The High Value Impact Of Productivity With Ray Sidney-Smith

What is your relationship with time? Are you wired and tired, stressed and overwhelmed, busy and going nowhere, or just want to scale your business? Welcome to Take Back Time with your host Penny Zenker. Penny focuses on books, strategies, tools, and tips to help you work smarter and approach your time more strategically. As a result, you can have more energy, focus, and get more done in less time. Be more efficient and effective. Get ready to take back time.

Hello and welcome to Take Back Time. My name is Penny Zenker and I'm your host. And on this show, we really seek out the best minds, the biggest geeks, and the technical experts that are going to help you to invest your time wisely so that you can take back time. So today is no exception. I'm here with Ray Sidney-Smith, who's got an upcoming productivity summit that you're going to want to get registered for, and he is a management, productivity, and technology consultant who's focusing on small businesses. He's an Evernote Regional Leader for North America, Evernote Certified Consultant. He's the Google Small Business Advisor for Productivity, Community Manager of Digital Community Personal Productivity Club, and he hosts a podcast, The Productivity Cast, and Getting More Done with Evernote. Are these many? Listen to this. Prod Prod and Productivity Book Group. So this guy is Mr. Productivity, all right? And he's going to share with us some of his geekiness, right, around the tools and tips and tricks and why productivity is so important to him. So hi, Ray. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Penny.

So, you know, you were talking before we started about being the geek and the guru. So just tell us a little bit about why is productivity important to you? Like, why that?

Yeah, so it actually started in college, and I probably started in adolescence, but I was always one of those people who was—

Born with it.

Yes, exactly. I was always gravitating toward organization and having a planner and that kind of thing. But my real interest in productivity came in college when I really embraced self-help books and realized that I didn't particularly lend toward the things that were have a better life, be happier kind of content. But it was really the stuff that was, how do you actually become more productive? What is personal productivity? What is time management? What's efficiency and effectiveness? And I became very interested in psychology at that point. And so I've really been very interested in the intersection, kind of the nexus of personal productivity, the psychology, the science of productivity, and then technology. I had the pleasure of working in technology in the legal field for many years, and the nexus of those three pieces really just excites me.

Very cool. Well, you said you've been curious and wanting to know what are the definitions or what it's all about. So how would you define productivity and why?

So productivity for me is about doing the right things in the right amount to get the right results. And for so many people, it is about getting things done. And I happen to be a huge GTD David Allen fan of the GTD methodology.

And he was on one of our shows. So if you guys are listening, go back and listen to that one too. But yeah, he's awesome.

Anytime David talks, I'm happy to sit there and listen. And the thing for me though is that most people are actually not interested in getting things done. They're either stuck and they're looking to get more done. And so over time, over these past 20 years or so of me really paying attention to this material and being steeped in it, I've come to an understanding about the reality that people are really looking for the ability to get more done, to really look at being able to say, okay, what am I doing now? Because you're doing something every day. And what are you doing with your time? And how do you actually fundamentally get yourself through that? And so it's come to me, I'm calling it this sort of framework. I wouldn't consider it really a personal productivity methodology like Getting Things Done, which is more of an organizational methodology. I think of Getting More Done as a framework to look at how to truly be more productive.

Yeah, interesting. You know, my philosophy around that is I believe that productivity is a byproduct of thinking and acting more strategically, right? About kind of like you said, the right things with the right amount of time to get, I don't know about the right results, but the best results. But I think that we're not searching balance. I don't even think we're searching productivity. I think we're searching meaning and impact in our life. And so that comes out in the goals that we want to achieve, whether it's meaning for us, whether that means having the house and the car and the lifestyle, you know, whether it's that or whether it's contributing to charities or whatever. I think that's why we want to be productive, is because we want to feel like we're adding value. What do you say to that?

