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You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on July 18, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- What is the best kind of productivity setup?
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Right, it is live. Hey everybody, this is Adam with productivity Academy today is the 18th of July. This is Episode 91. Getting close to 100. I’m pretty pumped about that. But before we get into everything, I just wanted to go over what we’re going to be talking about today, I have came across a really good kind of it. I don’t know, I guess it was a post statement and a little bit of a question about the best kind of productivity setup that somebody had.
And they wanted to share with people. And I thought it was a really good example of you know, how you can get a lot of power out of having a fairly simple process. But I thought they left one important thing out, so I want to go over that. And then also want to talk a little bit about Monday calm, formerly known as the pulse. I’ve been using this for project management now for I think, a little bit over a year, year and a half.
And they’ve really come into their own. And I’m really starting to use it a lot more. And I want to go over some of the reasons why and just expose you to this a little bit. If it’s something you think you could use for your team or for project management, I highly suggest you take a look at it. So with that said, before we hop into it, do you want to also say if you’re joining us live, that’s great. Go ahead and ask questions as time allows, I will answer those. If you’re watching the Facebook group, that’s awesome.
Hello, and if you’re watching the replay on YouTube, that’s great, too. You can click Subscribe, stay up to date with us, as well as videos about app reviews, automation, team building, all that sort of good stuff. And if you do want to come join us in the free Facebook group, you can find that link down below. Click that and then you do have to answer three questions.
Just about you know, where you found the group and what you’re most interested in in terms of productivity, make sure that you really want to be there. So guarantee you can pass the test. It’s not not difficult. So with that said, let’s get into it. So the very first thing I mentioned was basically how somebody had written out, you know, they said, Hey, I talked to somebody, you know, they gave me these good ideas, here’s what I’ve implemented as turn my life around in the last 18 months.
And I personally was really interested because, you know, fantastic kind of headline, as in a forum. And then I went through and a lot of what the guy had done and implemented in his life was stuff that I recommend that people do, and don’t want to spend a lot of time on. This is just stuff like implementing the daily review, right kind of being the foundation of your day, you know, having a routine, structuring your time understanding where your time goes, and a couple of other things, pretty top level time management, and it was fantastic.
I was super pumped, you know, excited he was working was getting more done, felt better, all that sort of stuff. But then that was kind of it. And I say that just because immediately I started thinking of you know, this guy, and the next step for him, and you may not see it yet is that he needs to now implement some sort of review. And I say that just in a general sense, because there’s a lot of different once you can set up and I’ll talk a little bit about those.
But the idea of being in general, that you set up these processes. And you know, it doesn’t matter what system you use, maybe you’ve read the foundation that I wrote, and you decide to use those, and that’s your setup. Maybe you’re a big fan of David Allen, you’ve read getting things done, you just say I’m going to go Evernote and implement this hundred percent. But whatever you do, well, you know, whatever process whatever style, whatever it is, you need to have some sort of review.
So you can get an understanding of Hey, is this working for me? And more likely than not what’s working well, and what isn’t. And that’s why I you know, I try to tell people, you know, if you like what I’m talking about you like these ideas, like the methods, that’s great, put them into work or into, you know, work for you, but then go in overtime, you’re going to customize them, right, what works for me is not going to work exactly for you.
There’s the higher level ideas, like having a review, that is something everyone can use, maybe you know, you don’t want to schedule it at the same time, every week that I do, or you know, you don’t want to have the reminders in the same way, it’s more that you have these general processes in place. So with the review, for this person, in particular, somebody who had over the past, you know, six months or a year really put into place these building blocks for their productivity.
What I would have recommended them to do is to start just the one next step that would really help take them up to the next level would be to implement a daily or sorry, implement a weekly review. And I would do that I would start with a 30 minutes. And I would put this into my calendar. And I would make sure that for me, again, this is something where like, this is personal. And it may not be the same for you.
But I would go somewhere different. Okay, if that’s out of the office, it could just be into a different room. For myself, I like to go out, grab some coffee, even if it’s somewhere kind of loud or busy, I find that just getting out and kind of removing myself and being in a new situation helps. And then I go back and I answer those questions like what’s something I can automate or delegate or get rid of this week? What’s something that’s more really well for me this week? And what’s not working well? And how can I either do less of it or get it off my plate.
And doing that, you know, is kind of the next step. And I know a lot of people don’t dedicate the time to it, or it’s live by. And I guarantee you, if you put this into your schedule, put it somewhere, it’s one of those again, you’ve got to hold it, you know, pretty much sacred and make sure that you always do it always being that 80% rule, right? Like I drink my own Kool Aid. But I also realized that it’s the real world, I just try to make sure I do it the vast majority of the time.
And I missed it last week because I was on vacation. But that said the the results from this have been fabulous. So I talked at a live event in Washington DC last year. And I was talking about this from a time savings perspective. And just sitting down once a week and as part of my daily or weekly review, saying, you know, what, can I automate delegate delete, I was hit 215 hours in 2018, it was kind of crazy.
That’s like a work week. Because it’s stuff that adds up over time. You know, even if you only save 10 minutes a day, or you know, 30 minutes a week, you figured out a way to either get rid of it or automated whatever fits something that’s recurring. That’s a huge amount of time savings. And just keep doing this week, after week, after week after week, and you kind of build build upon that.
So that’s a little bit of an insight into the power of that. And this could be literally as simple like the the practical application of this can be as simple as, like I said, you know, maybe go sit down somewhere else, or get up Stand up, go in the kitchen, go another office, and you know, have a pad of paper and just write down these three things.
