Welcome back to The Growth Booth, episode number 66, where today we are talking about productivity hacking. Again, this is the second episode. This is the sequel to what we started last week. If you missed last week's episode, you might want to check that out: episode number 65, where we started off sharing 15 of my favorite productivity hacks.

In this episode today, I'm going to be sharing 15 more proven tactics to help you get more done in less time. Now, I think everyone struggles with being consistently productive, but consistent productivity often leads to better quality work, greater output, and as a result, achieving your goals so much faster than otherwise would be possible. So, I want to work through another set of 15 ideas here that you might be able to use. My hope from this is that you can pull out maybe just one or two of them to start implementing and playing around with, because I think the payoff for doing that for you could be huge. 

The first one that I've got is what I like to think of as a productivity morale booster, and this is giving yourself a shot of energy. It's like giving yourself a booster, essentially. What I like to do here, and I do this from time to time, is to choose three things that have been kind of on my to-do list for a while. They might be three things that, collectively, I could get done in the space of about 90 minutes, and I'll set aside 90 minutes in the afternoon and I'll just knock them out. This gives me an incredible sense of satisfaction. It's not about how good the output is. It's about getting them off your list, getting off that weight out of your backpack, if you like. It's about practicing and strengthening the habit of getting things done. That's a simple little one that you can use. It's more of a morale booster than anything else. But again, identifying a few tasks that you've had on your to-do list for a while, things that you've been thinking about, and just knocking them out and getting them done. 

The second tip that I've got for you here today is about automation and templates and this one is huge. What I like to do here is list out all of the tasks that I do on a regular basis and then design a system or a process or a template or a combination of these things to accomplish a better outcome from each of these types of items or even never, ever need to do them again because I'm putting a system in place. For standard operating procedures, I like to use the likes of Google Docs, and I just create a Google Doc that's got "Step one: do this. Step two: do this. Step three: do that." There's no real rocket science or magic to that. Loom videos are also great, and sometimes I'll use a Loom video. Loom is just an app that you can install on the Chrome browser and it can be used to record the screen, so you can record yourself doing something. It's a free app, and we'll include a note to Loom in the show notes over at thegrowthbooth.com. You can use Loom to create a video showing how to do something ,and then if you wanted, you could have someone take that video and turn it into a standard operating procedure, or that video could just be your standard operating procedure. I think the real power here though is identifying tasks that you do repeatedly and putting systems in place that will either completely eliminate them so that they're done automatically or by someone else, or to simplify them so that you can do them so much faster next time around. 

The third tip here is about having more energy and focus because if you're able to operate where you are in an energetic mode, you're focused even just for three or 4 hours, you'll get so much more done than grinding through 8 hours in a state of low energy. One way that I've found to get more energy and focus in my day to day is to dedicate some time to relaxing and destressing. It just so happens that for me, one of the ways that I do that is through exercise. That's when I can disconnect from what I'm doing and just focus on something else for an hour or so. I do this most days, but it's not the only way to do it. You could do it by going for a walk in the morning. Some people like to do it through meditation. You need to find out what works for you and what can put you in an energetic and focused state of mind and try to work that into your day. 

Physically recharging is the fourth tip that I've got here that's important. This can include exercise, it can include eating healthy and sleeping. Most people get way too few hours of sleep each night. That's an easy one that you can work on just by trying to get to bed a little bit earlier. I'm a morning person, so in order to be able to get up early, I need to get to bed at a reasonable hour and that's a big one for me. 

For recharging physically, the food that you eat also has a massive impact on your productivity. When you get these spikes or drops in blood sugar, it can really affect your mental stamina, so avoiding processed foods and avoiding incredibly sugary foods and instead focusing on trying to eat low glycemic foods, high fiber foods that keep your glucose levels steady. Some people like to avoid too many carbs for breakfast, especially not simple carbs. I'm not going to get into a whole deep dive into food and diet here, but just some things that have worked well for me are basically avoiding overly sugary foods and avoiding foods that have been processed too much and trying to eat more natural foods. 

