The One Productivity System You Need

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host Rob Dial. If you 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 and you want to get some inspirational text messages, some mindset, some tips and tricks, some text throughout the week, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, we're going to be talking about how to be more productive. And I'm going to give you one productivity system that you really, really need. And it might be a productivity system that you've never heard of and maybe never even thought of.

0:45But let's be real. Most productivity advice tells you to manage your time better, to set up a calendar, to batch your tasks, to wake up at 5 a.m. and grind and grind and grind. And don't get me wrong. I do think that time management is super, super important. And so many people think that they have no time. But in reality, they're just terrible at managing their time. But if time management alone were the answer, wouldn't everybody just be productivity machines by now? Yeah, but the real problem is not that you need more time. The real problem is that you probably need more energy. And not only do you need more energy, you need to get better at planning out your energy.

1:28And you need to plan out your energy with the natural cycles of your body throughout the day, which just FYI is different for every single person. Do you ever notice like if you have a day where for some reason you wake up, you feel really well rested, you have your cup of coffee, you feel like you have a lot of energy, you want to run through a wall and you're like, you know what, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to be productive. And in two hours, you crank out more than you have in an entire day with low energy. Have you ever noticed that happening before? It's not that you got better at time management for one day, and then you were terrible at time management a couple days later.

2:06It's that your energy dictated how productive you were in the time that you were actually working. And that's because of energy, not because of time. And energy is the real currency of productivity. And when I really realized this about probably 10 years ago, I started really paying attention to my energy when it was up, my energy was down. I started paying attention to my sleep when it was up, when it was down, what I did, what I didn't do, what could have gotten in the way. If I had a lot of energy one day, I started paying attention to what I ate or didn't eat earlier throughout the day. And if I had like a big dip in energy, I was like, what did I, what just happened?

2:43Okay, I just ate this thing. Okay, that reminds me, I never want to eat whatever that thing was again in the middle of the day. If it's something that I like, I can have it in the afternoon. When I'm done working and have an evening for dinner, but definitely not in the middle of the day. And so that's one thing that you really want to think about is what does your energy look like throughout the day? And I want to chat with you real quick about traditional time management and how it fails you and how energy management can transform the way that you work, the way that you create, and the way that you live as well.

3:15So let me tell you why time management isn't enough, okay? Time management assumes that you have the same level of focus at all hours throughout the entire day. And you just don't. You have different levels of energy at different times of the day and on different days. And if you just schedule things, just put it in your schedule, and you don't look at how your energy actually flows throughout the day, you might put a very important task at the point where you have the least amount of energy throughout the day. You might schedule a really important client call at a time where you just don't have a whole lot of energy.

3:54So in reality, some hours of the day, you're sharp, you're productive, you're firing on all cylinders, you're more creative, your brain's going well. And then other hours of the day, you're sluggish. And your energy can fluctuate on a lot of different things on the sleep that you have on the food, on your emotions on your environment. And so there was a study that actually Harvard Business Review did, and it was in 2007, it was by Tony Schwartz and by Catherine McCarthy. And they found out that employees who managed their energy rather than their time were significantly more productive and engaged than those who didn't manage their energy.

4:37And participants at Wachovia Bank who followed their energy management techniques improved their revenue by 13 % compared to the other group, which was only 6 % in the control group. And so these are people who not only looked at their time, but they said, well, let me figure out what my energy is like. Let me figure out what I feel like at this time of the day versus another time of the day. And so it's not about just squeezing more into your day and trying to get your to-do list completely done or just following hustle culture and working all hours of the day. it's about working better during the hours when you and your body and your brain have peak energy.

5:17And so, you know, instead of asking yourself something like, how can I fit more into my day? What you really want to do is you want to take a step back and think to yourself, how can I optimize my energy so that I work better, I'm more productive, and I don't have to work longer hours, which is completely opposite than what a lot of people think and what I used to think years ago. For me, I was like, I'm just going to work 12 hours a day, and then I'm going to get more done. Now that I'm older, I get way more done, but because I schedule out my day based off of how my energy flows, I'm way more productive than when I used to work 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day when I was younger.

5:54And when you think about your energy and you think about the flow of who you are and how you operate, it shifts everything for you. So instead of treating your day like an endless to-do list, you designed it around these natural flows and rhythms. And so your energy is going to peak throughout the day. It's going to dip throughout the day. So what you have to understand is your body runs on things that are called ultradian rhythms. And this is a natural biological cycle that occurs multiple times throughout the day, and they typically last about 90 minutes. And so your body is going to flow through natural rhythms about every 90 minutes.

