Task Fusion 360: The Ultimate Productivity Tool | The Growth Booth #86

Welcome to Episode Number 86 of The Growth Booth. Great to have you tuning in here. Today we're going to be talking about time management and a system that I call Task Fusion 360, which brings together three different elements that have proven to be absolutely essential in my own time management, productivity, and getting results.

Now, if you missed the episode last week, number 85 of The Growth Booth, then you might want to check that out before going through this one because in that episode, episode number 85, we spoke about goal setting and goal getting, which is very much the first part in this two-part series, this being the second part here today. So if you did miss out on episode number 85, make sure you go back and check that out to learn about goal setting, goal getting, the butterfly effect, and so much more.

Now, time management, time management is something that is vitally important. And I think it's worth mentioning at the get-go that different goals might need different approaches to time management. What I'm talking about here today is what I've, I think in my own mind, sort of perfected for running an online business and combining that with a balanced home life and personal life and so on and so forth.

I think time management in any kind of online business or online activity is unique in that we are faced with so many potential distractions. I mean, we've got dozens and dozens of distractions literally at our fingertips, we could open up the web browser, we could go to our email, we can look at social media, any number of different things are just waiting to distract us when we are online and connected to the internet. I think it's even more important to have a very effective time management system in place if you're doing any kind of work online, and that's where my Task Fusion 360 comes in, which we'll talk a little bit about here shortly.

I think, at the core, what you need in order to get your best work done is focus. Now it sounds obvious, but I see a lot of people as they're building online businesses floating along in what I sort of refer to as this gray zone. This is where maybe you're getting some work done, but you're sort of being dragged along reactively, if you like, by the current of life. When you're in that gray zone, often, often you might be feeling like you're working hard, but you're not achieving all that much. It's a terrible feeling when you're in that zone because weeks go by, sometimes months go by, and you look back and you realize you haven't really moved the needle all that much, you haven't got that much closer to where you want to be.

Now, this gray zone is the opposite of deep work. There's a great book with the same name, Deep Work by Cal Newport, and deep work is that feeling of being in the zone. It typically happens when you've got laser focus around what you're doing, and being in the zone is something that can happen when you're performing some kind of sporting activity, you could be cooking in the kitchen and you could be in the zone thinking about what you're doing and obviously, in the working environment as well. When you're in that zone, you can typically get more done in a 30-minute period or more substantial work done or significant work done in 30 minutes, then you could get done in eight hours of just cruising along in this horrible gray zone that most people tend to drift into.

I think a proper time management system can make sure that you're tapping into this zone, this not being in the gray zone but actually being in the zone, achieving this deep work on a regular basis. When I was able to get a time management system that was working for me, it transformed my life because my business exploded, I was able to get so much more done, I started building teams, and bottom line, just getting results. Now, as I mentioned, the system that I'm using is something that I've been working at, tweaking, perfecting for well over a decade now. I think if you start using this, if you adopt some of the ideas in it, you're probably going to find that you can get more done in 30 minutes than you could get done in four hours or more previously, so I'll talk about that here shortly.

Task Fusion 360 is really about maintaining balance, it's about increasing your productivity, but doing it with a new found calmness, it's about maintaining balance, while still giving attention to your other responsibilities. As I mentioned, Task Fusion 360 is a result of over a decade of tweaking and having spent thousands on different training materials and studies, having read hundreds of different books about self-improvement, about time management, productivity. I feel like I've been able to take something good from many of these books, but they've always lacked something. They've lacked some cohesion in what they're trying to get across. That's why I think if you can use Task Fusion 360 and combine it with what I discussed in The Growth Booth, episode number 85 goal setting and goal getting, you'll find that you can get so much more done, and it really could be transformative in your life.

I think if you are adopting the Task Fusion 360 system, then you'll be able to build a successful profitable online business in as little as one hour per day, because when you're working, when you're sitting down to build the business, you're going to be doing the things that are really going to move the needle as opposed to again, being in this reactive gray zone where you're sort of just being pulled along by the currents of life.