You know, what can I automate, delegate or delete? What has worked the best for me over the past week? And how can I get more results like that? And then what isn’t working so well? And how can I either get rid of it, get it done in less time, or pass it off someone else if it has to absolutely have has to be done.
And then keeping those together somewhere for me, I do this in Evernote, and I just I have a folder where I just put all these in each week. And it helps to go back sometimes. And to review, you know, am I still doing what I need to do? Am I out of ideas? You know, sometimes I sit down I have my coffee, I’m going to think okay, what can I do to be more productive, and I just kind of blank and that’s fine.
Because now I’ve got this little file where it’s like, Oh, that’s right, you know, I kind of automated this or set this up for a client and I saved them time doing whatever, you know, I should implement that. Now. Because I’m doing the same thing. Just having that it’s kind of like the idea of the people here you hear people who do a lot of writing them a swipe file, same idea, having this go to just kind of to tickle the brain and get you going so that you you know, you don’t sit there and say, Well, I guess I can do nothing, right?
Because there’s always something you could do. So I found, again, that you can then implement this on larger timescales. And I just mean for myself, that, you know, doing a monthly review of some sort, and then definitely a 90 day or a quarterly review. And then a yearly review. If you want to do more or less than that, that’s fine. Like I said, I always say, you know, just make this your own. But if you need somewhere to start definitely a weekly review.
And I would say definitely a quarterly review. And then you know, once you feel like you’ve got a grip on that, then you can move up to doing something like, you know, monthly or yearly, whatever it is that you get the best results from and by said, taking the time to review, you’ll look you’ll see the results. And so maybe if you do, you know, if you have quarterly reviews, if you’re not seeing the results you want or any results, you could say, you know, am I even Am I doing this correctly, am I investing the time?
If I’m not, maybe I need to be a little bit more serious about it or you know, regular whatever it is. And if not, maybe you just need to change how you’re doing it. So hopefully, that’s enough to get you started on that. And I think that doing review in various areas can be just incredibly helpful. Like I said, save you a lot of time and help speed up that process.
Instead of just going with any method, again, whether it’s your morning routine, or whatever it is, and just sticking with that forever, saying, Hey, you know, I always have room for improvement? What’s one little thing I can do better? And I guarantee you that’s going to lead to some great results. All right. Let’s see, I’m going to check real quick for some questions either in the group
don’t see anything. So I’m going to move on to talking a little bit about Monday and how been using that if you have any questions, pop over and leave them for me and in the Facebook group. Let me share my screen over here. Okay, so this is Monday, if you haven’t heard of it, I can’t share mine. Right now I’ve got a lot of client details in there. I don’t think they’d be too jazz to have me sharing all their details on a live stream.
But I do want to go through this in case you’re not familiar with it. And the I think the gifts on the page to really good job of showing this. But they’ve got a lot of different layouts. And they’re really showcasing how you can do this their stuff. You can have with time, lions, you can have compound boards, like Trello, you can have what they call pulses, just more of like a row of data, I found that this has been really good.
Now, I’m not going to if you’re looking for a free service, I think Trello is still a great one and can do a several of these. But if you’re managing a team, or if you’re really dealing with clients, and you’ve got some complexity in there, I find that this tool like this is really helpful. And it does integrate with Zapier. So there’s a lot of automation you can do. So when like with the customization, you really can drag and drop this stuff around like they’re doing.
And I agree with this right here. It’s easy, it’s visual and intuitive, right, you can get complex with it. But to get started, it is easy. And I do like the visual part. So for those of us who are interested or who learn or easily use visual methods, as opposed to maybe just writing things out in a bullet list all the time, that this can be really good. Also, this is neat, I’m not Can I say that I have a lot of experience with this.
I’ve just started dealing with this. But you can create dashboards that look at your individual boards. So like what they’re showing here is a dashboard that maybe you have a calendar showing different things, you obviously have a budget, got a little con bond board here, and then you can see where maybe you know how many tasks you have in various projects.
Let’s see, I’m not going to read through all this, you can go over to Monday and check it out. It’s pretty awesome. But I found project management to be one of them. Obviously, the strong points of this. And being able to have like they said three views. So you have this maybe you’ve got like client, or let’s just go with there’s you have team projects, you’ve got different groups on a board, you’ve got all these tasks, but then you can move it over and look at it.
And I combine sounds like Trello and see okay, where are all these out, like how many things are at this area, or this step instead of having to look through and see it this way. Or you could look at a calendar and see it that way. Like Where are things that are where due dates at. And then you can assign task, you can write content inside of each one of these lines. You can tag people in there, you can upload pictures, you can write code, all sorts of stuff.
So if you haven’t seen Monday, I highly suggest that you check that out in terms of just going and seeing it for yourself and seeing if that might be something I believe they offer a free trial, I’ll send the link over. But again, it’s something that if you’re really doing a lot of projects, you do any client work or you have a team, that that’s maybe something you want to look at for yourself. So definitely be doing some more videos on that in the future. If people are interested in finding out more.
Hop over, I don’t see any questions today. So I think that is going to wrap it up. So if you got any questions, you can find the link either above or below depending on where you’re watching to ask those ahead of time if you want to get those answered. And again, if you’re checking this out on YouTube, you can hit subscribe, stay up to date with of course these videos, as well as videos on automation, team building, app reviews, all that sort of good stuff. So that’ll do it for this week. Thanks for watching, and I’ll catch you next time.
