Productivity Academy Live Q&A – Episode 80

Join us live each week at www.productivity.academy/live and get your questions answered by submitting them at any time right here: www.productivity.academy/questions.

You can watch the video for the past episode recorded on April 25th, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.

In this episode we talked about:

  • How do I make my to-do-list and really do it?

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

Alright, we are live Welcome everybody to Episode 80 of the weekly q&a for the productivity Academy. Be honest, I’m coming in off of a crazy week and really been putting my systems to the test and probably broke a few. But anyways been moving. So I know that there’s at least one person in the group who’s been moving as well. And so that’s always, you know, kind of a stressful time a lot going on lots of moving parts, you know, physically mentally kind of demanding.

So anyways, that said, really happy to be here today to be able to do yesterday, it wasn’t even sure if the internet was working at the new place. So it’s been that kind of a week, but I’m here and really happy to dive into some of the questions as well share some information about the productivity challenge that was kicking off today. But real quick, we’re going to get into that. I just want to say if you’re catching the replay, that’s great.

If you’re watching on YouTube or Facebook, you can always find the link to come join us live in the group. And then if you’re watching live, go ahead, ask questions, if you got them. I’ll be checking on that on the side and making sure that we get to those as time allows. Alright, so let me minimize this and get over here.

Alright, cool. So what I wanted to talk about real quick, if you haven’t heard about the productivity foundation challenge, what it is, is a 14 day challenge meant to give you that foundation, right, like the word implies a foundation and productivity. And the two major areas that are covering the challenge is the daily review.

And then starting with automation and not just talking about automation, but actually building one with you kind of step by step that you can, you can go through and add if you want, you can alter it slightly, and then also giving you instructions on how to know what you should automate in case you’re just doesn’t work for you.

Down the road, you want to automate more things, looking at how you can automate, and then how you can kind of get a feedback loop so that you don’t just have things falling apart or things that don’t work or partially work, which is really important. Because a lot of times, you know, we think, Oh, well, I can just automate it and it goes away. And I’m like a lot of processes, things like that. If there’s no feedback loop on it, you can really have some issues. And I think this is detailed that a lot of people miss.

But then coming back to the daily review, I think this is so important, whether or not you’re already doing a daily review, or you haven’t gotten there yet, or you don’t find it effective. I think both cases you can really benefit from this and seeing the steps involved, and having a really effective daily review and how this carries on in the week, the month, 90 day cycles, whatever it is you do. So we’ve got a really broken down, doesn’t take much time each day. You can hop over sign up, get started. And then it like I said, breaking down to our broken down into 14 days.

And actually, let me share this with you. We’ve got second monitor. There we go. Cool. So this is where you go, if you go to productivity dot Academy slash, well, I guess I should have that up in front of me slash foundation challenge. This is where you’re going to go, all you have to do is enter your info get started $7 access for the 14 day productivity challenge. And if you are need more information, you can definitely listen to me talk real quick, with the little dot over my head.

But check it out. I think that this is a good one for anybody, no matter where you’re at, whether you’re just kind of feeling like you want to get started with productivity in terms of your daily review in terms of automating things and really starting to build that foundation. Or if you’ve already got, you know, what you feel is like a start, but you’re really wanting to maybe dive into it a little bit deeper and maybe break it down and see what you can improve, I think for both of these cases is going to be really powerful for people. In addition to that you get a free copy of the foundation, the guide book I wrote 60 page book dives into a lot more detail and different areas and not just on the daily review and automation, but going into some team building.

And there’s a lot of stuff in there and some good bonuses as well, I don’t want to spoil that for you. But again, hop over, sign up, come join us. And looking forward to that. If you want to join later down the road, that is fine, too. All you need to do is go to productivity dot Academy slash foundation challenge. Go. Alright, check real quick and see if we’ve got any questions.

All right. don’t see anything yet. So the one I had was about how to how to really make your to do list and really do it. And I think that there’s a couple things we can touch base on here. And the way I like to think about this is a little bit like it’s like doing your daily review. You know, if you don’t have a dealer view and I guess the analogy here would be if you just have like tasks all over the place.