Let's talk about Task Fusion 360. There are three main elements, and these are things I've picked up from different places from trial and error. I find that all three of them are important to be able to be functioning at your very best. The first element is something called the 12-week plan, and this is something that I've taken a lot of inspiration from a book called the 12-Week Year. The second element is something called This Week's 10, and the third element is The Daily Plan. And again, if you've only got two of these, you're not going to do as well as if you've got three of them. In my experience, you really need all three ingredients to be using this system to its full capacity.

Element number one is a 12-week plan. A 12-week plan, as I mentioned, is based on the book called the 12-Week Year. In a nutshell, what I'm doing and creating this 12-week plan is I like to start out by identifying a long-term goal, which could be something that is 10 or 15 years into the future. I then break that down to a shorter-term goal, which might be a goal that's a one- to three-year goal, and then I break that goal down to something which is ultimately my set of objectives over the next 12 weeks.

Now, for each objective, I like to flesh out all the things that would need to be done in order to achieve that goal. So you could have multiple objectives. One might be a fitness objective, maybe you want to lose some weight, gain some muscle mass or something. Another one might be a family objective. Maybe you've got some goals, things that you want to do with your loved ones. And of course, business objectives, and so on and so forth. So you can have multiple different objectives. Once you know what these objectives are for the next 12 weeks, should be something that you can achieve in the next 12 weeks, you want to start building a list of all the tasks all the things that you would need to do in order to achieve that objective in the next 12 weeks.

So again, just to sort of recap what we've covered here, the first step is to map out sort of like a visionary goal and aspirational goal 10 to 15 years in the future, scale that back to something much shorter timeframe, one year, three years, maybe even five years, and then turn that ultimately into a 12-week objective or a set of 12-week objectives.

So I think for each objective, it's useful to use the Goal formula that I went into detail on the last episode of The Growth Booth, which is essentially: "By such and such a date, I'm going to achieve such and such a result, which I will acquire through a method and why that's important." For example, the goal could be an online business or a goal could be "By the first of November, I will make $40 per day passive income through a new niche website. This will allow me to take my family on a special Christmas vacation." That might be the online business goal, and you could replicate this through multiple areas in your life. And that's the second step is to set these objectives.

Now the third step is to write a list of action items or tasks that would need to be completed in order to achieve your goal. So with an online business, you might have things like, "Okay, I need to come up with a list of niche ideas, I need to do keyword research to assess the viability, I need to decide on 30 target keywords that you're going to want to get rankings for, I need to buy a domain name, I need to create a special logo, I need to research a good WordPress name," and so on and so forth, and you would add all of these to a list.

Now the next step, the fourth step is to identify the critical tasks. This is where you want to be ruthless, and eliminate anything that is not absolutely mission critical. So if I've got something on my list, like, "I need to create a nice logo for the website," this is something that depending on the method could potentially be eliminated. For the most part, logos don't make that much of a big difference. So if it's something that you're going to be spending time on, which doesn't make a big difference, then you can eliminate it from the list.

Now the fifth task is to assign a due date to each of the tasks on your list. So what we're trying to do here is take our list of tasks and put them in chronological order. Another way of thinking about this is what we're doing is we are developing a critical path. First, you have to do task number one in order to do task number two, in order to do task number three, and so on, and so forth. So if we're talking about building a new online business, then in week number one, we might need to come up with a list of niche ideas, we might also need to do keyword research to assess viability in week number one. Week number two might be about deciding on 30 target keywords, if I'm going to be leveraging search engine optimization as an example, okay, and then so on and so forth. So we're putting each of the tasks in chronological order.

If you've got multiple objectives, then you're going to be doing this for all of the objectives simultaneously. So you might have one objective about building an online business, you might have one objective about health and fitness, and you're doing the same thing, you're putting the tasks that you've identified in chronological order. If you don't know what the tasks are, that's fine, just hazard a guess, make your best guess. Because this is not something that's set in stone. We can come back and should come back to improving the list of tasks as the weeks go by.

