how to *ACTUALLY* stay productive (and motivated!) | 10 tips to build healthy habits & stay focused

are you sick and tired of being lazy does your cat judge you for setting goals you never accomplish do you suffer from De and this is a video for you all right ladies and Gentlemen please grab your seats a glass of coffee and class will be commencing soon hi guys I'm Sarah if you're new here and if you haven't been here before welcome to the channel I am a YouTuber a full-time softare engineer and also a cat mom a person who's working on chronic back pain right now and the person you're going to be watching for the next 10 minutes hopefully but today I wanted to share some productivity and motivation tips if you someone who's looking for a boost of motivation or ways to stay productive without having to bend over backwards to change your routine or habits so the first tip that I want to share is Task stacking and mindful location stacking it sounds very intuitive but it is intentionally stacking your tasks so that it optimizes your time something that I think has helped optimize my time a lot especially in the last couple of years of having to cook for myself and clean after myself is trying to fit in the cleaning actually while I'm waiting for my food to cook either on the stove or in the oven and even though cleaning dishes won't take you more than 30 minutes it's still unloading a lot of mental load and you release this mental load that you're going to have to have a chore or task after you finish eating your meal and this also implies in most workspaces because there's usually tasks that you can fit into other tasks while you're waiting for something an example for me as a software engineer is usually if I know I have two different tasks research and scoping and coding and testing things if it's possible I usually try to stack my research and scoping time behind my coding and testing time because I know there will be pockets of 5 minutes 10 minutes where I'm waiting for a test to run and then I have this time period where I can actually focus on research and scoping and it just helps optimize like the chunks of time that you'll need to spend on certain things and then also takes away again the mental load of having to do things in a certain sequence that might take more time this next tip is something that I think has saved my energy the most in the last year which is location stacking this is building on the previous tip good rundown of how my weekend used to look like when I was such a people pleaser is I would hop on the train over to Manhattan for brunch in the mornings and then I'd hop back on the train and jump to grabbing coffee with someone in a very different neighborhood that would take another 20 minutes I'd come back home for another 1 hour and then I would have to go to dinner I think on average I probably spent on the weekends like four or 5 hours just commuting to different places and lately I've been asking friends if they want want to come to Brooklyn ever of course no pressure If they don't but more often than not I actually find that they want to come to Brooklyn cuz there's a lot of cool restaurants in the area that I live in and they're always saved on their like restaurant list somewhere and it definitely isn't always practical like you don't want to be the person that's always asking people to come to you I honestly feel like this is just a tip for people Pleasers because when you're a people pleaser you always want to meet people where they are at and not where you're at or even in between another way that this helps me is sometimes I have tasks that can be scheduled in advance and if I know know I'm going to the office one day I might just schedule something near the office on that day so a good example is I've been doing physical therapy which I don't know if I've told you guys but I have severe back pain from working a desk job for the last couple of years and I go to physical therapy twice a week now I schedule it always before my work time and so I'll go to physical therapy I'll go to work and then I'll come back home and this really really saves me cuz it takes me 40 minutes to get to my physical therapist 40 minutes to there and then 40 minutes back home because I can just go 40 minutes to there 10 minutes to work and then back home I don't know how much time that saves me okay the next tip is from this book everyone talks about this book productivity gurus a lot of YouTubers I watch my fam talks about this book I love her and if you're not a reader you can look up just a synopsis or summary I feel like people have drawn so many like infographics about what James Clear has written in this book one of the things that I realized sometimes I subconsciously do but now I'm more actively doing is making it obvious and that means making just habits obvious building good habits is so important for staying productive and motivated because that is what keeps you going and especially when you're super busy you'll really appreciate having good habits in place so you don't really have to think about doing the right thing another way this helps me be productive especially as a content creator because my mind isn't always on like autofocus for content is I have a camera corner and when I first moved in because I wanted the place to be so clean but always Stow my cameras away in this little cubicle and I found myself filming videos a lot less or finding it very hard to film videos because out of sight out of mind I'd always forget to film things or to bring my camera anywhere and so now I've actually carved out like a camera corner where I have my cameras and I also have my DSLR on a tripod so that I see it I know it's there and I know it'll be very easy to just pick up when I want to film