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Extreme Productivity with Kevin Kruse

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6 snips
Mar 23, 2016 • 20min

6 Secrets To Beat ‘Overworked & Overwhelmed’

Kelly Exeter, author of a book on defeating the feeling of being overworked and overwhelmed, shares 6 secret habits to cure overwhelm without sacrificing your goals or career. They discuss the reasons people feel overwhelmed, the influence of comparing ourselves to others, and the importance of setting boundaries. They also touch on the art of saying "let me get back to you" and tips for productivity.
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7 snips
Mar 16, 2016 • 14min

How Millionaires Schedule Their Day

Do self-made millionaires and ultra productive people think about their day differently? I’ve interviewed hundreds of ultra productive people including billionaires and highly successful entrepreneurs and in this episode, I’m sharing the commonalities in how they start and schedule their day. What you’re going to learn: What you should be doing in the first 30-60 minutes of your day The morning rituals of John Lee Dumas, Kevin O’Leary and Ken Blanchard How highly successful people manage email throughout their day The meeting habits of Marissa Mayer and Richard Branson Key Quotes: “A productive day is built on a foundation of a strong morning.” “One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours in their day on things that don’t require high cognitive capacity, like social media. If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want.” Read Full Transcript All right, all right. I am Kevin Kruse. Welcome to the show where I am teaching you how to 10x your productivity based on my research into highly successful people, the highest achievers out there in various fields. In the last episode I shared Mark Cuban's number one productivity secret, and today I'm going to explain how self-made multi-millionaires schedule their day. How do they go back planning their day? Let's start by getting you that cheat sheet, the one page planning tool that millionaires use to schedule their day. One page tool you can use right away, an instant download. All you need to do is send a text message to 44222 with the word achieve, or just come on over to the podcast website. It's productivity-podcast.com. Do self-made millionaires and ultra productive people, do high achievers, do they think about their day differently? What you're going to hear in this episode, if you've been following along and you listen to the previous episodes, this is going to be a good reminder, a good anchoring of a lot of the concepts we've been introducing on their own. As I've spoken to and interviewed hundreds of ultra productive people, I keep hearing these common themes over and over again. First, self-made millionaires, ultra productive people, they have a sacred morning ritual. Back when I was young and dumb, the alarm would go off, I'd take my five or ten minute shower, I'd race out the door, stop at the 7-Eleven for a cup of coffee on the way in and dive in because I just felt I was more productive getting into the office. I wasn't hungry, I didn't need food, and that's how I started my day. That's not how ultra productive people start their day. They know that a productive day is built on a foundation of a strong morning. Rather than racing out the door, they spend thirty to sixty minutes strengthening their mind and their body. Hal Elrod, I bring him up a lot, he talks about the miracle morning. Instead of trying to achieve more by doing more, your morning, your miracle morning, lets you achieve more by becoming more. John Lee Dumas goes for a thirty-five minute power walk while listening to podcasts first thing in the morning. Ken Blanchard, I had an opportunity to have lunch with him. He's the author of The One Minute Manager and sixty other leadership books, runs a very successful large training company. At lunch he told me that every morning he gets up early and he rides on his exercise bike while reading some inspirational text. Kevin O'Leary, Shark Tank entrepreneur, he shared in an interview that I saw that he rides an exercise bike also for forty-five minutes in the morning while watching the news. Dan Miller, great entrepreneur, career expert, told me, "I take advantage of the rich audio programs available, so then I fill forty-five minutes with physical exertion combined with mental input and expansion. I carefully protect that first hour of the day." You wake up, you nourish your body, and your nourish your mind. Second, they always identify their most important task, their MIT. It's based on their values and their goals. If health is truly a high priority, they make sure they schedule time for it during the day, some exercise time. If family is a priority, they schedule the time that they're going to head for home at the end of the work day. They schedule time for date nights, for kid events, birthdays, vacations, sometimes a year in advance. The people I interviewed knew how to take a big annual goal and break it into bite size chunks that could be actioned on a daily basis. They would always know what's the next domino to tip over that's going to get me closer to my goals. That's my MIT. That's what I need to focus on for the day. That's the third step. They schedule time for their MIT as early in the morning as possible, at least an hour, sometimes two. They know that they're cognitively at their best in the morning. About an hour or two after we wake up, that's when we're sharpest when it comes to willpower, decision making, all the good stuff. Reddit AMA, ask me anything, behavior psychologist Dan Ariely answered a question with this. He says, "One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours in their day on things that don't require high cognitive capacity, like social media. If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want." How many of us go into the office and our first couple of hours we're immediately pulled into meetings? Staff meetings, status update meetings, whatever the meeting is. How many of us will open up our email inbox and start clearing through emails that came in over night? How many of us will look at our to do list? Remember, we're not supposed to be using to do lists anymore. We want to look at that to do list, and we'll say, "Oh, let's feel productive. We'll sign some expense reports and get that off our list." Highly successful people, they're not looking at it that way. They're protecting their strongest cognitive time in the morning. During that time they're not multitasking. Mike Cannon-Brookes, he's a billionaire, co-founder of Atlassian, that software company out of Australia that just recently IPO’d. He says, "Listen, do one thing at once. Stop multitasking. Shut down your email. Shut off those notifications when you're working in the zone in the morning.” Fourth, they eliminate meetings or keep them as short as possible. We just covered that in a previous episode. Mark Cuban's advice, never do meetings unless someone's writing you a check. Highly successful people know that meetings are inefficient. If you can't stay out of them, keep them as short as possible. Marissa Mayer now at Yahoo!, previously at Facebook and Google, is legendary for holding meetings only five or ten minutes long. Similarly, Richard Branson revealed in a blog post, "It is very rare that a meeting on a single topic should need to last more than five to ten minutes." Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, are all known for conducting walking meetings. Others swear by standing meetings. I used to do stand up huddles at the end of my days. They also schedule time to process their email. Highly successful people don't check their email throughout the day. They're not responding to every buzz on their smartphone to see what landed in their inbox. They just schedule it deliberately, times to process their email just like any other task. Highly successful people also make it home for dinner. They have a hard stop on their workday, and they know when they will leave the office to get home. Founder and former CEO of Intel Andy Grove would consistently leave work at 6:00 or 6:30, regardless of what was going on. He wrote in his book, High Output Management, "My day ends when I'm tired and ready to go home. There's always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done. When you realize that there will always be more work to do it frees you up to be intentional about when is enough enough." There's a lot more items they do. They're included on this free download I'm encouraging you to get. Ultra productive people are staying hydrated. Dehydration of even one percent has an impact on our prefrontal cortex. That's the part of our brain that's like the CEO. They delegate more. A very powerful thing is they look at their calendar, they look at all their tasks and they ask themselves, "Can I just delete this thing and not do it? Can I delegate this thing? Can I redesign the activity in some way so that it takes less time?" They're diligent about it. My old mentor, Rudy Carson, used to say ... He would look at the list of to dos and he wouldn't ask himself, "How can I do this?" He would say, "How can this get done?" As soon as he would phrase it that way, all of a sudden it's like, hey, I don't need to do it, but maybe Kevin can do it. Can I just stop doing it and delete it or be a no show? Can I delegate it, or if I have to do this thing, can I redesign the process in some way that it takes less time? Hey, how can you apply all this? This wraps a lot of what we've talking about. The major pillars of how self-made millionaires, Olympic athletes, so many others I spoke to, how they schedule their day. I hope you will send a text to 44222. Just send the word achieve or go to the website extreme-productivity.com. Download the planning tool. It will help guide you through your most important tasks, other meetings or tasks, and whether or not you can get out of them. It will help you to schedule those email processing times, your hard stops, and how to take care of your health and your body in a way that you've got maximize energy. That's it. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or in Stitcher so you won't miss the next episode. Until then, remember master your minutes to master your life.
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7 snips
Mar 9, 2016 • 16min

