How to Become a Productivity Master

[Music] couldn't we all just be a little bit more productive whether you feel like you've got a pretty good grasp on your days or your life's a complete mess most of us could probably use a little sharpening up when it comes to mastering productivity at the turn of the Industrial Revolution productivity meant squeezing as much economic growth out of his few resources as possible from agriculture to fashion to masonry and journalism industries found ways to incorporate new technologies machinery and systems to increase profits and succeed in business it was about doing more with less and while the tools and systems have changed since the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 the basic concept still applies but today as millions of people are turning towards a freelance career increased productivity doesn't just mean more profits for your employer it could be more downtime with family leisure activities and time spent on passion projects the fuel productive is a beautiful thing it's what you might call a good tired the moment when you slide back from your desk at the end of the day turn down your computer put down your pen knowing that you gave everything you had to that day you got [ __ ] done what I say is I focus on helping people become more capable that's Thomas Frank you might know him from his popular YouTube channel or podcast and that encompasses productivity content whether it be like getting down and dirty with the systems or talking more holistically about things like habits of mindset basically anything that kind of sets you up for being able to better achieve your goals in life what does it take to be truly productive today from the small things we do to the larger systems we create how can we make the most of our days and what won't productivity get you how can we find fulfilment in our work without turning into automated robots at in a moment but first this video is sponsored by Squarespace every website I've built in the past five years has been with Squarespace I'll talk more about why I love them at the end of this video and how I'm able to create simple and effective websites really fast is there like a tool or a hack or something that you do when it comes to productivity that has helped you the most or that's the most memorable for you yeah it's probably downloading information be a little port in the back of my head did you get that at Staples yes yes staples experimental matrix yeah it's really good yeah so the biggest thing for me I think is not letting me be the deciding factor and what I get done because I think the more freedom you have the more self-discipline you require to actually take yourself off of the path of least resistance and even if you care a lot about the overall mission you might not always care about the individual piece that you are working on so sometimes it'll be hey you know keep me accountable I'll say as my girlfriend or to my best friend like I'm gonna get this done by this date so at the IKEA cabinet planner for research you're disgusting or I'll use a tool like beeminder which will literally charging money if you don't blog habits or if you do log habits depending on how you set it up or you know even have it acai just check-in my habits every single day so I get that little streak to encounter going up I use external systems to put training wheels on the teeter peterey bike that is my mind yeah we love we love talking about these like kind of the little things that we do like the little tactics that might help us or give us a little bit of an advantage but I know that recently you just created a course around how to develop productivity systems yeah and that to me is really interesting because that's just this the entire system it's the bird's eye view of how things are made in your life talk me through some of the most important aspects of it from maybe a to-do list or a task list to the calendar so overall philosophy here what I consider the main missions of a productivity system to be our number one to make sure nothing ever slipped through the cracks to sort of give you that peace of mind you know everything going on your life you know cuz people when they when they feel like everything is chaos then that brings a lot of stress like am I am I forgetting something right now can I relax right now or is there something that I should be doing if you know everything's going on then you have more control and then the other part of it is bringing in a little bit of that external control over your own self-discipline so for me the components are a to-do list a calendar and then a note-taking system of some sort and there's a few meta ones so I often bring in the way that you process email into this and they also bring in the way that you store your files both digitally and physically what I usually say is like a good starting point is I really like to do it and I know you use to do which is possibly even simpler I like to do this because again it's simple you can sort of divide your life up into different little buckets so I can have a project for say every class on the mat if I'm a student where I could have a project for grocery shopping I could have a project for like this UX design I'm working on and that can all be separate and I can sort of plan things out step by step within a little individualized list but then you can also have a day like today next seven days maybe even next Tullius list so you can see at a glance everything in your life that's coming up same thing with calendar you see what's coming up in your life and for me the split is are you going to it are you doing at a specific time well then that's a calendar event is it just do at a specific time but you could work on it whenever that's a to-do list or a task manager so if somebody feels like right now their life is completely disorganized and their productivity system is basically non-existent what steps should they take to go about doing it like what's the most important like set up a to-do list calendar I mean it's are there any of these that are the most important to follow along with or does the whole system need to be intact I would never go as far as to say you need to get the entire system up and running right now because that's overwhelming where is the biggest source of your stress coming from right now is it the fact that I really just don't know all that I have to do is the fact that I keep missing events is it the fact that I do not know where my files are and I keep like losing important documents I keep you know not being able to turn homework in because I can't find it what's