videos another good example of this that actually happens at work is there's something called like the Google 15 which is similar to like the Freshman 15 where you gain 15 pounds your first year in college cuz there's so much free food people are gaining a lot of weight going into these big big big tech companies because there's just so much free food the biggest thing is people were eating bad free food so chips sodas sweets and different things like that they know that people reach for things that are easiest to grab and easiest to access so they implemented out of sight out of mind and instead of putting like sodas on the main shelf where you can see it right when you look in the refrigerator they put it on the lowest shelf and on top of that they now have this like frosting over the bottom half fridges so that you don't even see the bad foods it's there and it's still the same quantity and the same selection of things but now that you don't see it most people don't think to go grab it and then same with the snacks they put the bad snacks at the bottom like the unhealthy snacks at the bottom and then they put like bananas and fruits and everything in your clear line of sight so that when you walk into the micro kitchen the first things that you see are the healthy things and I think this on a whole statistically reduced the consumption of bad processed foods like chips and sodas by like 30% or more and that's just a really great example of how there's small things that either build up like good or bad habits even the way that you structure the layout of something it'll severely impact what habits you build subconsciously this is a tip that has given me so much more understanding of myself and my habits and behaviors and what I should be doing with my day which is knowing if you are a night person or a morning person I used to think that to be the most productive form of myself you had to be a morning person but I feel like so many people preach waking up early but it's not talked about that being a morning versus night person is actually partly genetic circadian rhythm which you guys have probably heard which is like your internal clock is affected by your chromosomes this impacts your chronotypes which is your circadian breath pre preferences and I read up this article chronotypes can change so you can slowly become a morning person if you were a night owl but there's an element to whether or not you're naturally inclined to be a morning and a night person and so having this understanding really affects how you can schedule your day because some people work out better in the mornings but some people cannot work out in the mornings for the life of them because it just sets them off on the wrong foot and lately I've been on my like physical health journey I do physical therapy and I also started training um because I really want to get my Fitness in check and I think I've been seeing good progress in the last couple weeks but when I work out in the morning super early I realize that I end up crashing around 5 because I've consumed all my energy in the mornings and when I work out in the evenings I actually have more of an adrenaline rush that pushes me through the evenings and I don't have the urge to drink coffee at night as a result of course this is not always 100% true because your preferences can also change depending on external stimuli so if the weather's nice you'd want to do things during the day versus at night and different things like that can impact your Arcadian Rhythm this other tip is actually like a string of different tips which is the 1% rule with different personal cues the 1% rule which is also from Atomic habits the idea that if you do 1% of something every single day across a year's time or across more time it'll accumulate which is a great concept I really resonate with it and I think it's so true that doing 1% of something does help improve it but I feel like no one ever teaches you how to get out of that slum here's some of the things that help me so the first is V izing what you're going to do often times when I'm in a little bit of a slump and I end up getting distracted and doing something like scrolling social media for too long I end up vocalizing whether to myself or to James or someone else around me or to my camera if I'm filming a video the times when I'm just lazing around and I really want to do something and I know there's stuff on my schedule the more I think about it the less I want to do it like the more I just want to stay in bed and like R around but I'll say something like I'm going to get up in the next minute and go film a video or I'm going to get up and finish my taxes Which tax season is coming up so you guys better finish your taxes on time I used to have this heavy phase of believing in manifestation when I was in college and I still believe in it but I think there's certain elements within manifestation that help you bring things to life but when you vocalize something it puts it at the Forefront of your mind and you also hear it back yourself like you hear back something that becomes more real when you put it out so for a lot of C career goals I think it's beneficial to vocalize your intentions something that we do at work is occasional career chats with my manager he'll ask me what I want out of my career and what I'm hoping for in the next year and it can be anything from a promotion which I'm working on it or more leadership opportunities or more this and that and when you put something out into the universe other people are also more aware of it it could be Placebo but I've heard other people talk about this tip before too so I think it does help sometimes the other times when that doesn't work is doing the two-minute rule which I learned from