being productive is easy, actually

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor, give us a rating and review however you listen to us. More positive ratings and reviews that we get than one of those platforms like Apple and Spotify present this podcast to people who have never seen it before so that therefore they can discover it, they can hopefully listen to it, and hopefully we can change your life as well. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it.

0:35Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to be more productive, how to get more done in less time than you have been your entire life. And let's be real here, just me and you, right? You know you waste a lot of time, right? Like you feel like you're busy, but I know and you know that you kind of waste a lot of time sometimes. Look at your screen time on your phone. That'll give you a pretty good idea of about how much time that you waste. We all do it though. It's not just you. So don't worry about it. Time or lack of time is not the enemy. It's really lack of focus and lack of priority that is really the biggest enemy here.

1:17It's not time itself. It's that you're not focused and you're not prioritizing everything that's the most important. And all of that turns into you not being as productive as you want. And listen, we all want the perfect life. You're here. You're listening to this podcast episode because you want to be better. You wouldn't listen to a podcast called The Mindset Mentor unless you knew there was something inside of you that you wanted to improve because you knew if you improved, your life would improve. So that means there's a part of you that wants to improve your life. But we all get the same 24 hours in a day.

1:47That will never change. You cannot control time. You can't control how much time you get. The only thing that we can control is how productive you are in the amount of time that you're able to work. I like to think of time like a container. You can't make the container bigger, but you can be more intentional about what you put in that container itself. And so today we're going to dive into three different steps, three different things that I use in my life, I've been using for years that help me get way more done in less time. And, you know, I'm going to teach you some stuff that's based off of psychology and neurology and studies to teach you that these things actually work in your lives so that you can have a really clear understanding of how to leverage these three techniques to help you get more done.

2:36Cool? Let's dive into it. Step number one and tip number one, technique number one, I guess you could call it, is something that's called the Pareto principle. It's called the 80-20 rule. And I learned this probably 20 years ago at this point. Our brain has a limited capacity to process information. You can't just throw a million bits of information and just hope that it all goes through. And so with that, we also have very limited energy throughout the entire day. And so the question I always think about is, okay, I've got very limited energy throughout the day and I've got limited processing from my brain.

3:12So how can I make sure that in the moments when I sit down to get work done, that I'm moving the needle as much as I can and I'm pulling the biggest levers in my life and in my business that I can? How can I bring as much brain power to what matters most? And let me tell you this. I'm just going to be fully honest with you. I make to-do lists. I have never in my entire life ever finished a to-do list. I don't. I've never finished it. but what I do is I focus on the things that are the most important. That's where the 80-20 rule really comes in. What you're doing is you're focusing on this thing that's called cognitive budgeting.

3:51Like money, your mental energy needs to be spent on what gives you the highest return, not what's easiest just to cross off of your to-do list. So taking charge of what you dedicate your time and attention to. Attention is a currency and so where you spend it determines your life's trajectory. And so the Pareto principle, or what's also called the 80-20 rule, says that 80 % of your results in anything come from about 20 % of your efforts. So 80 % of your results come from about 20 % of your efforts. That means 20 % of your tasks on your to-do list will produce 80 % of your progress. Okay. 20 % of your clients will create 80 % of your income.

4:40Like if you look at a business and you just look at, okay, this business has a hundred clients. There's 20 of them that bring in the most revenue. So if I'm a smart business owner, I should really focus on, on developing the best relationship with those top 20, knowing that they're bringing me 80 % of the revenue. 20 % of your habits in your life shape 80 % of your life. So you've got to start to think about this. If I make a to-do list with 14 things on it that have to be done today, what are the most important 20 % on there? Because those most important 20 % are the ones that are going to move the needle in my life the most.

5:17So instead of trying to do everything, which I know there's so many people that are planners and to-do listers that want to get everything done. And then when they don't because it's actually impossible, they get stressed out. So instead of trying to do everything, I don't care about doing everything. I want to focus on doing the right things. That's how you get more done in less time with way less stress. What we want to do is we want to identify and concentrate on the tasks that yield the most significant results in our life, in our businesses, in our fitness, in our diet, in our relationships.

