How To Get More Done In Less Time
26 Apr 2023 · 22 min
Rob Dial breaks down three productivity methods: the 80/20 principle to focus on high-impact tasks, task batching to group similar work into focused sprints, and the Pomodoro technique of 25-minute focused blocks. He shares his own weekly schedule and explains why single-tasking beats multitasking.
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Learn more@chase.com SapphireServe cards issued by JP Morgan Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit Approv. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast, hey, do me a favor, go ahead and go to however you listen to us and give us a rating and review however you listen to us, more positive rating and reviews that we get, the more that those platforms actually show this to people who have never heard of this podcast before. So that allows us to be able to grow. If you would do that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Today I'm going to teach you how to get more done in less time. I'm going to give you three different techniques that are going to build upon each other to help you get more done. Because let's be real, you waste a lot of time, don't you? We all do. I waste a lot of time and I constantly get better and better and better at being more efficient, being more productive. And really, I think that that's a skill set and not something that you can build upon. But if we all want a perfect life, we have to realize we all get the same 24 hours, right? You will never be able to change time like you, you can't control time, can you? The only thing you can change is how productive you are with every single minute that you have each day. What you get done in an hour compared to what somebody else gets done in an hour. And if you're somebody who wants to make more money or have more success, the more productive that you can be, the more that you can pull the biggest levers in your life, the more that each hour of your time is going to be worth. And so when you look at somebody who's way, you know, has way more money than another person, their output for every hour that they have is just usually way higher than the average person. So today we're gonna dive into how to get more done in less time. These are gonna be based in, you know, psychological studies and science studies as well that have been proven to actually work so that, you know, hey, I'm not just teaching you some frou frou y stuff that doesn' Let me teach you stuff that actually really works. And when you can understand and use these three techniques, it will help you get more done in way less time. The first thing that we're going to dive into, the first technique is something called the 8020 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. And you have to realize that your brain has a very limited capacity to process information. You also have very limited energy throughout the day. You also have a very limited day. You only have 24 hours. So how can we bring as much of our brain power to what matters most? That's really what you should think about. How can you bring as much of your brain power to what matters most? So what that means is taking charge of what you dedicate your time and attention to. And so the 8020 rule is this. It says that 80% of the results that you get in your life, your business, your relationships, all of that 80% of the results will come from only 20% of your actions. Think about that for a second. If I'm a business owner, well, I am a business owner. But if I'm you and I'm a business owner, I have to realize that 80% of my revenue in my business comes from only 20% of the actions. Same thing where if I'm a salesperson, 80% of my sales revenue is going to come from the top 20% of my clients, my prospects, my customers. So if I'm smart, I would go, okay, if only 20% of them bring in 80% of the revenue, how can I put more time into the 20% so that I can then bring in more revenue? If I'm a business owner, what is it that I do on a daily basis that brings in the most amount of revenue into my business? What we want to do is we want to identify and concentrate on the tasks that bring in the most significant results. It's really not complex, but it drives me crazy sometimes when I see how many people do stuff like, for instance, in their business, that just does not matter. You know, if you're, if you're someone who's out there, the majority of your time, if you have, if you're a solopreneur, you're the only person in your business, you know, the majority of your time, most of your time should be spent doing the 20% of the tasks that you do in your business that
pull the biggest levers.
