Hi everyone, it's Justine. Thanks to
Skillshare for supporting this episode. Today I'd like to tackle a question that
I get quite often really: Justine you get so much done pretty much by yourself how
do you do it, what's the trick? Truth is I am all about optimizing everything in my
life. If you're new to this channel and it's the first time you see my face, very
quick summary: I own two master degrees in business which I did in parallel. I
later fast-tracked my fashion design studies, I'm now a fashion designer, I
worked in Chile so that I could learn Spanish on the job. Now I run my own
fashion label, I'm based in Berlin, in Germany. I run this YouTube channel, other
social media and I'm working on additional projects for next year
already now. So I would say I'm a productive person, yet I only have 24
hours per day, still, of which I need to sleep at least eight for my brain to
function properly and to be able to think creatively. There are people I know
who are fine with five hours of sleep... It's just not working for me,
I need eight. Especially in this past month, I've been challenged quite a bit
professionally and personally and it reminded me yet again how
important it is to have a good system, to have good habits
to safeguard your productivity and be able to stay on top of things. Over time
I worked out a system of rules and tips that are perfect for me and I'd like to
share them with you in this video, so that if you hear at least one point that
helps you improve your productivity as well this video will have been worth it :-)
First big topic: managing your energy levels on the long run. I see working
life as a marathon, not a sprint: you need to find a rhythm that you can sustain
not just short-term but really long-term. For instance in Germany, retirement age
is now 67, I still have a while to go we don't want to burn out before we retire
and we don't want to wait until retirement to start enjoying life. I want
to have fun and free time right now. Consequence: everything counts,
everything is planned in my schedule, like even filing my taxes, paying my
bills, bringing your kids to the doctor or to the gym on Wednesdays: things like
that are not officially part of your real working hours but they still cost
your time and it's not free time in which you can do whatever you want. So it
counts and it should be scheduled. Then short-term, mid-term, long-term tasks: I have
everything in my calendar, I don't forget anything. Everything is written down,
there is not to do in my head that I haven't written down... so that at night,
when I go to bed, I can safely turn my brain off completely and out of those
eight hours I get real regeneration. Then I'm a huge fan of Gmail, personally,
because it allows you to plan meetings, tasks & reminders separately. So I use
orange for the private tasks that I have to do like filing my taxes, go buy blah
blah blah, the admin stuff that needs to be scheduled. Then I use blue for fashion
label related things, red is for YouTube, purple for birthdays
etc. I keep my long-term ideas in Trello which is an app, very visual, you have
boards and on each board you have cards that you can move around, very flexible,
very visual: if you're a visual person like me you'll love it. Then I use
Evernote to keep very quick notes like ideas for potential future YouTube
videos. I just want to keep note of them. I don't want to open a new document but
I just just want to write two lines: I do that in Evernote. The advantage of using
apps is that I make a note very quickly on my phone, I don't open my computer and
the next day or the next week when I want to tackle these ideas, I open my
computer and they're synchronized so they're already there. Then when I do
decide to tackle an idea, I copy-paste it into my calendar, which means that it
gets a deadline, it gets an allocated timeslot and it becomes an actual task...
and then I have to do it. Planning, for me, is key
to stay on top of things. Next big topic: it's about controlling your inbox if
you're working on an office job, hear this out: I use Gmail. In my inbox, the
feed reaches the bottom of the page and then disappears to the next page... I let
my email sink. I heard at least six years ago that it is more efficient to let your
email sink than to archive them into subfolders in your Gmail. I tried
thinking: this is really scary and radical and what if I forget an email
and then it disappears and then I forget it forever?? This method really works. This
is how I made it work for myself. I check my emails three times a day, that's it.