5:52By focusing on the critical 20 % of tasks, we minimize the distractions in our life and we optimize our cognitive resources, which are very, very limited throughout the day. And so research and behavioral economics confirms this and it confirms that not all effort in your life is equal. Often we confuse being busy with being productive. You know, when you look at it, when you think that you're busy versus being productive, it's like when you finish a day, you worked your ass off all day long and the end of the day you laid on your couch, you're like, God, I still don't feel like I did anything.

6:24Lots of times it's because you're focusing on just crossing things off your to-do list and being busy versus being productive. When in reality, what we're doing in those cases is usually, we're usually avoiding the deep work that really moves the needle in our life. And so how do you use the 80-20 rule to enhance your productivity? You make your to-do list. And in your to-do list, you identify the high impact tasks. Those are often the ones that we avoid. We procrastinate. We feel resistance towards, right? We usually don't do them because they demand more from us. They usually demand more brainpower, more effort, more focus, but they usually bring the biggest ROI.

7:03And so the first step to implement the 80-20 rule is to determine which of these tasks contribute the most significant amount to our goals, the ones that align with our long-term success. You create a list of all of the tasks, and what you do is you circle the ones that are the most urgent and important to achieving your goals. And what I recommend is you ask yourself this question. If I could do only one thing today that would create the most impact in my life, what would it be? That's usually part of your 20%. And so what I do every single day, I've said this for years, is I will make my to-do list.

7:36I take an index card, a three by five card. I write number one, the most important thing that needs to be done today. I write number two and I write number three. I rank my three most important things. I throw my to-do list off to the side and I don't look at it usually ever again the rest of the day. and I put that index card in my back pocket and I just focus on taking action number one. If I just get the number one thing done every single day, usually over the course of a year, that's a very productive year. That's the first thing. Make sure you're prioritizing correctly using the 80-20 rule.

8:05The second thing is something that's called batching and we will be right back. And now back to the show. Batching is really taking things that are kind of like very similar or the exact same thing and doing them all at once, like once a week, putting them all together. Because your brain, what happens is it thrives on rhythm. When it gets into a flow, it wants to stay in that flow. And when you're batching and putting all of these tasks together, and I'll explain exactly how to do this and what it means, it reduces something that's called context switching and it protects your deep focus zones that you get into.

8:44So for me, creating content is one of the things that is most important for me, creating these podcast episodes, creating reels for Instagram and creating anything else that we need to create for my business and marketing and all of that. So I want to focus on putting as much effort as I can. I want as much of my brain power as I can into that. So today, woke up, did my morning routine, did everything that I needed to with the family, with the baby, all that stuff. And then I plan two podcast episodes back to back and then record two podcast episodes back to back. And then if I need to record reels, I'll usually plan and record four, five, seven reels for the day and then record them.

9:23Because when I'm in that creative headspace, I want to stay in that creative headspace versus record a podcast episode today and then record another one on Wednesday and record another one on Friday and record one on Saturday. I'm like, no, no, I want to take my energy since I'm in this flow and continue to stay in the creative space. So that's what I do for my creativity. For times when I need to sit down and work and really get things done and have Zoom meetings, that's usually the way, like my Monday, Tuesday is my coaching sessions that I have for like Mindset University and all of that. And also my Zoom calls on my team.

9:58My Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are my creative days to create stuff. And the energy tends to flow better when you do that. So maybe you don't have work days and then creative days, but what would you be able to batch together? What would you be able to use? Because your ideas kind of stack. And when you do that, your execution becomes easier because you're not going from this thing to another thing to another thing. And they're all completely unrelated. So I recommend you figure out what you can batch together. And then what you do is you spend as much of your time as possible in that deep work, working on just a couple of things that are all very related.

10:33And it just allows your brain because creativity is one part of your brain. focus and execution and being productive and thinking about business and numbers and analytical is another part of your brain. How can you use parts of your brains, batch them all together to get things done? So that's number two is to batch. And then number three is when you're sitting down to work, use something that's called the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is very, very simple. You sit down, you have a timer. If you've ever been on a zoom call with me i usually show it i have a timer that lives on my desk and the timer will time for 45 i'm sorry for 25 minutes the pomodoro technique is 25 minutes on five minutes off 25 minutes on working on one thing and one thing only five minutes off and the reason why is because this is the thing that's called single tasking people think that they should multitask they people are like i'm a great multitasker there's really detrimental effects of multitasking there's a study that was done by researchers at Stanford University that found out that people who are heavy multitaskers actually perform worse on tasks that require attention and memory than those who focus on one task at a time.

