Episode 066 - Personal Productivity & Time Management Examples

Definitely times where I will put off all of the tasks that I do not want to do whatsoever, and then I'm stuck with them all on a Thursday or Friday when I— and I want to be doing anything else, and I have this long pile of debts.

This is not the most sexiest topic, But we're going to be talking about personal productivity and time management examples. Things that make people extremely excited. I wake up every morning going, how can I increase my personal productivity and have better time management? So that's what we're going to try to talk about today. So I will be the first to admit that it has taken me many, many years to struggle with time management. I've utilized different systems. And I think, knock on wood, that I've come up with an example or a system that is working for me. But in today's episode, we're going to talk about a bunch of different things. Now, we have not compared notes on this one like we have in prior episodes, so I don't know if there's overlap. I don't know if you're going to debunk some of the stuff that I'm talking about or what. So let's start with you. Okay.

Okay.

So we got two topics here. We got personal productivity. And then how do you manage your time?

Right.

Okay, so what do you think, or what have you found, are great examples of personal productivity? Hmm, first of all, what is it?

Yeah, so I, I think that's the very first thing, is that you have to define what that means for you. So you have to— there's kind of two aspects that play into it, right? There's the actual output, you know, so what are you completing? What is the finished product? Is it sales? Is it YouTube videos? You know, whatever it might be. What is your output and what is the time frame that it takes? So you have to be able to track your time and you have to be able to measure your output. And those are really just the key indicators right there. So right off the bat, if you don't have anything in place, to track your time and, well, tracking time is fairly simple. You just have to look at the clock and write it down in your notebook. There's also tools like Clockify and all kinds of other ones out there, but also measuring your output. So consciously deciding to start really putting a focus on personal productivity as well as time management.

And I think there's a kind of devil in the mix there where you may feel like, "Oh, I'm so busy. Like I just have so much to do and I'm spending so much time," But are you being productive, right? Just because you're busy doesn't mean that you're productive, right? So you can actually put some of these techniques and skills in place that we're going to talk about to up your productivity and give yourself back more time, right? So the best example that I found in researching for this was looking at your tasks as assets and debts, right? So what I meant by that is and assets are things that you really enjoy, do well, can do efficient, and debts are things that are just sucking the life out of you, right? You hate doing it. These all have to be done. And then just sorting those in those two lists, right? In there. And then your assets, if you're doing really well, you just basically don't need to really do much about that. But your debts are then having to either reallocate them to someone else or delegate them, or you need to find a better way to have them done that way, right?

Yeah, and that's actually something I've never even thought of before, and I've never heard of that concept. And for me, that actually just kind of clicked something in my brain because there are definitely times where I will put off all of the tasks that I do not want to do whatsoever, and then I'm stuck with them all on a Thursday or Friday. When I— and I want to be doing anything else, and I have this long pile of debts. And so that's actually something that would make a lot of sense to be able to clearly divide them. And so, so every day is even, and you'll be able— you're able to sustain that productivity level as opposed to being super productive and then not wanting to do something at the end of the week.

I read a book a couple years ago. I couldn't tell you who the author was. But it was more the topic of it that caught my attention. It was Eat the Frog First is what it was called. And the whole idea was nobody wants to eat a frog. It's disgusting. But looking at that as the frog is a metaphor for the task you don't want to do. So start your day with the one that you absolutely despise the most, get it out of the way, and then you'll fly through the rest and it'll be an easier day. Which most people put it off and put it off and then they end their day and then they're grumpy and then they hate it, right? Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's the other thing. And then reverse engineering was the other part of, of, you know, there's the ones you don't like, but then there's ones where for priority, like prioritizing those tasks, which ones are most important? You know, are they holding up other things from happening? So if you're in a team atmosphere where maybe you have to do step 1 and then another team member does step 2, is your step extremely important? It's holding them up from, from being productive.