6:27And so there's three different types of people that usually exist in the world, and you need to kind of start paying attention to your energy more to figure out which one you are. So there are morning people, which are people who have peak energy early and then it declines in the afternoon. There's people that are like the midday thrivers. This is me, where I don't really have a whole lot of energy and I'm not the most excited person in the morning. I'm fine, I'm chill in the morning, but I'm not wanting to get a whole bunch of shit done in the morning. But I like hit my stride a little bit before lunch and then I start to slow down in the evening.

7:02and then there's people that are just night owls who might struggle a little bit in the morning, but then they peak in the evening. My best friend, he gets a little bit of a bump that's like, you know, a little bit of excitement, a little bit of energy around like one o 'clock, but there's times when he will text me. I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have a text from him at like one o 'clock in the morning because at like 10 or 11 o 'clock at night after his kids go to bed, he gets this crazy spike in energy. I'm like, I'm asleep by that time. I'm going to sleep by 10, 1030. And so who are you and what's really your energy is what you need to figure out.

7:37And then you plan your productivity based off of that. And so there was a study that was done by Christopher Barnes at the University of Washington in 2011. And they actually found out that cognitive performance varies based on an individual's chronotype, which is whether they're an evening person, a midday person, or a morning person. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so morning people tend to perform best before noon. Night people were the best and their sharpest in the evening, usually after seven, eight o 'clock at night. And so your energy isn't this constant thing.

8:12What you want to do is start to be aware of your own natural rhythm and work with it versus working against it. So you need to figure out which one of those that you are. Now, how do you figure out which one you are if you don't know at this moment? Here's what I recommend. If you have a phone, you can set an hour long timer. So it goes off every 60 minutes. And so when you wake up in the morning, you're going to wake up and you're going to set a 60 minute timer a couple of minutes after waking up. Then what happens is 60 minutes later, your timer is going to go off. And what I want you to do is I want you to have a notes tab in your phone.

8:43So say you wake up at seven o 'clock, right? You wake up at 7 a.m. Your alarm goes off at eight. Okay, so you're going to go to your notes tab and you're going to have a energy tracker inside of your phone. And you're going to say from seven to eight, and you're going to rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, your energy and your focus over the past hour. So then your alarm, you're going to reset it from eight to nine. So it's going to go off at nine. You're going to rate on a scale of one to 10, what your energy was for the past hour. And you're going to do this every day for a week. And what you'll start to notice is that your body has natural cycles that it goes through.

9:18And so you can start to plan your day. I'll tell you how I plan my day in just a minute and what my day looks like based off of how I know my energy is. And then what you're going to do is you're going to align different tasks with your energy levels. So now that you know, because you made the whole list and you did this for a week, now that you know your peaks and your dips, you're going to match your tasks accordingly. So when you need to get really deep work done, which is like creative projects, problem solving, strategy, that's when you want to, you want to do it when your energy period like is at its highest.

9:51So when is your energy at its highest, that's when you're going to do the deep work, the problem solving, the creative stuff, the strategy. The medium energy periods is kind of like your routine work, which is emails, which is admin, which is meetings on Zoom, all of that. And then your low energy period is like rest and recovery. It could be movement, it could be fun, it could be rest, hanging out with the family, whatever it might be. And so, you know, you have to understand that the less amount of energy that you have, the less you're creating, you know, really good decisions. The more amount of energy you have, the better decisions you're making.

10:27There's actually a really interesting study that was done in 2011. And they actually looked at parole judges. And they found out that the judgments were significantly harsher right before their breaks and more lenient after their breaks. And the reason why is because they're working so much and they start to get decision fatigue. And so their energy declined the more decisions that they were making. And then they ended up having way harsher judgments when their energy was down. And so their cognitive function went down as well. Then they took a break. Their cognitive function went back up. They probably went through another cycle and now they're in another higher energy of 90 minutes and they ended up having more lenient decisions in those moments.

11:11And so if you want to do mentally demanding tasks, don't do it when your energy is low because your performance is going to suffer. So for me, I know after a decade of really paying attention to my energy, exactly what my energy is going to look like most days throughout the day. So, you know, from the time I wake up until about 9 a.m., I don't do anything work related. I don't look at my phone. Don't text me. Don't email me. I'm not going to respond. My phone is usually off until about 9 a.m. That's just my hangout, family time, coffee, do the things that we want to do, all of that. 9 a.m. to noon, that's my creative time.

11:46So for me, I tend to be the most creative around 9 a.m. to noon. So that's where I will put down podcast ideas and start to write out like, okay, if I created a podcast, I don't plan out the podcast in this time. I start coming up with ideas. I start putting some bullet points down. Usually a really good time for me to start thinking about some of the ideas that I have in my business or to come up with creative ideas around solving business problems. It's more of my time to work on the business and on the podcast, but not in the business in the podcast itself. So that's my more creative time. From noon until about 3, 3.30-ish, if it's a recording day like it is for me, from noon to 3.30, I'll usually plan out and record podcast episodes.