Yeah, I always think that everything is a values statement. So I don't think of it as being values in the sense of morals. A lot of people think of values as being morals, but I think of things as being more— what I value in terms of my time is a factor of many different things. So for example, something has intrinsic or extrinsic value to me in every moment of the day. And so we need to determine what that value is and figure out what's going to provide us with the highest impact. I probably differ a little bit from most productivity experts in the sense that I don't actually think that something that has— someone would consider low value, that's something that's mundane and very granular. So picking up the phone and calling Sally about X is not necessarily a high-value task, so to speak, but that 3 minutes on the phone could have huge amounts of impact. We have to—

And it could be a lot more productive than an email, right? So we know that just because it's faster doesn't mean that it's better.

Exactly, exactly. And so when we talk about things like deep work and shallow work, what I really like to talk about is really high impact, like high value work, and that which is low value work in terms of, in terms of its outcomes. What's the value of the outcome of that particular work? And if I could do 3 minutes of work that's going to get me high value, I'm certainly going to prioritize that over, say, very long amounts of work and arduous work that's going to give me very low value. So I think it's about— again, that's where the right outcomes really come into play. Like, I want to put in the right amount of time in the right way to get the right outcomes. And many times what people do is they try to do hard work instead of smart work. And that's not always wrong. I'm a hard worker. I was raised by my mom and dad to be a hard worker, but It's about how much more can I do? How much more can I be getting done if I choose the right paths to get there? Hmm.

So, you know, a lot of people are like, yes, yes, yes, you know, I believe that, but they're like, well, how do I do that? That's one of the challenges that they have is being able to identify what are the right things to do. What would you say to people that are struggling with that?

Yeah. So the first step is focus, what I call focus mastery.

What do you mean?

Squirrel. Yeah. So much of our world, is fragmented and distracting, and what we need to really learn how to do is to choose a goal and to focus on that goal doggedly until it's completed. And— doggedly, yes. And we frequently forget that much of the things we do, much of the work we do in the world, while it has value to us, is fairly arbitrary. So for example, a meteor could come crashing and hurtling toward our planet and end human civilizations as we know it.

Happy show, what are you talking about?

No, but the good part about that is that it's very, very unlikely. But the point is, is that most of what we do on a daily basis is arbitrary, and we give it meaning. We choose to have meaning in the things that we do. And the moment you do that, you actually create control, right? The locus of control now moves closer to you. You now have greater command over your life and over your passions and over your values. And at that point, then you need to choose to focus on what you're going to do. And focus mastery is about choosing one thing and making that thing better, improving on the skills, the knowledge, and the experience you have about that thing. I give the example of writing reports. I have a job that requires me to write lots of very in-depth reports. It's a fun project. Not. And so I took that as a focus mastery exercise. And I spent a good 3 months working on a template that had many different permutations. And every day I was working to be able to make myself produce more of those reports faster and better every single day. And over time, what that meant was, oh man, if I meet with a client and I have to produce a report for that now, it is done in blazing speed and it's done with high quality. My clients love seeing my emails with those reports now because They're engaging. I try to make some jokes, have a good time with it. And that's focus mastery. It's the idea of saying, okay, there's something that I need to be able to do better with. How do I get more done? I get more done by filtering out some things for a short period of time and focusing on really being great at this one thing. And then you can use that focus mastery in all kinds of other areas of your life once you learn how to use focus mastery in that way.

Yeah. And you're investing in— once you've done that focus mastery in that one thing, then you're freeing up time and space for something else to be the point of focus, correct?

You got it. You got it.

That's what you're saying. You know, I want to play devil's advocate a little bit here because when people hear one thing, right, you're going to focus on the one thing. That's all well and good and probably not realistic in reality, right? Because we all have lots of different things. And so how does one do that? How do you choose what that one thing is? Because let's say you've got somebody, a single mom who is running her business. She's got 3 kids that she's got to shuttle around to different places. She's got dating on the side and all these things that are taking care of her elderly parents. Like there's a lot going on. So I think they really have a hard time to see any reality in that. And then I think they push it away and say, yeah, there's no value in that.