So the fifth step again is to assign weekly due dates to the task. Now the sixth step is to add the action items to a 12-week plan. Now, I like to do this using a Google spreadsheet. However, you can also do it on a piece of paper. Perhaps a piece of paper is an easier way to imagine this. But what I like to do here is create 12 columns, column one on the left-hand side is for week number one. In this column, I'm going to be writing down all of the different tasks that I need to achieve in week number one, in order to eventually get to my goal 12 weeks later.

Column number two is for week number two, column number three is for week number three. Now, what we've got here also at the top of each column is the due date or when that week actually is, so maybe that week is the 4th of January to the 10th of January. That might be week number one. Week number two might be the 11th of January to the 17th of January, so we can clearly see when the window of time is that we're going to be working on these tasks and by when they need to be done. What we're really doing here, think about this as we are working backwards to create a roadmap, we know where we want to get to. And then we're saying, "Okay, in order to get to that place, we need to do all of these things over the next 12 weeks," and what order are we going to do them. We're putting a chronological plan in place, a critical path in place, to make sure that week by week, gradually, we're moving closer towards our goals. So that's step number six.

Step number seven is to go one step further and sort of build out the weekly plan. So step number six, we built out a 12-week plan. Step number seven would be to get more granular on a weekly plan. This is where you look at the column for week number one, for example, and you see that, you've got all of these things that you need to achieve. Some of them might be quite time consuming, and where that's the case, I like to go into a calendar, like I use Google Calendar, and set aside time to do that thing. I might set aside two hours to do some research, or this podcast, for example. I set aside an hour this morning to be able to sit down and film this episode. These are things that I put in my calendar in advance. Fifteen minutes of timing at the beginning of each week can save a huge amount of time when you start getting into the work of the week, because you're not wondering "Oh, what is it that I have to do today?" It's already planned for.

A couple of other things that you can build into your weekly plan are strategic blocks, and buffer blocks. Now, strategic blocks are three hours, typically, there could be less, but two to three hours of uninterrupted time, where all of your time, all of your energy is going to go into these pre-planned tasks. By setting something in stone, at a certain time, when you're going to be working on something without distraction is a great way of achieving deep work, a great way of making sure that you don't fall into this trap of this sort of gray zone of just being tagged along by the current of life.

Strategic blocks are things that you can plan out in advance, put them in the calendar, and you'll typically like to do one or two of these per week, buffer blocks or something else you can add into your weekly calendar. You might need one of these per day, maybe it's a 30-minute block of time where you can deal with miscellaneous and unexpected tasks that have come up. Maybe something's come up in your life that you need to attend to. A buffer block is a great way to do that, or a period of time where you could be replying to emails that you were not expecting to come in.

Finally, and this one here is really a luxury, is a breakout block. A breakout block is where you get three hours of non-work-related activity during your week. This is something which admittedly is harder to achieve if you're not your own boss, but if you are your own boss, then you can start programming this into your schedule and making sure you get this time to just get away from the day-to-day operations of what you're doing. I feel like if you give yourself time to get away from the operations, that oftentimes gives you more perspective and allows you, ultimately, to get more work done. So that's the first element.

The second element is This Week's 10. That's what I call it, This Week's 10. This Week's 10 is a short list of items that if you were to accomplish them would make you feel like you had a 10 out of 10 week. You would have hit all your goals for the week, and you'd be able to feel good about what you're doing. For the second element, and the third element that I'll get to in just a second, the second element being This Week's 10, I actually like to use a notebook. In my notebook, I have a page for each day of the week. Part of that page, I have noted down what this week's 10 is. So this week's 10 might be a list of, again, a few items that if accomplished would make you feel like you had the perfect week.

For me, it might be that I've achieved five hours of study on something that I'm working on. It may be that I've filmed a couple of new podcast episodes, that may be that I've achieved my fitness goals for the week, which would typically be for me 4 different workouts, 2 gym workouts, and 2 swimming workouts, and that may be it. That may be what would make me feel like I had a 10 out of 10 week. If I've got some virtual seminar or something happening, then that might be on there as well. But typically, we're talking about four or five, maybe six things, the big things that if achieved this week would make you feel like you had a 10 out of 10 week. That's the second element.