12:30If it's a coaching day, because I have three different programs I've got, and I coach all of them on Zoom, there's Mindset 2.0, which is a 12-week course. There's Mindset University, which is a 12-month course. And then there's Business Breakthrough, where I teach people how to grow their coaching businesses. All of those are on different days, between noon and 3.30 for me. And so that's when I go live and I teach on Zoom. And then from 3.30 until 5 or 6, depending on the day, usually about 5, but sometimes I have to go over about 6, that's when I check in with the team. I will do my team Zooms.

13:05And the things that don't require my full brain, 6 p.m. at the latest, I'm done with work, family time, hanging out, I turn off completely from work. This is what I have found works best for me. And I found this through just basically doing trial and error. It's really important for us to have that. And it's really important also to have a disconnection time from work, from your business, whatever it is that you might have. Because your energy is not just about when you work, it's also about when you don't work and how you recharge. And so I take my energy super, super serious throughout the day.

13:37So when I'm done, like I'm done because I need rest as well. And so rest can be like being away from work, being away from your job, going home, not answering emails, not working on the business 24 seven. It's sleep. Like you should really pay attention to your sleep. I take my sleep very, very seriously as well. Sleep isn't just wasted time. Sleep is a probably the biggest performance enhancer that exists. When you have poor sleep, you have weak focus, you're sluggish in your thinking, you're more stressed out. and there was a study that was done on sleep and cognitive performance in 2003 at the University of Pennsylvania and they found out that people who only got, check this out, only got six hours of sleep per night for two weeks did as poorly on cognitive tests as people who had been awake for 24 hours straight.

14:27So this is six hours a night for two weeks performed as poorly on cognitive tests as those who had been awake for 24 hours. And so less sleep equals less brain power, no matter how much coffee you drink, whatever, how many cold plunges you jump into, right? Another thing that's really important besides sleep is to move your body to reset your brain. When you sit all day long, your brain, your energy just tanks. And so it's important to move about every 90 minutes, about every cycle. Even if it's just for a five minute walk that boosts your mood and your focus. Like I'm one of those weird people now over the past month.

15:04I became one of those weird people who has a treadmill desk now. So sue me. I guess that's who I've become. I'm approaching 40, so I guess I get a treadmill desk. But what I've found is that when I'm sitting for a while, my brain starts to kind of, after a little bit, an hour, hour and a half, it starts to kind of slow down a little bit. So I disconnect in some sort of way, and then I realize that I can get a lot of my work done when I'm planning podcast episodes, when I'm on a Zoom call, whatever it might be, and I can be walking at the same time, which keeps my energy up as well. And then the other thing that's obviously very, very important is the food that you have.

15:38So for me, the majority of the time, what I found that works best for me, and this is just mine, I found it works best for many other people, but you know, it depends on who you are, your body type, all that. It works best for me if I wake up in the morning and I have coffee and then I don't eat, I have the most energy if I don't eat until three or four o 'clock. And it's not the most fun thing in the world. Like my stomach still growls, but I found that my brain is just on hyper-focus when I haven't been eating. And the reason why is because no matter what is it you eat, any digestion requires energy.

16:12And digestion is most energy consuming thing that your body does. And so for me, I get all of my calories after 4pm and I'm completely fine with it. I'm still alive. It's pretty wild. But what I've found that works the best for me. If I do get really hungry, I'll have bone broth and that's about it with some salt in it. And so It's different for every single person. You have to test it out. For me, my energy is so important because I believe so much in what I do in the world. If I have less energy, then that's going to take a lot away from it. That's also the reason why I drink very little alcohol and I'll never drink alcohol during the week.

16:47The only time I'll do it is a Friday night. I'll have a glass of wine Saturday. I don't even have it on Sunday because I know that it's going to be in my bloodstream. It's going to slow me down on Monday. It's all about paying attention to your own personal energy and about trying to master your energy as well. And of course, figure out what works for you because what productivity looks like is starting to evolve. The hustle harder mentality is dying off. Thank God. I was a part of the hustle harder mentality. I was working, what is it, 16 years ago, I was working 15 hours a day just trying to do as much as I possibly could and didn't work too well for me, ran that business into the ground.

17:26Real productivity isn't about doing more, it's about having the right energy to be as focused as possible to get as much done in as little time as possible. So it's important to work with your body and not against it. Productivity is about showing up with full energy when it matters the most and finding your own body's natural cycles and working through them. So manage your energy as you manage your time. So that's what I got for you on today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories, tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr., the only way this podcast grows is if you guys share it.

17:59So if you would share it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. It helps the podcast more than you know, helps us impact more people's lives. And also, once again, if you want to join my inspirational and strategy mindset text messages, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. And with that, I'm going to leave it 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.