how to be really really really productive without getting overwhelmed

hello it's been a while i thought that considering i talk about productivity a lot maybe i could just make a video with everything all in one place oh slack hello nope sorry like a productivity boot camp for how to become more productive like i think the reason i'm good at productivity and i know like oh she's so full of herself but like i'm really good at productivity like i can tell you that for i will back myself till the ends of time in terms of productivity and i think that is because i'm actually really lazy like i hate things taking longer than they need to take like why am i sitting here doing this when i could have just got it done like it's not an obsession with work it's an obsession with like why am i sitting here for four hours when i could have got this done in one hour and then spent three hours cuddling my dog but it goes without saying that you do not need to be productive all the time in fact the definition of productivity is about doing the maximum in the least time possible it's not about working all the time like this like whole sleep when you're dead hustlers unite a hashtag with a lion in the background can die i basically believe that sometimes productivity is a form of self-care if you think of the definition of self-care caring for yourself sometimes the most caring thing you can do is reach a deadline push a bit harder when you have goals to reach and now you're being like i can do them in three days time that to me is self-care just as much as having a bath when you need to have a bath not just because you're dirty but because like you need some risk and relaxation i refuse to believe that self-care is just about relaxation because like we all need to pay our bills also important to say before i go into like all these productivity tips is this will be different for you if you have adhd i cannot stress that enough i don't have adhd so i can't see it from your point of view what i can say is you're likely to procrastinate a lot more um you're likely to find it a lot harder to prioritize and this is just a generalization based on symptoms of adhd but i think that's really important when i like sit here and i'm like here's how you're being more productive like i'm not up against that what i will say is i would say i have had the most love for these kind of like tips from the adhd community because they're all about organizing visibility and prioritizing so that you can get things done so that was a huge ramble which comes as a surprise to no one but we're gonna get into some productivity tips and change our lives and might change our lives i just mean like just be like a little bit better a little bit better every day that's nice that's nice it makes big change okay so first things first the plain truth is that we all need to work and when we're working we're better off like working smart so being productive efficient effective which means we're going to have more time to do more of what we love whether that is like more working or more playing that being said on the whole like working smart thing i don't buy this whole like work smart so you don't have to work hard thing first of all off second of all like working smart is hard it's hard to be able to get systems in place to be able to work smart and work effectively and kind of like get to know yourself well enough to know when you need to push when you need to hold back all of these different things so i feel like yeah sure like work smart that's all about like productivity effectiveness and efficiency which we'll go into but ultimately at the end of the day that isn't easy like it's work is always going to have an element of like hardness to it and i feel like this online narrative of like do something you love so you'll never work a day in your life it's just such a shambles and shut up like grow up we all know that even if you're doing something you love and in fact if you're doing something you love you'll probably burn out easier you won't know when to stop you're so emotionally attached to it that you're probably gonna drain yourself so much easier but like it's creating this expectation that work is gonna be fun and like i do think that we as a generation i don't know literally i don't know how old you are watching this but i do think as like a like kind of like gen z millennials we've kind of dropped this idea that we have to work super super hard um all the time for like 30 years to like move up and only stay in one career and like all of these different things but ultimately this expectation that we're gonna like absolutely love our work i think is just if we have that in our heads we're setting ourselves up for failure but that's a lot deeper and we don't need to go into that today um right lads tip number one the life changing the one the only stopping doing a to-do list and i know this sounds counterproductive i know it does i hear you having a list of all the things you need to do with absolutely like no prioritization metric that is going to be overwhelming every single time you do it you have to both reach a deadline on a big project you're doing for your boss and you need to clip your toenails why are they on the same list we are rejecting the to-do list so i've always done this thing where i split up my to-do list basically i take an a4 like lined notepad and i'll write out quick tips tasks projects and my schedule so that for each day i do this it sounds insane it's not insane you're gonna spend that time thinking trying to remember like what you have to do to prioritize anyway so you might as well write it down properly once you think about it you realize how ridiculous it is that we're writing to-do lists that are like shopping lists so to talk you through it the quick