Recharging emotionally and mentally is another one. I think happier people are more productive. So what can you do to get into that state of mind? Happiness really is a state of mind. It's something that to a large extent you can control, and on a mental level of that you've got things like meditation, like reading. I know people that like to do puzzles, to mentally decompress, drawing, sketching, coloring in. These types of activities can quickly allow your brain to recharge and put you back in your most effective state of mind. 

The 7th hack that I've got here for you today is to understand what your most productive environment and noise level are. This is something that I've spoken a little bit about in the past. Not everyone likes to work in a dead silent office. Some people like to work with loud music going on, some people like to work with people buzzing past them. I think that for me, I'm a mixture of these. Sometimes I like to be working in my office where it is quiet. Sometimes I like to be working in my office where I've got music going in the background. I'll get some music going. Sometimes I like to be out in cafes, and in Buenos Aires, we've got dozens and dozens of amazing cafes that I can just take my laptop down to and work from. It really depends on what I'm doing. You can use the likes of workfrom.co to discover different workspaces and read comments about others. Rainycafe.com is a place you can get good soundtracks for playlists. I also like to use YouTube and Spotify for this. I think, again, you just have to figure out what works for you. Sometimes I like to go to a cafe so I'll have the activity around me, but then I'll put my noise canceling headphones on and I'll listen to my own music so I'm not being affected by the constant buzz of sound, but I am in a new environment and sometimes that's refreshing. I think figure out what works for you and probably it's going to be some variety and mismatch of different things at different points in time. 

Also, try to figure out when is your most productive time of the day and lean into that. Don't try to force yourself to be productive when your body is naturally tired. So for me, I'm a morning person. I can get good creative work done in the morning, but if I had to do something overly creative in the evening, then that would be really difficult for me. Instead of trying to do that, I design my day in a way where I'm getting a lot of the heavy lifting done in the morning. 

Avoid decision fatigue and you will be able to increase your willpower. Willpower will deplete with every decision that you make, and you're going to make thousands of decisions a day. Some decisions are going to be bigger depleters of willpower than others. I think one way that you can limit the number of decisions that you need to make is by having fewer things to focus on, by just having one or two projects to focus on at a time, that can make a huge impact to decision fatigue. 

Eliminating distractions – so distraction costs a lot in terms of not just money, but also missed opportunity. I think it's pretty easy for the most part to eliminate distractions, at least to get started in eliminating them. You can make sure that you're not distracted by social media. You can make sure that alerts are turned off. You can, not just on your phone, but on your desktop as well. You can make sure that you're not diving into your emails five or ten times a day. Maybe you could just check them once in the morning and once in the evening. You can make sure that your phone is silenced and you don't get interrupted in certain strategic blocks of time where you really want to get more things done. I think there are some easy wins there for sure.  Another way to eliminate even more distractions is, again, staying focused on one particular task or objective or project at a time because the more you've got, the more noise you're going to get coming in from all different angles. 

In terms of time management, one of the most effective tricks that I know, and this is similar to the Pomodoro technique, so if you're familiar with that one, you're going to understand how this works nicely. It's the 55-5-55-25 hack. This is where you work for 55 minutes, you take a five-minute break, you work for another 55 minutes, and then you take a 25-minute break. So the total there is 2 hours and 20 minutes. The idea here is that after 55 minutes of work, you are going to get a break. It's either going to be a five-minute break or it's going to be a 25 minutes break, and then you can repeat that cycle. If you were able to repeat that two or three times a day, you'd be amazed at what you can get done. Part of the power here is also building on what we spoke about in the last episode, which is using a timer. So if you've got that timer ticking down, you know you've got 55 minutes before you even start the 55 minutes, you're going to be deciding what you're going to do and you're going to be making sure that it's something that you can complete or partially complete in a 55-minute block. You're going to have a firm objective. You've got a time deadline, and then you can just go for it and see what you can get done. 

If you're learning something new, then there's another ratio that I like to use and it's basically study-action-action. So for every ten minutes that you're studying, you spend 20 minutes working or executing what you've just learned. This is a great way to overcome any overwhelm. Make sure you're not getting confused because you're taking in small amounts of information, you're then using it, and when you're using it, you're cementing it into your own knowledge base. 

