this was me six years ago and more importantly this was what I was doing back then I was a new father working a startup job flying around the world doing multiple projects and had just started one of the most challenging business school in the world needless to say my calendar was constantly packed with 8 hours of school 6 hour of sleep a daily gym session and 3 to four hours every day to do some part-time work and I did all this still managing to have a relatively healthy lifestyle with family and friends but I wasn't
obvious like this in my early 20s as soon as I started to try working on a new side hustle or do some extra work or trying to start my own business preparing for my CFA GMAT hosting rbnb I got overwhelmed by sheer amount of work I have to do this was before the productivity topic become a thing on the internet so I had to experiment with con time management tricks to even have a chance to Ace my professional exams working on my master degree from inad and managed to secure a stable career in management consulting
ironically is another career that has some groing work hours day after day I push myself beyond the limit and with so many TRS and arrows it finally paid off my career Advanced and my ability to solve problems GRE exponentially the journey to fully understand how to manage one time was anything but easy but 6 years later the growth I experienced was worth every sacrifice the turning point for me is realizing that my job is not a problem my lifestyle is not a problem what was holding me back and most likely was holding you back its
ability to manage time energy and attention I learned a lot of valuable lessons from my mentors friends colleagues and it all come down to seven principles which I later found out are also backed out by a lot of productivity expert and researchers in today's video I want to share with you this principle I learned over the years so you can get more done by the end you will know my exact system for staying productive reaching my goals and truly enjoy life beyond the confines of a day job so before I start I want to set
the basic framework how anyone should think about organizing their time it revolve around three things I talked about earlier which are time energy and attention which coincidentally is work for Te a we fitting if you're wondering why this other two matters I hope to pick your curiosity by explaining that planning the perfect schedule is just a small part of the equation in fact as life gets busier as you get older you will gradually realize that the best calendar in my maybe no calendar at all and you can work down not because of whether you have
two hours to spare but because what you decide to put your focus on and better you can stick to the plan and execute consistently there's a quote I really like by Daniel H pink he wrote this book called scientific secret for perfect timing and I quote the danger of a rigid schul is that you can become a prisoner of the calendar the calendar is useful servant but tyrannical Master we must use our understanding of the timing to begin our day with intention and align our schedule with our biological rism and I took that advice to
heart in my years of exploring the topic I took a more fluid integration of task and activities based on my own personal and physiological State throughout the day and I came up is the following seven principle that help me manage my time energy and attention so please keep these three things in the back of your head as we continue this video first lesson I learned over the years is that you have to think big but limit your opportunity a few years ago when I was applying for business school uh I had an idea to apply
for some of the best and biggest name out there like Harvard Stanford inad MIT HC the list goes on getting accepted by any one of these schools will be opportunity of Lifetime however the problem is I had very limited network resources I knew absolutely nobody my grade wasn't particularly high and I was very busy working a startup job at the time so I actually did the one thing that nobody else was doing with applying for business school I have banned all my application except for one which was insan it was a school that I think
I have the best chance to get in and could provide me the best career opportunity after graduating you have to understand I have no backup no plan B I either got accepted or I decide to just give up on business school entirely but that means I almost triple my time networking with aliz uh reaching out to people and have a very focused conversations when I ask for reference and this allow me to spend a lot more time time on my applications and prepar my GMA exam as well uh and but I later got accepted I
attribute My Success mostly to the decision to focus my attention on that one thing and this principle apply to you as well your time is most precious resource you have by far if you feel short on time ask yourself this do I really like time or am I trying to do too much Steve Jobs was famously proud of the project he didn't pursue just the same as the one he did when he returned to Apple in 1997 he reduced a company output in terms of product lines from 350 products down to just 10 just listen
to what he had to say during Apple's developer conference 26 years ago you when you think about focusing right you think well focusing is is saying yes no focusing is about saying no focusing is about saying no and you've got to say no no no and when you say no you piss off people I mean just think back on all the New Year resolution you you had over the years if every year for the past 10 years you manage to take off just one thing at a time how would that change you as a person
today we all want lot of time to do many things in life but try to do one thing at a time and do it well what I suggest you to do just take a poster size paper set one goal for the entire year not two not three just one write on the one thing that you must accomplish within the next 365 days ask yourself if you could POS time for a year what would you do be ruthlessly honest with yourself and reveal your true purpose for seeking productivity so you need to find that purpose before
setting a 5:00 alarm clock every day consider why you are doing it you might realize your current busy routine is not helping you say that your goal is to spend more time with loved ones if that's the case don't sacrifice your Rec for work just to afford a family trip that would be very counterproductive so on that poster not only you want to identify your one thing you also want to break it down into smaller steps and make notes on the poster I will personally hang that poster on the wall to remind myself every single
day about the goal and I write some tiny notes on it with regards to what I can do each month to contribute to the success of that goal and over time as this notes PS up you'll have a very clear plan on how to achieve it if you watch my how to journal video uh this is actually how I set out to make this YouTube channel there are quite a lot of comments saying that breaking things down especially one objective down to many little things can be quite challenging and I get it this step is
