Productivity Academy Live Q&A – Episode 97

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You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on September 05, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.

In this episode we talked about:

07:39 How to Focus on the one thing?

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Alright, we are live Welcome everybody to Episode 97. Alright, we are going to get started here with the productivity Academy Q and A’s it is again, Episode 97. This is the fifth of September. So first one in September. And this is good to get one out of the way for September, I think there’s going to be a week or two that I have to miss going to be traveling, going to a wedding doing some really awesome stuff I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

But if you have questions, please go ahead, you can find the links, whether you’re watching live, or you’re checking out on YouTube, you can find the links below to ask questions ahead of time if you want. And then as the next show happens, I’ll get to them. And of course, if you’re watching live, you can ask questions, I’ll check back and get to those as time allows.

So today we’re going to be talking a little bit of an update on a new tool I’m using or new to me rather, I know, notion has been around for several years and lots of people are using it. I’ve slowly moved into it, and I am really loving it. So I want to show you not just you know that it exists. Although if you don’t know about it, I certainly want to show you it, but also some real world use cases, because that’s where I find that a lot of times I have the hardest time, you know, with a new tool I see.

Okay, I know this can be neat. But how do I really use it, I want to show you what I’m using it for a couple of examples. And then a really good Beginner’s Guide to it by somebody else who will mentioned here in a minute.

And then talking about focusing on the one thing is recently brought up in the group, somebody is doing the real world productivity group, and was talking about, you know, how, you know, they feel like they’ve got a pretty good grasp of things, they’ve got a good system laid out, but they have trouble really focusing what their limited amount of time on the one thing that they know is the most important.

So I totally agree that that is an important thing to cover. So we’re going to talk about that as well. So real quick, mentioned it just a minute ago. But if you are not watching live, you can always join us live by following the link below. Come join us in the free Facebook group, you do have to answer a few questions about things like do you want to be in a group about productivity and automation and time management.

But once you pass those real hurdles, you can join the group want just want to make sure we’re a group of like minded people in there. And last but not least, if you want to check it out, and you’re watching on YouTube, you can find the link below as well to come join us. And just hit subscribe if you want to stay up to date, we’ve got these updates, as well as videos just for YouTube. Every once while we do reviews, like to obviously share new tools I’m using how I’m using them, and then updated training as well. So with that said, let’s get into it.

I’m gonna share my screen and show you real quick notion. So this is inside of mine, let’s hop over there. So this is what the way I’ve got it set up real quick dark background, you can have a light background if you want. And then the fun part is just show you what you can do, you can do just about anything. I’m going to do a backslash here because you can put it in text page, like you could just drop in a page and click on it it opens up its entirely new page to do list.

Different sorts of formatting bulleted list, you can have in line like mentioning person mentioning another page. So you can self reference, you can have tables, you can have combo ports. Anyways, I’m not going to go through all this, you can get the point, this is really flexible. So to be honest, that’s what took me a little while to get started with this is that there’s so much you can do it can be a little bit overwhelming.

So where I started off with this was taking Tiago Forte’s idea of the para. So four levels, projects, areas resources, and then an archive section. And making that really my top level. So this is what I see. And then a little bit of an inbox. And as soon as I started using this, I sent them a quick note and said, Man, I would love it, if I had a way to quickly from like my phone, add something to a designated table. If I could do that this would replace a lot of tools. But right now, there’s no real quick insertion way.

And then down here, I’m just going to remind you about what the para method how he breaks it down and to remember what goes where. And then just to show you like an idea of where I’ve gotten here, I’ve got some projects, right, whether it’s going into someone’s wedding and the travel details, working on a product launch, you know, doing a lot of this other stuff, even a camping trip.

So for me that makes sense to have it here. And then I can break it down by tags or filter them if I need to areas gets more complicated stuff, I’m responsible for things I want to keep up to date, you know, my personal principles, things like planning and review. So weekly review, trying to set up a daily planning in here and then definitely doing 90 day planning, yearly planning as those times come up. And this is important, I think I want to hop back to that real quick.

Every once while we do reviews, like to obviously share new tools I’m using how I’m using them, and then updated training as well. So with that said, let’s get into it. I’m gonna share my screen and show you real quick notion. So this is inside of mine, let’s hop over there. So this is what the way I’ve got it set up real quick dark background, you can have a light background if you want.