Mark Cuban’s #1 Productivity Tip

In this episode, I share the #1 piece of time management advice I received from Mark Cuban. What you’re going to learn: Mark Cuban’s #1 productivity tip How to facilitate efficient meetings (even when you’re NOT the facilitator!) What Dustin Moskovitz’s (co-founder of Facebook) meeting schedule looks like at Asana (his new productivity company) Key Quotes: “Mornings are when we are cognitively at our best, so we should be doing our deep thinking work before noon.” “The wrong people dominate meetings.” “People will spend more time discussing the trivial items because they think they have an opinion on it and less time on the important items because they’re afraid to say something stupid.” YOUR FREE BONUS: Maximize Your Meetings (Ready-to-print PDF) Read Full Transcript Would you like to 10x your productivity and stop feeling so overworked and overwhelmed? Welcome to the extreme productivity podcast with New York Times best selling author and Inc. 500 entrepreneur Kevin Kruse. Kevin Kruse: Welcome, welcome, welcome. I am Kevin Kruse and I am sharing tips and advice from my new book, "15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management," where I interviewed over 200 highly successful people and boiled down their productivity habits so that you can 10x your productivity. The last episode, I gave you the 9 steps to cut your email processing time in half. Today, I'm going to share what Mark Cuban told me was his number one productivity tip. First, I want to send you a quick start action plan that includes the one page planning tool that millionaires use to schedule their day. All you need to do is send a text message to 44222 with just the word achieve. Head on over to the website productivity-podcast.com and put your email address in there if you'd rather get the free download that way. I cold emailed Mark Cuban asking for an interview, asking him to just tell me his number one secret to time management. Now a lot of people discount Mark Cuban and the other billionaires I reached out to as saying they have nothing to learn from them because they're billionaires. They got lots of servants, and maids, and butlers, and staff, or admins, or whatever. It's a different, they just can't relate. I actually think that is very limiting thinking because yes, of course, Mark Cuban and other people at his level have larger teams of people to get stuff done, but he also has a tremendous amount more than all the rest of us have to look after. I mean, he owns the Dallas Mavericks, he owns Landmark Theaters, he's a TV star co-hosting, investing on Shark Tank. He's written books, he's invested in and is guiding dozens of start-ups and tech companies. He's always being interviewed on TV, on the news programs, on the financial programs. He's a husband. He's a father with three young daughters. This guy has responsibilities and obligations and things to watch at a magnitude that are much greater than most of us can ever imagine. Yet, given all of that, he got back to me faster than any other person that I reached out to. I probably reached out to over 800 people. Almost 300 got back in touch with me, most of them within a day or two. Mark Cuban responded to me in 61 minutes. I was shocked. What is Mark Cubans advice? What's his number one piece of advice for time management and productivity? Well, in typical Cuban style, very direct, very short, kind of funny. He says, "Never take meetings unless someone is writing you a check. Never take meetings unless someone is writing you a check." What's very interesting about this advice is I talked to seven billionaires, most of them made some reference to the evils of meetings. Highly successful people live by the 1440 rule. There's 1,440 minutes in a day, make them all count. They know, more, because of the value of their minutes that sitting in meetings and taking care of business in meetings is a very inefficient way to do it. I bet you don't wish you had any more meetings right now. Right? Here are the common problems with meetings. We spend so much of our time in meetings, especially if you're a corporate employee. Here are the common problems. Here's why meetings stink so badly. Here's how to also fix them. First of all, most meetings start late. Either the facilitator, whoever called the meeting is lax or late herself, or important people stroll in late so you can't really start the meeting on time until everybody gets there. It starts a horrible cycle. If you show up two minutes late and then sit there for 10 more minutes waiting for everyone else to get there, well the next time that meetings called, you're going to show up 10 minutes late because you know it won't start on time. You don't want to sit around the conference room for 10 more minutes. It creates this horrible cycle. The fix is of course, to start and end meetings on time. If you are the one calling the meeting, start the meeting immediately on time. If people walk in late and you're mid-sentence, oh well. They can get up to speed, they can ask someone who was already there what's going on, and they'll remember that you start your meetings on time. End your meetings 5 minutes early. A lot of people have back to back commitments, that's why they show up late to meetings, and you're going to gain respect and become a change agent by saying, "Hey, the meetings going to run until, from 1:00 to 1:55, or 1:50. Don't take up the full hour or the full half hour. In general, your set for yourself. Try not to book back to back meetings. I talked about the CEO of LinkedIn who always put 30 minute buffer times in between meetings and calls just so that he can not be on that never ending hamster wheel from one thing to the next where you can't even process or digest the information, or make a calm, well thought out decision. Another big problem is that the wrong people are often in meetings. The prevailing wisdom seems to be, "When in doubt, invite them." This wastes the time of the person who was invited if they don't really need to be there. They might not have the professional courage to say no thanks, or they might want to show up for the free coffee and donuts. Also, if the person's in the room and then feels compelled, like they have to participate, even if they don't really have an important role, well then they're going to be taking up time, asking questions or going down tangents that aren't really necessary. The fix is just to have that mindset of, "When in doubt, leave them out." Steve Jobs was legendary for throwing people out of meetings. He would be in the middle of a meeting and if he'd notice someone was in the room, maybe hasn't been contributing anything, and he'll ask why they're there. If they don't have a good reason, he'll say, you should leave and they'd have to pick up their stuff and walk out right in the middle of a meeting. There's also something, the third reason is called, "Parkinson's Law of Triviality," also known as the, "Bike Shed Effect." This law states that organizations spend the most time on trivial issues and the least time on the most important issues. Why is it called the bike shed effect? The story goes that there was a committee put together that had to make several decisions related to an expensive and risky nuclear power plant. Now, the approval of the power plant went really quickly. There wasn't a lot of discussion in the meeting. There wasn't a lot of debate. Those votes, those decisions, happened very quickly. Then it got time to talk about the commuter bike shed. The bike shed that would hold the bikes for people who were commuting via bicycle to work. All of a sudden, that bike shed topic took up more time than all of the other nuclear power plant topics combined. All of a sudden, everybody felt they had a say in how big should the bike shed be, where should it be located on the property, what color should we paint the bike shed? People, when you get into groups and group think, the group will spend more time discussing the trivial items because they think they have an opinion on it and less time on the important items because they're afraid to say something stupid, or they're just out of their league. The fix on this is again, it goes back to facilitation. There's some extreme ones. Jeff Bezos at Amazon. He opens his meetings by handing out the paperwork and having quiet time where everybody sits in the room and will read for 30 minutes before talking about the report, or the slides, or the memo, or whatever it might be. When he was asked about this, he said, "Listen, the prevailing wisdom is you distribute the material ahead of the meeting so that people can read it on their own time, and