Productivity Academy Live Q&A – Episode 63

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You can watch the video for the past episode recorded on December 13th, 2018 above, or you can review the transcript below.

In this episode we talked about: 

• How to be productive without stress

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Alright, we’re live. I’m Adam with Productivity Academy and welcome to the weekly Q&A number 63. Today is 13th of December we’re marching steadily on towards Christmas and got a little interesting story about today but we’ll get into that in a minute what I’m going to do today’s be talking about productivity without stress. I think this is a really good and actually fun topic given that Christmas is approaching and things usually start to kind of, you know, bunch up and stress us out around this time and then a little intro story about what happened with my own planning today and kind of stress and how that worked out. But real quick if you’re watching live and you got any questions you can always pop it into the into the comment bar there I’ll check that out and answers we have time.  

If you’re watching the replay, thanks for watching you can come join us in the real world productivity group by clicking the link below. Got to answer some quick questions and then you’ll be in. Just want to make sure you want to be here in your instant productivity, process, automation, all that sort of good stuff. So let’s get into it. Let’s talk about productivity without stress, okay?

Are you going to always avoid stress? Or is there some magical way to reduce stress to zero? No, that’s not going to happen. But it’s managing it and Okay, and finding the appropriate levels that work for you. Some people, for example, have the ability or they like working with deadlines and they like having little pressure I think most of us do.

But then there’s that very level some people kind of take the ready, fire, aim approach towards things and they’ll get moving and put themselves under that stress but deadline or the book and event space things like that and then they plan and then others of us maybe just a deadline is enough when we don’t want to, you know, do certain things but that I think is the first part is understanding how you handle stress and what things kind of caused that problem for you so, today I had a fun one, I got to do a great interview. I just got off a live interview for a podcast episode with Liam Martin with Time Doctor and I had that in my calendar.

Speaking of poor time management, and so I had that in my calendar wrong, and I thought it was yesterday. So it turns out that was actually today, obviously, that caused a little bit of stress. But, you know, the part that took over was planning. All right, which I think is one of the most important parts of this because I do my daily review, even though I recognize it yesterday, I was able to move things around this morning because I had the reminder, hey, you messed that up, you know, you need to make some time and you’ve got to do the q&a, you need to do the interview, you’ve got these other things going on.

So sitting down and being able to do that planning was really helpful and you can then take this to the larger idea of well, you can lower manage your stress levels, especially in you know, the holiday season or when you have less time by sitting down and doing that planning and that might be a weekly thing. It might be your quarterly review.

Again, it’s the, you know, the daily review is always very important and helps you catch mistakes or issues. And then during that, you know, eliminating and delegating, I think a lot of times we get a lot of stress put on us, because we’ve said yes, or we have all these tasks to do. And what we actually need to do is get better about delegating, okay? And that depends where you’re at what your position is, if, you know, you’re what you’re doing, you could delegate to a VA, maybe you have an assistant, do you have a partner, you know, do you have automation you can bring into this to help you out and then deleting some things, what’s truly important, what isn’t and understanding how to do that.

And that is part of the planning process. Okay, because you can say, okay, have all of these things. What’s one of them’s actually or which ones actually need to get done. Which ones can i delegate and which ones can I delete, okay, and then getting better about saying no, in the first place, if you recognize if there’s something that’s really not important, or it’s not something that needs to be done right now, you say hey, let’s put this off till next quarter, or bring this up next week, whatever the case may be.

Secondly, I would say on this is that time management obviously plays into this, if you again, are not prioritizing, you’re not planning very well. And then on top of that, your time management isn’t very good. That’s when you know, you’re going to really feel the pain because maybe you’ve got too many tasks, you don’t have the time to do them, and you don’t know how long things are going to take you and then you start getting into that overwhelm mode.

Okay, and that’s where it can be a good time to just take a minute, five minutes, 10 minutes and do that planning again and say, okay, realistically, I have three hours and I’ve got these five tasks, which one is the most important, okay, and then get to work on that. And then the next one, and then the next one. And while you’re doing this, look at your distractions, you know, as is it bugging you that you’ve got Slack open or that you have a messaging app or that people are sending you messages somewhere, close those down, right, especially when you’re feeling kind of overwhelmed or stressed out don’t worry about it, get that email shut down.

If you can wear some headphones, do whatever you need, and really focus, okay? because now you’ve taken the time to do the planning, you’ve taken the time to manage your time, get rid of those distractions go to work, do what you can guarantee you, you know, this stuff really does help your stress levels and, you know, addressing the issues don’t ignore them.

This whole process is about, hey, understanding what’s on my plate, how can I deal with it and then dealing with it and by doing that, you generally are able to deal with stress a lot better instead of saying you know, just not going to look over there at all this you know, mountain of tests or anything like that because that’s not going to help you, it’s not going to help your team is not going to help employees or anything like that.

So hopefully this will be helpful for you in the holidays check real quick for some extra questions but I believe that is it for today. That was a really important one that I wanted to touch base on.

Alright, it looks like that is it so this is going to be a very short q&a but I appreciate everyone watching and again if you’re watching the replay, you can come join us live. The link is in the description below or you can just hit subscribe and stay up to date with these as well as app reviews and anything about productivity, process, automation. So thanks for watching and I will see everyone next week.