3 Ways To Get More Done

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode because I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn yourself grow and improve because if you can improve yourself you can improve your life so if you want more of that go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Today I'm going to be teaching you how to be more productive how to get more done in less time and how to stop being such a busy bee, I guess you could say. I've worked with a lot of people over time and I have this day that kind of pops up and is told to me all of the time.

0:46And you've probably felt this way before, which is, hey, I work so much, but I don't feel like I'm getting anything done. You ever had one of those days where you're just working, working, working, and you're slaving away and you're doing something at the end of the day, you're like, man, I'm exhausted, but I don't feel like I did anything? If so, you are probably being busy and not being productive. So there's a massive difference between busy and productive. Busy is just doing things. Product, like being productive, productivity is conquering the most important things. And let's be real. You waste a lot of time, don't you?

1:22Like we all do. It's funny because I'll talk to people and they're like, I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm like, show me your calendar. And they're like, well, I don't really keep a calendar. I kind of have like a little bit here. Most people that I have found are absolutely terrible with time management. So it's not that they don't have enough time. It's usually that you're not really good at managing their time. We all want a perfect life. We all want to make money and travel the world and have fun and buy some cool things and, you know, donate a bunch of money to the world and have great relationships.

1:55We all want a perfect life. But what's really interesting about being a human is that you only get 24 hours every single day. You and every single person on this earth gets 24 hours. That will never change. You cannot control time. The only thing that we can change is how productive we are when we want to get something done. Now, this is not an episode about hustle culture and working your ass off all day long. I used to be that person. And I'm telling you, don't be that person. Learn from my mistakes. That's not how you get to success. Let me say that again. You can get to success, but you're going to hate your life on the way over there.

2:33And so what I recommend is like having a time where you click on to be productive, to get stuff done, whether that's your business, whether that's work, whether that's, you know, helping the children get something done with their schoolwork, whatever it might be. When you click in, you're in. There is nothing else that you're doing. When you click out, you're out. You're not thinking about it. You're not going back into it. So today we're going to dive into how to get a lot more done in less time. Because when you look at the average person that works an eight hour day, they only usually get about two to maybe three hours of productivity done, which means that they're wasting time or trying to multitask or trying to do a whole bunch of other things for five hours out of the day.

3:15And so we're going to talk about some stuff about how to get more done based in psychology, based in studies to teach you what has actually been proven to work. And I'm going to teach you these different techniques to kind of help you do more in less time. The first one, the one that a lot of people don't know about, you've probably heard about it, is something called the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle. And so you have to understand our brain is a very energy consuming organism or organ is what it is. Your brain consumes more energy per pound than any other organ in your entire body. Right now, digestion takes more energy throughout the day, but as far as the actual brain itself and for how big it is, it actually takes the most amount of energy.

4:01And so what I think about is, how can I use every bit of energy to be as productive as possible when I'm trying to be productive? Because our brain has limited capacity to process information. We have limited energy throughout the entire day. How can I bring as much of my brain power to what matters most? And so the way to kind of really think about that is to realize what am I dedicating my time to? In the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle is basically this. 80 % of the results that you get in your life, this could be your business, this could be the company that you work for, This could be your clients in the revenue that comes in your relationships come from 20 % of your actions.

4:48So like, for instance, if I run a business, which I do, and I help a lot of people who do run businesses, right? If I run a business, there are a million things I could be doing every single day, but 20 % of those actions are the most important actions. 20 % will usually give me 80 % of the results. They might even give me 90 % of the results. But 20%, and it doesn't have to add up to 100 because I'm talking about 20 % of my actions, which is actions. On the other side, I'm talking about results. 20 % of your actions that you do on a daily basis in your business are the most important things you should be doing.

5:23So if you're a CEO and you've got employees, you should find a way to delegate everything except for those 20 % of your actions. if you are a salesperson usually your commissions and you look at your commissions throughout the entire year usually 20 of the clients are the majority of your commissions if you're in relationship 20 of the things that you do are going to bring the majority of the connection the happiness the joy between you as well and so what we want to do by looking at this is we want to identify and concentrate on the tasks that are going to give us the most significant results.

6:04It's crazy to me when I work with business owners, how much time they waste doing stuff that does not matter because they either are afraid of taking the big action because the big action could yield some failure and that would make them feel bad about themselves or because they have problems delegating. This happens all the time. And so when you're focusing on the most critical task, what you want to do is you want to minimize as many distractions as you can so that you can really optimize your cognitive resources and be in it. As Cal Newport says, you want to be able to do deep work on those things.

