Ep. #128: Motivation Monday: My 5 Best Tips for Increasing Productivity

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike from muscle for life and welcome to another episode of my podcast. This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed motivation Monday. Yes, I know. So creative of me. What can I say? I’m just a genius. Seriously though, the idea here is simple. Every Monday morning I am going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead.

See you then. Because it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it. And I hope that this series gives you a jolt of energy and encouragement to go ahead and do all of those things. Things that you want to do. So if you like what you [00:01:00] hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment.

Have you ever struggled with the idea that no matter how busy you might be, you’re just not getting enough done that too many minutes of your days are being squandered on? Productive activities that you’re going to eventually just wind up flattened under the tonnage of all the work that you have or that you want to do.

If you are nodding your head, you are definitely not alone. I have been there myself. And in fact, research conducted by Microsoft found that while people worked about 45 hours per week on average. 17 of those hours were spent unproductively 17 hours per week. That’s a tremendous amount of time. If you look at it, if you expand it, that’s 68 hours per month.

That’s 884 hours per year, 36 full days of wasted time per year. Imagine what you could do with [00:02:00] those. Wasted hours. And I’m not talking about just doing more work necessarily either. You could read about 60 books. You could write your own book or two in that time. You could learn a new language, probably become pretty fluent actually, or you could work out every day or just have more time to spare for your family.

And even if you are not that bad, even if you’re not one of the millions of people out there that are frittering about Third of their days away, chances are that you do have some room for improvement. I know I do. And it’s something that I work on fairly consistently, which has allowed me to become far more productive than the average person.

And in this podcast, I want to share my five. Best for easily and effortlessly increasing productivity. If you do these five things today, you’re going to see immediate results. And if you make them habits, then you might be surprised at just how much more you can get done every week. So here’s the first one.

Stop checking your email so much. I basically try to spend as much time. in my email as [00:03:00] possible said no productive person ever. I’ve known, and I’ve spoken with quite a few scarily productive people. And one for one, they talk about doing email, like they were performing surgery. You wash up, you don your scrubs, you put your game face on, you cut probe men, then you get out.

On the other hand, Many horribly unproductive people are hopelessly addicted to email. I swear they would mainline it if they could and research backs us up. Actually. Studies show that knowledge workers spend upward of 28 percent of their time every day, just waiting through their inboxes.

And the problem here is that email is a diabolical time waster. It’s the easiest way to feel productive without Actually doing anything all that important. Most communications just don’t need to be answered immediately. People can wait. Now, spending too much time in your email inbox is one problem. And another one is starting your day with it.

And the reason why this is an issue is because when you start your day with email, It prevents you [00:04:00] from planning and prioritizing your time and tasks for the day, which I’m a big believer in. Instead, what starting your day with email can do is it can set you up to react to whatever other people want you to do with your time and attention.

It can basically get you working on other people’s ideas and goals and not yours. So remember that every minute that you spend. Doing one thing like email is a minute that you spend not doing something else that could be far more important. There is always an opportunity cost to whatever work that you do.

And that’s why I believe that working off of a list of clearly prioritized tasks is far more important than just having a list of things to do. So this is implied, but What I recommend is that instead of starting your day with email, start it with laying out and reviewing what you need to get done for the day and dedicate your first block of work time to those tasks, to the things that are most important, that are most aligned with your greater goals and purposes for the [00:05:00] activity that you are engaged in.

And if you want bonus points, then schedule your email routine. Personally, I clean out my inbox. Once per day, and once I’ve finished, I really only return to it if my work tasks demand it, and I go in, I’ll quickly grab what I need, and I’ll get out before my eyeballs can lead me astray. Alright, so my second tip is to manage your priorities better, and this just follows naturally from the first, because one of the best ways to get nothing done is to try to do too many things.

You have to look at your to do list like it is the hottest club in the town and you’re the steel jawed hulk of a bouncer. So the kid with the sloppy fake ID, get the fuck out of here. The blowhard with the blowout and the fake Rolex and spray tan, back to the Jersey shore. No, my point here is you have to be very picky with what you deem worthy of your time and attention.