And then the fun part is just show you what you can do, you can do just about anything. I’m going to do a backslash here because you can put it in text page, like you could just drop in a page and click on it it opens up its entirely new page to do list. different sorts of formatting bulleted list, you can have in line like mentioning person mentioning another page.

So you can self reference, you can have tables, you can have combo ports. Anyways, I’m not going to go through all this, you can get the point, this is really flexible. So to be honest, that’s what took me a little while to get started with this is that there’s so much you can do it can be a little bit overwhelming.

If I could do that this would replace a lot of tools. But right now, there’s no real quick insertion way. And then down here, I’m just going to remind you about what the para method how he breaks it down and to remember what goes where. And then just to show you like an idea of where I’ve gotten here, I’ve got some projects, right, whether it’s going into someone’s wedding and the travel details, working on a product launch, you know, doing a lot of this other stuff, even a camping trip. So for me that makes sense to have it here.

And then I can break it down by tags or filter them if I need to areas gets more complicated stuff, I’m responsible for things I want to keep up to date, you know, my personal principles, things like planning and review. So weekly review, trying to set up a daily planning in here and then definitely doing 90 day planning, yearly planning as those times come up. And this is important, I think I want to hop back to that real quick.

And say that as things come up, I’m putting them in here because again, it can be really overwhelming to try to like move in here all at once. So what I’m doing is, as things come up, I’m starting to find out, oh, I can do this notion. So just move it over there. So for example, my weekly planning, so once I realized, Oh, I could be doing this a notion Why am I still doing this and Evernote started, you know, the next time I did it, I set it up, built a little table in there, added the link to it, started doing it there updated my calendar notification to go to notion instead of Evernote, boom, I’m done.

But I didn’t try to do daily planning, weekly planning, yearly planning, you know, quarterly planning all of that at once just doing one thing at a time, so I don’t get overwhelmed. I think that that’s a good way to approach it for myself, I’ve certainly had to do that. Because it’s also a time constraint, right? Getting this stuff.

All right, the first time is almost impossible. So hopefully that gives you a few ideas of where you could get started using this. There’s obviously a lot more to it. Let’s just go in here and come back in here and look at the area. So for me, this is a fun one to bucket list and trips.

That’s me and my wife, and just adding stuff in here like what do we want to do a lot of these running trips having a great place for that instead of just you know, in a notebook somewhere in our heads, it’s really been fun to use, as well as now it’s becoming a great tool to help me become much more organized.

And although I do like the idea that Tiago presents in terms of you know, not going too deep, you know, you want you don’t want your organizational system to be you know, hundreds of layers deep because you’ll get lost. But I did want to have something a little bit deeper than what Evernote presented me, man.

So so far, this has been great. And I’m definitely starting to transition over to notion I could see it eventually replacing, like I said, several tools. And I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t tried it yet. And if you’re not sure where to get started is a fantastic article written by Francesco who was on the podcast, man is I think it’s been almost two years now.

But highly suggest checking out go to keep productive, calm, or even just search, you know, like a Starter Guide for notion and it’ll pop up. Lots of really good stuff here. So highly suggest checking out his course just how it works, how to use it. And then you know what else you can do with the program. So great place to get started.

Give me one second hop over and see if we have any questions as of yet. All right, and then Mr. Just a minute ago. But if you haven’t seen it yet at the podcast with Tiago was published. So head over there, you can go to productivity Academy and just click on podcast. And it’s right at the top Episode 30. So this was really fun to interview Tiago forte. Again, he’s a practice labs and the guy behind progressive summarization, building a second brain and that para method.

So really enjoyed speaking with him, a lot of good stuff in there, I’m not going to spoil it for you head over there, check it out, I think you will definitely get a lot out of that if you’re into any of this stuff at all. So last but not least, I wanted to talk about how to focus on the one thing I had somebody who had recently joined the real world productivity group asking about this.

And you know, like I said, at the beginning of the show, you know, he felt like he’s got a good grip, he’s got a good decent system, you know, like all of us is not perfect, you know, but he’s got some of those working for him. You know, he’s got a few methods, he’s trying this, that and the other thing, but he’s having trouble focusing on the one thing and was looking for, you know, some some ideas on you know, I understand it’s not working for me.

So what should I do, I thought that this was a really good time to touch on it just from a higher level I wrote a while ago, a little bit of a article on that you can head over and find that you just Google focusing on the one thing to get more done productivity Academy and find it or just go to the site, and type the one thing in the search bar, and you’ll find a short article with a video on how to do that.