that's respectful of everybody's time. Then you discuss it and make a decision in the meeting." He says, "We all know, nobody reads the material ahead of time." You go into the meeting, say you've all gotten the material and reviewed it, now let's talk about it. As you're trying to make a point, or make your argument, everybody is quickly reading, or scanning, or skimming the bullets in front of them. Not really listening to you, and they're not getting the full information in the report or the memo. That might be an extreme thing to do. The Bezos approach. I use to do things like, when I was young and dumb, I would call a meeting of the top people in my company and I would have circulated the financials for the quarter, and then I would either lecture reviewing the financials and they were probably thinking of something else and half asleep. Or I would say, "Okay, I'm sure you've all read the financials, let's talk about them. What went well, what didn't go well." It was crickets, or I would see them flipping through quickly trying to get up to speed. Later I learned to really be a facilitator. I would still send out the emails ahead of the meeting for those who would read them, who wanted to get them ahead of time. Then, as soon as we got in the meeting, I would break the room up. There weren't that many of us, but I would say, the three of you, I want you to look at just the revenue side of the profit and loss statement, and the three of you, just look at the cost side of the profit and loss statement, and the three of you, just look at the balance sheet and cash flow. Let's just take 15 minutes and huddle in our little groups and analyze your assigned section, and then we'll report out. Then all of a sudden there was more time, and people took that seriously. I'm really really going to review sales, and sales by product, and our sales growing or not growing, and by segment, and by customer, and what can we do to increase sales. They're really diving into that topic and saying some smart things when it's their turn to share out, and it's their job to brief their colleagues in the room. Similar for the group that's on expenses. Are they going up, are they going down, what's the percent, what, should we implement some cost cutting measures. There were some good quality time because I put it on them and gave them some time to do the work right in the meeting. Four, meetings are often scheduled at the wrong time. Most people don't even think about it. It's just, "Hey, when can we get everybody together." Meetings can end up breaking up the work day in illogical ways. This is especially a big problem for knowledge workers and software engineers who really need to be in the zone. Get into that flow state to do their best most productive work. If they're right in the middle of the zone and all of a sudden, oops, it's 10:30 in the morning, I've got to now get up from my desk and go into a meeting for an hour, and then go back and try to get back into that flow state, it's really, really harmful. The idea is, the fix for this is to just block off certain times or day as meeting free. Dustin Moskovitz, he's the co-founder of Facebook, and his new company is the productivity company called Asana, project manager and software, and he said, he told me, he says, "Pick one day a week, that you and your team can focus on getting individual work done without any interruptions like meetings. At Asana we have no meeting Wednesdays established to encourage flow and productivity across the company." I've got a friend who runs a hospital not far from where I live and Kate has no meeting Fridays. The last day of the week, there's no meetings. It's a chance to get caught up before the weekend comes. The great Rory Vaden, entrepreneur with over 100 employees, he laughed when I told him this. He says, "We only have one day a week when you're allowed to hold meetings. That's Mondays. The other days are for doing things." Maybe that's extreme, maybe you can't block off an entire day, but can you implement a rule at least on your team that says, guys, in general, let's do our meetings in the afternoon. Morning should be for our most important task time, or MIT time. Mornings are when we are cognitively at our best, so we should be doing our deep thinking work before noon. We want to work on what's strategic before the day gets away from us. Hey, when in general, if you're going to call for a meeting, try to schedule it for 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 when we're half asleep and burnt out anyway. You know, look, if you've got a boss that you can't control, you can work on that. Maybe you can't control all those meetings, but try to get out of the meetings when you can or let people know that you've got certain times that are already allocated to different projects. Finally, the wrong people dominate meetings. That's the other common problem. In any group that gets together, the over confident people will tend to dominate the conversation, the extroverts tend to talk more than others. Quite often, now I am an introvert, and I've done this a lot. I sit there, and I might silently be thinking, that person just said the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but it's just not worth my effort to speak up. Or I have a different opinion but I don't feel like blabbing on or cutting anybody off, I'll just send an email later to the boss. A good facilitator, the fix is, if you're the facilitator, and if you're not, you can guide the facilitator, it's to call out on everybody in the room. You cut off the people that tend to dominate the meeting, and you get the people who are quieter, say, "Hey, Kevin, you've been a little quiet, what are your thoughts on this issue?" I know, if you're not the facilitator, you might have some limitations. You can still be a change agent. If I'm in a meeting and the two people next to me start whispering back and forth and it's bothering me and not helpful in the meeting, I'll turn around and say, "Hey guys, do you mind if we have one meeting because I really do want to hear what you guys are saying, but I also want to hear what they're saying at the same time." You just need to politely keep everyone on it. If someone’s droning on and on, or they're on a tangent, even if you're not the facilitator. Can't you raise your hand and say, "You know, I just noticed we got 10 more minutes and we're only half way through the agenda, maybe we can put that issue on hold, maybe we can table it until the next meeting. Maybe we can put it in the parking lot and come back if there's time left." A lot of people just aren't trained in how to facilitate a meeting so they're not thinking, they're not watching the clock, they're not managing the dialog. Even if you're not the official facilitator, dive in and help. What do we do with this? How can we apply it right away? Again if you're not the boss, you might have some limitations on this. If you're running your own company, you have your own team, you've got a lot of control on this. Look, take Mark Cuban's advice. Don't call meetings unless no other form of communication will do. Try to get out of the meetings you're invited to. Say no, say you're busy. Say hey, can someone else who's going just brief me afterwards, or can you just send me the minutes instead. If you do go, show up on time and leave on time. Train the facilitator and everybody that, hey, even if they're running late, doesn't mean they're going to get your time late. Don't be afraid to be the unofficial facilitator. People will thank you for it, people will respect you for it, it's a sign of leadership, it's a sign of professional courage. You'll see that their behaviors change very quickly. Fight the power, fight the meetings. That is the lesson of the day. All right, as usual, I've got a one page, ready to print poster for you called "Maximize Your Meetings." You can download it instantly, print it out, tape it up on your conference room door, put some copies on the conference room table to ... Do it anonymously if you need to just to send everybody the message that meetings are wasteful usually but by making a few changes and switches, they can have a dramatic positive impact. If you want this Maximize Your Meetings info graphic, just text the word achieve to 44222. You can always visit the website productivity-podcast.com. Make sure you subscribe to the extreme productivity podcast in iTunes or Stitcher because our next episode is when I'm going to share how millionaires schedule their day. Until then, remember, master your minutes to master your life.
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9 snips
Mar 2, 2016 • 17min