And here’s a little tip that I’ve learned. If you can do something quickly and easily. then you probably shouldn’t [00:06:00] be doing it at all. You can probably skip it with little or no consequences or you can probably just find someone else to do it. It’s really the hard time intensive arduous work that you know only you can do that’s going to get you closer to where you want to be.

The work that is really the highest and best use of your time. So in my case, it is content creation. It is recording podcast episodes like this, writing articles, writing books, shooting videos and so forth. All of this takes a lot of time. Only I can do it. I could outsource some of it, but the quality would decline and I don’t want that.

So this is the type of work that is always the highest priority. The work that I make sure always gets done. And that sometimes means that other things don’t get done and that’s okay. Okay. So the next tip here is to eliminate all distractions. Too many people out there, they’re just full on distracted. Who has time for deep thought or deep work when the penny arcade of the internet beckons with its clanging [00:07:00] bells and strobing lights and greasy food?

I guarantee you that if you can’t learn to work undistracted, you are never going to be good at getting things done. And I might even go as far as saying that you are never going to be really good at anything because it takes tremendous amounts of focus, concentration, and work to develop extraordinary abilities.

Furthermore, research shows that distractions make you dumber and more error prone, and that they cause you to waste a significant amount of time Simply refocusing on the tasks at hand. Now, what type of distractions am I talking about? Just the usual suspects, the things that immediately come to mind, like talking to other people or listening to other people’s conversations, wandering around mentally, doing email, watching TV, listening to lyrical music, making phone calls, sending text messages, instant messages, surfing the web, and so forth.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with any of these things, of course, [00:08:00] But the reality is you are sitting in a productivity strike zone when you’re trying to work on something while also thinking about the argument that you had earlier or flicking through your emails or watching a YouTube video or carrying on a text conversation.

Hours and hours can go by like this with very little to actually show for it. And the only way to escape the trap is to block out everything and then focus deeply and intently on your work at hand. So that means banish any digital distractions, put your phone on silent, put on noise cancelling headphones, shut your door so people know not to bother you, and so forth.

Alright, moving along. Here is the next tip. And it is create a personal routine. I don’t really know how I get everything done and how I get fit in all my workouts and get my meal prep. I don’t know. I just, I guess things just happen. I just hope for the best said no productive person ever.

I think too many people, they really just ask too much of their [00:09:00] willpower and their self discipline because they don’t realize that it’s really important. In pretty limited supply. Yes, you can improve it as I spoke about last week, but many people are starting with rather shallow reserves.

And the most productive people that I know, they all do the same thing. As far as willpower goes, they save it for the most demanding and creative parts of their work and lives. And they just. Automate the rest. And, it turns out that many of the most productive and ingenious people throughout history have done the exact same thing, no matter how creative or eccentric their work was, they robotically set about it every day at the same times in the same places and in the exact same ways.

And, this goes beyond even that, because Many of these people, they even ate the same foods. They drank the same beverages. They walked the exact same routes. They spoke to the same people. They read the same books every day without fail. And they did this for a good reason because the more their lives that they [00:10:00] just gave over to habit, the less time and energy they had to waste thinking and deciding on trivialities.

Studies show that the average person makes over 200 food related decisions per day. That’s crazy. That’s just related to food. And that’s also quite draining mentally that drains mental energy. It drains willpower and self control, and it can be completely avoided by just following a meal plan.

For example. Anyway, by automating a lot of the frivolous aspects of our day to day living, what this does is it leaves you with more mental bandwidth to dedicate to the. Truly meaningful parts of your life. And this is why people like Mozart and Voltaire and Ben Franklin and Hemingway and Tesla, they all did this.

It just, it isn’t a coincidence. So a simple place to start in building an effective personal routine is reviewing all the activities that you engage in regularly, and then applying the 80 20 rule, the Pareto principle. I’m sure you’ve heard of that. If you haven’t, it’s very simple. It is the scientifically [00:11:00] validated observation That 20 percent of the input is responsible for 80 percent of the output.

So 80 percent of the consequences stem from 20 percent of the causes. And this can be seen in all types of areas like manufacturing and management, human resources, and so forth. And you can apply it to your life. By looking at all the activities that you engage in every week and identifying the minority that are delivering the majority of your progress and success.

