How to Live A Productive Lifestyle?- Chris Bailey

12 Lessons on How to Manage Time, Energy and Attention by Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey & His Book “The Productivity Project”

Introduction

The notes below are summarised from a 4-hour presentation by Chris Bailey to The Society Group (Neil Strauss’s Secret Mastermind Group). Chris is the author of The Productivity Project: Proven Ways to Become More Awesome.

Disclaimer: Chris’s productivity hacks aren’t something that you’ve never heard of. Most of them you already know, but common sense doesn’t equal common action. I’d advise you to implement 1–2 productivity tips per week. Only take what works for you, and leave the rest.

Productivity is no longer how much you produce. It’s how much you accomplish. Accomplishments are what matters at the end of the day. We should work hard, and put all our time, attention, and energy into them. Everything else is secondary.

When we talk about Productivity, we are actually referring to managing 3 things:

1. Time: How much time we allocate to the tasks and when do we do them
2. Attention: Deep use of focus and fewer distractions
3. Energy: The “fuel” to burn to be productive

This article is also divided into 3 sections- Time, Attention, and Energy, and each includes very practical tips to apply in your life.

After reading this article, you will learn how to tame external and internal distractions, be hyper-focus on what you want to accomplish, and manage your energy effectively. Enjoy!

Section 1: Time Management

Lesson #1: Have Intention & 3 Most Important Tasks (MITs)

“Not all tasks are made equal.” Only a few things matter every moment, every day, and every week. It is very important to plan and separate what matters from the rest of the tasks. How we spend our days is how we spend our life, make sure you spend on the important tasks. Do not go on autopilot mode. Have intention behind everything you do. It helps us reduce guilt, doubt, and stress.

At the beginning of the day, write down on your notepad or whiteboard, “What are the 3 main things that I want to achieve by the end of the day?” Also, list out your 3 weekly MITs every Sunday night, so you can sleep on them, and let them sink into your subconscious mind. This creates intention for your day and your week because it’s so hard to remember what’s important during the middle of the day.

Remember that the 3 MITs should be “Accomplishments”, meaning that they align with what you want to achieve in life, and can make a difference to you and others.

Chris likes to write the 3 MITs on top of his note pad, and other nitty-gritty tasks beneath them as a To-do list. He suggests having 3 work-related MITs and 3 personal MITs (like spending time with family or working out etc) every day because maintaining a personal balance with work is important.

The 3 MITs can also be applied in a business context. You can review with your team the 3 MITs on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.

Assignment

1. Write down: “What are the 3 things you will want to have accomplished by the end of today? And by the end of this year?”
2. Find out your most productive and important tasks in general. First, list out every single task in a week. Then ask yourself, “Which of these tasks allow me to accomplish the most with every unit of time invested in it, with the most consequential results?” Put a “1”, “2” and “3”, beside the most important tasks, according to the importance.

Lesson #2: 4 Ways to Deal with Procrastination

Before going to the solutions, let’s first understand the triggers in a task that leads us to procrastinate:

1. Boring
2. Frustrating
3. Difficult
4. Lack personal meaning
5. Lack intrinsic or immediate reward
6. Ambiguous
7. Unstructured

We can combat procrastination by flipping these triggers around.

The reason why important tasks require more energy and focus is because they turn on the “Frustrating, Difficult, Ambiguous, and Unstructured” triggers. On the other hand, activities like checking Facebook, watching Netflix, and checking email are always more attractive than our MITs, because they don’t turn on any triggers.

Even though you procrastinate, don’t beat yourself up, even the most productive humans do procrastinate. The key is knowing how to shorten the procrastination time only.

Here are the 4 ways to tackle procrastination:

Tip #1: List Out the Costs

List out the costs of putting something off. It fires up our brain to use logic to fight emotion. After all, procrastinating is an emotional issue.

Tip #2: Disconnect

Disconnect from the internet. We often use the internet for procrastination. Most people spend an extra 47% of their time on the internet than they are supposed to. You may also download “Rescue Time” on your computer, turn off the wifi, or turn on airplane mode on your phone to disconnect.

Tip #3: Shrink your resistance

Shrink your resistance to doing certain things by building momentum. For example, once we clean our closet for 5 minutes, then we usually overcome the initial resistance, and things get easier to keep going.

Tip #4: Awareness

Have the awareness that you are procrastinating to beat it. You can keep a time log to mark down all the activities that you’ve done in a day, and examine when you procrastinate. For all the tasks that we’ve procrastinated on, take a step back, review the task triggers above, and try to flip them around and make the task more attractive.

Assignment

1.Write down: “What’s the ugliest, most adverse task you’re putting off right now? What can you do to beat it?” Apply the 4 tips above to overcome procrastinating that task.