the thing that's sort of like screaming out this needs to be fixed right now focus in on that and then just work on building that part of the system first like make a little bastion of safety and then sort of spread out from there and I good start is just bring up a document or grab a piece of paper and just write out everything that is stressing you out in our quest to increase productivity there are things that will inevitably get in our way and steer us off-track from social media to video games there are an endless amount of things that compete with our attention and beg us to procrastinate we each pick our own poison when it comes to distractions but one aspect of digital work that's impossible for most people to ignore is email email is a source of stress because there are obligations I mean it's an evil Hydra you cut off one head to take its place yeah the one thing I tell people is if you're sitting with a inbox full of like 4,000 messages that's the same as an inbox with zero messages in it because you're going to look at it get overwhelmed and close it right so you know take an hour go through the first like four or five pages and star what you know you need to reply therefore you're creating like a little second inbox for yourself and then everything else just our guide it yeah my friend Josh Milburn he recently went on vacation and said hey guys during vacation I'm gonna be going away but then when I come back I'm gonna declare email bankruptcy and then or kyv all of my emails and I was like that's brilliant I never thought to do that but if you think about it when you come back from a vacation you have hundreds of emails or I mean depending on like how busy you are or what kind of work that you do if you have even 50 emails to respond to that could be an entire day the first day that you get back to work and if you set the precedent beforehand if you let people know hey this is what's gonna happen if it's important enough they'll email you back after you get back yeah well I think another thing people have to realize is like people thrive on their expectations and their expectations are set by previous behavior so if you're the kind of person who everyone knows for applies to an email like within a day then now that pressure is on you people expect a you know snappy response from you and when they don't get it you violated their expectations and I think about the Salah the violation of expectations is probably the thing that makes people angry in the world because it is taking them out of order and throwing them into chaos in some way you know it's a threat to the way they live so if you can manage expectations by maybe being the person who just doesn't reply to every email and you don't reply super super quickly then no one cares and that's a load off your plate mentally once we've built a solid productivity system implemented all the various ways we can incentivize ourselves to work ignore distractions and tame the Beast of email we still need to understand that there's a limit to what we can do when we constantly seek to produce more work to create more profit it's easy to end up with less and less time sure our hours are productive but are we truly making enough time for ourselves and for our families paying the bills is great but is our life defined solely by work or are we finding the right balance for our physical and mental health we were talking recently about some burnout that you faced it's it's kind of the other side of productivity where it's like you can only be so productive you can only get so much work done yeah when do you know when to start taking some things off your plate I pushed myself past the burnout point for too long and when I really knew that it was an issue was when my girlfriend said I don't like how negatively you're talking about your work every time you say you want to make a video and it's more like I've to make a video you're doing too much and I realized oh yeah if I'm projecting a negative sentiment about my mission in life essentially to the person I love the most that's clearly a sign of burnout so that's when I had to take it very seriously a lot of times I think we get into this habit of thing saying if I make this decision that's forever that's my content forever it's you know if I if I switch to one video this month and take a couple weeks off then everything's gonna fall apart and the other thing is once you hit upon something that works it often seems like that's the only thing you can do forever and if you stop doing that you're dead you're gonna be in the gutter and your whole life will crumble around you and everyone will point and laugh and it's funny like if you give yourself just a little bit of space what I found is the creativity starts to come back all these things start flooding in once you give yourself space to breathe should we shake hands I think so oh thank you it's a lot of fun that much for doing it absolutely cool all right we can just get up and walk off the frame cool music plays yeah you know how it works as you guys know I like to keep things simple and I do not like wasting my time so that's why I use Squarespace have you Squarespace to build every website I've created over the past five years and I cannot recommend them enough I've used it to build my personal website my podcast website as well as my favorite website get the rock on Matt's podcast calm as you can see they're templates are beautiful and simple and they make it really easy to get your message across in a concise way also by the way if you happen to be Dwayne the rock Johnson I actually left a contact form on this website so feel free to you know message me back on that if you're not Dwayne the rock Johnson please don't use that form everybody keeps using it and it just keeps cluttering my inbox go to Squarespace comm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace comm slash Matthew Vella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain if you go check them out and use that code that I just gave you it's going to help to support this channel thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Matt D'Avella

Views: 2,353,234

Rating: 4.9428325 out of 5

Keywords: productivity, how to be productive, productivity tips, how to be more productive, how to get more done, how to do more, productivity hacks, how to manage your time, increase productivity, how to become a productivity master, how to become more productive, how to improve productivity in the workplace, how to be a productivity master, how i became a productivity master

Id: L8aRN2HgW7U

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019