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1. Set your goal.
2. Set aside decision anxiety and choose a reasonably promising routine.
3. If necessary, customize your process to be extremely specific.
Instead of “go jogging,” here’s what your process should look like: Monday: Run 1.5 miles. Tuesday: Stretch (list the different stretches) for 20 minutes. Wednesday: Run 2 miles. Thursday: Walk at a pace of three miles per hour for 45 minutes. Friday: . . .
4. Rework your schedule.
5. Map out your daily plan.
6. Work the process.
More important, don’t compare yourself with other people. Don’t worry about whether you’re as fast as your neighbor; you probably won’t be.
7. Fix your schedule problems.
8. Your results may vary, so adapt accordingly.
So what is the best way to say no to yourself? It’s easy: Stop saying “can’t” and start saying “don’t.” It works. Science says so. Researchers conducted a study: One group was given a simple temptation and told to say, in the face of that temptation, “I can’t do (that).” The other group was told to say, “I don’t do (that).”
Years ago, a friend decided the home health-care industry was poised to take off. He asked me to go into business with him. I thought about it a lot, even helped him flesh out his financials and refine his start-up plan . . . but I never pulled the trigger. Today he has locations in fifteen cities. The only connection I have with home health care is that I will someday be a customer.
Instead of acting, though, I let “idea” stay a noun. I didn’t make “idea” a verb. Fitness and computers and home health care weren’t really ideas, because ideas without action aren’t ideas.
HOW TO HAVE YOUR MOST PRODUCTIVE DAY EVER
Step 1: Let everyone know you won’t be available. Interruptions are productivity killers, so letting people know you’re doing something special and will be out of reach for a day is an absolute must.
Step 2: Decide how long you will work. Don’t create a plan based on “I’ll work as long as I can” or “I’ll work as long as I feel productive.”
Step 3: Totally commit to how long you decided to work. You know what happens: Once you decide a task should take four hours, it somehow ends up taking four hours, even when it should actually have taken only two hours. It’s natural to fill extra time with “stuff.”
Step 4: Start your EPD at an unusual time. Have you ever taken a long car trip and left at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.? The first few hours always fly by, because you stepped outside your norm. The same trick works for an EPD. Start at 4:00 a.m. Or indulge your inner night owl, starting at 6:00 p.m. and working through the night. Either way, those first few hours will fly by.
Step 5: Delay and space out your rewards. Say you like to listen to music when you work. On an EPD, keep the music turned off for the first few hours. That way, when your motivation starts to flag, a little music will provide a great boost to your morale.
Step 6: Refuel before you think you need to refuel. When you’re exercising, waiting until you’re thirsty to get a drink means you’re already dehydrated.
Step 7: Take productive breaks, not relaxation breaks. Momentum is everything on an EPD (and on every other day). Don’t take a walk or watch a little TV or check out your friends’ latest humblebrags on Facebook. You will definitely need to take breaks, but those breaks should reinforce your sense of activity and accomplishment.
Step 8: Take your breaks at a counterintuitive moment. When you take a break, don’t stop when you complete a particular task. Stop in the middle.
Step 9: Don’t stop until you’re done—even if finishing takes longer than expected. Stopping short is an easy habit to form. If you quit this time, what will stop you from quitting the next time? (Answer: pretty much nothing.) Quitting is a habit.
HOW TO HAVE YOUR MOST PRODUCTIVE WEEK EVER
Step 1: Every Sunday, map out your week. Every Sunday evening Jim sits down with his list of important objectives for the month and year.
Step 2: Actively block out task time. You already schedule meetings and appointments. Go a step further and block out time to complete specific tasks. Slot periods for “Write new proposal” or “Craft presentation” or “Review and approve marketing materials.”
Step 3: Follow a realistic to-do list. Once upon a time Jim created to-do lists, but he didn’t assign time to each task. What happened? He always had more items on his to-do list than he could accomplish, and that turned his to-do list into a wish list. If you have six hours of meetings scheduled today and eight hours of tasks on your to-do list, those tasks won’t get done.
Step 4: Default to thirty-minute meetings. Whoever invented the one-hour default in calendar software wasted millions of people-hours. Most subjects can be handled in thirty minutes.