Exactly. Because that's the last thing you want. And I mean, in addition to that, something that I've kind of taken on is the, the domino method, they call it. So basically rating your tasks that you have to do for today. So, you know, whether that's 3 to 5, around there normally for me, and rating the difficulty. So actually taking time to look at each task and thinking, how long is it going to take me? How much effort does it take? And, you know, what— how difficult do I find this? And then completing most difficult to least difficult. Now, that being said, I also make a very conscious effort to group my tasks together. So if I'm working on something, you know, social media related, so maybe I'm doing a new strategy or some social plans for clients, I'm going to do everything that has to do with social media subsequently with that, because a lot of times in the past I found like that feeling of being all over the place and having 5 million things to do and not knowing where to go and getting distracted with email and all these sorts of other things. When I group my tasks together, there's, there's none of that because I know exactly what the next little bit of my day looks like.

Mm-hmm. Especially if you're in that mindset, it's the— we talked about this a couple episodes ago about the cost of switching tasks, right? So if you've got all your tools up for— if you're doing like, say, graphic design for stuff, you got all the tools open, it's easy to do like the client A, client B, client C, all within those tools, and then switch. Yeah. Right? I mean, you're not gonna bake a cookie and then you're gonna go, you know, make a steak and then you're gonna come back later and bake another cookie, right? You're gonna do all your cookies first, right? Yeah. That kind of thing. So that makes a lot of sense for that. Now, you may be listening to this and you're like, well, I'm the only person in my business. I'm a solopreneur. But there's a lot of stuff and things that I hate to do or don't have time to do. That's where the delegation comes in. And Dan Sullivan, who's the, the founder of Strategic Coach, which, you know, it's a huge program in the States for helping people be productive, he wrote a book called Who Not How. And the whole thought behind that is find the who's out there versus spending the time to find out how to do it, right? So if you have to do bookkeeping, which I absolutely hate, and I, you know, for years was like, well, you know, I don't want to hire a bookkeeper, so I'm going to try to learn how to do it. And anyone who's trying to do that, if you don't like doing it, it sucks to try to learn to do it. I finally found somebody who is like my who, right? I don't care about the how anymore, right? I have the who, and that has taken that off my plate. I'm not spending, you know, 2 days doing my quarterly like tax remissions and all this stuff. That person takes care of it. It's well worth the time. That way.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this one seems pretty simple, but it took me a shockingly long time to actually get in, in this habit, but planning your day. So every single morning I have a routine where I first check my emails and I deal with that. And then I move to monday.com, which is our main productivity tool. And I'll look at my list of things to do today. And then I'll categorize it by difficulty or how urgent it is and those sorts of things. And so I have that little routine. So I'm not coming in and opening something and getting distracted or doing this or trying to jump right into something. Like, I'm answering my emails, I'm doing anything that comes out of that, any of the quick tasks, so I don't have to put them off till later and forget about them. And then I look at my day and I plan it out and time block. And that has worked extremely well for me, even though it's, it's so simple and seems so obvious. It was something that I wasn't necessarily taking the time to actively do every day.

Yeah, and it comes down to simplicity. Everything's going to come, you know, full circle. It doesn't have to be complicated. You know, I used to do, um, I think I mentioned this in another episode, you know, a Kanban-style board, right? I had this huge whiteboard in the office and it was like, it was Post-it notes and these columns and it was like all the tasks that I need to get done, kind of like in a queue. And then there was the working on and then there was the blocked or done or whatever. Um, and the training that I went through, the program to learn how to properly do this system was that you can only work on 3 tasks at a time, right? So your brain can only consciously carry 3 tasks. Doesn't mean you're doing them all at the same time, but if it's like today, these are the 3 main ones I'm doing, and if you get one done and you still have time, bring another one over, but don't bring over like 7 or 10 because you're gonna get overwhelmed that way, right? So finding a system that works best for you doesn't necessarily mean it's that Kanban style. There's hundreds of different styles out there. You know, maybe it's just a notebook and a list format. Maybe you want to have the digital tools to use it, but you have to figure out what's gonna work right for you that way. And just another thing that was really— once I've thought of this, it made complete sense, and this was in my research for this episode— forgetting passwords. Like, the amount of time people spend trying to remember a password. Password recovery is because they don't remember what the passwords for all their systems are. Using like a 1Password or a LastPass system in your business is huge. Like, think about how many tools we go into in the run of a day, uh, from your social media accounts to Canva and all this kind of stuff. To be able to just have— go to it, have the secure passwords pre-fill everything like that, versus like, oh, which one was that?