But I wanted to touch base on this again, and talk about this just briefly again, how do you do this from like a high level perspective down to what you actually do? So the first thing I really recommend doing is saying, you know, how do you know it’s the right thing that you’re focusing on? Right? Because if you have one thing, you better be the right one. And so something that I think we can simply do.

And I know I have to do this myself is asked myself, you know, occasionally, whether that’s daily or weekly or quarterly, you know, is this working towards my bigger goals? Okay, whether, you know, maybe it’s a quarterly one thing, does it support my yearly goals? And my 10 year goals or midterm long term? And then is it SMART goal? Right? Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it achievable? Is it is it relatable or relevant? And is it time bound?

And just saying that, you know, it’s a kind of a goal in itself, you know, that one thing, so we want to make sure that we’re going after not only that it supports everything else, but that it fits that SMART goal that, you know, it is specific, it’s not that General, I’m going to build a business, right? That’s not something that’s going to happen, there’s no end point to it.

It’s not a specific, it’s not a time bound thing. So really want to make sure that we define that, again, you don’t beat yourself up about this. It’s just being more specific when you go through this. And making sure that yes, this fits in with my goals. And yes, I have a you know, a good formulation of it, I understand what it is, it’s very, I can easily explain what it is how long it’s going to take things like that.

And then secondly, I I think that this is important to just like having a daily review, or a weekly review is reviewing right and that how are you spending your time? A lot of times we realize, man, I’m you know what, I’ve got this one thing I want to do over here, but all this other stuff is going on? Okay, well, then that’s where you start looking at him be specific and say, Okay, if I want that one thing, then I should apply the 8020 rule to it.

And I should be taking up 80% of my time. But if I’m doing all this other stuff, what is it and just start knocking them off one after the other. And again, it could be you stop doing those things. You delegate those things, you automate them, whatever it is you do, but don’t worry about well, all this other stuff is slowing me down, just take care of one of them at a time. And over time, you really can start clearing them away.

And so to make that more tangible, let’s say, we’ll use the always used social media, one, I’m spending more time on social media than I intend to Okay, then do something practical to help yourself, take your phone, put it out of reach, literally, and maybe like upside down and put it on silent. Okay, maybe the other one is I check email too much.

And this is something I’ve had to do. Okay, well, then I work with a set of tabs and like Chrome, where I pin them, right, you can make them smaller, so that they’re always open. But then my other tabs I just use for working on whatever I’m working on at that point in time.

And then I close them down so that I don’t just constantly have email, open email is not one of the pin tabs, right? pin tabs, I calendar, Google Drive, maybe to do this notion, and you know, things like that, where I need them constantly open, I’m grabbing information going back and forth. And then keeping those things out of there.

So that again, just to recap on that, it’s taking a look at your one thing. And if you’re not spending your time on that, then moving towards that by doing a regular review, I highly suggest that that’s probably a weekly thing that you do, it could be daily again, but whatever you’re doing is you’re saying, Okay, well, I’m reviewing how I’m spending my time.

Now, how am I going to adjust and once like the one thing that I can do to move towards my one, whether it’s spending more time on it, or focusing more time on it or saying I have this other area that’s detracting from it? How can I stop doing it? How can I automate it? or How can I get someone else to do it right.

And looking at it like that, again, you don’t tackle everything at once just you know, once at once review, identify what you could take care of then and that that day or that next period, and go for it. So over time, that stuff really adds up. So the same basic concept I used to free up as 115 hours in 2018,

which is awesome of just taking, doing a 30 minute review every week. And then you know, automating delegating or deleting like a five minute tasks, that’ll free up 115 hours, which was like a week, it’s it’s insane. So highly recommend you do that. And that’s a great way to make sure that you’re able to focus more and more on that one thing, especially with a limited schedule or a limited amount of time to do that.

So hopefully that’s helpful for you. And I think that is going to wrap it up for this week. That’s it. If you’re watching the replay, that’s great. I appreciate you checking it out. You can find below the link to come join us in the world productivity group. You do have to answer a few questions about whether or not you want to be in a group about productivity, time management, automation, all that sort of good stuff.

And if you checking this out on YouTube, you can click Subscribe, stay up to date with this and other videos that we put out there around the same areas like automation, time management, all that sort of good stuff. So that’ll do it for this week. I’ll see everyone next week for Episode 98