How To Cut Your Email Time In Half

In this 15-minute episode, I share my 321Zero Email System which is guaranteed to cut the time you spend on emails in half. What you’re going to learn: How International Power (a company in England) was able to reduce their total email traffic by 54% Useful codes I use in my subject lines to indicate the action required for the recipient How to bulk unsubscribe from all your email newsletters Key Quotes: “Ultra-productive people don’t check their email throughout the day.” Read Full Transcript Hey, you time management ninja, you. Welcome to the show. I'm Kevin Kruse, and I'm sharing tips and advice from my new book, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. Now, last episode, I revealed Richard Branson's secret productivity tool, and today, you're going to get my 321Zero email system, so that you can get to inbox zero, and cut the time you spend on emails in half. But first, I want to send you a cheat sheet, just for this show, just for email mastery. All you need to do is send a text message to 44222, send the word ACHIEVE, or head on over to the website, productivity-podcast.com, and you can instantly download the 321Zero email mastery system. Now, let's begin. Imagine, if you could cut your email processing time in half. How much time would that save you? According to a survey, conducted by McKinsey Global Institute, the average office worker is spending 2.6 hours per day reading and answering emails, which is one third, 33% of a forty hour work week. It's probably why so many of us are working more than a forty hour work week these days. What's worse is that smart phones have now tethered us to email, so we're checking it constantly: while we're driving, sitting with our family at the dinner table, even in the middle of the night. You've got to stop the madness, you need to reclaim all these hours in your week. Here are seven steps to master your email. First, step number one. Unsubscribe from all those email newsletters that you get. I mean, do you really need to get emails daily from all those fashion websites, those flash deal of the day offers, or those buzz feed-y, everything's a click bait news headline that the article never matches up the headline that you clicked on? You can't be giving permission to all these strangers, all these companies to interrupt your day. They are getting in your inbox so that they can get into your mind. They make money when they interrupt you successfully. So, here's what you do. Just search, go into your email inbox, and search on the word unsubscribe. You're going to get a list of all those email newsletters, are going to come up, and you can manually unsubscribe them, or the ones that you really don't want. Save yourself a lot of time, and instead, you can go to a website called unroll.me. All you need to do is, give it your email address, it'll analyze your inbox and give you an entire list of every single email newsletter that you subscribe to. You can unsubscribe with one click, or just tell it to roll it all into one weekly digest. Last idea on those email newsletters, I don't even use my primary email address for any email newsletter. I subscribe to a lot, it's a good way to get information from the gurus out there, the consultants, the experts, the industry magazines. I set up a second gmail account that I just use for the junk mail. Keep all these email newsletters out of your primary inbox. Step two, turn off all email notifications. Email is not intended to be an urgent form of communication. It's not supposed to be text messaging. These days, when we're getting anywhere from 100, to 250, to 500 emails a day, to have a little ding go off, or a little buzz on our phone, or a little square window pop up on our monitor every single time, is a sin. We need to be productive, which means we need to be focused. We need to shut off all of those push notifications, whether you're on they desktop or on your phone. Step three, think twice before you forward, cc, or blind cc anyone on a message. Wall Street Journal reported on an experiment that a company in England did, International Power. They reduced their total email traffic by 54%, by over half, just by encouraging their executives to think twice before they forwarded an email or added anyone to the cc line. Too often, we add someone to the cc just because we want to keep them in the loop, we're afraid of not giving someone information they might need. In reality, you're just contributing to the information overload problem. Remember, every email you send means you're likely going to get an email back, with some kind of reply. The less you send email, the less email you're going to receive. Step four, use the subject line to indicate the action required. Use the subject line wisely. It's a pet peeve of mine, a blank subject line, a cryptic subject line, a subject line that doesn't change even though the thread of the conversation has changed four times over the last month. You want to indicate the subject of the email and the action it requires. For example, you just might want to start a subject line with "FYI", which means "for your information", you're just passing it along, there's no urgency, it's just a courtesy. You might start a subject line that says "action required by date", and then the subject. That tells someone, especially if they report to you, "Hey, this is a to-do list item that I'm going to follow up on. Here's the due date." You can always use "NRN", which means "no response needed", and that can cut down on all those, again, just little emails that clog up your inbox, that says, "Thanks," or "Looks interesting," or "I'll read it over the weekend." You send someone some information, and put "NRN", and then they will know not to respond. My favorite, I use it all the time, especially, really, I should say only, with people who I know, I work with, it's "EOM", I put "EOM" in the subject line, which stands for "End of Message". I might, say, write in the subject line, "Let's meet for lunch at one o'clock at Corner Bakery, EOM". As that email shows up in their inbox, they're going to get the entire message right there in the subject line, and then they can delete it, they don't need to click it open and read. It would be ridiculous to put in the subject line, "Lunch", and then they have to open it up, and I say, "One o'clock at Corner Bakery". Use "end of message", and then put your entire message, if it's short, right in the subject line itself. Step five, we're burning through these. Step five, keep emails short, really short. Think like a text message. There's legendary stories about Jeff Bezos at Amazon. He will often forward an email to an executive with just a single character, like a question mark. It might be an email from an upset customer, or a report of a technical crash, so he'll forward it to somebody with a question mark. Everybody knows that means, "All right, you've got to look into this, and solve it, and get back to me when it's solved," but he can communicate in a single character. There's even a website called five.sentenc.es, so five sentences, but there's two dots there. It says, you know, you really need to limit your emails to five sentences or less, and then you can automatically add a footer message that says, "Click here, why is this message so short," and then it sends them to that website to explain that, "Hey, out of a sign respect for your time, as well as mine, I'm being really brief here." Here is ... Step six is my 321Zero system. See, ultra productive people, they don't check their email throughout the day, they process their email during scheduled times. They think of email communication, and social media communication, as any other task that needs to be done. If it needs to be done, how much time should I allocate to it, and when do I want to do it? A lot of ultra productive people will check their email once a day. Tim Ferriss was famous for having VAs process all of his email, and, you know, only very occasionally get back to people after it's already been filtered. To me, that's not very practical for most of us, and that's the kind of relationship and customer service I want to provide to my tribe, so what's practical for me is to check, I should say, to process my email three times a day, that's the 3 in 321Zero, and each time I only go through it for 21 minutes. It's like the Pomodoro system, I'll just set the timer on my smartphone for 21 minutes, and then I start processing the email in my inbox. It sounds silly, but when that timer is going down, when it's ticking down, it kind of makes a game out of it, and I'm less likely to click those stray links that go off on the internet, and then I read something, I click another link and I've read another article, and next thing I know, twenty minutes has passed, and I only went through one message in my inbox. I check it, I process it, three times a day, 21 minutes each time, with the goal to get to inbox zero, 321Zero. You don't want to use your email inbox as a to-do list. Remember, we're living life from our calendars. When you're processing, in this 20 minute time period, how can you burn through, and clean up the emails so quickly? That's where step seven, it's called the 4D's. Every time you open an email, your brain just needs to go through the 4D's: Delete, can I delete it? Of course, this day and age, delete really means to archive. You don't need to erase emails forever, we've got almost unlimited storage, you can almost archive things. If you can't delete it, can I delegate it? Can someone else take care of this? If so, forward that message. If I can't delete it and I can't delegate it, can I defer it? Now, the recommendation here, remember we're on that countdown clock, to clear through, to process our email. If you can take care of something in five minutes or less, you probably want to just do it, and take care of that email right then and there. If it's going to take you longer than five minutes, you want to defer it, which means schedule it on the calendar, don't leave it there. If you're using Microsoft Outlook, you can just drag the email onto the calendar, and then fill out the popup window of when you want to come back to that task. If you're using a Google calendar, as I am, then when you open an email, you're going to see, at the top towards the center of the screen, a drop down menu called "More", and when you click on the "More" button, there's a drop down item called "Create Event". That's going to open up the calendar, and copy that email text into a calendar entry. If I can't take care of it within five minutes, I hit "More", "Calendar Event", I look over the next few days, and schedule that ten minute, fifteen minute, thirty minute window to get back to somebody, and then it is out of my inbox. Finally, you do it. If you can't delete it, can't delegate it, and it's less than five minutes to do, then you're just going to do it. Those are the 4D's to burn through and clean up that inbox in record time. How do we apply it? I think this is pretty applicable information, but what are you going to do with it, I mean right away? The big take aways: shut off your email notifications. That can change your life right there. Go to unroll.me, you're going be shocked at how many automatic newsletters you're subscribed to. A lot of them, you didn't even do it. People are spamming you, putting your name on things. Maybe you bought something from an online store, and they automatically added you to their system. Go to unroll.me and clean out all those emails. Try the 321Zero system. If it sounds crazy, adjust it to your needs. It's designed to just get you out of the habit of checking throughout the day. Maybe checking, or processing email three times a day is too frequently, maybe you only want to do it once a day. Maybe you're going to say, "Kevin, this will never work. My boss, she demands that I respond to her within an hour, otherwise she's going to think I'm goofing off." Well, you might want a new boss, first of all, but, okay fine, set it up so that every hour, on the hour, you give yourself time to process email. If you say twenty-one minutes isn't long enough, give yourself thirty. If it's too long, give yourself ten. The idea is to break the habit of constantly checking, and you want to process your email in identified, scheduled times on your calendar. You'll feel great having all those inbox to-dos out of the way and scheduled, that whole Zeigarnik Effect, that stress effect of having undone things will disappear, and you're going to sleep better at night. Remember, just for this episode on email mastery, I created an instant download, 321Zero email master system, a little infograph. You can download it, print it, tape it up on your monitor, leave it next to your laptop, and it will remind you of the 4D's and the 321Zero system. I hope you will just text the word ACHIEVE to 44222, or visit the website, extreme-productivity.com. Come back for the next episode, because it's with my favorite high achiever. I'm going to tell you what Mark Cuban's number one piece of advice is, when it comes to productivity. Until next week, remember, master your minutes to master your life.
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Feb 24, 2016 • 15min