The third and final element of the Task Fusion 360 is the Daily Plan, which I also put in my notebook. Typically, each page in my notebook has two columns, the left-hand column of the page, six to 10 items that I want to achieve today, and this is the daily plan, and on the right-hand side of the page, I typically have This Week's 10.

I can see everything at a glance, I can see sort of a broader objective that I'm trying to achieve this week with five or six tasks, and then in the daily plan, that's where it gets much, much more granular. The weekly plan might have something like, "I need to get four workouts in this week to hit my fitness goals," and on the daily plan, I might actually have, "Go to the gym," as an example. If on this week's 10, I've got something like "Prepare and deliver a new workshop," then the daily plan might have something like, "Slide preparation or research" as an example. So that's how the daily plan works.

I like to start with a new page in my notebook every single day, and I just fill it up with again, might be five or 10 tasks, things that I need to get done in a day, they're not in any specific order. I will sometimes put an asterisk next to the task that is the most important. I typically like to focus on that one in the morning. If I don't get through all the tasks on my list, they can rollover into the next day, but I'll certainly try to plan things out to make sure I've got a realistic number of tasks that I can actually get through, and I'm prioritizing them.

Now, if you don't have a good time management system in place, then I would recommend that you try this one, it doesn't take all that long to set up. It's not rocket science, it's simple cause and effect. It's building as working backwards to reverse engineer what you would need to do to be able to hit your objectives that starts with seeing that long term objective of years into the future, boiling that down to a 12-month objective, boiling that one down to a 12-week objective, which is about three months, and then figuring out all the tasks that would need to be done to be able to get to to those 12-week objectives, breaking them down, putting them in front of logical order, and working them into a daily plan. It would take you probably a couple of hours to work through and set this up. But I tell you what, once it's in place, it gives you a game plan that you can follow for the next 12 weeks.

When the 12 weeks are up, you'll be able to assess where you're at. You'll be doing this on a weekly basis anyway, but you'll be able to assess where you're at and make any necessary changes. Hopefully you would have achieved what you wanted to achieve, and then you'll go back to the planning and make the next 12-week plan again.

Now, I want to share a few supplementary tactics here that, like I've said, that's tactical in nature. The first one, and this is undoubtedly one of my favorites, and I've shared this with a lot of people over the years, is the Pomodoro Technique. Now, this is a time management tactic that was created by Francisco Cirilo. I think it's very, very powerful. It's perfect for online marketers, it's perfect for anyone that's got a desk-based job, and I find it to be the ideal procrastination blaster.

Part of the Pomodoro Technique, or a big part of it, really the backbone of it is to use a timer, and that timer is your new boss. Your timer could simply be a countdown timer on a cell phone, you don't need any special type of timer, although the Pomodoro Technique is named after these little egg timers that are in the shape of tomatoes. Anyway, your timer essentially becomes your new boss and you make a commitment to following the timer.

The way it works is you start off by setting the timer for 25 minutes. You focus on a single task from the daily list. It's important to focus on just one task and not do multiple tasks at the same time. You focus on one task from your list or one part of a task from your list, and you make a commitment to finishing that task one way or another, come hell or high water, in the next 25 minutes, and you've got a timer which is counting down which creates a real urgency for you to be able to get that done.

Now, if you happen to finish that task before the 25 minutes is up, you simply move on to the next task. Don't juggle multiple tasks at once. Do one task and then move on to the next one. Once the timer goes off, reset it for between five to seven minutes. I sort of vary that, sometimes I go with five minutes if I've got lots of energy, if I felt like I need a bigger break, I'll do seven minutes. For the next five to seven minutes, until the timer sounds, again, do something that is not work-related, maybe get up, make a snack, go and sit down, have a coffee, have a stretch, watch a bit of TV, go for a walk around the block, whatever you want to do that is not specifically related to knocking out more of your tasks.