That's how you're going to grow the most. There's so many times, like, I obviously help people grow their coaching businesses online. And, you know, if you're interested in learning more about that, send me a DM on Instagram. You can do that, it's fine. But really what happens is I'll see people and we'll, we teach a strategy of how to grow on Instagram, how to get clients from Instagram and how to actually get them to be paid coaching clients. Right? And you can see people that think like, oh, well, I need to figure out my branding colors on Instagram and I need to make sure that I figure out my fonts and I need to make sure I set up my website. I'm like, none of that matters. None of those. Like, no one's going to become a customer of yours from Instagram because of the fact that they liked your branding colors, because of the fact that they liked your font, or because of the fact that they found your website. Because let's be real, there's billions of websites. That thing is, it's lost in the sauce. Nobody looks at your website. What really matters is how can I get more leads and how can I get those leads to turn into customers? That's what really matters. That's what people should be focusing the majority of their time and money and energy on is how do we bring in more people into the business? And so by focusing on the most critical 20% of the tasks that yield 80% of the revenue, or 80% of the happiness or 80% of the joy in your life or whatever it is that you're talking about. We minimize distractions and then optimize our cognitive resources. And so how do you use this? Really what it comes down to is getting out a pen and paper and going through and writing down everything that you do on a daily basis, like everything you do on a daily basis. So let's just keep going back through business owners, but this could be used for, once again, anything. Not just business owners, but let's just say this could be used for your diet, this could be used for working out, this could be used for your family, all of this stuff. But let's just take out a pen and paper and let's write down everything that I do in my business and I look at all of the things that are the biggest, you know, needle movers in my business and the smallest needle movers in my business. And what I do is I say, okay, can I delegate the things that aren't the biggest needle movers or can I dedicate time at the end of the day to get those done, but spend the majority of my day focusing on the 20% of the things that bring in 80% of the revenue. And that's the first thing that you want to do, is know everything that you do and figure out what moves the needle the most and what moves the needle the least and spend your time, the majority of your time doing the things that matter the most. And so you're going to just create a list of all of your tasks and you categorize them according to their importance and urgency to achieving your goals. You could do this exact same thing. When you look at trying to lose weight, you know, is what is it that's going to help you? You know, if you could only if there's only 20% of the tasks that you do in your weight loss journey that give you 80% of the results, why would you spend more time doing the things that don't bring as much results? And so you really start to go through and you evaluate each each task potential for long term impact and alignment with your goals.
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Then what you do is after you find out with the 8020 rule which one's the most important, then you do something called batching. I made a big mistake of when I first started this podcast, when I first started my company where I did not do any batching. Now I try to batch everything. And so batching is basically you, you figure out the tasks and figure out if you could do as many of them as possible in a sprint of a couple hours. And so for me, like, I know that one of the biggest things that I do in my business is creating content. Creating. One of the most important things that I do is create content. These podcasts, YouTube videos that we put up, reels that we put on Instagram, all of that stuff that is, that is one of the most important things that we do that I do here. But you know, I record and I have four podcast episodes that come out every single week. And then I have, you know, at least seven brand new reels that come out every single week. And so what I do is I, instead of, you know, recording one episode today and one episode tomorrow and one episode the day after and one episode the day after, instead of doing that, which I have done in the past, like my first 600 episodes, I did like that. What I do is I wake up, today is Wednesday, I wake up on Wednesday. And my day, Wednesday is content day. The entire day is only focused on content, right? All of Monday in my business is all zoom meetings with my team, with my executive team, with the entire team, or all hands meeting, all that stuff. All of Tuesdays is me coaching people who are in my programs, right? So me actually live coaching on zoom to groups of people. All of Wednesday is me planning out and creating the content. So this morning and today I planned four podcast episodes. I am now going to record four podcast episodes. And also this morning I planned seven reels today. I'm going to record seven reels today. And so it's a way to be able to plan, record, to plan record to get it all done. And all I do is I Just change my shirt in between. So it looks like it's a different podcast episode, which it is. It's just not a different day. Right. But that's what batching looks like. So when you look at it is like instead of doing it a little bit here on Monday and a little bit on Wednesday and a little bit on Thursday and a little bit on Friday, and, you know, we skip Tuesday on it. Why don't you just see if you can get all of them done in a sprint of time, like a three hour time period to get your most important things done each and every day. So once you've identified the top 20% of what you do, the biggest needle movers in your business or in your life and your relationships, is there a way to batch all of the stuff that you do and that's really what you want to think about and then what you do. And this is what a lot of people are really bad at. I've come to realize after coaching thousands of people, a lot of people are really terrible at scheduling their time. They think they don't have any time. And the reason why I think they don't have any time is because they don't actually even track their time. They have no idea what's going on in their life. And so what it comes down to is once you figure out what you, you know, you figure out your top 20% of what you do, once you figure out that you need to batch them and how to batch them. Well, now let's actually look at what our schedule is for this week and let's actually figure out when we're going to do the most important things. Because all too often I see people, you know, they're solopreneurs, they just start a business and the business starts to grow a little bit, and then they wake up in the morning and they're like, well, what do I need to do today? Like, you should never wake up in the morning, especially if you're a business owner and think to yourself, well, what should I do today? Like, you should know what you're doing every single day by Sunday night. You should take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it takes, and plan out your entire week on Sunday night. So, you know, Monday, I'm doing this. Tuesday, I'm doing this. Wednesday, I'm doing this. Thursday, Friday, you know exactly what you'll be doing. Now, will it move and shift? Yeah, it'll move and shift. It's a moving, living, breathing thing. But you should have a pretty good idea of what you're doing every single morning. And so what it comes down to is once you figure out how you're going to batch things, then you actually put them into your schedule and you follow that schedule. And what you'll find is you will be so much more productive by simply doing this. So that's number two is batching and number three is by using, you know it. I say it all the time. The pomodoro technique. There is nothing that I've ever found that is better at getting stuff done than the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique says that you work on one thing and one thing only for 25 minutes. You set a timer, and then after that 25 minutes is up, you take a five minute break. And in that five minute break, you do nothing.