Stop Typing Notes And Start Writing Them By Hand

Today, we’re talking about Richard Branson’s secret productivity tool and why you need to be handwriting your notes instead of typing them into your computer or tablet. Shocking, I know. What you’re going to learn: The tool Richard Branson claims he could not have built the Virgin Group without My favorite type of notebook The scientific reason why taking notes by hand is better than typing them into your computer or digital device Key Quotes: “The pen is mightier than the keyboard.” Read Full Transcript Dang, I'm feeling productive. How about you? Welcome to the show. I'm Kevin Kruse and I'm sharing tips and advice from my new book, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs. That's got to be the longest book title in history. In the last episode, we covered how George Bush, even while as a sitting president, was able to read 95 books a year. Today, we're talking about Richard Branson's secret productivity tool and why you need to be handwriting your notes instead of typing them into your computer or tablet. Shocking, I know. Hey, first I want to send you a quick start action plan so you can 10X your productivity. All you need to do to get it is send a text message to 44-222 with the word "achieve" or go to the website productivity-podcast.com. Now, let's dive in. It turns out that many, many of the greatest minds in history consider a notebook, a simple notebook, to be one of their prized possessions. Indeed, Richard Branson talks about this a lot. Obviously, Branson's the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, very colorful character. He said once that the little notebook in his back pocket is his prized possession. He said, "I could never have built the Virgin Group to the size it is without those few bits of paper." Billionaire Aristotle Onassis, he was a big shipping magnet. He used to always give advice that he called his Million Dollar Lesson. He said, "Always carry a notebook. Write everything down. That is a million dollar lesson that they don't teach you in business school." Once you kind of know about this notebook secret, you're going to start hearing it everywhere you go. It's like when you buy a Honda Civic and then you see all the other Honda Civics on the road, it's the same kind of thing. I was listening just two days ago to an interview on the Mixergy Podcast with John Lee Dumas. Now, John Lee Dumas, of course, has his own podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire, but he was in the guest chair. He was getting interviewed. He was asked, "So if I called you at 5:30 in the morning, what would you be doing?" He said, "Well, I would be walking around the bay in San Diego, listening to podcasts, and you would see me with my notebook in my hand. I'd be jotting down ideas and takeaways and words of wisdom from the notebook." I'm paraphrasing there. Just two days ago, John Lee Dumas makes $3 million as a solopreneur and he brings up the fact that at 5:30 in the morning, going for his power walk, he's still got that notebook in his hand. People always make fun of me because I'm carrying my little black notebook around. I go out to lunch with friends, it's there. Business meetings, it's there. It's always with me just because you never know when you're going to get an idea, you're going to meet someone, someone's going to say something, and you don't want to rely on your memory. You want to write it down. The only time I break that rule is sometimes if I'm jogging outside or on the treadmill or something, I don't have the notebook on me, but I usually have my smartphone because I'm listening to a podcast or I'm pumping out some music. Sometimes I'll stop and I'll send myself an email, which in general, you don't want to do this as your normal practice, but if you have no other choice, then it's better to just send yourself an email with the little thing you thought of or the little note. Then, once you get back to your desk and you start working, it's like, "Oh yeah. I forgot about that." Then you transfer it into your notebook. What type of notebook is best if this super powerful tool is a notebook? What should you go out and get if you're not already using one? Well, for a lot of years, I was using a very large nerdy kind of, they call them an account style notebook. The brand name is Boorum and Pease, B-O-O-R-U-M and then it's P-E-A-S-E. You can type that into Amazon and see these big books. Now, they're large. They're hardcover. They're really cool, but they're kind of expensive and, again, they're large so they're harder to carry around. Here's a weird suggestion. Author, entrepreneur James Altucher, he uses waiter's pads, you know, those little paper pads that people will take your orders on. He says, one, they're cheap. They cost ten cents each, about the cheapest you're going to find for a pad of paper. He says it makes a statement to people that you're frugal with your money and they're a great conversation starter. What in the world are you doing taking out this waiter's pad? Where did you get that? Now, most people that I know, and I've switched over, they're using a moleskine notebook. Now, many of you probably just said, "Why did he just moleskine? Isn't it moleskin?" Now, it's true that most Americans call those little black notebooks moleskin. Officially, on that website, they have a blog page because everyone wants to know how you say the word. They say, "Look, you can say it anyway you want. There's no official right way." People who say moleskin, they often think it's M-O-L-E-S-K-I-N. They are forgetting that there's an E at the end of that word for that notebook. It's a French word, which means imitation leather. I can't speak French, but it's moleskine is like the French pronunciation. Sometimes you even hear people say moleskine with a little accent on the E. Officially, call it anything you want. Seth Godin, when I saw him talk once at a private event and he was talking about we all send signals as to what club we belong to, like if you have an iPhone, you're part of the iPhone club, he held up his little notebook and he said, "If you carry one of these, you're part of a tribe." He says, "If you call it moleskin, you're no longer in my tribe." Anyway, whatever works for you. Another popular group are field notes. They're literally called that. Field notes. You can get like a three pack for $10. That's the style that Richard Branson uses, like a really small, you just put it in your shirt pocket or in your back pocket of your jeans, real easy to carry around. The point is have a notebook to write everything down and don't use just loose pieces of paper that you're going to lose. The great thing about notebooks, I'm looking right now at my bookshelf, I've got, I don't know, twenty stacked up from the last fifteen years or so. It's kind of neat to kind of have a physical record, a journal, a diary, of your life and of your career to back and to just flip through the pages and to see, "What was I doing five years ago at this time of year? What about ten years ago? What were the books I was reading and some of my takeaway notes?" It's a great legacy to leave to your kids or to your partners or whomever that might want to see what you were working on or your words of wisdom and bright ideas over the time. The second thing I want to talk about, really quickly, is why you should always be writing notes by hand. With digital age, you go into a conference room at work, everyone's pulling up their iPads or their MacBook Airs and they're typing notes throughout the meeting. Well, I'm saying don't do that. Hand write your notes in a notebook or hand write them into your tablet. Before the haters start hate, hate, hating on this, first let me say that if you have dyslexia or some other learning condition that makes typing notes better for you than handwriting, then go ahead, do what works for you. I get a lot of hate mail on this issue. Do what's right for you. Before you just dismiss this idea, there was a research article called The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard published in the journal of Psychological Science in 2014. Doctors Pam Mueller, Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton University and UCLA, they did three different experiments. In the first study, they had students watch a TED Talk and then take notes and then take a test 30 minutes later. Now, half the people used a laptop to type the notes in from the TED Talk, the other ones wrote it out in a notebook by hand on paper. The laptop users and the hand-writers did score the same on the factual questions, but on the conceptual questions, the laptop-typers performed worse. Now, the researchers noticed that the laptop people were actually transcribing the TED Talk, like typing it out word-for-word, like a robot. They noticed that the hand-writers were having to take shorthand and summaries and only the key points. They said, "Listen, we're going to do the experiment again, and laptop users, just take notes in your own words. Don't transcribe it word-for-word." Results were the same. Hand-writers had better recall of the material on the test that was taken a half hour later. Now, other people say, "But yeah, if you take your notes on a laptop, you have a more complete set of notes and so when you want to review the material at a later date, study for that test at the end of the semester, you've got a full set of notes and that's going to be a better study resource." They did the test again. They delayed the test by over a week and once again, the hand-writers out performed the typers. This Princeton research and UCLA research just confirms what a lot of people had kind of instinctually had guessed. The act of taking notes by hand involves active listening, cognitive processing, and then recalling it to put it back down, record it on the page. People who takes notes with a laptop tend to just jot down the spoken words or the shortcuts for those words and they don't use the same mental work. The pen, the power of the pen, is mightier than the keyboard. What can you do with this information today? Listen, if Richard Branson swears by the power of a notebook, shouldn't you? If you're not already using a notebook or have one that you like, just go to Amazon.com. Get the moleskine or field notes or just type "notebook" or "journal" and get something that's pretty that you'll carry around with you. Listen, I am an Evernote user. I'm sure right now, until this point, all the Evernote users are going crazy. See, Evernote is a great note classification system, filing system. I don't think it's a great note capturing system. I will routinely write my notes in my notebook and then scan it or take a picture of it and send it in to my Evernote. When I'm online and I want to take a screengrab or copy an article, I will do that with Evernote and send it in to Evernote. I still have that paper-based notebook. There's some good hybrid solutions between these notebook companies and Evernote. I'm not against those. It's more important to just be using a notebook system and to be handwriting as much as possible. All right. Once again, I got an infographic to help you get the most from this advice. It's called Get the Most From Your Notebook. You can download it right now, within a minute. Just send a text to 44-222 and the text is just the word "achieve" A-C-H-I-E-V-E or go to the website productivity-podcast.com. Extreme, a little hyphen, productivity.com and download Get the Most From Your Notebook Infographic. It includes my own personal note system, my little symbols and things that I use. Listen in to the next episode. Please come back to the next episode. I'm going to cover the seven steps you can take to cut your email time in half. It's doable and there's good research that shows this will work. Cut your email time in half. Hallelujah. Till then, remember master your minutes to master your life.    
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5 snips
Feb 17, 2016 • 16min

