Join us live each week at www.productivity.academy/live and get your questions answered by submitting them at any time right here: www.productivity.academy/questions. You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on June 20th, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- What do you do outside of work to be more productive at work?
- Is daily walking the key to being more productive?
To find recommended tools and other great resources, check out the Productivity Academy Resource Toolkit: https://productivity.academy/resources
Alright, welcome everybody to episode number 87 of the productivity Academy live Q and A today is the 20th of June 2019. And we are going to get into it with some good questions. We’ve already got questions about doing what do you do outside of work to be more productive at work, and then some questions about daily walking and keys to being more productive. as time allows, we’ll hop into questions from members and if you are checking out the replay, that’s great.
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You are into productivity, time management, team building automation, all that sort of good stuff. So let’s actually get into it and answer some questions. All right. So make sure this is working right, since I had some technical difficulties earlier. A really good question. So question is, what do you do outside of work to be more productive at work? And so I came up with a short list of three things.
I think that there’s any number of things you can do. And I’ll preface this by saying again, that you know, try these things or try the things you come up with. But then the most important part is are they working for you? If they’re not, don’t do them. You know, and do you need to in order to find out if they’re working for you, you need to have some sort of review.
It could just literally be like a reminder on your phone once a week like hey, did the thing I try, you know, work. You could either use a reminder you could use nap like habit or I think its habits on iOS or habit loop on Android. You just have that question come up so that at least you’re consciously thinking about it, and then making improvements from there so that you’re not just doing things that don’t actually work for you. Okay, that said, I think that some big ones for me are exercise.
And I actually just got off of recording a podcast interview with Jay cron or Jonathan Krantz that the president of Punjabi and he brought this up and said, You know, he had to prioritize it. That’s a big part of his daily review. And the one of the things he ended up prioritizing it just automatically every day was exercise, because if he tries to do it, lunch, gets pushed back and tries to do it after work. It doesn’t happen.
And so you know, I said this year, he’s, that’s his thing is he’s prioritizing work, or sorry, prioritizing exercise before work. I think that that’s really important. It may be going for a walk, it may be a run, it could be going for a swim. It’s whatever you do, but I would say if you’re not doing this, try it. And even if you already have some time, set aside for this. I would say you know, maybe try switching it up if you feel like it’s not enough.
Or it’s not working for you, or if you’re like, Oh, I can’t get a workout in, I don’t have enough time, everyone’s got enough time, right? Maybe it’s just going for a five minute walk. And just that time to just let your brain do its thing. maybe think about what you’re going to do for the day. Or just again, don’t think about anything, just enjoy walking or getting some exercise.
But I find that that really helps. It’s a good way to relieve stress. Sometimes doing things like going for a walk can be great to really let your mind kind of review things subconsciously, or think about a problem you’ve had, or maybe some harder exercise where you’re really more focused on that exercise, like running, bike riding or something that you know, is really getting the heart rate going and you’re having to focus on that.
So you’re not, you know, letting the brain go off on tangents. Which brings me to the second thing what you should do outside of work is not work right. And that’s easier said than done sometimes, which is why I mentioned that with the exercise. Sometimes it can be nice to do an activity where it really takes your focus in
That activity so that you’re not then going back and thinking about work or, you know, did I send that email? Or did you know that person mean that thing? Or, you know, did I do that one thing correctly if you’re done with work be done with work. I think that Cal Newport the author of deep work, he also has a blog I believe at Cal Newport calm. And he had a great idea with the like, daily shut down, you know, we do a daily review, but then at the end of the day, do a quick shut down and do it the same have a little routine or a process for this.
So that you go through and maybe, you know, this is again, unique to everybody, but generally it’s a good idea. Go through, did you have any tasks or to do notes that came up during the day go ahead and sort them you know, get that ready for tomorrow review, review your calendar, to you’re aware of what’s going on tomorrow?
Is there anything you know, in your mind you’re thinking about, you know, again, that email or that one thing at work that you didn’t finish, you know, put it into your task management system so that it’s out of your brain, so that then when you’re out of work, you can enjoy whatever you’re doing being with your family, going for a bike ride, whatever that is. The other thing I want to say is learning. I think, you know, professional development is really important.
But a lot of times, it’s easy for us to get focused on that route. And to disregard that, you know, learning out different areas, whether it’s literally I’m just going to try to think of some random things like woodworking, or birdwatching, or whatever it is that learning more about these areas, they only are going to strengthen everything else you do, you’re going to find these inter inter linking ideas, you’re going to meet people with different viewpoints or you know, they can help you think through problems.
There’s all of these cool benefits that come about by learning and doing these other activities. So again, you don’t have to like go off the deep end and you know, become, you know, biologist to you know, further your business development, but learning more about just anything in general is going to be helpful and then those people you meet doing that is also going to be some interesting connection. So highly, highly, highly recommend doing that.
Alright, so the second question for today, is daily walking the key to being more productive? I would say no, it’s not the key to being more productive. Is it a great tool in like their productivity and life tool kit? Hell, yes. Yeah, I think daily walking is great. Personally, I do it every morning or just about I’m certainly not perfect, but I think you know, go for the 80% rule. I either go for a walk in the morning, or go for a run and on the days I go for a walk, my wife has time she comes with me, it’s great.
You know, sometimes we don’t do much we just go for a walk and chat about what we’re up to. Sometimes it’s great and you know, we have some great insights or we have this really cool conversation. Like everything, it’s the the ups and downs. And in that case, you know, maintaining the connection, I like talking my wife before we both get busy. So it serves that purpose.
And then throughout the day, because I want to stay healthy, I go for short walks, but it’s also a mental health, get away from the computer get away from what I’m doing. I’m still thinking about work, usually I but I go outside and I’ll walk around, you know, for 10 or 20 minutes or whatever time I have clear my head, you know, enjoy kind of some relaxed thinking. And that does in fact, help me be more productive instead of just continuing to go go go saying No, you know what, I’m going to take that break.
I’m going to go for a walk healthy, I physically feel better and mentally definitely, definitely helps me. All right, so that does it for the questions I had ahead of time. I do want to say I mentioned it just a minute ago. But there’s going to be a great podcast episode coming out. I just recorded it with Jay cron, the president of job he had a lot of really great topics. I went over with him everything from his daily routine, you know, as President of a large company like that, what he does a lot about leadership and prioritization and some really good recommendations from it.
As far as some books as well and some additional areas, if you want to go back and check out previous podcast episodes, you can just go to productivity dot Academy slash podcast and find all of those there and you can subscribe there you can find the links to like anchor. It’s also on iTunes, bunch of the other podcast aggregators. So this I believe is going to do it. I don’t see any additional questions.
So that’s it for Episode 87. And if you want to, and you’re checking this out outside of the Facebook group, you should find the link below. You can come join us You do have to answer three tough questions, not just three questions, make sure that you’re interested in productivity, time management, automation, all that sort of good stuff and that you’re going to be a good fit for the group. All right, that’ll do it for this week. I will see you next time for Episode 88.
