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 29th, 2018 above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- Where is the best place to get a productivity planner?
- What is the best color for productivity?
To find recommended tools and other great resources, check out the Productivity Academy Resource Toolkit: https://productivity.academy/resources
Today is the 29th of November 2018, and I’m Adam Moody with the Productivity Academy. And this is episode number 61. So before we get going here, want to let you know today we’ve got a couple of really cool questions. One of them is talking about planners, productivity planners, journals, where to get them, what the best ones are some things around that really common question, really fun to talk about. And then also we’ve got a question that I find interesting and wanted to touch on. And that’s the use of color and productivity. So a little bit of a puzzler there we’ll get to that in just a minute.
So real quick, if you haven’t joined us yet, you can find the link below if you’re watching the replay and come join us in the free world productivity group. Got to answer some questions to get in, you know some stuff about what you’re interested in finding out about productivity processes, automation, that sort of thing, but I want to just want to make sure that you want to be a part of the group.
If you’re already in the group and watching live thanks and just saw that I think Deanna just joined us or Diana hello and we’ve got a couple other people coming in. So as we get started here too, if you want to and you’re watching this on YouTube, you can hit the subscribe button and stay up to date. You can always find a link there to ask questions on these videos ahead of time.
So with that said, let’s get into it. Alright, and the first question was talking about where to get a planner so where to get the best productivity planner or a productivity journal or a daily journal. And I think that, you know, I’ll start off with this very top again, like a lot of tools. It’s not that maybe there’s that one tool or that one planner that is the best for everybody. But it’s finding out what you want and then kind of adapting the tool to that. So I think of that in terms of like, you have a framework and then you find that tool that works best for you.
That said, I think I’m going to run through some options real quick that that will help someone who’s just saying I don’t know I just want to try one I personally use the best self journal been using it for I believe it so might be two years but a year and a half at least gone through several cycles with it, it goes on kind of a 90 day cycle, which I find to be very effective. And there’s a lot of business planning that happens that way too. And this is not a coincidence plus a lot of there’s a lot of psychology behind it, but it works really well.
So you can find the link to that and grab that they’re generally about $30 and you know, you think about that, that what would that be 30 cents a day so like almost a quarter I mean, it’s, it’s a great investment and it’s a great way to keep to set goals, keep track of goals, keep yourself accountable, and it’s pretty awesome. So I can think of a few improvements to it myself. Like I like having additional paper to do some doodling and brainstorming and things like that but overall been pretty happy with it.
And maybe one of these days we’ll get around to kind of optimizing and making my own but until that point I would say you know check out the best self journal if you’ve tried to other journals and you want to incorporate some other elements you can make your own have done that before. And I’ll have a link to that I have a post where have put my own together and I think that’s perfectly fine if you know what you want in a journal you know it doesn’t take that long to lay it out maybe in like Microsoft Word or in Google Docs and make it so you can print it out, fold it in half and you know every sheet of paper, if you print both sides, you could get one to that 1234 days if you do a daily journal lot of and that can be really effective and you can put it into your notebook. And if you’re into that sort of thing, either customizing or you’re more craft-oriented that might be up your alley.
The other thing without going now into a long list of all the journals that are out there and there’s some additional good ones out there for sure is to come join the Real World Productivity Group and joined with the link in the description and ask people their get you can get a lot of different inputs on a lot of these journals that are out there that may be different people in different fields use or they use them in slightly different ways. And I think that getting that input is really effective but to circle back to the beginning, I think that you have that framework of why do you want to use a journal? How are you going to use it? And what do you want it do for you and then you go find the journal that fits that and sometimes you have to try a few but again I would say just grab one get started with it and see what works what doesn’t and then you know, kind of adapt from there.
So anyways good question and always fun to talk about these you know, getting a new journal is kind of fun I know getting started with them can be difficult sometimes people you know, it’s like a blank piece of paper when you’ve got to start writing and you’re thinking like oh man I don’t want to mess it up for you know, but a lot of is just getting started use it journals meant to be written on scrapped stuff, scratched out goals, you know, set and changed and, you know, it’s the process, not the product, you want to just concentrate on using it and how you’re using it, what it can do for you and get in that habit. And don’t worry about well, what happens at the end of 90 days. I didn’t hit my goals. Well, you didn’t hit your goals but you tried and you’re moving towards them and you do it again. So cool.
Alright, the second question, let me pull this up real quick. And anyone watching live if you want to ask, I’ll keep an eye here on the side for any comments. Um, let’s see, where did that go?
Okay, which color increases productivity? Okay, so this is an interesting question. And I’ve actually seen this from a different angle rather than productivity. I’ve seen this from a marketing standpoint. I don’t have it in front of me on my laptop here of my Chromebook since I’m traveling. But there’s some cool charts that show like all the brands and like major brands, IBM, Coca-Cola, you know, things like that love these brands. When you I say the words you can probably think of the color if I say Coca-Cola you think red say IBM, you think blue and it’s even if I think that’s part of their motto but anyways getting into the weeds here so what I think of this is remarketing what it wanted evokes in your brain and there’s a lot of research obviously on the marketing side of the It’s been done into this and like, why does Facebook use blue and things like that. And a lot of it is blues known as kind of a calming and trustworthy color. And that’s maybe that’s why I’m wearing the shirt today.
But it turns out that actually some of that is the same for productivity. And there’s a lot of articles that that reference it, but I found the article or the original research that was done at the University of Texas and about different effects of colors. And basically it comes down to and not surprisingly, anyone who’s worked in a really boring office is you know, if you can you want to stay away from like, pure, plain white, beige, kind of brown walls and instead go for something that has some color but then again, staying away from some things like depending a little bit on gender, but things like purple and orange I think had some side effects if you will, like just in feelings a vote, but then things like blue being really good color and then let me find the other one here kind of calm green and blues.
If that those had the best effects overall just over a wide group of people in terms of productivity, relaxation and focus. And so I think that that’s a really interesting one. I’m not going to go out and paint my office entirely blue or green. But I think you can use that for things like well maybe your screensaver, your sorry, your background on your computer could be a light blue or light green or you could have something with those colors nearby you instead of just you know, happening or having like the plane walls behind you.
So I think that that’s something you can easily do and it’s a fun way to look at you know, how to start influencing yourself subconsciously and outside, you know, without having to really do anything is maybe you do paint your walls and especially if you work from home or you have your own office, that’s something that you could do to you know, improve your ability to focus improve your mood, you know, and there’s things that go into that to them like lighting and you hear a lot of people saying how much they don’t like the overhead fluorescent lighting can you change that, you know, it’s these little things you can do and really improve your workspace that then has a long-term impact on your productivity. So some really fun stuff to look into there and all provide a link to at least some articles and the original paper if you’re interested in checking that out about how color can affect your productivity and which ones are you know, good or maybe not so good.
So, alright, I don’t see any more questions. And as I’m on the road today, I’m going to wrap it up. I’m just glad that the stream was able to stay up this time instead of being cut out. So thanks for the questions. And as always, if you want to, you can get your questions in early there’s the link below. But you can just go to Productivity.Academy/questions and then that’ll get filtered in so I can have those ahead of time and answer those live and then as well if you’d like to grab the guidebook.
As far as taking your productivity up a few notches having you know processes to help you and then you hear me talking about the framework, you know, how can you make yourself more productive, you need the framework within which to put these tools to use these apps to do all this stuff. So you can get that at Productivity.Academy/start. Alright, so thanks again. That’ll do it for this week, and I will see you next time.