Former President George W. Bush Secret To Work-Life Balance

Today I’m going to talk about how President Bush read 95 books a year and how his productivity secret will enable you to leave work at a decent hour and enjoy your personal time stress free. What you’re going to learn: Why successful people always seem so calm and stress free (and their secret to achieving this) How to leave the office at 5 PM, EVERYDAY Key Quotes: “There will always be more to do and more than can be done.” “There will always be another crisis, another fire. Life is a marathon. Life needs to be balanced.” Read Full Transcript Hey there everybody. Kevin Kruse here and I'm sharing the surprising things ultra-productive people do differently. Based on my original survey research of thousands of working professionals and on my interviews with over 200 super high achievers. Now in the last episode I shared the nine step cure for procrastination and today I'm going to talk about how President Bush read 95 books a year and how his productivity secret will enable you to leave work at a decent hour and enjoy your personal time stress free. First remember you can get the quick start action plan that includes the one-page tool that millionaires use to schedule their day just by sending a text message. Send the word achieve A-C-H-I-E-V-E achieve to the number 44222 or go to the website productivity-podcast.com. Have you ever wondered how the world's most important people always seem so calm, stress-free, so fully present in the moment. In other words they are completely opposite of who I used to be when I was starting and running companies back when I was young and dumb in my 20's. Things go so bad. Business was going well but at a tremendous cost. I didn't know how to be productive. I would literally be jogging down the hallways, the hallways in my own building, racing back to my office to jump on a call that had just come in or to make the next meeting. That's how tight the schedule was. I was physically jogging through my own office. I can visually distinctly remember so many times when I would be driving to work or driving back from work or in to the office and I would have a sandwich in one hand and my mobile phone in the other and I'm steering with my knees. Not a good idea. Children do not try this at home. I used to go round and my constant state I always tell people I was fatigued, I was frazzled, I was so frustrated, I was totally F'd, the three F's. Worst of all and I bet you can relate, a lot of you out there can relate. I was on this emotional yo-yo between guilt and stress. If I was working late in the office I felt guilty that I wasn't home with my family. Then Sunday when I'm sitting on the floor with my toddler stacking blocks for hour after hour I'm jumping out of my skin inside stressing out that endless to do list. I got so much to do and here I am stacking blocks for 2 hours this morning. Guilt or stress. Stress or guilt. Yet so many of the super high achievers around me didn't have that going on at all. I started to talk to them, investigate, how do you have time to train for a marathon, to go golfing every weekend, to be reading books all the time, to sit across from me at a lunch meeting and be completely focused and mindful of me and the restaurant and the food and not even worrying about your smart phone or text messages or what was going on back in the office? This is an interesting story that caught my eye and it stayed with me. Back in 2008 Karl Rove, that republic political strategist, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal and Rover had been working for President George W. Bush and in this article Rove talks about a little competition between him and the President. This is what Rove described. He says, "It all started on New Year's Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year's resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who'd gotten out of the habit my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later we were in the oval office he fixed me in his sights and said 'I'm on my second where are you?' Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest and the outcome of the bet, at the year's end I defeated the President 110 books to 95. My trophy looked suspiciously like those given out at a junior bowling final. The President lamely insisted he had lost because he had been busy as the leader of the free world." This article blew my mind. The leader of the free world, the President of the United States has time to read 95 books in one year and Karl Rove, a very powerful important man in his own right, he read 110 books in one year. I was totally blown away and you know the President of the United States, imagine what his calendar must look like. How many meetings are scheduled? How much time is needed to ponder all the decision that have to be made? You know that at the end of every day there's still more foreign leaders to call back and to influence, more CIA briefings to read, more campaign contributors to call and suck up to or more wounded veterans to write letters to, voters to rally. There's so much to do and there's a ticking time clock. Presidents must feel tremendous pressure in their first term. They've only got four years to deliver some goods otherwise there won't be a second term. In their second term they've only got four more year to leave a legacy. How will history remember them? Their minutes count and yet they're reading 100 books a year. How can this be? I didn't talk to President Bush. He didn't return my email I did try. I'm sure he valued reading two books a week because to him it was important. It was a way to relieve stress or to get smarter or to just have some fun. He knew that learning and recharging the batteries, his batteries, was an important task. This is what all the Olympic athletes told me that I interviewed for the book. They said very often the thing they can do to get closer to winning a gold medal is to take a nap. Didn't really talk about it as napping or sleeping or being lazy. It was called recovery. In short President Bush had clearly defined what he valued in his life and he allocated his time accordingly. He didn't respond to endless calls for attention, the endless to-do list. He figured out what was important. He knew that life was marathon not a sprint and he just allocated for the long haul. A life changing quote from the book High Output Management from Andy Grove who was the founder and former CEO of Intel, High Input Management. He talks about he goes home at a reasonable like 6, 6:30 every single day. Doesn't matter what's on the to-do list, doesn't matter the crisis of the day. He said basically he goes home when he's ready to go home not when he's done because he's never done. He says there will always be more to do and more than can be done. It's simple words but when you really let that sink in, when you realize you're never going to catch up. There will always be more things you could do. It just changes the way you think about your time. When I was running around totally F'd, I had a believe system that the next items on my to-do list was more important than other items in my life like my health, my marriage, my kids, helping other people. I didn't have this consciously in my mind. It was subconscious but you can't argue with it because you looked at how I spent my time. I spent 100 hours a week desperately working to grow my business because of my because of my passion to make money and to achieve financial independence, to be an entrepreneur. I probably gave, I don't know, 10 hours a week to my family? In those 10 hours, how present was I when I was constantly thinking about work? Physically how much energy did I have to have fun with my kids or to connect with my wife when I was just totally exhausted and wanted to sleep. I'm sure from their perspective it was like hanging around with a zombie, me shuffling through the hallways and kind of groaning and drooling as they tried to tell me about their day or whatever it was. I didn't have it all right because I just always felt I could solve the problems. There's a crisis I could fix. There's another thing I could do. I didn't set limits. Listen, I know now a lot of self-made millionaires, guys who started and sold their companies or went public or whatever. On the outside they all look great with their $100,000 sports cars and race horses or they collect art or they have articles written about their success in the business magazines. I know a lot of those guys who have completely messed it up. My friend Alan who had a heart attack in his 40's and his doctor said, "Here's the number one thing that you need to do to not die. Stop eating pizza." That stinks because I really like pizza. He had to completely-he almost died. May die young from another heart attack and completely had to change his lifestyle. Tony has a teenage son who's a phenomenal young man and his son doesn't speak to him anymore. That's his relationship with his son. Ned blew up his marriage to the point where his grown daughter didn't even let him come to her wedding. He wasn't even invited to his own daughter's wedding. I've got two teenage daughters. I cannot imagine the pain of being disowned by them not being able to walk them down the aisle. I can think of almost nothing worse. You can never catch up. You can never get it all done. There will always be another crisis, another fire. Life is a marathon. Life needs to be balanced. The solution, the take-away from President Bush reading 95 books a year is that you need to think about and identify what do you value in your life recognizing that life is a marathon and then allocate your minutes your 1440 a day to those areas. You might value your health not just because people say you should but it's going to give you more energy. You're going to think and perform better. You're going to take fewer sick days and yes hopefully you'll live longer. You might value time with your family because you feel happy when you feel connected to people. You feel good giving love and guidance to your kids. We need our families when we get low in times of crisis. We need our families to celebrate with. Why are we doing all this if we can't celebrate and enjoy it along the way? You know what, for those of you who think, "Oh, I'll connect with my kids when they're not toddlers when they're older when they can speak more like adults." Believe me, if you're trying to connect with your kids for the first time when they're teenagers ain't going to work. Figure you'll connect with them when they're adults and you're retired, it's too late. They've connected with other people in their life. Connections take time. You might value hobbies, golf, scrapbooking, reading, whatever it is because that helps you to recharge. It's okay to have fun and listen there's no judgment here. If you truly value business and financial success maybe you're not married, maybe you don't have kids, maybe you're an introvert and you don't have a lot of friends and you get charged up by your mission, your passion which is your business, good, but just be intentional about it. I was not intentional. I was working 100 hours a week and it felt like I was running from a freaking grizzly bear nonstop for 5 years. Be intentional about what you value in your life. Realize that it's a marathon and then allocate your time accordingly. This year I'm going to read at least 52 books. How about you? All right that's another episode of the Extreme Productivity Podcast. If you want to instantly download the one-page planning tool that millionaires use to schedule their day you know what to do. Just text the word achieve to 44222 or to go extreme-productivity.com. Listen in to the next episode where I'm going to reveal Richard Branson's number one tool for success. He said he would not have been able to build the billion dollar Virgin Group without this tool which actually costs just a couple of bucks. Tune back in and I will let you know what his secret to success is. Until then, remember master your minutes to master your life.
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14 snips
Feb 10, 2016 • 15min

The 9-Step Procrastination Cure

This podcast discusses the cure for procrastination, including the reasons behind procrastinating and 9 steps to overcome it. The hosts delve into the different procrastination personalities and provide strategies for reframing thoughts and developing daily habits. They emphasize the importance of taking small actions and share quotes from successful individuals. Check out the show notes for a quick start action plan and an infographic on procrastination.
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9 snips
Feb 3, 2016 • 12min

The Four Procrastination Personalities

Learn about the four causes of procrastination and how to identify your own procrastination personality. Get a Quick Start action plan for curing procrastination and discover President Bush's secret for reading 95 books a year.
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6 snips
Feb 3, 2016 • 19min