6:41And you really want to start putting a whole lot of deep work into that. And so the thing that I've shared, which is a very simple thing that I recommend that everybody does every single morning, is you make a to-do list every single morning. if you're a business owner, if you're a mother, if you're a father, if you are somebody who is a high school athlete, whatever it might be that you're doing, if you're a college student, write down all of your to-do list. And then what I want you to do to make it very simple, because you probably won't get your entire to-do list done today, is you find and you circle the three most important tasks.

7:19This is what I do every single morning when I meet with my team, is with my energy, I want to put all of my energy or the majority of my energy into the biggest, I call it, I always tell my team, the biggest levers that I can pull. What is the biggest lever that I can pull right now? I could be working until midnight, 1am every single day, but I don't. And so with the time that I have, if I'm going to get done at five, six o 'clock, what's the biggest lever that I can pull right now that can make the biggest impact in the business? So you make your to-do list and you circle the most important, the three most important tasks.

7:52Then you get a three by five card, an index card, and you write down number one and you rank them number one, number two, and number three. Just work on number one. Don't do anything else except for number one. This helps you identify the biggest needle moving, lever pulling task that you could possibly do for today. And what you want to do is you want to just write all of them down, the three things. And if you don't do anything else except for get number one done, it's a pretty damn productive day. if you get number two done as well and number three done as well, you had a really great day. But all of the other things you can either delegate, you can eliminate, or you can do another time.

8:34That's it. You delegate them, you eliminate them, or you can do another time. And that's really what it comes down to is identifying what are the most important tasks that I could be doing. So that's the first thing is the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle. The next thing that I recommend people do is to batch. Batch as much as you possibly can when you're doing stuff. And so for me, like I'm creating content today. Today is one of my content creation days. And so I woke up in the morning and I did, you know, I checked in with my team after 10 o 'clock because in the morning is when I am the most creative for me.

9:08And so I looked back and I was like, okay, I know I need to plan episodes today. I need to record episodes today. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to look through all of my ideas. I have this massive list of ideas that I've been putting together over years and years of recording this podcast. And I just see which one hits home with me this morning. And then I find the one. And then what I do is I start writing them all out. I start putting bullet points and starting to make a flow of the podcast. And I'll do two episodes in the morning, morning, late afternoon-ish, late, excuse me, late morning as well.

9:40and then I come to the studio and I record two or three podcast episodes whenever I come to the studio. When I first had the podcast, this is not even me lying, and the podcast used to come out only three times a week, I used to record the episode the night before. Sometimes, majority of the time. I'd record the night, oh my God, I got to put an episode out tomorrow. What should I talk about? And I just plan it out real quick and I put it up. It's way easier to plan and record and to batch them. I'm in the flow of writing. I'm in the flow of writing. I'm going to go ahead and get them done. I'm in the flow of recording.

10:11I'm going to go ahead and get them done. So like yesterday, I planned two episodes. I recorded two episodes. And then I planned six reels for Instagram and then recorded six reels for Instagram. So that over a few hours, I'm doing the biggest needle moving thing that I can do. And that is, you know, have more people aware of the brand, more people aware of the business. And so what can you do to batch what it is that you do? You know, instead of saying, oh, I'm going to do an email here. And then 20 minutes later, I'm going to check my email here. I think the average person, I saw a study that says they check their email 32 times a day.

10:43Holy shit, that's crazy. What if you just checked your email in the morning and you got emails done and then you didn't look at them again until four o 'clock and then you got emails done from four to five, right? Like how can you learn to start batching things that you're doing often? And then what you do is you look at your schedule and you schedule and batch the most important tasks. And I do this every single Wednesday and Thursday I record and then sometimes Wednesday, Thursday, and today is Friday, three days in a row, plan, record, plan, record. Cause I'm trying to get ahead because if you listen to episode two or three episodes ago, my wife is pregnant.

11:16So I'm going to take some time off from recording. So I'm actually trying to get ahead so that I could take some time off for recording once the baby comes. So that's the next thing is to batch. So 80, 20 principle, which is called the Pareto principle. There's batching. And then the last one is you, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, I love getting messages from you guys saying that you never did this before. You started doing it and it completely changed your productivity because it completely changed my productivity as well. It is called the Pomodoro Technique. I have an entire episode on it if you want to go back and listen to the Pomodoro Technique.