Lesson #3: 5 Ways to Handle Unimportant Tasks

Unimportant tasks are work that doesn’t create much value to our lives, including checking email, buying plane tickets, scheduling tasks, etc. It’s important to eliminate what’s not essential, so we can create space to work on our most important work.

Here are 5 ways to handle unimportant tasks:

1. Automate
2. Delegate
3. Eliminate
4. Transform
5. Reframe

Section 2: Energy

Lesson #4: Have “Fuels” to Keep You Energise

Brain cells consume double the energy of other cells. We need to provide “fuel” for our brain to operate at its best performance. Those “fuels” include food, exercise, sleep, and taking breaks. Make it a habit to put good fuel into our body throughout the day.

Tip #1: Eat Unprocessed Food

Have more unprocessed food, because they burn slower, and give you more energy. Also, notice your fullness level. It’s better not to eat too full.

Tip #2: Drink More Water, and Use Alcohol and Caffeine Deliberately

Try only drinking water for a week. No caffeine, fruit juice, or alcohol.

A small dose of alcohol scatters our attention, which makes us more creative (connecting dots), but reduces productivity. Alcohol is borrowing energy (and happiness) from tomorrow. Without drinking alcohol, you will have a tremendous amount of energy, so drink deliberately.

Caffeine can bring you energy and focus, but it is borrowing energy from later on in the day. You will crash 8–14 hours later. Also, coffee narrows your attention spotlight for a certain period, so you become less creative. In order to drink caffeine strategically, use it for your most complex and tedious daily tasks, or your important meeting or presentation (if you are an introvert, drinking coffee may bring much more external stimulation that may affect your presentation performance). Green tea or mocha is the best substitute for coffee because they don’t have that much of a crash later on.

Tip #3: Exercise More

Exercise increases blood flow to your brain, it helps mental performance, concentration, and memory.

Tip #4: Sleep Better

• For every hour of sleep you miss out, you lose 2 hours of productivity the next day
• The key is getting to bed at a decent time and have sufficient hours of sleep. It doesn’t matter when you wake up
• Consume less blue light, because it inhibits melatonin production which is important to our sleep. Wear blue light filter glasses at night. Install Flux on your laptop. Turn on Night Shift on your iPhone
• Embrace naps
• Stop consuming caffeine 8–14 hours before you go to bed
• Think of your bedroom as a cave. Dark, quiet, and cool

Tip #5: Take Breaks

Take a break from work from time to time, so that we can recharge. What we should be doing during our breaks should be things that require little willpower, self-control, and decision-making, like having a walk. The more frequently we can take a step back and do something completely unrelated to our work over the course of the day, the more we can maintain these peak energy periods over the day. If you’re in the flow state or doing things that you truly love and care about, you barely need a break, because you don’t need extra energy to self-regulate yourself to focus. According to studies, the most productive people tend to work every 52 minutes and take 17 minutes break.

Lesson #5: Schedule Your Work Based on Energy Level

Our energy fluctuates over the course of the day. We are all wired with different peak energy periods. Some people are morning birds, and some are night owls. What we can control is to block out our biological prime times (with the most energy) for our most important tasks of the day. And when we are tired, take a break and recharge, or leverage those time to do creative work. Because our brain inhibits our prefrontal cortex (logical side) when we are tired.

Lesson #6: Spare Time to Daydream

In order to foster creative ideas, spare time to daydream. You can achieve it by doing nothing at all, or doing something habitually. For example, taking a shower, going for a walk, reading fiction, meditation, etc. It gives us some attention to spare and let our mind wander freely. I’d advise bringing a notepad and pen with you to jot down your new ideas in your mind.

Lesson #7: Use Habits to Reserve Energy

If you want to form new habits, it requires a lot of willpower in the beginning. Once it becomes a habit, it will require much less willpower and energy. The Habits Loop: Cue (the trigger to do the habit), Routine (the habit itself), Reward (what we get for doing the habit). The best thing to remove a bad habit is to replace the routine, with something more productive.

Tip #1: Shrink and Chip at the Habit

Start as small as possible. Shrink the time and scope of your new habit, then make incremental improvements. Let’s say you go to the gym, you just work out for 5 minutes the first time.

Tip #2: Define the New Cues

There are 5 types of cues. Certain timing, a certain place, presence of certain people, a particular emotion, and preceding behavior that you have ritualized. If you want to build a new habit, make sure you have these 5 cues in place. Let’s say you want to go to the gym consistently. You may go every day at 8 am, to a gym nearby your house, go with 2 friends, and go right after having a coffee.