And you know, you’ve got some in an app here and on you know, list here and then yeah, it is kind of a mess in your and it’s really hard to keep track and understand what’s going on. So a lot of what I talked about in the daily review is trying to prioritize and trying to batch like tasks and gathering everything in right taking that kind of getting things done idea of having one central place where you can then clear things I of course, use different systems, I use sticky notes and all that but bringing it together. I think this is equally important with your task list, that you bring everything together.

And I see some people recommending that you should just have a task list. That’s like three things. And for me, I don’t think that’s practical. It doesn’t work. I never have just three things to do. But there’s there’s wisdom in that that’s where you’re going to and I start with Okay, get everything together and then prioritize okay and do the kind of the triage Is there anything here I can automate delegate delete, and that works great for your daily review and it works great for your task list.

So start getting things off it. Once you’ve gotten everything together that is you can start paring it down. And then you make your task list as small as possible. If you can get down to one thing, I think that’s great. There’s an entire book written about this called one thing. But you know, getting down to a manageable number. And then beyond that, there’s a lot you can do in terms of time tracking, I think that it’s difficult for a lot of people.

But over time, I think that you start to get kind of what’s the word I’m thinking of here. Maybe like exponential results and the sense of it’s not linear, you get better and better at understanding yourself and how long task you’re going to take or your team. And then that helps you with the entire cycle of assigning tasks and planning and understanding what you can get done.

Instead of having that constant feeling of overwhelm or you’re dropping things because you have too much to do or you’ve already you’ve said yes to too many things. And just as a side comment on this, the one thing I’m really liking for time tracking right now is this time Mueller I actually forgot if they have a name for this, so my bad but I love this thing. And I’ve incorporated it a little bit with the book clockwork that are read by Mike McCallum and he talks about in the business having you here, segmenting your time by the four DS, which would be doing deciding delegating and designing.

And I’ve got a few other things on here like learning and meetings, things like that. And I just flip that over on the whatever side I’m working on. And that way, I don’t have to go back and think about it a couple hours later. I don’t have to, you know, try to use something externally or have something guessing what I’m doing.

This has been really good and it’s not so specific that like, okay, I spent, you know, three minutes on Facebook looking for this piece of information. It’s it’s broadly broken down like, Am I doing something? Am I deciding on what needs to be done or answering a question for someone? am I working on delegating a project someone else? Or am I designing Am I doing like higher level stuff where I’m actually designing and working on my business. So I found that to be to be very helpful as a again, it’s kind of a fun side.

But anyways, um, yeah, the task list, I think there’s a lot you can go into as far as getting better about actually doing your task list. And it starts off with being aware of all of your tasks. And then from that point, starting to pare it down, and then working on your time management skills, whether that’s understanding how long tasks actually take, you may be saying no to a few more projects, so that you can get down to just having, you know, the bare minimum of tasks each day.

And then realizing that, you know, hey, sometimes there’s some things don’t need to be done. And some days, you’re going to have a lot of tasks and that this is a long term process, that there isn’t anything that you just snap your fingers and magically, you’re that person who has one task per day. It doesn’t happen like that. But by going through this process fairly simply you over time, you’ll get a lot better at it. And again, the time management part is really important, but also takes a while to get used to it.

Payoff is very high. So just kind of going into it with that understanding, I think will really help.

All right, gonna check real quick for any questions. I see Jenny is watching Hello Jenny, how’s it going?

Let’s see nothing else right now. So I’m just going to say real quick. If you didn’t see earlier, come join the productivity challenge, you can go to productivity dot Academy slash foundation challenge and actually, I’m going to post that right here.

Join the… alright, so I think that’ll wrap it up for this week. Looking forward to seeing everybody either in the group or joining the challenge. And then I will be back next week to answer more questions. So have a good one.

About the author

Adam Moody

I'm Adam Moody with the Productivity Academy. Get your productivity, time management, automation, and organization questions answered here. Be sure to check out the Productivity Academy YouTube Channel.
 

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By Adam Moody

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