The 13th tip that I've got there for you today is to learn what's necessary and do that. So coaching, if you've got the opportunity to take any kind of business coaching or coaching for whatever it is that you're trying to do in life, that's one of the greatest hacks of all here because your coach can give you a personalized plan versus a one-size-fits-all approach. Your coach can give you a plan based on your personal situation, but even if you don't have a coach, you can still apply this by carefully focusing on only the necessary and eliminating fluff. So again, this is about taking deliberate decisions and deliberately deciding, "This is very important, I need to learn this and I'm not going to focus on that." When I'm doing any kind of project planning, I typically come up with a big list of tasks or things that I'm going to need, and then I go through that list and I eliminate the ones that I think are not absolutely mission critical. That's kind of what you're doing here. You're eliminating things that are not mission critical, and you're focusing on the things that are. 

The 14th tip is about learning with intention. What I like to do here is to set three intentions, and the first one being, "Here's why I'm reading or watching this thing that I'm reading or watching," "What I'm looking to get out of this is", and "I'll know I've gotten what I need to get out of it when such and such thing happens". So when you learn with intent in this way, you're giving yourself a firm objective so that you know when you've learned what it is that you're aiming to learn. It sounds obvious, but so many people just kind of read a book without taking anything from it or go through a training course without really internalizing the core ideas. So next time you aren't reading a book, think about this. What are you trying to get out of it? And when will you know whether or not you've got that thing out of it or not? 

The 15th tip here is about learning from your actions. Dissecting past projects and writing like a post -mortem, a review of what happened, about the successes and the failures, even from incomplete projects, if you can do that and take notes, it's almost like journaling but it also serves well for next time when you come to a similar project. This is something that I do after big projects. It might be launching a physical product. It might be launching an educational product. I'll come back and I'll write notes about what went well, what I enjoyed, what I didn't enjoy, what I could do better, a better job of next time, and I find that works really well. 

Now, to wrap this episode up, I've got two bonus tips, and I'm also going to share with you five of my favorite books on productivity and getting more things done. So first, the bonus tips. Scheduling personal time: I think it's important to create a hard end-of-day deadline. If you ignore it and allow your work to expand in your personal life, then generally quality of your personal life will tend to suffer, at least that's what I've found. I set myself pretty firm finish times each day, pretty firm start times. In my case, it helps that I've got young kids because I need to be there for them, helping them, but it also keeps my life nice and balanced. So scheduling personal time is important. 

The second bonus tip is to practice daily. The key is to start using as many of these techniques as possible and as immediately as possible and begin to build new habits. They say that it takes 66 days to build a habit, so you need to practice something for 66 days for it to be built into your subconscious and to be a default action. Even if you can identify just one or two of the different tips that you like the sound of here today and build them in then focus on them and deliberately implement them for the next couple of months, and you'll probably be amazed at the kind of results that you can get. 

Now, to wrap up this episode, I want to share five books that I've taken a lot from in terms of productivity over the past few years. One that I read probably a decade ago now, is The One Thing, and that book dives into the importance of focusing on just one thing and the danger in focusing on multiple things. It also gives you guides to how you can plan and line up that one big goal that you've got with the daily small tasks that you need to get done on the way to getting there. 

Another book that expands on this idea of focusing on one thing is called Deep Work. This is one that I read relatively recently and I really enjoyed it, and it talks about how with just a couple of hours of really focused work in a day when you're in the zone, that's more valuable than 8 hours of just sort of going through the motions. 

The 12-Week Year is another one of my favorites, and we've got an episode all about the 12-week year in The Growth Booth. You can find that over at thegrowthbooth.com, and that's about how you can do four planning cycles per year and divide each planning cycle up into a twelve-week block. 

Getting Things Done is a classic of time management, really easy to read and lots of good tips and advice in there. Atomic Habits is another great book about building different habits and routines into your life which will ultimately allow you to get more done. 

I hope you found this episode of The Growth Booth useful, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, episode number 67. We'll see you there next week.