11:46And the reason why is because their brains struggle to filter irrelevant information and they're more likely to make mistakes even when they thought they were being efficient. And so when you look at multitasking, multitasking is you switching from one task to another. You're never doing two things at the exact same time because your brain can only focus on one thing. So when you do the Pomodoric technique, what you're doing is you're going, okay, I'm going to focus on one thing and bring as much of my brain power as possible to getting this one thing done. Like if, would you really want to bring 50 % of your brain power to try and do something?

12:22No, you want to bring a hundred percent of your brain power. How do you do that? You focus on one thing and one thing only. So what I recommend is you sit down at your desk. if you're going to do some deep work for a Pomodoro technique. And you sit down at your desk, you put your headphones on, you have your coffee, you have whatever it is you need, you put your headphones on, you're noise canceling, you zoom out of the entire world and you're literally just in this one thing. And all you start doing, you put on your timer, you work for 25 minutes on that one thing and then take five minutes off.

12:49Here's what's really important. The reason why it's important to take five minutes off is first off, the first couple of times you do this, I will tell you, it was a complete struggle for me to get to 25 minutes without my brain wanting to go everywhere. My brain would want to go here and here. And oh my God, I got to do this. And I got to text this person back and I've got to make sure that I do this thing. What you're doing is you're trying to train your brain to shut the hell up, right? Like our brains are so all over the place. And so when you first try to take your brain and say, sit down and do one thing, your brain's going to fight.

13:18It's like a monkey that just wants to throw crap all over the place. And you're like, nope, you got to sit down. You got to, It's the same way that you train a dog. Dog pees inside, you take him outside. Pees inside, you take him outside. You do this enough times that the dog goes, oh, okay, I pee outside. The same way where it's like, oh, when I sit down to work, my brain eventually goes, oh, okay, yeah, that's what we're doing. We're being productive. And what you're doing is you're doing 25 minutes on, five minutes off. The five minutes off, you don't want to look at your phone. The best thing that you can do is try to rest your brain.

13:47How do you do that? Two ways to do that. Go outside, sit on your backyard furniture, or sit on a park bench, whatever it is, and just allow your brain to wander. Just look at trees, just do whatever it is that you can do. Next best thing that you can do is just close your eyes and just do some breathing for five minutes until your timer goes off. You're giving your brain a full-on rest in those in-between stages. Full-on rest. The worst thing you could do is look at your phone. There's a whole lot of reasons why. I write about it inside of my book of the reasons why you shouldn't look at your phone in the in-between time of a Pomodoro technique.

14:22but 25 minutes on, five minutes off is what you should know. Then you can go into something that I put inside of my book that's called Pomodoro Plus. It used to be a struggle for me to get to 25 minutes. Now I can breeze to 25 minutes and so what I started doing is I went from 25 minutes on to 30 minutes on, to 35 minutes on, to 40 minutes on, to 45 minutes on. So now my Pomodoro techniques is 45 minutes on, 10 minutes off. Which is crazy because it shows you that focus is a skill set, something that you can build over time. And that worked exactly for me. It was hard for me to get to 25 minutes.

14:58Now 45 minutes is usually my sessions that I do. You're focused on one task and one task only. Multitasking is not a skill. And the more that you do it, the more that you fragment your focus and dilute your results. And so if you want to be more focused and get more done, focus on these three things. Number one, the 80-20 rule, the Pomodoro, excuse me, the Pareto principle, 80-20, 20 % of what you do brings 80 % of your results in your life. 20 % of the actions you take bring you 80 % of your money. The second thing is you batch as many tasks that are similar as you possibly can. And the third thing you should do is use a Pomodoro technique to make sure that you focus as much of your brain power to getting your most important things done anytime that you sit down to get them done.

15:41So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. If you want to see other ways that you could do coaching with me, I do group coaching sessions weekly, every single week. I do them over the course of the entire year. We do them on Zoom. I do coaching sessions, lessons, all of that. You can learn about stuff like Mindset University at mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. There's more information. And with that, I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every single episode.

16:09Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.