The Secret To Multiplying Your Time & Productivity | Rory Vaden

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0:38With all the tools and all the distractions and all the social media and all the apps and all the responsibilities that we have in our life, is there a way to multiply time and to become more productive? Yeah, there is. So, I mean, this is what you just described was my life. I This was pretty much like all the things we study. I was not trying so much to solve the problem for the world. I was trying to solve a problem in my own life. Just busy, buried, behind, overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated. No matter how fast you work, you just never feel caught up. No matter how many hours you didn't sleep, you felt tired and you were working sluggish and trying to get it all done, everything.

1:18Yeah, you just can't. There's this frustration of like, am I ever going to have peace? Like, am I ever going to have margin? Am I ever going to have space? And just feeling like things are under control. And so we started looking at this and we started profiling people that at the time we called ultra performers, which were the top one percenters in different industries. Is this top one percent earners, top 100 percent accomplishments? Yeah, I mean, just what it's kind of used that term loosely. But like, you know, if it's church leaders, it's large, you know, large church leaders. If it's athletes, it's professional athletes.

1:49If it's financial advisors, they're probably top earners. Sure, sure. So it's just from different walks of life. And what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged. We call them a multiplier because most people are trying to manage time, right? Like you even hear this. You go, I need to be better at managing my time. Time management. But you know, what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management. there is only self-management right you cannot manage time there's their time ticks on second by second i can't fast forward time i can't stop it i can't pause it and so what this conversation really about is managing ourselves managing our decisions managing our use of time but even that is is kind of a is a first shift that needs to happen is it's not like i'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff.

2:51No, you're in charge. Everything that exists in your life, you either said, you said yes to it in some way. So it is your responsibility and you created the problem, but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it, that you have the power to change it. I went so far as the opening line in my TED talk is I said, everything you know about time management is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very linear way. And the world today is much more like multi-dimensional. When you mean linear way, do you mean focusing on our priorities? Yeah. So a little bit about that.

3:32So if we talk, we love to take people on a quick like history of time management theory. Okay. So era one time management thinking was very one-dimensional. We refer to era one thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was I got 10 things on my to-do list. How do I crank them out faster? And time management and productivity as a body of work really develops like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was how can I be more efficient? Now, efficiency is good.

4:14All things being equal, doing things faster is great. The problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity, which is that no matter how fast we move, the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available. Then in the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies. And Dr. Covey pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought. You know, the world refers to as prioritizing, But we would classify prioritizing as era to thinking, which is still to this day, the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time.

5:05And so here's here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Super powerful, super relevant. Dr. Covey had this thing called the time management matrix that, you know, he explained of like urgency and importance. And basically he taught us to score our activities. so that we could reorder them and say, it's not just about getting these done faster. It's saying, hey, item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one. Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. But what I noticed in my own life, because I was a student of Dr. Covey and several books on time, I mean, there's no shortage of books on time management.

5:46There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exists to help us with this problem of feeling so busy. And yet the majority of us are still overwhelmed. Right. So it's like there's something missing. What we started to notice in these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers is that they are doing a different type of thinking. It's like evolution. Like their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious. They weren't even aware of it. Not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do. They did it instinctively.

6:30How do you become a billionaire in 10 years when most people work for 40 years and they can barely retire? Right. It's a different type of thinking. So here's what it is. So era three time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency. It's not prioritizing. is multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation. It's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he presents this two-dimensional figure like a square where the y-axis is importance and the x-axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance.

7:10If you were doing algebra, it would be the z-axis. It would turn the square into a cube. Three-dimensional. Three-dimensional thinking, era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking. And so here's the difference. Urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now. Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still. Significance is how long is this going to matter? So what is the impact of this activity in the future? 10 years out, 20 years out. Even 10 days out, yeah.

7:54It is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow. How is it possible to multiply time? The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow.

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