tips are things that take you up to five minutes so i'm talking like check slacks message manager about annual leave i'm talking clip your toenails those are up to five minutes then you have tasks which are like five to 30 minutes so this could be review a report that someone else is sending you so it's not you it's not taking a long time but it would take a chunk of time to go through it and then projects are like the big boys like these are probably going to be split into a few tasks so if you need to prepare a presentation for your boss this can be split into like planning the structure doing the research fleshing it out reviewing it like all of these things you can like break those down if you spend your monday morning writing out your master to-do list for the week i promise you you're already going to be 10 times less overwhelmed because one of the biggest issues we have with like procrastination and feeling like you can't get on top of things and feeling like you just have like 50 000 things to do is because it looks like you have 50 000 things to do and as soon as you have it written out like that and say with the project you've then looked at your week and you've been like oh well tuesday morning i actually have a few hours where i don't have meetings let me just block that out in my diary time blocking to to put that in and you just instantly have this visibility over what your whole week looks like that is life i cannot tell you how life-changing it is because there's just visibility is one of the biggest things one of my top tips with this is to make sure that you always say you do your like projects then break that down into tasks underneath it because otherwise a project is always going to feel so big and a project is only ever an accumulation of tasks and tasks are only ever an accumulation of quick ticks so you can start breaking things down so you know when you've needed to start a project for ages and it's like looming over you and you're feeling super stressed about it it could be your dissertation it could be a big report you need to do for your boss it could be a client pitch whatever your work is or student hood is you know when you spend that first session just like getting to grips with it and just being like oh it's not actually that big it just needs to be like all of these different things you're going to be doing that at the beginning of every week and i promise you it will change your life i love this technique so much that i got so fed up of using like double page spread notebook planners that i went to design myself literally just design myself one that split it into the page that i write out every day and then if you don't know i posted it on my instagram story and everyone went a little bit wild and was like sell them and i was like you do not encourage grace to take on more things like i have no self-control i have not a single bit of self-control when it comes to any opportunity like if there is something that looks shiny and fun and i'd enjoy it and it would make me money i'm i'm an addict anyway so i did that this is not a new business i cannot stress enough how much this is not a new business however i did decide to do not one not two but three designs and that was because i decided that it would there are just lots of different people in this world like i'd like a funky planner but then i know that um ben from accounts is gonna want his lovely navy blue cloth bound planner with gold writing and kim kardashian west is going to want this that matches her skincare line so here we are as i said no self-control but today was my first day using this planner quite frankly might be the best day of my life is this not the best thing you've ever seen so basically just to take you through it to give you a deep dive we've got quick tips here we've got tasks here we've got projects here we've got schedule here and then we've got three non-negotiable tasks i'll get done today which i'll talk about in a second and then we've got one habit i'm keeping today the atomic habits um thing if you haven't read atomic habits read atomic efforts um but basically just just the small changes are what make the big changes right so just like tiny little things every day stop thinking that you need to change everything down your little little bits are going to make the biggest difference honestly having this to do this today best day of my life and then just a quick whistle stop tour of the rest of it here's the contents we've got forward how to use getting to know me yearly planning monthly planning weekly planning daily planning and notes um i just didn't want to make it over complicated like there are so many planners that are like asking you how many shits you've taken that day it's not necessary i don't want that i just want an effective way to be able to plan my things and then there's like a productivity self-evaluation because it's really really really important to know what you do best rather than working against it and then we've got like mind maps and stuff but the majority of the planner like 250 pages is just your weekly and daily planning so that's good we love her i basically just decided to set it up for pre-order because a the amount of people that said they wanted a planner the stock would have cost 300 grand 300 000 of queen lizzie's pounds and i also don't want to wait because it's only like a little passion project i don't want to get inventory and then it create waste and everything so it's going to be on a pre-order from the 30th of august until the 1st of september so my second big productivity tip is three non-negotiables i showed you it in the planner but basically every single day stop getting overwhelmed stop it every day just think of three things that if you did them they would make that day a success