Right. And I'm not asking you to stop your world in deference to this one thing. I'm asking that when you're going to do that one thing, you're going to— going back to that word doggedly— you're going to give maximal effort to improving that thing. So you have to feed the kids every day, right? So why not do it in the best possible way? Pick the best food, pick the best time of day, figure out mise en place for your kitchen so that all the pieces are in the right place, so that dinnertime, breakfast time, lunchtime just moves with the ease of Wonder Woman, right?

You may pre-prepare your meals so that— I see what you're saying. And I'm just playing devil's advocate because I know there's people who want to be more productive, but they're also in resistance, right?

Right.

They've heard so many different strategies. So what I think I also hear you saying is, is that you're filtering out those things for other things, but not everything. You're talking about also taking a specific amount of time, not all your time, right?

You got it.

And I think that's where people get a little hung up is if you're going to focus, maybe that focus is even for an hour or two a day. But on the same thing maybe for 2 weeks or 3 weeks, right? Is that what I understand you saying? So that you can really make progress and be amazing in that space.

You've got it. And this really comes down to your daily routines. I tend to have people look at their routines throughout the day. I happen to not be the big habit fanatic that a lot of people are, and it's not because habits aren't great. Habits are actually really fundamental, but to learn habits actually requires a little bit higher level, which is looking at routines. When we look at routines, we then see the way in which habits connect to one another. If anyone's hearing me and saying that I don't like habits, because I get that quite frequently in my talks, it's not about disliking habits. It's actually about the fact that we have habitual behaviors that are connected to one another that establish routines.

Distractions are the enemy of productivity. Go to distractionquiz.com and find out your distraction profile. Are you a time zombie or a hamster? Take this free distraction quiz today to rate your ability to focus on what keeps you from being a wizard. Go to distractionquiz.com.

Habits are difficult to change. Habits are difficult to adopt, difficult to drop, and they're difficult to then maintain. So the easiest way to do that is to look at the routines that are already established. And by linking habits to the beginning or the ending of an existing routine, we have a tendency to actually have higher success rates in developing those habits. So what I'm really saying is choose a routine that you already have in existence, like the single mom with kids. That's a circumstance where what she can do is choose Focus Mastery over that particular routine and then once she does that, the habits kind of build themselves. If she really gives that level of focus to it, she can really develop herself in a way that then creates the seamlessness of that environment. And then what you've done is you've shrunken maybe the amount of time necessary to deal with the chores of it all. Maybe you can spend more mindfulness time with your kids in that experience, so the kids are having more quality mom time as opposed to run-ragged mom, right? And then you have more time to actually do other things as well. So you can actually get more done included with actually doing this one thing really, really much better.

Right. So let's come back to your habits and rituals because I have— or routines. Sorry, I have some thoughts and things around that. Anybody who is looking to break a habit can totally agree with you that it is not easy to break a habit and building a new habit, I don't know, somehow can be broken like that as well, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

What are some examples of how people can be more productive by using these routines outside of the let's say the working mom, what about the solopreneur that's out there and is looking to see how can I apply that in my life?