all about setting wildly ambitious goals and slicing it into manageable by siiz pieces it's not easy for most people that's why staring at the go on the wall 24/7 day in and day out truly help me brainstorming what do I have to do in order to accomplish that it was my constant reminder to leave this purpose and to visualize each step towards a goal and eventually after a week two weeks or even a months and I assure you you will have yourself a war of Interest ideas and the one true goal that's worth your time
energy and attention principle number two th is better than perfect I first encountered this concept in team Ferris book 4our work week in 2005 feris tested uh from the 20 hour week to 90 Hour Week interestingly he found he accomplish about the same amount of work regardless of the hours it turns out the energy and attention you exert on some objectives are actually directly related to the time you have we all experien this uh to some extent before for example two months before an s you stare at the empty page and couldn't produce a word
yet two days before it's du every one of us suddenly turns into Prime Shakespeare if you give yourself too much time to work on something you often lose the motivation to take effective action or sometimes we want to give all our attention to a project and spending hours perfecting it only to realize that end result is probably not that much better this video is also backed up by John pinkel professor Stanford University who published a study in 2014 shows how productivity takes a no di once a worker crosses the 55 rware marking a work week
it clearly shows that someone working a 70 hour week on the same task won't accomplish anything more with your extra 15 hours that realization has some profound impact on World productivity research a week only have 168 hours if you can train your day job from 55 hours to 40 or even 30 what you can achieve with extra time is Monumental for those of us who has a office job I truly believe it's not that impossible and it can be transformative the biggest takeaway from this research is this setting a DI line saving time and energy
is a matter of survival for the goal you're working towards purposefully shorten the time you have to work on your everyday tasks and the quality job may not be as high as you might think but it might just have the huge impact on your time think about this shifting mindset not just about efficiency it's about reclaiming your life principle number three take advantage of the unequal hour have you thought about whether you're a lar or an all of course I'm talking about when you're are naturally more productive in the morning or at night scientists have
known about this for more than four decades that we all have different levels of cognitive power at different times of the day in the ' 90s this was well documented by a scientist Simon forart at the University of Wales he closely examined how ciran Rhythm or our biological clock influence Human Performance and productivity forart revealed that most people experience Peak cognitive performance in the mid morning hours around 10:00 to noon this peak is followed by a gradual decline with a noticeable drop after lunch performance then improved slightly in the late afternoon and evening especially for
night of people some of us may even reach another productivity Peak later in the day and in recent years American Author Laura vender cam conducted an extensive analysis on her study over 40 successful IND indidual and reach a similar conclusion her finding was published in her book what the most successful people do before breakfast in this book she found that this people often use their morning for high focused task that require significant mental effort and if you think mental energy doesn't affect the quality of the work or even the best of us you might be
wrong in the early 2000 we discovered that the perole judges were much more likely to give favorable Judgment at the start of the PLO hearing then towards the end this is because judge tends to rely on the default decision of of no parole as a day goes by and their willpower runs low what's interesting is that the rate of favorable judgment actually picks up again after just a short break or sometimes even a snack therefore aligning the work per be the one thing you're supposed to focus your energy on Bas your natural productivity Peak can
really make a difference for example if you're a morning person you want to schedule something meaningful but also require extra self motivation first thing in the morning many of this activity don't have immediate payoff so they require a lot of dis discipline and focus things like writing a book or network with a colleague you don't particularly like but can definitely help your career these aren something that you necessarily enjoy or can finish in one goal so you want to do them when you are mentally strongest whether that's in the morning like most of people or
in the afternoon in the evening depends on your own situation stick to this plan and you will notice there's a significant difference when it comes to your productivity so basically you want to get a better understanding of your own energy curve and take advantage of it here are some uh common chart for you to to reference this one I'll call the morning Lark and this one the night all and me the roller coaster make sure you uh spend some time observe your own energy level throughout the day and plan accordingly principle number four paying yourself
and procrastinate even at you pick energy level what if you just don't feel like getting up and do what you're supposed to do what if procrastination always getting your way well that's what I'm going to talk about next principle number four is you want to pay yourself when you procress let me explain timal is a professor of psychology at Ottawa colon University his research conclude that six attributes makes procrastination more likely there's borom frustration difficulty level of the task unst structure or ambiguous goal lack in personal meaning and lack in intrinsic reward any of this
emotion can get in your way regardless of your energy level these are common human emotions that we deal with every single day let's say the tax day is approaching but you will still rather get a root canal than fill out Those comp licated forms now we all been there and whenever I'm in that situation one trick I find really useful is to leave the office and go to my favorite spot in the city sometimes it's my favorite fancy restaurant or sometimes I'll just go to a park with nice view my friends laugh at me when
they find me doing taxes in a park but that is a point I enjoy my time there so much I'm in such a good mood it helped me get through the task a lot quicker and you don't have to physically go somewhere you can create your own reward system I used to buy this huge bag of snack that I really enjoy and the promise to myself that I will only eat a handful whenever I finish one page of exercise question on my CF exams and it worked uh little sad effect is that you making some
weight not 100% recommended but I hope you get the idea principle number five use a 10 10 rule to deal with chaos I came across this just a few weeks ago when I was listening to Ali abd's newest book feel good productivity there is one segment when he talk about decision making that I really liked and I want to share with you the basic idea is that whenever you face with an important decision ask yourself how am I going to feel about that in 10 minutes how am I going to feel about it in 10
