step of taking action. And, uh, for most of us, we try to bundle, uh, all of those pieces of, of dealing with our core parts of our life. And, and the core parts are the parts that make that are both meaningful but also help us to make meaning about the important parts that are arbitrary. And so we're, we're trying to take Getting Things Done, for example, the methodology, and fit everything into it, and that's not what David Allen intended. And then trying to, trying to figure out why we can't figure out Horizon 5, but we can't figure out our life purpose, uh, because the reality is, is that honestly, if you can figure out meaning and purpose in focus mastery, you can, you can have a very meaningful, rich, contented, joyful experience in life without ever knowing why you were put here on this planet. And so Getting Things Done is a, is a, is a wonderful part of my life. I'm a GTD-er, as you know, Ken, and, um, and I believe in the methodology, but it's not for dealing with the things that help me get more done. It's— it helps me get lots of things done, right? And how— and just because of the play on words, it helps me get more, more done. Sure, you know, that I get— I get— I'll get more done in less time. Sure. But that's not what getting more done is about. And so I'm not, I'm not really disagreeing in the, in the, um, larger sense. It's probably a semantical disagreement than it is a core philosophical disagreement. I think I believe what you are saying. I just choose to put put my getting more done methodology in a, in a place that gives me a framework, a methodology, a set of steps that I can take to move in a direction. And what I see people doing is that they try to clean up the cards that have spilled on the table when the table is the part that's actually falling apart. So yes, then you can clean up the cards, the cards are all nice and stacked neatly on the table, but then the table falls over. Over because the legs on the table were not on, on correctly. So I'm talking about creating foundations that are far more powerful for people to use over the long term.

Awesome. So the last question I have here is from James, said, is, did you have a long-term plan for all the categories you want to improve?

And how, or, or how, or did you just work one at a time and that's it? I think that some people need a bypass valve, and so you can use something called the major projects queue. If you actually go over to Dr. Buck, Frank Buck, if you go to frankbuck.org, I wrote an extensive blog post about this. And in that blog post on frankbuck.org, you will find, I think it's called Getting More Done with Evernote is the name of the blog post, I'm pretty sure. And so if you go to his blog, you can find it there. And in there I talk about something called the major projects queue. So go check that out and you can learn more about how to kind of defer the things that you want to do, but you, you should really be focused on one. I haven't seen many people who can, who can fracture their focus. It's just like fracturing your attention, you know, your, your, your mental capacity to focus on one thing. Every time you fragment that, you lose You know, you lose something, you lose attention to detail, you lose complete direction, you just don't have— and then the recovery is more difficult. So that happens with focus, goal orientation. So if you can goal orient by having fewer things to focus on, and focus really means focus is one thing, being, you know, keeping your faculties on one thing, then you are going to be greater— you're going to have a greater likelihood of success. So if you're starting a business, for example, you would choose that one first product that is going to provide you with the most profit for the least labor costs and, and real costs, right, your cost of goods sold, to start your business, right? You wouldn't start with 50 products if you know that you can start your business with one and really make, make large inroads with that one particular product. So it's about that kind of concept. Go, go after the thing that's the, that's the lowest hanging fruit with the highest reward first and do that one thing.. And what you'll find is that in the process of focus mastery, learning how to do that thing, you will truly get more done in all the other areas of your life. That's the thing is that, you know, people think, well, I'm going to get more done by doing a whole bunch of new things, but you do them all poorly and you do them all poorly. You didn't actually learn how to focus. You didn't learn how to master something. And so therefore you can't master anything else because you're just a jack of all trades for everything. But if you really learn how to be an ace of spades in that one area of your life, guess what? You can replicate that over and over and over again in all kinds of other areas of your life that you didn't realize otherwise. When people do that, they really fundamentally get it. They get the idea of getting more done, and then they start to make more inroads in other areas of their life, and they get things done, but then they also start to get more done. And that's what I really hope for everybody. So as I always say, we are what we do every day in pursuit of getting more done. And so I wish everybody good luck, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of Productivity Summit.

Thank you all for being here and sharing the time here in this session with me. And before we close, well, first of all, let me say thank you to Raymond Sidney-Smith for this. And I want to remember you guys, we have the following sessions coming up. At 3:00 PM, we are going to have Matt Plummer for Saravana talking about how much more productive could productivity submitters to come and is going to be fun and interesting. At 3:30, we have Lindsay Hom from Usable Tech, Integrate Evernote. And then also we have Andrea Anderson from Productivity Environment Institute, Discover the 5 Keys to Position Yourself as an Expert Productivity Consultant so You Can Grow. You can go from a struggling generalist to a 6-figure specialist. And then at 4:00 PM, we will have Get Off Your Plate, Automate Your Growth, Your Business, and Avoid the High Cost of Hiring. With Mary Sue Dahill of MSD Advisors, and Letting Go with Both Hands: Finally Deal with Those Emotionally Charged Materials with Terry Blanchard from Time Sorters. And after that, of course, we will have the Mega Productivity Networking Event. So thank you very much, all of you, and we look forward to seeing you guys later on.