Tip #3: Reward Yourself

Treat yourself. Genuinely reward yourself after you follow through with your habit. You have to love your reward. It can be as small as having a cookie.

Tip #4: Anticipate Obstacles

It’s crucial to look for possible things that may get in the way. Have buffer in your schedule to deal with them.

Assignment

Pick a habit you want to change/form/keep. What’s a simple, actionable plan you can make to keep it?

Section 3: Focus

We have very little conscious attention to give. Out of 11 million bits of things that we encounter, we can only focus on 40 bits. We can fit more than one habit in our attention space, but multitasking more than one important new task is nearly impossible. When we multitask, we are more likely to experience more boredom, anxiety, depression, and remember less. We have 20 minutes of hyper-focus space before we get distracted. Practice bringing your attention to only one important task, then whenever you are distracted, gently bring your attention back. Here are some tips on having better focus:

Lesson #7: Keep a Set of “Lists”

Any tasks that are incomplete in your head, weigh on your mind more than the tasks that you’ve completed because they are open loops. Our mind is not for holding ideas, but for having ideas. That’s why we need lists to mark down things that are in our minds. For each list, we can also sort by context: like personal, health, relationship, etc. When a task is done, it should disappear from the list, don’t accumulate, because it clutters up your list.

The Distraction List

Jot down distracting ideas onto your notepad whenever they pop up in your mind, for example, something that you need to buy by the end of the day. When you focus on one thing and disable distractions, you are more likely to be in a flow state.

The My-Word List

Any time I promise someone I’ll do something for them, I’ll mark it on the list. It’s important to your integrity and building relationships.

The Worry List

Anything that you are worried about at the moment. It could be money or relationship-related.

The Waiting-for List

Everything you’re waiting for and remain an unresolved open-loop like you’re waiting on an email response. For “Waiting-for-emails”, you can create a folder to put all these emails inside.

Calendar

Externalize the events in your mind onto your calendar.

Lesson #8: Keep a Tight Deadline

If you have a tighter deadline, and less time, you will have more focus and work with more intention. Chris experimented with working 90-hour vs 20-hour a week. He realized that he accomplished more or less the same through all those hours. This aligns with Parkinson’s Law- “The work we do tends to expand to how much time we have allocated to it”.

Lesson #9: Practice Meditation

The objective of meditation is to train our attention to focus on one thing. Meditation helps us focus deeper. Mindfulness practice is observing what’s occupying your attention space.

Lesson #10: Listen to less distracting background noise

Compared to silence, music will make you less productive. So it is relative. You could have an ambient long “music” in the background to help you focus.

Lesson #11: 10 Ways to Deal with Email

1. Become aware of how frequently you check email. Keep a tally
2. Wait before sending more important responses
3. Have email-delay plugins, to manage people’s expectation of how frequent you respond to emails
4. Unroll.me. Unsubscribe useless subscriptions
5. Yesterbox Technique. You respond to all yesterday’s emails today. For everything new, you deal with it tomorrow
6. Set up VIPs email, where you respond to only the most important people
7. Keep emails in 5 sentences or less. Put it in your email signature- “For your benefit and mine, to respect our time, I keep every email I send in 5 sentences or less.” If you type an email that requires more than 5 sentences, pick up your phone to call the person
8. Only check email if you have the energy and focus to respond to whatever comes in
9. Quit organizing your emails in folders. It takes up so much unnecessary time
10. Turn off email alerts and notifications

Lesson #12: Manage Your Negative Self-Talk

80% of our self-talk is negative, and internalizing these negative dialogs would lead us to take on less impactful tasks, make it difficult to focus, and make us less happy. This self-talk includes “I’m no good. I’m never going to succeed. They’ll laugh at me…” These phenomenal come from our parents. When we procrastinate, our negative self-talk goes through the roof. Happy people are 30% more productive because they see more opportunities. Here are some tips on reducing negative self-talk:

Tip #1: Be Grateful

Recall 3 things you’re grateful for before you sleep for 21 days. You see more opportunities and happiness.

Tip #2: List of Accomplishments

Keep a list of your accomplishments. We don’t usually remember how much we accomplish. Keep a weekly accomplish the list, and also a yearly accomplish list. The accomplishments could be milestones that you have reached.

Assignment #1: Observe your self-talk when you…

• Push yourself to get things done (Maybe you’re not satisfied with who you are)
• Don’t do what you intended to do
• Are about to open up your email
• Accomplish something awesome
• Eat something terrible to you

Assignment #2: The Distraction Grid

Fill out the Distractions/Interruptions Grid with the attention hijackers you face. The grid’s X-axis is “Controllable, Uncontrollable”, and Y-axis is “Annoying, and Fun”. Deal with controllable distractions ahead of time.

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