11:49But really what it comes down to is it is impossible for a human to multitask. There are many studies that show that multitasking is just single tasking and you're switching between two things at one time. When you switch, there is a little bit of a delay in time. It could be up to 15 minutes for you to get your brain into like fully be in that thing. And so multitasking, they showed it makes people dumber. It also makes the quality of your work worse. Google it. Just check is multitasking good or bad. But you know, there was a study just to kind of give you an idea that was done at Stanford that found out that heavy multitaskers performed worse on tasks that required attention and memory than those that were focused at one task at a time.

12:35And so the research really supports the idea that prioritizing your high impact tasks and avoiding multitasking makes you more productive. And so with the Pomodoric technique, you basically identify one thing that needs to be done and you shut out the rest of the world. You put on your headphones, You put your phone in another room so that you don't accidentally go for it. You turn off all of your notifications on your computer. You put a sign on the door that says, don't bother me because I'm getting shit done. And literally you take 25 minutes and you put 25 minutes. I wrote about this in my book, Level Up, of how to do the Pomodoro technique and how to do what I call Pomodoro Plus, which is a whole other technique that I've kind of built over years.

13:20And so you do the Pomodoro technique. It's 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And in those 25 minutes, you only do one thing and you bring 100 % of your brain power. And that's like as Cal Newport would say, that's where you actually put in the deep work. And so you put in deep work for 25 minutes. Now, if you get done at those 25 minutes, you can go to your next task. But if you don't get done, you just go back to that task again until that task is done. And so it's 25 minutes on, five minutes off, because in those five minutes, you need to give your brain a full rest. When I say full rest, that means you don't look at your phone.

13:55You don't do much. You can go outside. You can go for a walk for five minutes. Or you can just sit at your desk, close your eyes, and breathe for five minutes. You're giving your brain a rest. It's like lifting really heavy weight. You got to take a rest for a few minutes. And then you go back into lifting really heavy weights. And the Pomodoro technique will absolutely change your life and your productivity. It's so damn simple, but it works so well. One thing, one thing only, 100 % of your brain power to this one thing. And so if you really start to think about it, if you can figure out a way to start using the 80-20 rule to identify the biggest tasks that need to be done today, that will be the most productive things that you could do.

14:36You batch out the things that can all be done. Like, oh, I need to record three episodes, four episodes this week. Well, I can just get all of those done in one day or two days. You batch them. But then when you sit down to work, it needs to be, I have an entire chapter in this in my book. You can read about it and level up. But it needs to become a ritual. It needs to become a thing where it's, uh, instead of like, oh shit, I got to get, sit here and get work done. It's like, it's a ritual, not a habit, habits are habits, you know, routines are routines, but a ritual like feels important. It is important that I bring a hundred percent of my brain power to this task.

15:11You will get more done and you will be light years ahead of other people years down the road because most people, as I said, only get two hours of productivity done, maybe three hours of productivity. if you can get five hours done, you're light years ahead of people in a year and you're in a completely different universe five years down the road. And so what's most important is to stop being busy, start being productive, and to start focusing on the needle moving tasks and getting those crossed off your list every single day and then bringing 100 % of your brain power when you're doing those things to bring the best of yourself and everything that you do.

15:46So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories, tag me at Rob Dial Jr. Also, if you haven't heard the past few episodes, if you love this podcast, I'm launching a thing called Mindset Mentor Plus. It's an entire community and platform to help you not just listen to the podcast passively, but actually actively integrate this fully into your life. There's a lot of different ways we're going to do it. There are detailed worksheets for every single episode so that you can use them as study guides and get better. There's thought-provoking journaling prompts.

16:17There's really targeted assignments so that you can take these episodes and actually start to use them in your life. And then also at the same time, there's gonna be an entire community that you're gonna have that you can join of all other people who are podcast listeners, mindset mentor podcast listeners, so that you're not the only weird person in your life that's trying to grow and improve and get better, but you can meet other weirdos like us. We're gonna have exclusive Q &A sessions. We're gonna have a ton of other bonuses and it's all for less than you probably spend on coffee each month.

16:45And so if you wanna sign up for the wait list, waitlist founding members will get 25 % off. And so that'll be for lifetime. And so if you want to learn more about it, go to mindsetwaitlist.com. We're going to email them before it gets announced in the podcast. And so if you want to join, once again, mindsetwaitlist.com and you'll be one of the first people in the world to learn about it. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.