Or Yeah, and I actually remember when I first started and you had shared the LastPass with me, which is the tool we use, and I was like, why would I need this? You know, like this, like what? I have like 3 passwords that I need. And then, you know, fast forward to a couple months later and it's filled with, you know, clients, like everything you can imagine, every everything that I need, and it has been the lifesaver, right? Because you don't have to worry about forgetting, which is, you know, like you said, a huge time sucker.

So— Yeah, and another benefit to this is, you know, how many times are people's accounts getting hacked because they're using the same passwords? Having a system that will remember those passwords securely allows you to use those long alphanumeric character, like, infused passwords that that are unique to that one system because you don't have to remember to type them in, it's in there. And now these systems are getting smart and you put in a password and it's gonna say, you used this 15 other times, like choose a different one kind of thing. So they wanna make sure that the security is happening. That's out there, so.

[Speaker] Yeah, definitely. And I had briefly mentioned time blocking, so I just wanna touch on that. So the way that I do this is in my calendar, like I, I very rarely will have a meeting in the morning. All of my meetings are for the afternoon, and I've kind of just scheduled it that way because I find I'm very productive just, you know, putting my head down in the morning and not having to be interrupted. And in the afternoon when, you know, you start to feel like you're worn out a little bit, I get to have conversations with clients and, and, you know, actively be engaged in something. And obviously, while I'm still sitting in front of a computer now, it's still more engaging than having to, you know, edit or write content or whatever it might be. And in addition to that, you can also do it in the sense of maybe you want to time block a specific day of the week for meetings, so then the rest of the week you don't have to worry about being interrupted at any time.

Absolutely. And if you're putting them into your calendar and your calendar is linked to your booking system, then that block is blocked out. You're not gonna worry about something getting booked in there. Or if you've got multiple team members that are looking at your calendar, it's like, oh, you know, Jodi's available, I'm gonna go and call her or visit her office or whatever. They're gonna see that you've got this time blocked out, right?

Yeah.

You've got a whole nother page of notes.

I do.

I'm so underprepared.

Do you want me to go through it?

Go through it, let's do it. Let's give these people some value.

This one is a little bit, you know, obvious. Obviously everybody's heard of SMART goals, you know, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound. But how many people actually actively think of this process when they're, you know, making a goal, even if it's just for the day?

I don't.

Exactly. Get on it, Shaun.

I know.

So actually taking the time in your morning routine while you're drinking your coffee and just write down a goal you have for the day. And even better, break that goal into smaller goals, because nobody feels great about themselves and nobody feels productive when they have one thing on their to-do list and it takes them the whole day and then they only get to cross one thing off. So even if it feels silly, breaking that into the 5 steps that it's going to take you to accomplish that and being able to check them off throughout the day, that makes me so much more productive. Because when I feel productive, I am more productive. Yeah.

So, yeah, or even put some things on the list that, you know, if you're feeling like I'm not productive, put things on the list you just did already. Like, like got my socks on the right feet, got the kids to school without killing them, right? Like check it off, right? Those type of things.

I do that, you know, I, I, on those days that I need that little pick-me-up, this little dopamine rush. Exactly.

Check, check, check, right?

Yeah, correct. I'm a highlighter kind of person. I like to highlight. Yeah, big fan. And then lastly, investing in some tools, you know, even if it's— even there are free tools out there, right? But just recently we made the switch from Trello to Monday, and I'm very used to switching softwares now, because you're always trying to find the best one, and I have to say Monday by far is my favorite. So I know you're the one who geeks out about it more than me, so I'll let you take the reins on this one.