again i think we think too big and we set ourselves up for failure by being like i need to do this and this and this and this and it's like of course we need to do more than three things a day of course we do but there's probably three core things that actually if you did nothing else that day and did those three things that would make a real difference to whether that day is moving you forward so they can be working out they can be finishing a proposal they can be finally booking that doctor's appointment you've needed to put for ages they can be any of these things what i would say about them is make them realistic but also don't make them ones that you can take off the mockingjay don't make them something that you're going to be able to take off within the five first five minutes of your day as well because come on one of the reasons i love this technique so much is because it allows you to kind of make every day a success like even if you're super overwhelmed or you're you have a pretty much a whole day of back-to-back meetings and you feel like you're never going to get anything done three things three tiny things it makes all the difference because otherwise i feel like we do half of that because we're so overwhelmed aiming to do more break it down stop setting yourself up for failure three things okay tip number three is time blocking i would sell my soul to whoever created the time block i don't know why i'm still doing this as if i am in the hunger games time blocking is the most effective way to plan your time when i put my daily schedule up on instagram on my instagram story every day everyone's like when did you block out this time this morning or maybe earlier in the week where i'd done my to-do table and i'd seen a big project and i'm like where am i going to fit this in this week because i know it needs to be done this week but currently it's not scheduled in and i will find a free two hours and literally block it out as if it's a meeting but time blocking is based on the kind of principles of like autopilot and task batching so understanding that if you're like constantly jumping from your emails to a task to a quick tick to a project you're never really going to get into the flow of it like you're never really going to get into autopilot by creating these time blocks you're allowing yourself to get into autopilot and to get into the right headspace and to not feel like you're running around like a headless chicken all the time i think it's also really important in helping you decipher what parts of the day you need to be really concentrated for because i think if we think that you need to be concentrated for the entire eight hours of your workday you're physically not going to be able to i know you think you are but even say when i was studying for finals even if i was doing a full day in the in the library like time that i'd actually have my head down would only be like six seven hours and that was like over a 12 hour library day so i really think that you think you can spend more time concentrating than you actually can and you want to know that actually like some of this is like light work and some of this is deep work which will be the times where you really really really get in get concentrated and do your work um so for example this afternoon i have two three calls and they're at two three and four so they're in my calendar for those times i'm not gonna be that it's not gonna be head down concentrated at that time but i need other blocks so i have like a block for filming this i also have a block for doing one of my projects it it just starts to like make sense and the reason the to-do table kind of like feeds into this is it gives you really clear visibility of what you need to block for because those projects you're going to need to block into your week i think one of the reasons we become so overwhelmed is because we know we need to do all of these things but we don't know when we're going to do them and you need to just iron that out and you just need to be able to allow your brain a mix of light work and deep work within the day otherwise you're literally just going to turn into brain soup you're setting yourself up for phoenix you cannot expect to be able to concentrate all the time you need to be able to give yourself breaks number four is something that is not going to be for everyone but if you can do it is setting email alarms email time blocks rather than checking your emails throughout the day i think there was a study by like university of california irvine irving that said that for each distraction it takes you 27 26 minutes on average to get back into something so if you constantly have your emails popping up it's gonna disrupt you and you've got to not be surprised because you know that's gonna happen obviously there'll be some jobs where you do actually need to check your emails every hour so for the first 10 minutes of every hour do that but i think having them constantly pop up i really think that if you can avoid that then you really should because otherwise you're just like working on something and you're like oh i'll just deal with this oh and you just never fully get into it and then you're never able to really get into the flow and do your best work you know i'm right number five is actually being aware of how long tasks take you i think we think that tasks take us a lot less time than they actually do and it means that you're always going to then try and fit more into your time blocks or into your day than is doable so again when i'm posting my schedules up on instagram that is based on what i know i can do in what time and i very rarely stray from those and i know that that like i'm not perfect at work in any way but i do know myself and the work i need to do and how long it's going to