Why Millionaires Don’t Use To-Do Lists

Today, we’re going to talk about why high achievers and ultra productive people don’t use to do lists and what they use instead. What you’re going to learn: The truth about to-do lists and why they’re making you unproductive and stressed out What millionaires and high achievers use instead of to-do lists How to use the same tool to get your own goals accomplished on time Key Quotes: “Throw away your to do list. Toss it out the window, burn it, stomp on it, tear it into a million pieces and toss them into the wind like confetti.”  “You run the day or the day runs you.” Read Full Transcript Hey, hey, welcome everyone. I’m Kevin Kruse and I interviewed over 200 self-made millionaires and successful entrepreneurs—like the cofounders of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Atlassian and also successful solopreneurs like Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas all to discover their secrets to extreme productivity. In the previous episode I gave you simple questions to zero in on your Most Important Task and talked about the power of proper priorities. Today we’re talking about why high achievers ultra productive people don’t use to do lists! But first, if you want to 10x your productivity grab your smartphone and text the word ACHIEVE to 44222 and I’ll send you The 1-Page Planning Tool That Millionaire’s Use To Schedule Their Day. Just text ACHIEVE to 44222 or you can visit the website productivity-podcast.com to download the 1-Page Planning Tool that Millionaire’s Use To Schedule Their Day and other bonuses. Let me ask you this, do you really think back in the day Steve Jobs just kept a running task list in his pocket and would pull out that little piece of paper and ask himself several times a day, what's my next action? If you are not a Steve Jobs or an Apple fan, put in whoever your productivity superhero is, whether that's Bill Gates or Michael Dell or any of these kinds of guys. Do you think they're just running around with that long to do list picking things off throughout the day? Let's get out of business, do you think extreme athletes, professional athletes are working and running their life off a to do list? Does a quarterback say, "Wow, I got a big game on Sunday, let me wake-up and look at my to do list and get to it?" That's not how they work, that's not how they live. To-do lists should be called, nagging wish lists. A whole bunch of tasks that you hope to accomplish, you think you're supposed to accomplish but you don't have a specific plan as to when you're going to get it all done. How many things on your current to-to list, be honest, have been there for days or even months. There was a time when I had some items on my list for more than a year, like you know, get the 2012 family photo album done. I think that was on the list for several years. Research was done in 2014 and was published in a guide, if you want to start googling around. The Busy Person's Guide to the Done List and they found that 41% of to do list items are never completed, 41% are never completed. 50% of the to do list items that are completed are completed within a day and many of those within an hour of it being written down. It's almost like, we write it on the to do list and then cross it off right away so we can feel productive. Here's the problem, to do lists are, it's a technology that's 120 years old. The story goes that to do lists were invented by a guy names Ivy Lee. He was a consultant that was hire by Charles Schwabb who was running U.S steel at the time and Schwabb said, " Hey. I want my executives to get more stuff done, you know, to be better with their time." Ivy Lee said, " All right, here's the answer, at the beginning of the day, I want you all to take out a piece of paper and write down 6 things that you'd like to do and start working on the first item and then work on it until it's done and then move on to the second item and keep going through your list until it is time to go home." Well, that sounds really quaint. Only 6 items and work on stuff until it's time to go home but that was 120 years ago. When people worked an 8 hour day and was more about put clock in your time in instead of this round the clock, never ending cycle. You know the world was round and not flat, meaning you worked in one time zone and not multiple time zones. It wasn't as competitive, these were companies and businesses that had monopolies. Every executive had their own secretary, you know, called secretaries back then. It was just a completely different time and look, to do lists work today if you don't have much to do. If you only have a handful of things to do, sure write them down, cross them off. For most of us, we're talking about high achievers, we're talking about extreme productivity. How do we get in the top 10% or even 1% when it comes to getting things done? This shows why, people always ask me, "Does the world really need another time management book? Why are you working on that Kevin?" The fact that we've been taught to use to-do lists all this time, all the books are about to-do lists, all the time management courses are about to-do lists and yet, here we are. Do you feel any less stressed? You know, we're over-scheduled overworked and overwhelmed. I like to say, "We're fatigued, we're frazzled, we're frustrated, we're totally effed because of the to-do list." Listen, to do lists they're the graveyards of important but not urgent tasks and the reason why is even when you try to prioritize them, we don't distinguish our to do list. What is going to take a few minutes vs. what's going to take an hour or more so we generally just say, "What are we going to tackle next?" And we gravitate to the ones that are real fast, you know the ones the we can cross off within the hour. It makes it really easy to work on the urgent stuff instead of the important, Ooh, this feels like it's a burning fire, let me work on that. To do lists also cause undue stress, the psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect. When our minds, when our subconscious knows we got stuff to do and there's no plan to do it, it eats at us, it stresses us out. That's why at night we go home and we're exhausted and we collapse in the bed and then we can't fall asleep. You know we've got insomnia because out brain's churning on all those things that we still have to do. What's the answer? Highly successful people don't have a to do list but they have a very well kept calendar. Ultra productive people live from their calendar. Now you're probably like disappointed with the surprise answer but sometimes the simple stuff is hard to implement and still life changing, career changing when it's done right. This was one of the most consistent messages I got from all of the people I interviewed, from all the research. If you truly want to get something done, if you truly plan on doing it, put it on your calendar. Jordan Harbinger, co-founder of the Art of Charm, its a podcast and a school and course that teaches people networking and relationship skills. He told me this, he says, "Listen, use a calendar and schedule your entire day into 15 minute blocks. It sounds like a pain but this will set you up in the 95 percentile as far as organization goes. If it's not on the calendar it doesn't get done. If it's on the calendar, it gets done no matter what. Use this not just for appointments but for workouts, calls, emails blocks et cetera." Notice the 15 minute blocks ultra productive people know the power of 1440. There's 1,440 minutes in a day. It's true that by default Outlook and Google calendar is going to open up an event for 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Change that. You can change that in the settings done to 15 minutes. Marissa Mayor runs 10 minute long meetings because she is doing so many meetings. Serial entrepreneur, best selling author Chris Ducker told me what's his secret to success? What's his secret to productivity? "I simply put everything on my schedule, that's it. Everything I do on a day to day basis gets put on my schedule, 30 minutes of social media, on the schedule, 45 minutes of email management, on the schedule. Catching up with my virtual team, on the schedule, quiet time to contemplate and plan, on the schedule." Shannon Miller, won more Olympic medals than any other gymnast. She told me that she learned it back when she was an athlete and she's doing it now that she has, you know, her own business. She schedules her life down to the minute. CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner wrote a blog post about this, about how his entire day is scheduled and he schedules buffer time. 30 minute blocks throughout the day for him to catch up or to sit quietly and to think. To regroup so that he's not running around like a crazy maniac. He says, "It felt like a luxury, I felt guilty about it at first but being mindful, being present, being strategic, focused on the right things is the right thing to do." When you move from a to-do list to a calendar, all of a sudden you can manage distractions so much better. You know you're not checking email throughout the day as thinking you are being productive when really it's just a procrastination technique. You're not checking in to Snapchat or Facebook or Twitter throughout the entire day. You can process social media, you can process email but you've got a time for it and limits on it. Listen, I know I am going to be doing social media 30 minutes this afternoon, so I am not going to hop on it 50 times between now and then. The other reason why putting everything on your calendar is so important and effective is it makes sure that the urgent items don't erase the important items. Think about Jeff Weiner and Chris Ducker, they're even scheduling their quiet time, their creative time, their strategic time. Now I talked about in the last episode, Identify your most important task and time block it. You should have at least an hour, if not 90 minutes or 2 hours of a recurring time block, five days a week on you calendar. Okay from 9-10:30 that's MIT time and I'll jot in the specific MIT on a day to day basis but it's just time blocked there. Don't ask me to have a coffee meeting at 9:30 in the morning because that's my MIT time. The other reason when you time block all of your work and life activities is that it makes it more realistic in terms of saying yes to items or saying no to items. "Oh, you want to get together and catch up and pick my brain over coffee. Hey, sure I'd love to do that, that's great," but instead of saying, "Yes let's do it tomorrow because there is a blank slot on my calendar" and now pushing all my to-do list down another 2 hours at least because I've now got this coffee time. I'm going to open the calendar and if the time slot isn't available tomorrow for catching up with people or for networking or whatever you want to classify that. I'm going to say, "You know what, we can grab coffee but all of my calendar is full until 3 weeks from now. How's Friday the 21st at 10 am, I've got a time block there?" That was something I learned from Dave Kerpen, he said, "Listen, I value making new friends and getting back to people including strangers, so I don't just ignore all of those emails that come in. People saying, hey can I pick you're brain. Can we jump on the phone. I just time block it. I've got 1 hour a week dedicated to talking to random people on the phone and when someone asks to get together, I send them my calendar link and they get into the first slot. If I got 15 minutes free this Thursday, fantastic but maybe I'm booked up for the next 5 weeks." He's not saying, "No." He's not saying, "I never do that thing." He's allocated time for it, whether that's an hour a week, a day week, whatever you want to do and then when it's full, It's full. When you really get in tune with time blocking on your calendar, you can look at your week and see your true values. They say we can tell what a person truly values by looking at their checkbook and their calendar. You know, how are they spending their money? How are they spending their time? You say that you value your marriage? Well, why don't we see date night time blocked on your calendar once a week? You say that your kids are one of the highest priorities and values but have you already put all of their soccer games on to your schedule for the season? Did you already time block all of their practices and their dance performances and all of those things? Why is that not on your calendar? You say that in my own case, something I learned, I value my team members both because I want to coach them and help them from a humanistic reason and because it makes sense. You know everybody that reports to me, if I can upgrade their skills quickly, then they're going to do better for my business. Every Monday, I time block one on one time for each of my direct reports. Now look, they might not get a whole lot of my attention Tuesday through Friday because I have other time blocks but they know they are always going to get my attention, one on one for 30-60 minutes every single Monday. I value my health so I time block 60 minutes of workout times on a daily basis. Another thing is once you've identified your values, you've time blocked all of this, then you need to protect the time like it's a doctors appointment. You know someone wants to get together. Your boss wants to talk to you, it's like okay I can but I got a doctor appointment can we do it another time? If not it's okay, I can reschedule. That's the other take away. You don't just cancel your doctor appointment, you reschedule it. I think you've got the idea and it's amazing. Once you've put everything from your to do list on to your calendar, that Zeigarnik effect disappears. Your subconscious knows yeah you've got a lot of stuff to do but there's a plan for it. You've got a time already allocated on this day and this time, you're going to work on it. All of a sudden that insomnia and all that chatter in your subconscious goes away. How do you apply the really specifically? If you are not already using an online or digital calendar, I suggest you get one. I use Google calendar. In the past I used Outlook calendar. There's great calendar apps. Just pick something that can be synchronized across your devices that's available online remotely that you might want to share with some virtual assistance or your admin or some partners and then look at your to do list. Take all those items on your to do list and schedule time to get them done. Even if it's a non-urgent non-important item, lie work on the family photo album or whatever that is. Okay, put it 3 months from now and on a Sunday afternoon get It all out of your mind, out of your to do list piece of paper and get it on your calendar and throw away that to do list. Toss it out the window, burn it in the fireplace, tear it up and you know, yell hip, hip, hooray and toss the confetti in the air because now you are gong to sleep well tonight knowing exactly what you need to do and that you've got a plan to get it done. You need to stop using a to do list and start living your life from the calendar. You run the day, or the day runs you. All right, thank you again for joining me on this episode of The Extreme Productivity Podcast. Don't forget, if you want to download that one page finding tool that millionaires use to schedule their day, just visit extreme-productivity.Com or text the word "achieve" to 44222 and come back for the next episode. You are going to learn that there are 4 types of procrastinators. What is your procrastination personality? Find out on the next episode, until then remember, master your minutes to master your life.
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Feb 3, 2016 • 21min