Unless you're a heart surgeon or you have a clothing production being sewn
right now, that happens sometimes, there is no email reaching you that cannot
wait at least a couple of hours. "Urgent" in the topic line is always quite
relative isn't it? I'm gonna give you a concrete example so you see that it can
work. In one of my previous corporate jobs, I worked for seven different people
who always worked separately, they didn't know how much the others gave me to do
and I was the only one to have the overview. So I would get constant
requests: can you do this analysis, can you check this, can you prepare this
presentation... all for "ASAP". I had to prioritize and when I was already
working on something and not replying immediately they would send me a message
through the chat: hey, have you seen my email? No because I'm not checking my emails,
right now, I'm working right now. I will check your email later... So you see: it was
a recipe for burnout,so I had to do something about it. I addressed this
situation in a team meeting and I set rules. I said: I will check my emails
in the morning when I arrive, after lunch and before I leave in the evening. Those
are three chances you have to get your task to me, so to speak. If you
haven't done this but you have a task that really is urgent,
then you need to go negotiate with the other person, of which I'm already
working on the task, and you guys come back to me with a decision. If you sent
me your briefing by email, be sure that I have it, be sure that I will read it. I
will not be using the chat tool anymore. The important thing here is that I
communicated the way I work. You know, people push you because they don't
actually know how much you already have. If you set clear rules like: I only
read my email three times per day, I only accept meeting requests between 10:00
and 5:00 (so that you keep the rest of the time for you, to work), then people
cannot say that they didn't know and usually they are also polite and
respectful enough to go with the rules that you set. If they want something from
you, they kind of have to. One last thing that is required for my email management
system to work is that "unread" means that the email is a task, I haven't dealt with
it yet, I have to deal with it. "Read" means I read it and I answered. I never read
emails and then think I will answer later because I don't want that extra to
do in my head. If it's read then it is solved and answered, which means I can let it
sink to the bottom of my inbox. Next huge point: learning to say no and to even
decline potential opportunities that could have been great and you never know ;-)
It's okay to say no to potential opportunities. As far as I'm concerned, I
don't do more than three meetings per day in different locations, that's all I
can do within Berlin, where I live. The time after that I need for me, I need to
work and get stuff done. So any meeting requests on top of three, I will postpone
or decline. I don't do more than three. I also try to
do most meetings via video-conference (Skype or Hangout or another system), so
that I don't even have to physically go there. That saves me so much time. If
you're an entrepreneur and you have a very small team or even work by
yourself, time is gold. I have to be very very harsh in
judging why is worth my time and what isn't because I work so much by myself.
For instance, for YouTube, I get requests from brands that want me to promote
their products several times per day. At the beginning I answered: thanks for
contacting me. I'm not interested in a collaboration because bla bla bla.
Now I opened the email and I have three seconds to understand: if it's not
personal, specific if it does not include a clear question and enough information
for me to be able to reply, I will erase that email without answering. I get
requests to speak at different events, invitations to dinners, things like this.
We love a free dinner :o) but we love our time even more... and what is scarce here as
an entrepreneur is time, so I will fiercely defend my time. If there is not
a clear concept to the event, if I'm not absolutely convinced I'm the best person
to talk about it, if I don't see how it helps my long-term goals or if it does
not help me spread the message that I carry about the fashion industry, I will
decline that invitation with no regrets. I'm especially picky when it's an event
that requires traveling to a different time zone because I get severe jetlag.
Again it's just me, I know people who don't feel jetlag and I really envy
them... but for me traveling to plus or minus five hours throws off my
productivity completely for several days afterwards. So I have to be very careful
about that. A good tool to help you prioritize what is important and ignore the rest
it's the so-called Eisenhower matrix: you might have heard of it already.
Important, urgent: 2 axes. You want to focus on what is important and urgent
you want to ignore what's not important and not urgent. Ignore that completely, let it
sink. Keep time to plan projects, the big things that matter for later and try
to minimize the little things that are urgent but not really essential to your
long-term goals. Next huge point: I categorically avoid multitasking.
Multitasking does not mean switching from task to task within a day, it means
literally performing different tasks at the exact same time. For instance:
checking your emails while you're in a meeting room discussing something else
with real people. It doesn't work. If you ask me, multitasking is a killer for
productivity, it doesn't work and the brain does not work like that. So when
I'm in a meeting, I am fully present, my phone is off
and away (unless I'm a heart surgeon). When I'm working creatively - so I separate
creative brain and business brain because I have to do both in my job - when
I'm working creatively my computer is away so that I'm not distracted by the
business tasks that I have on my list. And even within the day or within a week,
I find it really hard to separate and to jump back and forth between business
tasks and creative tasks. I find it hard to work on more than three projects at
the same time so if I have more than three going on well there are some
projects that are not going to be worked on this week and they will get clearly
allocated time the following week. And that's alright too.