Step 5: Stop multitasking. During a meeting—especially an hour-long meeting—it’s tempting to take care of a few mindless tasks. (Who hasn’t cleaned up their in-box during a meeting?) The problem is that splitting your focus makes those meetings less productive.
Step 6: Obsess about leveraging “edge” time. Probably like you, Jim’s biggest downtimes during the workday come when he drives to work, when he drives home, and when he’s in airports.
Step 7: Track your time. Once you start tracking your time, you’ll be amazed by how much time you spend doing stuff that isn’t productive. (You don’t have to get hyperspecific. The info you log can be a summary of activities, not a minute-to-minute diary.)
Norman Mailer said, “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.”
Successful people are successful because they do things differently from other people.
HOW TO HAVE WILLPOWER . . . WITHOUT NEEDING WILLPOWER
Step 1: Eliminate as many choices as possible. We all have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self-control. Some of us have less, some have more . . . but we all eventually run out of willpower steam.
Step 2: Make decisions tonight so you won’t need to make them tomorrow. It’s also easier to make a smart choice when the decision isn’t right in front of you. Pick easy decisions that will drain your store of willpower tomorrow, and make them tonight. For example, choose what you’ll wear. Leo Widrich, the cofounder of Buffer, found a way to make this decision incredibly easy: He wears jeans and a white T-shirt every day.
Step 3: Do the hardest things you need to do first. You have the greatest amount of mental energy early in the morning. Science says so: In a landmark study performed by the National Academy of Sciences, parole board judges were most likely to give a favorable ruling early in the morning. Just before lunch, the odds of a favorable ruling dropped to almost zero.*
Step 4: Refuel often. Although the judges in the study started the day strong, a graph of their decision making looks like a roller coaster: up and down, up and down. Why? They took periodic breaks to eat or snack. Just after lunch their likelihood of making favorable rulings spiked. The same held true after midmorning and midafternoon breaks. It turns out glucose is one of the foundations of willpower.
Step 5: Create reminders of your long-term goals. You want to build a bigger company, but when you’re mentally tired it’s easy to rationalize doing less than your best.
Step 6: Remove temptation altogether. Every time you have to decide not to do something you would like to do—even though what you would like to do runs counter to your goals—simply rework your environment so you eliminate your ability to be impulsive.
Let Your Past Inform Your Future—but Don’t Let It Define Your Future The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others. Then let it go.
See Your Life—and Future—as Within Your Control There’s a quote often credited to Saint Ignatius of Loyola (and you have to love a fighting saint): “Pray as if God will take care of all; act as if all is up to you.”
Learn to Ignore the Things You Have No Control Over Mental strength is like muscle strength—no one has an unlimited supply of focus. So why waste your power on things you can’t control?
Don’t Resent; Celebrate the Success of Others Many people—I guarantee you know at least a few—see success as a zero-sum game: There’s only so much to go around. When someone else shines, they think that diminishes the light from their stars.
Resist the Temptation to Complain, Criticize, or Whine Your words have power—especially over you. Harping about your problems always makes you feel worse, not better.
Count Your Blessings Before you turn out the light every night, take a moment to quit worrying about what you don’t have. Quit worrying about what others have that you don’t. Think about what you do have. You have plenty to be thankful for. Doesn’t reminding yourself of all the things you have in your life—all the things you would miss desperately if they were taken away—feel amazing?
Before we do that, start asking yourself one question—over and over and over again.
“Will this help Southwest be the lowest-cost provider?” If so, the answer is yes. If not, the answer is no. The most effective people apply the same framework to the decisions they make. “Will this help me reach my goal? If not, I won’t do it.”
THE FEWER THE GOALS, THE GREATER THE RESOLVE Of course, that approach works only if you don’t need to ask yourself multiple questions. The more goals you try to achieve at one time, the more questions you need to ask yourself. More questions make the decision waters murkier. Murkier decision waters lead to greater decision fatigue and, as you know, overcoming decision fatigue requires willpower. Willpower is a finite resource; the fewer decisions you make, the less willpower is required. Create the right environment and willpower isn’t even necessary.
Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent is a cool book filled with easy and proven methods to learn to do almost anything. Here’s an example. Say you want to learn to do something. Simply going through the practice motions provides little or no results; the key is to make sure you use a system that follows Dan’s REPS methodology: R: Reaching and Repeating E: Engagement P: Purposefulness S: Strong, Speedy Feedback