Now, this might sound counterintuitive if you're someone like me who wants to make the most of every single moment in the day, but it actually helps you perform better because it gives you a break, which you can then come back from in a more creative way. Once those five to seven minutes are up, the timer is going to go off and you'll set it again for another 25 minutes, you will then work on one task until the time is up, and then you'll have another five-minute break. So what we're doing here is we're cycling through these 25-minute sprints, we were working on one task at a time, and then we're giving ourselves a five-, sometimes a seven-minute break.

In the space of an hour, you can get through two Pomodoros, essentially, two 25 minutes sprints, and you'll have 2 five-minute breaks there. In total, I think the objective here is to link together 4 Pomodoros in succession. If you're going to do this, then that's going to take you through a couple of hours of fairly focused, intense work. But again, when you're doing this, and when you're focusing on what you've identified to be tasks that are part of your critical path, it's amazing what you can get done.

This is something that you can repeat, this Pomodoro cycle, throughout the day. Typically, after you've done 4 Pomodoros, two hours, essentially, you'd want to take a longer 20- to 30-minute break. I typically would go for about 30 minutes here. I've done two hours of sprinting, essentially, with five-minute breaks along the way, and then once I've done two hours, 4 Pomodoros, I take that 30-minute break, and then I start again.

The timer gives the accountability and fosters a sense of intense focus, and you don't have any time to lose, because we only got 25 minutes. I mean, every minute counts. You're giving yourself clearly defined work periods. I just find that again, this is the ideal procrastination blaster. It creates this hyper focus, eliminates unnecessary distractions, you're not going to get pulled off into the world of social media if you've only got 25 minutes to get something done. It prevents you floating along in these gray zones, keeps you energized, and gives that sense of accomplishment. I find that at least in my experience, it really makes me feel good when I'm knocking through the Pomodoro cycles.

So that's a little bit about a tactic that's been incredibly effective for me and many people that I've shared it with over the years in getting more done, but, and importantly, linking it up to what we've been speaking about with the Task Fusion 360, linking it up to the tasks that are going to be important in order for you to reach your objectives, we're not going to use a Pomodoro just to get more stuff done for the sake of getting it done.

What I want to talk about briefly now is something I refer to as the balancing act. Now, you might be wondering, why is this important in the scheme of time management? I think it's important to maintain balance across your life because otherwise you get frustrated. Balance is something that's going to give you happiness, and you can build a balance in deliberately, strategically into any plan that you're putting together. There are five core pillars of wellness, and these are physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual. These things mean different things to different people, but I think they're worth thinking about when you are building out any kind of a plan and making sure that you're getting some level of balance across what you're doing. I'll share a couple of tools in a moment for making sure that you're achieving balance.

Before I do though, let me talk about personality types because if you can understand your own personality type, then you'll be able to see a big clue as to where you might need to put a little bit more effort. There are typically three different personality types. There's the active personality type, the passive personality type, and the neutral personality type.

The active personality is someone who has strengths of being very self-motivated, very easily focused, and driven, but someone who's got an active personality oftentimes got weaknesses of being prone to obsession or having tunnel vision or just general dissatisfaction. Someone who's an active personality type thrives on setting goals and focusing on achieving them. That's the first personality type.

The second is the passive personality. Now, the passive personality type is typically someone who's good natured, more laid back, more pleasant to be around for the most part, but their weaknesses are often that they are unmotivated, they can come across as being completely scatterbrained. Sometimes this personality type might be perceived as being lazy, but the good news for this group of people is that the mere act of setting some goals will often bring more balance into their lives. So that's the second personality type, the passive personality.

The third is the neutral personality. The neutral personality has strengths of being fairly focused, self-motivated, relatively pleasant to be around, but also having a degree of drive as well. The weaknesses of the neutral personality though is that they tend to be more rigid and fearful. This personality type is someone who is often resistant to the goal setting process. They don't want to change. The challenge is sticking with an objective that they may actually have.