In French we say "you can't be watching the oven and working in the mill"... freely
translated! (On ne peut pas être au four et au moulin). Next big thing: work/life balance. That is such a personal concept,
in my opinion. I find it so hard to say I work from nine to six and I do nothing
during weekends. When I started, coming from a corporate job, I tried to stick to
fixed business hours. It was so stressful that I eventually gave up. Now I use a
more flexible approach: let's say my goal is to work from 9:00am to 6:00pm. If at 6:00pm
I'm in the middle of researching for a new video I will finish. It might last
until 8:00pm or until 10:00pm but I'd rather finish that block than stop in the
middle and have to resume and get back into it the next morning. It's less
efficient than doing it in one block. Or if it's 4 p.m. and I just finished a big
block and I'm feeling tired I can also call it a day and that's ok too. So I do
more flexible working hours. Weekends... weekends are tricky. Most people around
me have employed jobs, they don't often work weekends and especially
when I started I had to jump in & do things on weekends all the time. And
every time, I felt miserable, guilty of being a poor time manager buhh. Now I give
heads up to my friends: look, you can come and visit, you're welcome, but be aware
that I will have to work for x hours on Sunday. On Sunday, I change rooms, do my
thing focus on a computer, then I turn off the
computer again and I resume my weekend and my social activity. So I even
geographically separate weekend vs. work and that's a lot more natural.
So I do work on weekends, sometimes, quite often, usually not Sunday and Saturday
but either/or... that happens quite a lot. But on Monday morning, I might sleep in
while all my employed friends have to rush to their 9:00 a.m.
weekly team meeting ;-) So work-life balance really is a personal thing. If yours is
to work six hours per day, seven days a week, or ten hours per day but just three
days a week, you do you. It's your call and only yours!
Next thing, absolutely essential: preserving your free time, your play time.
Play time means when you're not working and also not doing admin stuff or
cleaning your house. I mean actual free time when you do nothing if you want to,
or something that really makes you happy: reading your book, planting things in
your garden, meeting with friends, etc. Things that you do really for free just
because you like them. I find personally that I can really push myself well to
perform business tasks under time pressure but it does not work for
creative tasks. If I sit down in front of a paper, stopwatch, give myself two hours
to come up with something, all I get as a result will be a creative block, 95%
chances. It just doesn't work. I get my ideas when I'm doing something else, somewhere
else. So I cannot control my creativity but I can make sure I preserve time for
it, time for my mind to be able to wander
freely. That's what I mean with preserving your play time. And if you
need to schedule that in your calendar to make sure that you don't put meetings
and tasks on top, then do it. Keep that time really free, for you to
reload your batteries. When your private life is balanced as well ( to use that
word which is used way too much), that's when your productivity will be a lot
higher when you're actually working. I've tested quite a few tips and tricks and
hacks to try and improve my productivity but I have to say the tips that I shared
in this video really work for me... but it's personal so you need to do your own
research and your own experiments. One resource that I found very helpful to
define my own "system" is Skillshare: it's a website where you can learn new skills
and they have brilliant tutorials on the topic of productivity. There's a
masterclass called "create a custom system that works", exactly my point.
There you will learn all the basics, for instance how to manage your calendar a
bit like I do with the color coding and everything. There's a class about
creating productive habits: "habit" is the key word because once you have a routine
that works for you, it is true, it's so much easier to stick to it over time.
There's even a class dedicated to managing your Inbox, if your job involves
a lot of emails. Skillshare is a membership-based website where you pay a
monthly fee and that gives you access to all the classes: may it be marketing,
photography, fine arts, illustration... whatever you want to learn. We're talking
about less than $10 a month for an annual subscription, absolutely worth
the investment. Skillshare is sponsoring this video so if you want to try it out,
you can get 2 months of membership FOR FREE by using the link that I put in the
video description. Now I would love to hear how you do it: what is your secret
trick to be more productive? Please share so that in the comments section, we can
all benefit from each other's experience, experiments. Failed experiments are valid
contributions as well, please share your experience :-) I feel like after an
organization video like this one, we need some inspiration so I will include (here in the
corner and down below in the description) a video
about my top 10 favorite creative websites, which means beautiful images in
eye candy all over. Don't forget to subscribe to this channel before you go
watch something else so that I see you next week again, in the next video. Until then
take care, bye!