And if you really do that, you are going to find that those are very few in the greater scheme of things. You’re gonna find that a lot of what you do doesn’t really move the needle and in many cases may actually be sabotaging you. So the idea of course is to remove as much of the ladder as you can. To make more time for the former.

All right. So the last tip here is to manage your mood. I don’t need to cite scientific research to tell you that [00:12:00] you just work better when you are calm and happy. We’ve all experienced that. And on the flip side, we also tend to work like crap if we feel like crap. And that’s why many productivity systems, I think they really miss the boat when they focus too much on managing your time and not managing your energy and mood.

Here’s how Sean Aker puts it in his book, The Happiness Advantage, which I do recommend if you haven’t read it. Doctors that are put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster.

Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests. Far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best, not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

So if you manage your mood as carefully as your work, you’re not only gonna get more done in less time, [00:13:00] you’re going to feel better as well. And particularly important is your mood at the beginning of the day, because research shows that this has a market effect on both the quantity. and quality of your work throughout the rest of the day.

So starting off on the right foot is very important. It turns out this is one of the reasons why I personally like to work out first thing in the morning and highly recommend it. It really sets you up for a good day. So last year, I want to share 10 simple and scientifically proven ways to improve your mood.

So one, you can jot down a few good things that have happened to you every day, too. Two, you can make time to do things that you’re uniquely good at. Three, you can show gratitude for the nice people and the good things in your life. Four, you can spend time with people you like. Five, you can stop obsessing over making more money.

Realize that this is not going to make you as happy as you think. The great western disease of I’ll be happy when I have the house or the car or the boat is a Trap. [00:14:00] Six. Stop obsessing over yourself and your goals and help someone else with theirs. Seven. Watch less TV and do something productive. Stay busy instead.

Maybe with mastering a skill. This could just be a hobby. It doesn’t have to be work. Eight. Choose to be optimistic. Even to the point of overconfidence, this is much better than being pessimistic or cynical. Nine, eat something sweet and take a nap. You are going to feel better after both of them.

My little sweet indulgence is chocolate. I’ve said that many times. I like it. It makes me feel good. I eat about 150 calories of dark chocolate a day. It’s great. And 10, Take time to reflect on and savor the little wins in life and stop holding out for the big events that you hope will make you happy.

Again, there’s not very much happiness to be had in achievement. Happiness, I think, is something that you can’t necessarily pursue, but it just ensues from how you live. That I think is again, I mentioned this earlier, really dedicating [00:15:00] yourself to something greater than you making it more about the people that count on you and the people that you can serve than yourself and what you can get out of it.

So the bottom line here is a super human level of productivity. It Doesn’t require superhuman genetics or education or even superhuman levels of willpower. Anyone can cultivate this by just adopting and gradually strengthening these five strategies that I laid out in this podcast. And those are break your email addiction, identify and prioritize high value activities, work in a completely distraction free environment, build an effective personal routine, and do things regularly to raise your mood.

Hey there, it is Mike again, and I just wanted to say that I hope you enjoyed this episode, and found it interesting and helpful. Now, if you’d like to read about all this stuff as well, then head over to muscleforlife. com, that’s muscleforlife. com, and legionathletics. com, l e g i o n athletics. com, [00:16:00] because I’ve published over a million words of athletics.

free articles on the blogs, on those websites, on all types of things related to building muscle, losing fat and getting healthy new articles go up every week on both sites as well. So if you like what you read, then definitely hop on my mailing list and you will be notified when new stuff goes live. My email subscribers also get exclusive deals on my products and services and other goodies.

So there’s that. Two. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I will see you in the next one. Oh, and before you leave, let me quickly tell you about one other product of mine that I think you might like specifically my workout app stacked. It has tens of thousands of users and close to 400 reviews on the Apple store with a four star average.

And it helps you get more out of your training in several ways. It helps you quickly and easily plan out your workout routines. It gives you quick access [00:17:00] to useful tools like plate math and one rep max calculation. It allows you to visually track your progression in your workouts as well as your body measurements and much, much more.

It’s free to download too. So if you want to check it out, then head over to www. getstackedapp. com or just hit the iOS app store and search for stacked workout and you will find it.