Yeah, so this really comes down to motivation and the way in which I see motivation is probably very akin to what I've read about and heard from you in terms of motivation, which is accountability. We are social creatures. We are built on our ability to collaborate and work with one another. We live in interdependent lives and the more we're able to actually look to others to be able to help us, in our routines and also in our focus mastery, the greater likelihood we are to progressing in those things. So when we have a solopreneur who maybe is not so good with the books, they go out there and they bring in the business, but they're not invoicing, they're not tracking their records, they have no idea what their profit and loss statement is, better yet, what it looks like for the past quarter. That's an opportunity to be able to say, okay, where am I in terms of how accountable I keep myself to things? Gretchen Rubin, she uses kind of this 4-level paradigm of the 4 tendencies where you have the upholder and the rebel and other roles. I tend to look at this from 4 levels of accountability, starting at self-accountability, which is I hold myself accountable for things. That's Gretchen Rubin's, I suppose, upholder paradigm. But then we step outside of ourselves, and then we have one-to-one accountability. That is when Penny says, "Hey Ray, will you show up for a podcast recording?" And I say, yes, am I really going to do it? And I will. Then we step one step further beyond that, which is maybe I'm not so good when my friend asks me to go running in the morning. I can't quite get myself to be motivated for that. We step up the risk one more level, and that's to group accountability. So maybe I join a running group, and now it's just not one friend, but maybe a loose group of people that I maybe know, maybe I don't know them so well. So the investment is then higher because the social requirement, the social obligation is higher. More people have their eyes on me. And then we go to our fourth level of accountability, which is public accountability. And this is where people say, "I'm going to run a marathon," and they post a Facebook page and they start a campaign to raise funds for breast cancer or for HIV/AIDS funding and those kinds of things. And now they're declaring to the world they're going to do this thing. I tend to believe that type of highest level public accountability is very high risk and very low reward. So it's actually not the best kind of reward. Because think about it from kind of an 18th century perspective, or earlier than that even. And when someone makes a public declaration and they get shunned by their group, right, they get kicked out of the village. And we don't want to necessarily create that level of psychological danger for ourselves. So the real right amounts of accountability is setting the right amount of accountability to the right goal. And so usually self-accountability, one-to-one, and group accountability are the best kinds of. And if you can't keep yourself accountable, motivated to get those things done, then step to a spouse or a friend or a colleague and then to the group.

Right. Accountability is so important that people really start in the beginning of the process. Before you start with any goal, think about how you're going to hold yourself accountable first. I think it also depends on the circumstance and the person as to whether public is something that is useful, because I do some public and it really works for me. Right? So before I wrote my book, I created the COVID and I put it out there and I said, here's the date I'm going to be releasing it. That had more power for me than if I just put it to one person, right? Like you said, there's a greater risk and that greater risk drove me, right? But it depends on what you're putting at risk, right? I mean, it's not going to ruin my whole career or my whole— So it does depend on what it is that you're declaring out there. But I think that it's a combination of these. Like you said, that really working together have a huge, huge impact.

Yeah, and remember that personality and the person's experience over time has a great deal of impact on what type of accountability works for someone. And in your case, you are comfortable with the risk associated with— I mean, you're an entrepreneur, you have the inbuilt risk tolerance to it. Most people don't.

And not all entrepreneurs do either. Even though they're an entrepreneur, they may be there for a different reason.

Right, exactly, exactly. So I absolutely see that, and I'm probably the same. If I said I was going to do something publicly, there's a very high likelihood that I'm going to be motivated by that and I'm going to achieve it. It's just one of those things of how I roll. Just like with Productivity Summit, I said publicly I'm going to do this, and here we are, we're 7 days out. And so I think absolutely you have to really know yourself, do some internal testing. I very much believe in self-experimentation in any level of productivity systems you're going to invest in. So that you know who you are and how you best appreciate different types of accountability.

Yeah, and different types of tools and processes, right? If you bring that over, you know, and I'll be talking about that a little bit on the summit, is when you know yourself, then you also know, and like you said, that testing, you know what works for you and what doesn't. Because not every— people are looking for that tool that's gonna like fix whatever they think is broken or is gonna make them more productive, but it's really when you understand yourself, then you might understand which tools are gonna best to support you. So I wanted to, before we close out today, I wanted to talk just for a minute, you're Google and Evernote guru. So for Evernote, I'm an Evernote user, but not, not a heavy user. So what would you say are some of the reasons why, or what types of people would be best suited to work with Evernote? And what are some of the features that you think are like really cool?