take me really quite well and that's been one of the most important things because i cannot stress enough how much if you keep setting yourself up for failure by planning too much in your day and then constantly missing your targets for self-esteem for morale for productivity it's just so bad because you're constantly going to feel like you're not doing enough or you're failing and actually if that's continuously happening no the only way you're failing is you're failing and planning effectively because you know that you can't get all of that done in a day and now you're putting it in your diary to get it all done in a day and then you're shocked when you don't do it for the fifth day in a row like engage sorry like really tough love but this is what i tell myself the whole time if i'm constantly getting annoyed about the same thing change the way you do it if you feel like you're bad at this i would recommend spending a week or so kind of monitoring how long things take you so if you think that usually actually taking composing a quick email will take you five minutes you're probably gonna find out it takes 10 to 15 minutes instead of five minutes especially if you're like towards the end of the day any of these things just start noting down how long your tasks that you spend a lot of time doing take you and i think in no time when you actually have like a better awareness of how long things take you you'll be far better at planning and each morning when you're like what are the most important things out of the things i'm doing today and then planning them in your day you're going to have a lot better awareness of how long things are actually going to take you and you're going to stop putting in a 15 minute break before a call that's probably going to run over by five minutes anyway and you're probably going to be a bit drained you're going to stop putting something in there that's exactly 15 minutes and actually takes you longer another thing that's kind of along the lines of this is my next point which is taking breaks i know this sounds ridiculous it sounds both self-explanatory and it sounds like you've got your lunch break or whatever at work but i think that we really really underestimate how much we can get drained especially from doing like deep work or continuously just like typing away and working for a bit i do this like really really unhinged and quite like sociopathic thing which is i set myself a 10 minute timer to read because that actually takes me completely out of my headspace and just like takes me away from my work so much that i can then start again in that 10 minutes and of course if you have space for a longer break like it completely depends what you're doing but it is highly effective in just understanding when and how long you need breaks for so if you have a two hour time block and it's actually going to take you two hours do not schedule something for right after that or make sure it just ends just with like a little 15 minutes i think we think it's more productive not to take breaks but actually we end up doing a lot less lower quality work and a lot feeling a lot more burnt out and frustrated and like cutting corners and all of this when we don't take breaks we think it's good because we think we're pushing ourselves through and i'm the first person to give this advice and not take any of it um but i think that's really really really really really important i'll especially if i'm like really passionate about something or really excited about a project or i'm close to a deadline i'll work with some on something for hours and hours and hours um and then i'll really start to lag and actually the best thing to do would just be to take a 10-minute break but you just try and push through but you know the right thing to do is just to take a 10-minute break um so i think that that is really important i also think i completely understand it obviously completely depends on your line of work when you can take a break like obviously you're not going to really want to be sitting in the office like with your novel out um but just go sit in the toilets like if that's a problem just like go sit in the toilet for ten minutes no one's gonna ask if you're doing a huge obviously if you're close to a deadline it goes without saying that there are times where this just can't be the case and you do just have to like plow on but i think most of the time there is space for understanding how long you can work without a break and in putting things in there and planning once again not to set yourself up for failure okay so if you're not sure on this i think the most important thing to ask yourself is how long it takes you to lose concentration on a task and understanding that this will be different across projects tasks and quick tips so for example i can probably work on a project as i said for like an hour and a half two hours but quick tips if i'm blitzing through all my quick tips because it's so many different things i can probably do like an hour tops it's gonna get a bit exhausting going through all of these different tasks after that point so then you can time block with that in mind the most important thing for you to take if you take anything out of any of these tips that literally no one asks for is to work alongside yourself like do not work against yourself if you can only concentrate for x amount of time if you're better in the morning or better in the evenings like any of these things stop working against yourself and start working with your tendencies in mind because otherwise it's going to be ten times harder once you admit that actually like oh no this is the way i work best and start working with that in mind rather than against that life-changing next tip is to make your own deadlines a lot of the time particularly