So thinking about those, if you can identify what type of personality you've got, then you can use that to your advantage when you're thinking about trying to achieve balance in your life. The first thing that I want you to focus on here is awareness, so being aware to what your strengths and weaknesses are mean that you might be able to anticipate some of the challenges that you may face, and then tackle them more easily when they crop up. By being aware of the five pillars, you're automatically going to be putting yourself in a stronger position.

Just remember that happiness is normally a combination of physical components, mental or psychological components, spiritual components, emotional, and also social components. I would recommend trying to avoid focusing on just one or two of these because ultimately, it may lead to you feeling unbalanced.

The second thing that I find useful, and in addition to awareness and maintaining balance is creating a vision board. This is something that we spoke about in episode number 85, where you can almost paint a picture of what your ideal life would look like. If you're doing this, then try to include at least one image that's representative of the five pillars. So again, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and social wellness to keep you balanced. If you work that into what we discussed in the goal getting routine from episode number 85, then I think they can be very, very powerful.

Scheduling activities is something that can also help you stay balanced. So if you know that you are someone who is prone to obsession and just doing one thing all the time, then maybe you want to schedule some time into your day when you are going to be doing something else. If for example, you're prone to being a workaholic and working on your project, then maybe it would serve you to book a few fitness classes into the calendar or put yoga classes into the calendar and treat these like you would treat a very important doctor's appointment, prioritize them, make sure that nothing is going to get in your way of you being able to attend and do whatever it is that you've scheduled, as that activity.

That can be something that is helpful, I think, especially for people that are very, very focused, the active personality types, and also for all of them because if someone is scatterbrained or can come across as lazy or unmotivated, like the passive personality type, then that's something that can bring a bit more structure to what they're doing and help them achieve better goals. I also want to stress that there's no right or wrong personality type. They've all got their strengths and weaknesses, and the key is being aware of where you fit into that matrix.

A few final thoughts here in this episode. The Task Fusion 360 time management system is very powerful, and it's integrating multiple things and it can give you confidence, which you'll get from achieving your goals. It can be used to prioritize, and for a lot of people, I've seen this give them a sense of empowerment. I think detaching yourself from outcomes is important, and it's important to realize that if you don't achieve your goal, that doesn't mean you are a success or a failure. All it means is you haven't achieved your goal yet. It's okay to get passionate about something, but don't let your goals or your results towards your goals define who you are.

I see a lot of people setting goals for an online business. They don't achieve that goal at the first crack and first go around, and I've seen some people unfortunately, then give up on their objective of having financial freedom, geographic freedom, time freedom, things that can come from an online business, because they tried once and they failed. Make sure you've got some detachment there and realize that if you don't achieve your objective, all it means is you haven't achieved it yet. It's a great opportunity when that happens to learn and to set a new objective.

Goal setting is something that requires immediate action. The Chinese have got a tale about planting trees where they say, "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second-best time is right now." There's no better time like the present to take action, and that starts with setting goals and then putting a task and time management system in place to enable you to be able to reach them. You can build your system to help you achieve the goal. I think the Task Fusion 360 is a great way to do it, and you can set the wheels in motion just by taking small steps forward. Never stop moving, take small steps forward every single day, and you'll be amazed at the results that you can get.

Make sure you use you know a planning system. It doesn't have to be Task Fusion 360. Different people find different things work for them. I found the 12-week year to be fantastic. I found having a daily plan and having this 10 out of 10 week really helps me keep focused on a daily basis and make sure that I've got alignment between the short-term tasks and goals that I need to achieve and the longer-term ones as well.

That's a wrap for this episode of The Growth Booth. As always, you can watch this by going over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 86. Make sure you tune in in the weeks ahead. We're going to be discussing some pretty interesting things in the next episode about artificial intelligence, different ways that you can use it. I think that's going to be something that's valuable to everyone. We've got more interesting things coming in the pipeline as well. So that's wrap for this episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.