Yeah, and just kind of a— not a plug for them, but more of a, a kind of a productivity thing. When you're looking for a tool, when you initially try out a tool, don't judge it right on that right away. I have signed up for two prior trials with monday.com, went in, I was like, well, okay, it's neat, but I can't see the use of it. And that was because I didn't have a need for what it did at that time. I then had a pain now when I went back in and it started to do— and then I started to watch the training. I'm like, oh yeah, it can do that and that. And then it started to become a better use case for us. So, you know, if you are looking at tools, don't go in and be like, okay, well, I don't know how to use it, it sucks. It just means you just don't know how to use it yet.

Yeah, right. Yeah. And I will say there definitely are some tools that I've just looked at, even, um, like even when I was in college, and You sometimes you just look at the format or like the interface and you're like immediately no, which I would encourage you to take some time to be able to, to take that time to, you know, get to know that, get to know it before you, you know, write it off.

We're in a mobile world, so if the platform doesn't work on a phone, it doesn't have an app, I would rule it out right away.

Okay, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, that for sure. But I mean It's not— you have to just try a bunch. It's trial and error, right? Like you have to figure out what you like, the format you like, and also a lot of times it's going to be a hybrid between a couple different ones, right? Like we use Zoom, we use Google. I love Google Calendar. That has been like my lifesaver, especially with, you know, on your phone now you have like the— I believe they're called like widgets, the little pop-ups. The fact that I can have my calendar just on my home screen, I don't even have to click into it, like to me is like the best thing ever.

Oh, my Apple Watch. If I put a face on there, one of the screens, I can actually have the next appointment show up there. Like, so I can look down, it'll tell me when it is and what it is will be the next one on the screen.

So, all right, you've convinced me. I want an Apple Watch.

So, but I mean, you know, the same thing, like if you're not in the Google ecosystem, then you're going to be in like an Outlook, like you're going to be a Microsoft person, right? And you can, it's the whole like Ford Dodge kind of thing, right? It's like you not, I don't think one is better than the other. It's just whatever you're comfortable with and what you've grown up with, right? It's the PC-Apple debate, right? Nobody wants to flip over to a PC from an Apple or vice versa. So just figure out what you're using, right?

And honestly, just what fits you best, right? Because maybe— I was a PC gal growing up, okay? Hardcore, like hated Mac app, like computers, hated them.

I'm glad to see you came over to the right side.

I did. I came to the dark side. So then I was looking at the computers to buy for college and I was like, you know what, I'm feeling, feeling, feeling out there. I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna buy a Mac and now I hate PC. So.

How long was college? 2 years?

Yes.

Well, you need a computer that at least lasted that long, so that ruled out PC, right? Okay.

Clearly we're getting a little too opinionated now.

That's right, we just lost a bunch of subscribers. Yeah. Or we gained a whole bunch more. I don't know.

They just immediately went no.

I think we gained more because Apple is more of the podcast world.

That is true.

Right?

That's true. Although I use Spotify, not Apple Podcasts.

Well, who knows, right? You can't be perfect in every area, right?

No, I can't be. I'm working on it.

All right. So, um, yeah, let's wrap this up. And any last words of wisdom in your book of notes?

I think just I really want to emphasize that tracking, because like I do on every single podcast, it is the only way to determine if it's working or not and if you're also happy with it or not.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, draw your line in the sand right now before you start this and say, what, like, why am I doing this? Because These are the things that are sucking, right? I'm up till midnight and I'm worried about things. Um, and then look at it probably, you know, 60 days from now and say, what's it like now, right? Have I eliminated some of those issues? If you haven't, if you gain more, then you need to either try completely wiping it out and doing something different. But I'm pretty sure that if you stick to something or implement something, um, even just writing the task down and not keeping them in your head is going to be a huge productivity issue for you to fix.