Tools and tactics to become more productive

Most people love a bargain.

The idea that you can get pretty much the same product or service but for less of your hard-earned cash. We’ve probably all had a situation where we have bought something and then a week later spotted it on sale somewhere else for a fraction of the price. Tough to take!

What we all share is that our days are 24 hours long.

What sets us apart is that some people can get discounts on their time every day getting more done in less time. 

Have you heard of the expression busy fools?

Stephen Covey, author of '7 Habits of Highly Effective People', discusses the “activity trap” (busily climbing the ladder of activity without realising it's against the wrong wall).

This is where your day either gets filled with urgent and non-value driving activities or worse still, procrastination and other activities that waste your time.

So outside of the Eat the Frog and our Habit Tracker what do we do to keep efficient with our time?

The Eisenhower Matrix

One of our favourites is the Eisenhower Matrix, formalised by Stephen Covey, based on principles developed by Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was a busy dude, a general in WW2 and the 34th president of the US. 

He said “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

How do you know the Eisenhower Matrix is for you?

If you:

• need more mental space for your goals
• are a busy fool
• spend your day putting out fires or getting pulled away from your actual role
• have a difficult time prioritising your tasks
• have a giant workload
• are partial to bit of procrastination

Research by Meng Zhu in 2018 showed that people tend to prioritise urgent, unimportant tasks above non-urgent important tasks. An (albeit extreme) example Zhu cites is ‘choosing to visit a store for its soon-to-end annual sale might lead one to postpone a routine medical check-up, which could be potentially lifesaving by diagnosing cancer at an early, curable stage’.

There’s a couple of potential reasons why we may end up prioritising tasks in this way.

• Important tasks are often more difficult
• Urgent tasks often come from others so there are social pressures
• Payoffs from Urgent tasks are typically realised sooner
• Payoffs from important tasks can be more uncertain

Know your enemy though. Being self-aware and reflective is often half the battle.

If you can be more present and aware of how you are being pulled away into urgent tasks it will help you prioritise your time and get more out of your days.

So that leads us on to the Matrix.

What are the four types of tasks in the Eisenhower Matrix

Urgent, not urgent, important and not important.

Credit – Todoist Blog which breaks down each step in more detail. Eisenhower Matrix template

Give the Matrix a go and let us know how you get on!

The two minute rule

Top tip from us… we think it works best when accompanied with the 2-minute rule.

David Allen, productivity guru explains “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.”

The reason I love using this rule myself is twofold.

Firstly, it stops procrastination and prevents the build-up of small tasks which  have the tendency to overwhelm you.

Secondly, its way more efficient.

If something takes 2 minutes or less to complete where is the sense is in logging it in at the bottom of your to-do list for you to then forget? 

We hope you found this useful. 

It really is the simple things that matter.

Instead of trying to overcomplicate things and comparing yourself to others or your future self, it is so very powerful to focus on what you have, that way you gain what you lack. 

If you focus on what you lack you lose what you have. 

Benefits of meditation

There are many people out there still skeptical of meditation and I totally get that, partly because I was one of them a few years ago.

The research out there of the potential benefits meditation is abundant but for some reason my mindset was always slightly cynical in that doubted my own ability to firstly get any good at the act itself (which in my head is where I imagined the benefits would come from) and secondly, to fit it into my life.

The only meditation that I had tried previously was either in times of extreme stress or anxiety in a desperate attempt to return to baseline. Now I have managed to integrate meditation into my daily routine as a habit the practice is second nature to me.

I also realised that there isn’t necessarily such a thing as ‘being a good meditator’ I think you very much get out what you put in, it is a skill that can be developed but also at its simplest level the practise itself, the very act of concentrating (or trying to concentrate) on the present moment brings immense value.

There’s an abundance of research out there that shows meditation has physical benefits such as a reduction in inflammation, decreased blood pressure and a boosted immune system. In addition to the physical effects, research suggests meditation can rewire neurons in the brain to improve attributes like self-awareness, endurance and compassion.

"I think in the future, mental exercise will be considered as important and mainstream as physical exercise" Dan Harris

The above benefits may be difficult to easily quantify in your own life so I will speak of my own experiences and hopefully these will encourage you to take the time to develop a consistent meditation habit.

My personal meditation experience

I show up as the person I aspire to be more often now and I am connected to the present moment in a way that brings me lots of joy

Quite often I used to reflect on an event whether that be an intense conversation, an interaction with a stranger or a whole chunk of the day and would think to myself ‘I didn’t act congruently with who I am’, and I wish I had behaved differently, it was below the bar that I set for myself.

A perfect example for me would be intense episodes of ‘hanger’ where I would essentially turn into an unreasonable, miserable asshole until I could shovel enough food into myself to be pleasant again. (If you suffer from Hanger you’ll be pleased to hear you don’t need to live with it for life, a combination of meditation and intermittent fasting has completely deleted it from my personality)

A meditation practice helps you sift through the noise in your brain and to think clearly in the present allowing your true self to shine.

When you meditate you become aware of how much bullshit floats through your head. 

When you stop to listen, it’s almost comical what your logical brain spits out in these moments of quiet.

Now, the freaky bit is that if you didn’t mean to think those thoughts and they just appear in your head, are you really the thinker or are you just the observer?

Meditating has allowed me to differentiate between these thoughts in the present moment and it has helped me to react less with my monkey brain and instead to act congruently with who I aspire to be.

I can also concentrate better in lots of circumstances as I can silence that chatter, that crazy bastard within you who is desperate to be heard.

It has also made me a better listener. I no longer get distracted by thinking of what I should be doing with my feet or what my reply to the person will be instead of actually truly listening to them in the moment.

The impact on your relationships and the way people feel about you when you are a better listener makes meditation and mindfulness worth it even if that was the only benefit. 

There is only the present moment and there will never be anything else, even what you are remembering of the past is happening in the present (if you like Sci-Fi books check out Recursion – Blake Crouch themes are memories and time, it’s a mind-bender).

Sometimes I find myself pulled out of the present moment as I think about the future however, with meditation, I can catch myself more and more often and I can bring myself back into being in the moment.

I will often have a wry little smile to myself when I observe one of the thoughts and impulses that float through my mind, I smile because I choose not to act on the impulse instead to observe the thought dissipate like a train into the distance until its gone. 

Overall, I still have a long way to go with my journey with meditation but even after practicing it for this short time it has been a real catalyst for self-improvement/not being an asshole or whatever you want to call it.