Like, you don't look at your phone,
you don't go talk to people, you don't do any of that. You give your brain a rest. You go outside, you go for a walk, you allow your gaze just to dilate and see the world around you. You can close your eyes for five minutes and just start breathing. But really what it comes down to is that's a break your for your brain to take. So don't like do hardcore work for 25 minutes and then go on your phone for 5 minutes and do hardcore work again. Because those being on your phone is requiring actual mental processing and you're trying to give your brain a break. Same way that like when you work out your biceps, right, you work out your biceps. You don't work out your biceps the entire 45 minutes. You're in the gym, you do a set, you take a break for a minute, you do a set, you take a break. For me, you do a set, you take a break for a minute. Same thing with the pomodoro technique. So it's 25 minutes on, five minutes off, and you only do one thing. You don't try to multitask. Multitasking does not work. Like if you're making a sandwich and listening to this podcast, yeah, that's fine. But if you're trying to do multiple things at once that are really require a lot of your brain, you'll actually do way less work and way worse work. So there's been many studies around this, but Stanford University actually found that people who are heavy multitaskers actually perform worse on tasks that require attention and memory than those who focus on one task at a time. So the research supports that Prioritizing high impact tasks, your 20% of things, and avoiding multitasking will actually enhance your productivity. They've actually been found that if you do a lot of multitasking, it actually makes you dumber than if you do what they call single tasking. And that's the point of the pomodoro technique is let's say that you sit down and you need to do this task right. Like, for instance, I need to plan out podcast episodes. I usually don't plan them out in 25 minutes. It's not done in 25 minutes. Takes me like an hour per episode at least, Right. So what I'll do is I'll put, okay, I'm gonna work on this episode, today's episode that I'm going over with you right now, and I'll put on for 25 minutes. At the end of it, it'll ring, I'll take a five minute break. I'm usually about halfway done with planning out the episode and what it's going to look like. My research, all of that stuff. Then what do I do? I go back into the exact same task that I was just doing until it is complete. Once it is complete, then I can switch to the next one, right? So that's what it looks like. So it's not. I'm doing multiple things at once. Now, I promise you this, as you're working on something, your brain is going to start thinking of something else. Your brain is going to think of another thing that you have to do or another idea that would be good. What I like to do is I like to keep a pen and paper next to me so it's blank. There's nothing on the piece of paper. And if an idea comes to my head and I feel like I'm really getting pulled towards it and I want to pull up another tab in my computer, all I'll do is I'll write down that idea and I'll go back to what I was doing so my brain can let go of it, knowing that I can follow up with it later. And so this is what it really comes down to is you only are given 24 hours every single day. And the, the happiness and the success and what becomes of your life is really dictated by what you do. If you want to have more success in your life, you're going to need to get more done. And the way that you get more done is by being more productive in less time. And so the way that you do this is you use the 8020 rule. Then what you do is you batch all of the tasks, schedule them out, and then use the Pomodoro technique to move the needle in your life, your business and everything that you do. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at Robdial Jr R O
B D I A L J R
and I'm gonna leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
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