another friend who was in med school and basically it's just allowing yourself few minutes to do something this has been said so many times but the hardest part is starting and so when you get yourself to start with the intention of just doing it something for a short duration of time it's much easier to start because your subconscious understanding of like the startup energy is so much lower so if you're a student or someone who has like a big project or task to do a good example of this is telling yourself you're just going to study for 2 minutes you pick up your book just to read for 2 minutes but then what happens usually is you end up doing it for longer because the 2 minutes passes pretty quickly and now that you're starting to do something you have the momentum to keep going like a physics concept you'll just keep I took both AP Physics and I can't believe I don't remember this concept that well but those two tips are actually what allow me to do the 1% Rule and actually get stuff done that pushes me 1% more towards my goal the next thing I'll try to explain is understanding the difference between good busy and bad busy I like to kind of categorize my busyness in good busy and bad busy because the same way that when you work out you need to do pushpull exercises to exercise different parts of your muscle and the same way your brain is wired to be busy in different ways the way I like to think about good busy is good busy is something that is stimulating for you whether in your physical or your mental health it could be some form of Wellness like going to the gym and exercising or seeing friends and socializing which is a mental stimuli the way I think about bad busy is these are things that take up your time that don't necessarily provide any sort of immediate positive feedback loap for you these could be things that tire you out like going to work or filing your taxes or even editing if you're a content creator if you do something that is good busy for too much it will actually end up stressing you out and be a bad busy and it takes a a lot of your time in a bad unhealthy way the older I get the more I realize I have a limited capacity for socializing so if I have more than three social events in a day it ends up being a bad busy for me because I realize that my mental energy is exhausted my physical energy is exhausted and I come back home being so tired yeah I personally think having a good understanding of oh we have a guest lecturer with us is there anything you would like to say Mr Lu sington he does this thing where he breathes really loudly don't worry we've checked it out and he's just like that another good basic that you guys probably know for me is Pottery like finding an artistic Hobby and a creative passion that kind of like stimulates you in a different way um I think it's always positive so yeah that leads us to the next tip which is having a second space and I only really heard about this concept in the last year for me you guys probably know that now I have a second space which I'm very happy about which is the Pottery Studio and in the past whenever I used to feel super stressed or exhausted I'd be in the same space nowadays when I feel very uh unmotivated to be doing the work at hand I actually just end up going to the studio because I have access to it as a student and even if I'm not hitting the goals that I had for that day like if I wanted to finish editing a video but I'm having creative block I find myself naturally gravitating towards the studio and ending up building something and clearing my mental load a little bit even if it's the grocery store or the park or just somewhere that you like to go when you feel down a second space is always healthy for your mind I didn't want this video to be too long but I did want to share one more thing which was say positive things about yourself this means being able to celebrate wins and share wins is always a good thing when I first started my YouTube channel I never wanted to share anything like even the small things like when I got my first thousand subscribers everything um I found it so hard for me to like add it to my story and share it with people cuz I didn't want to come off like I was trying to boast about anything but I think having the ability to say I have confidence in myself is very important being able to have a positive Outlook really really leads you to it that was so much and my camera and my this thing died in the middle so I had to refilm part like literally this whole second half but if you've made it this far thank you for watching let me know if you guys have more productivity tips I want our little Community to share advice and tips with each other so if you have any let me know in the comments below and one last thing I do want to make this like a continuous series like I haven't done sit down videos in so long I used to do it all the time also I was going back and forth on like what to name the series I don't know and I don't have a name for it yet so please let me know if you have suggestions let me know and I'll see you next time ladies and Gentlemen please grab a seat grab a class of coffee and we'll begin course this soon grab a seat coffee and we'll start class soon all right ladies and gentlemen grab a seat and a cup of coffee because class will come in soon

Channel: sarah pan

Views: 170,971

Keywords: sarah pan, how to stay productive, productivity tips, how to stay motivated, 10 productive habits, 10 healthy habits, healthy habits to stay productive, healthy habits, productivity, how to stay focused, motivational video, motivation, productive, how to be productive, productivity and motivation, how to get out of a slump, focus

Id: QXCmirNKej8

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024