Productivity Academy Live Q&A – Episode 60

Join us live each week at www.productivity.academy/live and get your questions answered by submitting them at anytime right here: www.productivity.academy/questions. You can watch the video for the past episode recorded on November 22nd, 2018, above, or you can review the transcript below.

In this episode we talked about:

• What are good examples of productivity?
• How can I deal with stress, time management, and productivity during the holidays?

To find recommended tools and other great resources, check out the Productivity Academy Resource Toolkit: https://productivity.academy/resources

Hey, it’s Adam with the Productivity Academy. This is episode number 60. And today it’s going to be a pretty short one. Today is Thanksgiving and before I go out and do a little bit of a turkey trot with my wife, and then we go meet up with some friends for a good afternoon, have some food and just hanging out, wanted to talk about a few quick productivity-related questions in areas and one of those today is about good examples of productivity, which is kind of interesting. We’re going to get into that it might not be exactly what you think.

And then a little bit about holidays, right? We’re well today’s Thanksgiving and then obviously we got Christmas coming around the corner and then new years and it can be a really stressful time for people and I think that there’s a few good ways you can get started right now to help you come out the other side ready to go instead of kind of kicking yourself in the butt and saying that you know, it happened again, you know, I got stressed and overwhelmed and I didn’t meet my deadlines and all that.

So before we started doing that though, just want to say if you haven’t yet you can join below for those of us are those of you watching live thank you. If you’re not watching live you want to and you want to ask questions live, you can click down on the Facebook group below and you got to answer three questions to get into the group. But if you’re into productivity processes, automation, any of that sort of thing that’s the place you want to be.

Also, if you’re catching the replay on YouTube, you can click subscribe and stay up to date on obviously these as well as other productivity, process related questions and app reviews, all that sort of good stuff. So let’s get into it. The question today was about good examples of productivity. I think this was really interesting because I don’t want to get into like a really detailed analysis of you know, here’s a typical like economic model of productivity. That’s not what I’m hearing about. That’s not what I do. But I think it’s more important that you understand yourself and what you’re in examples or what it might be to you.

So a big one for me is that when I feel or when I know I’m being productive, it’s when I do the tasks that I have assigned myself. And that sounds really simple. But that means that I’m kind of narrowing in from both sides on, you know, I don’t have too many tasks leftover, which meant I probably did a poor job job of time management or of kind of assigning tasks to myself, as opposed to delegating, or getting rid of some, and then I’m not also left with that, like, well, I don’t have anything to do, I feel like I should be doing something. Okay. So I think that that’s a really good sign. When you have that you’re said, I’m going to finish it 4pm today, you know, maybe finished 4:10 or 4:15, your, all your tasks are cleared off and you’ve got that feeling of completeness. That’s a very good example of being productive.

There’s a pretty another obvious one for me, and I think a lot of people and that’s having less stress. Okay, I think when you’re more productive, and this goes hand in hand with time management organization it brings down your stress level. And this is something internal. I think everybody understands what it feels like to be stressed for themselves. But this is an example of the output of productivity is you lower your stress levels. And then along with that is that feeling of forgetting something, or like you’re, you know, you’re not sure if you’ve forgotten something, but maybe you have, I think, once you tend to get rid of lower those feelings, right? It happens from time to time.

But I know when we get busy, you can get in that zone where you’re constantly feeling like you’re dropping the ball or you might be leaving a something on time something like that. So lowering that dealing with those is a good example of productivity.

Something else it to me as being okay with not doing everything. I think that this is really important that you know, when you get to a point or you’re very productive, you’ve got to be okay with not doing it all. You can do the high level stuff yourself. Whatever it is you got to get done, you can automate a lot of stuff you can delegate hands off to employees or partners. And do you need to be able to delete, okay? And if you’re not doing these things, or at least one or two of them, then, you know, I really would question how productive you are. If you’re trying to do everything yourself, you’ve got to build that framework where you can get some of the stuff handed off or off of your plate, because there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to do it all.

And then lastly, I think a really good sign is when you’re doing a review, and hopefully you’re doing some sort of review, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, you can see the progress that you’ve made, okay, instead of just doing things and being productive, I mean, you’re being productive and you’re making progress in your goals.

Okay, and even if you don’t reach them, you know, it’s kind of the idea of aiming high. So when you look back on your maybe the last 30 days, you should be able to say, okay, I’ve made measurable progress to my goal instead of just doing busy work. Okay, I think that those are all really good, If not examples of productivity then really good indicators.

Alright so today being Thanksgiving I did want to talk a little bit about holiday productivity man how you can kind of help yourself and start to save yourself from some issues I think that one of the most important things you can do right now is to start doing a little bit more longer-term planning or looking ahead and your schedule and we know that obviously November is going to come to a close and then December’s really short month with a bunch of holidays.

And inevitably, you know, we think, oh, I’ll do all of these things and wrap up the year and a lot of times, that doesn’t happen or we end up intruding on time like vacation time or time with our family and then that that leads to a lot of stress it can lead to unhappiness, can lead to problems that you know we don’t want to deal with, right, we should be enjoying ourselves. So I think that taking the time now and if you could schedule even 30 minutes, maybe an hour into your next week after here after Thanksgiving then go through and be realistic with yourself and say what projects you know, what am I committed to?

What have I committed to others to do? And then what does the rest of my month look like have actually blocked out my time for any vacation I’m taking? Am I doing any traveling where, you know, my productivity is going to be lower than it normally would? Have I accounted for these things. What can I move around? What can I delete, and the deleting part of belief is really important. Because you should definitely leave yourself some slack. by that. I mean, you know, if you’ve got a day or two extra in there where you’re not sure what you’re gonna be doing, that’s probably a good sign that you know, all of your time will be used, because inevitably, last minute things come up just like normal and if not more during the holidays.

So I think that doing that obviously lets you meet your commitments, it’s going to let you manage your time much better. And then it’s going to allow you to really commit yourself to the other things you’re doing during this time of year which I believe is to be equally important, right? If you’re gonna want to go on a Christmas vacation or you’re just meeting up with family, you know, be there, do that with them, enjoy it, really get into it, and then you’ll be able to really enjoy that time and come back you know refreshed and ready to hit it again in 2019. So hopefully that helps. And if you’re watching, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. Otherwise I will see you next week.