in a busy period at work you're gonna have 23 deadlines on one day like it's going to be in line with the end of the tax year or in line with the end of the quarter or like whatever it might be and like that is obviously such a recipe for overwhelm what are the most important things you can do is actually giving yourself deadlines instead so for example i know i have a hectic week next week so if something's due next thursday no no no no it isn't it's due this thursday and i know that sounds pretty self-explanatory but like uni was the first time i really really really got this because it would so many of my tutorials would always fall on the same day like i'd have a jam-packed thing of tutorials so i'd be like i have 10 000 words due on thursday and in my head then i was constantly doing all of these things no you have 2 500 you're on the friday before then you have 2500 due on the monday then you have 2500 doing you know just like actually spacing it out to be able to like assign yourself a deadline and you can take time blocking into this too so setting yourself the deadline and then making sure you have enough time to block with that deadline in mind then you're like with no external factors this does make sense rather than i think a lot of the time we're like this needs to be done by the hair and we're like there's actually no place for that to fit or it could be done a bit earlier and then we could get this done next tip is focus enhancing apps if you were here in the uni days you know that focused forest is my best friend um first the app where you plant trees for when you're focused and you can't use your phone in that time or you kill the tree and it's life-changing use it use things that will help you use technology that's good we love technology that's good even though it's probably stealing our data and selling it to elon musk for legal reasons that was not comment about forrest i actually don't know if they have any link but i'm just a joke next tip okay very close to being finished we have three small tips left number one turn off your notifications i know it sounds drastic and obviously don't turn off your notifications if you're a pa and you need to be answering someone all the time but you'll check them all at the beginning but honestly not being completely controlled by whenever things just pop up is so important because remember that 26 minutes that you get distracted for every time you pick up something else we're not allowing ourselves to do that just turn off your notification or at the very least put your phone on do not disturb in the workday second last tip commit to tasks stop multitasking i know we think it's important but commit to task commit to meetings just commit you'll get it done in half the time it will be far better you won't feel like you're always doing a thousand things at once of course we sometimes need to multitask of course when i'm in a meeting that's clearly become quite useless for me of course i will start multitasking but i feel like we have this idea that we need to be doing 53 000 things at once and it actually just compromises everything so just taking down the multitasking where you can productivity over busyness comprehending and then the final tip to do your to-do table at the end of your working day so before your next day you know when you're like oh i didn't get to this i didn't get to this i didn't get to this channel channel it straight into your to-do table because otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to start the next day without that form of urgency of like all of these different things and you don't need to start your day with urgency no one wants to start the day with urgency so say i'd finish today and i've done all of these things and like this is just the beginning of the day so what like 20 other things will come up like here then before going home she's at home before leaving the office tomorrow i'll do my one for the next day and then just when i open it's just so nice you arrive at work the next morning you open you're clear then you can just create three numbers one two three around the first three you're gonna do time to block them into your day chef's kiss we're all happy we're all over achieving and we all tie our self-worth to our productivity for clarity not condoning also the only way i know how to exist so get it right so i hope you enjoyed this video as i said just wanted to make sure there was everything in one place i highly recommend not trying to do all of these things at once because once again then it's just about like we have these sprints of trying to be really good at self-care sprint's trying to be really good at productivity just pick a few of them like the three non-negotiables or the to-do tables or time blocking and just just try and work those ones in there gradual slow and steady wins the race i never believed the hair and the tortoise when you think of the hair in the tortoise it's obviously ridiculous like obviously the hair would win no are we not are we on the same page here because i feel like that anyway slow and steady does win the race and i have a passion for being more productive so i can spend more time doing what i actually want to do let's laugh have a great day and remember it's not all about productivity but when you're working you might as well be doing it well and we all have goals to reach okay bye okay bye [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Grace Beverley

Views: 574,615

Keywords: gracefituk, flexible dieting, bbg, new makeup, must haves, intermittent fasting, vegan, weight loss, how to, grace fit uk, what i eat in a day, full day of eating, oxford university, entrepreneur, sophia cinzia, flossie, olivia neill

Id: mN2Tr5BY3Kw

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022