So with over 220 million Evernote users globally, the reality is, is that almost any person can use Evernote in their world. That's why I really love it. If you want to just be able to take notes cross-platform in almost any modality, whether that's writing directly into the application or taking photographs of the receipts, or just taking notes on your computer while you're in a meeting, Evernote has the ability to do that in the most easy and efficient manner possible. You can record directly into— audio-wise— into Evernote. It's just very, very simple on that level. Then you take it up a notch and you're someone like me, and you really like the technical components of being able to integrate and automate your functions. Evernote has your back. You can integrate with dozens and dozens of tools with Evernote. Then you have other tools like IFTTT and Zapier that allow you to integrate and automate with hundreds of other tools. And so that's one of my just favorite things to do is to sit around and think of workflows.

Process— what's a process that you created that you use Evernote to create an automation from?

So Denise Hirt, who's a fellow Evernote Certified Consultant out in California, she had given me this idea of being able to generate a meeting note from a calendar event. So I set myself on a mission to be able to figure out how to jam a square peg into a round hole and take a Google Calendar event. I'm a G Suite shop in my business, obviously, Google Small Business Advisor Productivity. I use G Suite. So I wanted to be able to take a Google Calendar event, write up all of my meeting notes and so on and so forth, and then functionally create an Evernote note that was available to me at the start of every meeting. So using some duct tape and baling wire, I used Zapier to be able to do that, basically playing back and forth with a couple of tools. And so now I'm pretty comfortable with the format of having every meeting start with a pre-formatted custom list of who's in attendance, date, time, name of the meeting, my meeting agenda, and any other documents that I wanted available to me, all jammed into that note. And ready for me to be able to take notes and follow the agenda in the meeting. So that's just one small way in which I have bent Evernote to my whims, but there are so many ways. There's so many ways that Evernote just ends up being this backbone to data. It doesn't necessarily have to be the place where I'm directly capturing even. It can be a place where you're automatically capturing through filters in Gmail or filters in Outlook and automatically sending it to it.

What I love about it, and we'll wrap up, is that it seems to be searchability so much better than just like saving a Word document and having it somewhere in Word, because you can tag, and it just seems like I find what I'm looking for much easier when I have it in Evernote and have it categorized.

Yeah, and I will tell you that Evernote is doing some really, really fundamental foundational work to bring tags up to parity with notebooks and stacks. And so hopefully over the next year, we're going to see Evernote really bring tags forward. So if you're an iOS user, you have an iPhone or an iPad, You probably have felt some struggles with tags in your system today. That's the case. Hopefully very soon Evernote will have changed really the fundamental structure of how we interact and engage with tags to really bring them to the fore. And I'm very excited to see that because I believe that notebooks and stacks and tags are equal, equal partners in organization, but as well as in filtering and finding. And so Evernote is doing some really good work to be able to make that possible in the near future. So I'm very much looking forward to being able to do that.

Cool. And with powerful integration tools, how cool would that be? You're sharing tags then across your CRM and, and your other tools as well, which is awesome.

You bet.

Ray, where's the best place for people to go to get a hold of you and find out more about your tips and tricks and the Productivity Summit and other things that you've got going on?

Well, if people want to find out more about Productivity Summit, they can go to productivitysummit.org. And if they want to learn more about me, they can probably visit my— I kind of have a Tumblr omnifeed of everything that I publish at twominuterule.com, T-W-O, twominuterule.com. As you can imagine, also based on the David Allen principles of GTD, the 2-minute rule. But so twominuterule.com, you can find me and jump out to my 4 podcasts and everything else that I publish in the world of productivity.

Awesome. Thanks, Ray, for being here. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Penny. It's been a pleasure.

And thank you guys for being here because you are the backbone of the show. And I highly recommend that you check out the Productivity Summit. This may be aired after the summit, but I'm sure there's going to be a way for you to get access to the various different people who spoke at the summit, and the lineup is incredible. So Ray's really put together an amazing event that's going on there. So definitely check that out. So just want to thank you all and invite you to come back to the next show because we're going to be talking about more tips and tricks that are going to help you to take back time. That's the name of the show, and my name is Penny Zanker, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Thank you for listening. Today's topic is another opportunity for you to put the knowledge you learned into practice. Tune in again next week for more strategies that will help you have more energy and focus to get more done in less time, so you can continue to take back time.