How Briana Scurry and Other Olympians Win The Day

Today we’re going to talk about how Briana Scurry and other Olympians win the day and how to focus on your MIT. What you’re going to learn: The MIT Principle (What you should be focused on and how to get it done) What Briana Scurry and other Olympians do to win the day How to break down your yearly goal into daily MITs Key Quotes: “About six months before an Olympics, I would relate all the decisions I made to the ultimate vision of winning gold. The simple question I would ask several times a day was, ‘Will this activity help me perform better and therefore help us win gold?’” – Briana Scurry “I always start with the most important thing on my priority list. If you didn’t spend your week working on the most important thing, it was a week wasted.” – Randy Gage “I work more on time alignment. Is this part of my mission?.” – Chris Brogan “If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither one.” –Russian proverb “To do two things at once is to do neither.” –Publius Syrus Read Full Transcript Welcome back to the Extreme Productivity podcast, I’m Kevin Kruse and I interviewed over 200 billionaires, self-made millionaires, successful entrepreneurs, and even Olympic athletes and straight A students to learn how THEY 10x their productivity. In the previous episode we discussed how the number 1440 can change your life and I shared the advice of Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington. TODAY we’re talking about how Briana Scurry and other Olympians win the day. But first, if you want to achieve your goals faster than ever before, just grab your smartphone and text the word ACHIEVE to 44222 and I’ll send you The 1-Page Planning Tool That Millionaire’s Use To Schedule Their Day. Just text ACHIEVE to 44222 or you can visit the website productivity-podcast.com to download the 1-Page Planning Tool that Millionaire’s Use To Schedule Their Day and other bonuses. Do you remember the movie City Slickers? Hilarious. Got to watch it. In one scene, an old cowboy Curly (played by Jack Palance) gives a secret to life to Mitch (played by Billy Crystal). Holding up his index finger, Curly explains that you need to figure out your one thing and stick to it. But the “one thing” concept goes back a lot further than a Billy Crystal comedy. Consider this advice from the ages: • “To do two things at once is to do neither.” –Publius Syrus • “If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither one.” –Russian proverb • Wise old Buddha once said, “Put down your freaking smartphone and focus would you?!” We can take this wisdom and boil it down to a single principle. The MIT Principle – The Most Important Task Therese Macan, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, conducted groundbreaking research into time management, productivity, and stress, discovering that the two most important keys are priorities and mechanics (i.e., the mechanics of implementing time management techniques and tactics). Put simply, the most important things are to know what to focus on and how you are going to get it done. I call this always knowing your MIT: the most important task. The key to your productivity all comes down to understanding what is most important to you—and what activity will provide the greatest leverage to getting there—right now. Additionally, research that we’ve conducted at the Kruse Group in 2015 on over 4,000 working professionals indicates that having a daily MIT correlates to higher levels of happiness and energy. Briana Scurry, who won two gold medals as the starting goalkeeper for the United States women’s soccer team in 1996 and 2004, tod me: “About six months before an Olympics, I would relate all the decisions I made to the ultimate vision of winning gold. The simple question I would ask several times a day was, ‘Will this activity help me perform better and therefore help us win gold?’” Randy Gage is author of nine books including the New York Times bestseller, Risky Is the New Safe. For Gage, success is measured in identifying his MIT and sticking to it: “I always start with the most important thing on my priority list. If you didn't spend your week working on the most important thing, it was a week wasted.” Chris Brogan is a bestselling author and CEO of Owner Media Group. said: “I work more on time alignment. Is this part of my mission?.” Your MIT will be different from mine, and next month’s (or year’s) MIT will most likely be different than today’s. Let me give you an example from my own life… My goal is to impact 100,000 people and make 1 million dollars in a year. I break down all the things I need to do to make that happen…it involves reaching people and content marketing through articles, it includes writing and publishing books, it includes speaking engagements, it includes online courses…so there are many different projects to complete to reach my goals…tasks. So last year the big project was the successful launch of my book, which is what this podcast is based on. For a long time, my daily MIT was: • Write the freakin book • Finish the marketing plan • Line up book reviewers • Line up podcast interviews and do the podcast interviews • Right now…the biggest project to achieving my annual goal is this podcast…so reviewing podcast training modules was an MIT, then it was deciding on the format, length and style, then it was writing the scripts, etc. Here are some questions to help you to get at your big goal and MIT…if you have a corporate job: • What does your boss care most about? • How is your bonus determined? • What would be the thing that would get you promoted if you could accomplish it? (the busy work keeps you from getting fired, but your MIT will get you promoted) If you’re an entrepreneur, you have your big hairy audacious goal and the steps to achieve it…lined up like dominos…what’s the next domino to tip over that will have the biggest impact on your goal… - When I had a small company, double my revenues in one year. I had one sales rep. I needed to hire two by January 1… - Launch a new product… - Raise $35 million in VC money OK, so how can you apply this information? Step 1) Figure out your MIT; what is the project that if accomplished will get you promoted, or double the size of your business in a year?...Work on that task is your MIT Step 2) Schedule at least an hour a day, as early as possible to work on it Step 3) Protect that time (shut off phone, no email, tell admin you’re out) Make a habit out of it. Every morning I look at my calendar and say how am I going to WIN THE DAY? What do I need to accomplish before 10am, so that no matter what else happens, I will have won the day. Guess what. I got a tool that can help you to figure out your MIT. If you would like to instantly download your “Most Important Task Worksheet”, just text the word ACHIEVE to 44222 or visit extreme-productivity.com. Hey the next episode has a mind blowing truthbomb…I’m going to tell you why self-made millionaires don’t use to-do lists. Yep, you heard it here first. Instead of to-do lists what they use is…well, you’ll just have to tune-in to the next 10 minute episode to find out. Until next week, Remember, Master Your Minutes to Master Your Life.  

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