weeks how am I going to feel about it in 10 years this can be a very powerful question because if you decide to focus your energy in one area in your life as I suggest in this video two things will probably happen one of course you're going to focus in the one thing that really matters and you will probably succeed but two when you prce your attention on the one thing many lies important task will get pushed aside and from that sometimes you'll feel things to be a little bit chaotic and you need to learn
to deal with this not only by trusting the process but doing this little tin exercise in your mind for example when I restart this YouTube channel in March I had to allocate a lot of my work and social times to learn everything about video making I had to put some other project on hold and cut spending time with my kids to some extent because I know I couldn't handle everything at once sometimes my family and friends were a little bit upset about the fact fact that I decided to dedicate 20 hours a week to making
a stupid video but then I asked myself this three question how anyone feel about this negative side effect in 10 minutes 10 days or 10 years conversely if I stop making YouTube videos how would I feel about it in this straight time period and the answer was so clear to me in 10 days people will get a little bit upset over 10 weeks time my boss may find my attention on work a tiny bit weaker now and if I can keep this up for 10 years I will absolutely have a huge high quality video Repository
that documents my life pass on my learning that helps thousands of people along the way and I think that absolutely will feel awesome in short implementing this 10 rule let you filter out some of the noise and give you permission to let chaos build up in your life it reminds you that it's okay sure life does not have a pause button while you're working on that one thing that really matters to you the word does not patiently wait for you to finish things will Stack Up and there will always be other people and projects that
demands your attention elsewhere use this 10 to 10 rule to to help you make those important decisions principle number six a motivation system that ties it all together so for this one let me make an analogy achieving your goal is like driving a car across a country to your destination to achieve this goal three things are important you need a reliable car that ping Mage consistently day after day you need a good navigation system to avoid getting sidetracked and three you need to regularly stop for gas to ensure your car can last their journey and
being productive is extremely similar navigation is like managing your attention ensuring you focus on the one thing that didn't get srack stopping for gas is like managing your energy aligning your energy level with your task but what about the last thing that makes your car moving forward this is when we're finally going to talk about the motivation cycle that enable you to actually use your time to the fullest Daniel H pink actually wrote another book called to sell is human the surprising truth about motivating others in this book he argues that productivity start with satisfaction
at work it's a deeply human needs to direct our own lives to learn and create new things and I think that's quite true in my experience I again motivated by a vision because there's a real power to focus on the one single goal follow up is execution progress brings in a lot of small wins small wins builds up to achievements and eventually I became more motivated to try to achieve more I call this the motivation cycle you can plan your life using this concept and should you do that there are something you need to learn
which is a little bit like project management first on micro level this post you have on your wall it's your big picture and identify your overall goal you already have that this is your yearly objective and second you want to break that up into a lot of short-term goals and the short-term goals are basically synthesized from the little post notes you brainstorm day after day and basically it should have two type of metrics you want to have a leading indicator and the lagging indicator the leading indicator are actions you need to take for example I
need to finish 500 exercise question for the month or I need to make 20 CES call this week letting indicator are the metrics you need to hit for example I need to make 100K sales in my company or I need to hit 75 percentile in my mark exam result so basically anything that is result oriented and can be Quantified once you have a bunch of this short goals you want to assign them to each month this shortterm goals needs to be directly contribute to the bigger objective in a logical way it can either be sequential
steps can be parallel components can also be like number accumulations and that will be on the monthly level on the B and daily level this is where most people are struggling with the most here you want to be very mindful about setting de lines and manage your daily energy level before the beginning of each week make sure that you understand what exactly you are trying to achieve this week and what your energy level look like when is the best time to do what play your week very roughly but execute as closely as you can as
long as you understand all this principle we talk about in this video the calendar is essentially just a fancy tracker for have you done something right it really doesn't need to be get more complicated than um some people on the internet suggest uh for me personally I just carry a little notebook as my calendar SL reminder and I'll just take off that box once something is done so in short managing your life has four layers it has uh annual goals monthly goals and kpis and weekly planner and daily energy management and remember no one can
follow a strict schedule you're better off leing by a set of good principles I'm principal number seven glass and Robert boss now if you really understand this six principle that I mentioned I really feel like you should be quite comfortable managing your life no matter how much stuff left through at you but I just feel like there's one more thing I need to share with you and that comes from author James Patterson and he mentioned this dilemma when he said imagine life is a game you are juggling five bosss they are called work Family Health
friends and integrity you juggle all of them and try to keep them all up in the air but one day you finally come to understanding that the work ball is made of robber if you drop it will bounce back other four are made of glass I know in this video I talk constantly about setting the right goal and focus on the one thing that really mattered as it true as it may be I just feel like it wouldn't be fair to not point out that all priorities aren't quite equal however you want to set your
priority is complete up to you but just remember life is very short um there are probably just more important things than being productive at work so be happy and take good care of your precious balls I'm Kev I'll see you next time
