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Hey everybody. It’s Adam with Productivity Academy. Today we’ve got a few questions we’re going to go over. You can probably read the title, wherever that might be where you’re watching. First, just wanted to say if you’re new or you’re just watching this and you haven’t yet, you can subscribe. If you’re watching this in YouTube, of course, it’s easy. That’s pretty obvious. I think everyone knows you just click on Subscribe down there somewhere.
Also, the link to this; productivity.academy/questions. You can find that in the video description. You can go there and ask your question any time during the week or whenever. If you have a question about productivity, productivity apps, time management—anything like that—you can just head over there, pop in your question. It goes into a form and then I can go through those and then those are what I start with for every show, and go through here and answer those and talk about them. Also, if you’ve got any questions and you show up live and you can type your… It’s originally Live on Facebook. You can ask questions while I’m talking and I’ll do my best to not get super distracted and look at that, but I will try to answer those.
Anyways, let’s get started. What I had seen originally was some questions about boosting productivity and the difference between your best, awesome days and your worst days and some things about that. Let’s actually start with, “How are your most productive days different from your least productive days?” So this is obviously going to be pretty personal, but I think there’s some commonalities here. So, for myself, my most productive days, the big differences are that I stick to my habit, to my plan. So for me, if you’ve seen me talk about this at any time. I bring it up a lot, but daily review, okay? I do my morning review. Right now I’m in the middle of using the Bestself journal, but whatever it is; to do list or your own little journal. Whatever you have. Or maybe you literally sit down with a piece of paper and just write through your tasks and maybe look at your calendar.
On days when I do that, even when I’m not having a good day; I’m tired, I’m feeling overwhelmed or my head’s not in it. That generally makes my day much better. Then, the days when I skip that or I’m just kind of … It’s rare now but I’ve had days where I ignore that or wake up late and I just try to get things done. Once I start doing that, my productivity just goes down, because I feel overwhelmed, I’m not aware. I’ve maybe missed things and things just kind of fall apart or you just feel disorganized and that’s just unmotivating and doesn’t really build that momentum. That is probably the biggest difference between my most productive days and my least productive days.
Another difference, though, is that I also, I guess it’s just kind of how I do it for myself. I’m more productive up front. Okay, and I say that instead of saying I’m more productive in the morning, because I know some people, when they start … Some people may say, “Well, I’m an afternoon or evening person,” so they do a lot of their work then. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily the time of day. It’s just when, in your work period, you’re most productive.
I like to front load my mornings. I do my morning review and then I dive in to a lot of tasks and get that done and build that momentum that then carries me through the day to get done. Either, I know how much I’ve gotten done or I’ve made a lot of advances, which means if I want to keep working on those, I’ve already got the momentum there to do it. But also, if I want to do something else or take a break or do something kind of more strategic or higher level, like reading or learning about something, then I feel good about that and I’m not nearly as stressed about my other work that needs to be done. As if I had not stayed on top of things earlier in the day. That’s me.
Let’s see. Then, the other question was about, “How do I boost my productivity?” Without getting into super specific tips on this, because I think it totally depends on where you’re at, what you’re doing, what works for you. But something like, again, the daily review or a weekly review in this case, or even now a monthly review, can be really effective. So, what you might add to that weekly review is to say, “Okay, what did I do over the last week and what’s been the most effective or what gave me the biggest gains for the least amount of work?” Then, “Just what worked well and how can I expand on that or change it?” Or, “What are the things that I thought were going to work well and didn’t?” There’s a bunch of different ways to look at this. Like, “What did I think was important at the time but turns out, I spent hours on it and the results were this much, when I spent 30 minutes on this other thing and the results were huge?”
I think that’s a really good way to approach it, and I kind of take this from a business standpoint and apply it to productivity in terms of the 80/20 rule. Where are you getting the largest results for the least amount of input or work? Then saying, “Okay, how can I do that with my own personal time or my productivity?” Just saying that that can definitely be applied and get you good results, so if you do that on a weekly and monthly basis, you can just continue to boost your productivity as you add. Over time, you realize what’s giving you those results and maximize it. I know for myself, it’s led to some really good changes. Even better than that, I realize now if I keep this up, over time, again, you just get that incremental growth and you boost your productivity over time. It’s not that you’re going to double it every week or something, but over time, you’re just adding to it. Time and time again.
All right. Hopefully, that helps. That’s the end of the questions for this week. Pretty short. Again, if you’ve got any questions, you can always go to productivity.academy/questions and the link is in there. Go over there. Any questions about productivity, productivity apps, time management. Any of that stuff. It’s all fair game, so let me know what you’re thinking about in terms of productivity, and we’ll talk about it here. Thanks for watching!
