To better understand everything that is to follow, make sure you have already covered my previous post Mindset so you can follow along. If you wish to start from the original article, check out my post The Roadmap to Overman.
In this article you will learn the following:
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- What is essentialism
- Most important productivity hacks
- How to create a habit tracker
- How to create a daily schedule
The following article was greatly inspired by the books: “The 4-Hour Workweek“, “Deep Work“, “Essentialism” and “Atomic Habits“.
Before I start I want to highlight a crucial mindset you should possess before reading any of the productivity tips and that is the mindset of 1% better every day. It doesn’t matter if you can’t keep up with your ambitious daily schedule or skipped a certain habit from your habit tracker. As long as you are just a little bit better than you were yesterday, you will keep improving. This is the frame of mind I want you to adopt from now on.
This idea ties in with the concept of the great male filter. Between the ages of 25-30, the gap between mediocrity and greatness will be revealed. Those who partied for the last 10 years will wake up to reality, while those who worked on their goals will reap the benefits.
Essentialism
The idea of essentialism is to decide on a maximum of 3 aspects/areas of your life that are important to you. Now that you’ve decided on them, your whole life will revolve around them, which means if something isn’t on the list you remove it from your life. No more watching podcasts, movies, Tik-Tok, unless you schedule that into your rest period. The key to a happy, fulfilling, and successful life isn’t about adding more stuff to it. It’s about finding the essential few and sticking to them.
Once you’ve decided on the essential few, the next step is to realize which one of them is constraining you the most. Which area of your life is slacking behind the other two? You must keep them all close regarding the “level” of their development. For example, if you decide that work is one of the areas and you focus only on it, eventually, your other areas like health will start to slack behind and the speed at which you could continue developing will start to decay. That is why you must always make sure to work on your weakest area until it is leveled up to a point where you can move on.
Finally, make sure to focus fully on that one area, and do the lowest amount of work needed to maintain the other ones. This way you won’t be losing any progress that you already made, and you will be able to develop that one area at the fastest possible rate.
Here is a quick summary of what to do:
First, figure out a maximum of three areas of your life that are important. Then pick just one to make progress on (do maintenance volume for the other two). The one that you should choose first is the one that is constraining your life.
Example of my essential few:
Work | Health | Social |
Learning | Working out | Family |
Roadmap | Recovery | Love |
Forex | Mental health | Community |
Diet | ||
Sleep |
Work:
- Learning
- Roadmap
- Forex
Health:
- Working out
- Recovery
- Mental health
- Diet
- Sleep
Social:
- Love
- Family
- Community
Productivity hacks
Now I will give three tools to make you ten times more productive in your life. These 3 tools are the 80/20 rule, batching, and Parkinson’s law.
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- The rule of 80/20 states that 20% of the tasks bring 80% of the results. To maximize this rule find out what those tasks are and eliminate everything else. If you could only work for 2 hours a week, what task would you do to achieve your goal?
- Batching could be understood as grouping all the work in the same block. For example, when you go to the gym you do the whole workout at once. You don’t come back later in the day to finish a couple more sets. This should be the same for everything in life. Group the work into one block of time and do it all in that one block.
- Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. In short, if you don’t put yourself on a deadline, the task will keep being pushed further until you are forced by some other deadline to do it. So make sure that you create a hard deadline to force yourself to do it and not waste time.
Some additional productivity concepts that you should be aware of are:
1. Deep work
Dedicate 3-4 hours of your day to a block of deep work. Plan in advance where you will work, for how long, how you will work (for example write 20 words per minute), and how you will support your work (food, water,…).
At the end of each day, make a daily to-do list for tomorrow.
After that, start your shutdown ritual. This means you finish the last things you have connected to work (like a glance at your email,…) and once finished, leave everything work-related for tomorrow. That means no more thoughts about work, no more plans, you leave all of it for tomorrow.
Make a weakly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead. Look over your accomplishments and analyze how well you did last week.
2. Self image
Align your identity with the identity of a productive person. You have been programmed by school and early life to be given the work you should do. Become a person who gives that work to himself. Learn how to create your own instructions, not take someone else’s instructions. Use affirmations throughout the day. This ties back to the section where we talked about the importance of self-talk.
3. Success Visualizations
If you are not sure what visualization means go back to the article Principles of Reality, where I give you a visualization exercise to try.
4. Foresee your potential failure
This is similar to the previous tip, but the difference is that you will focus on your possible downfalls. In order to avoid failure you must anticipate failure. That is why you should visualize all the possible traps you could fall into during your day and find a way to prevent them.
5. Goal setting
Here I will explain the process of goal setting:
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- Aim to set reasonable unreasonable goals, small enough that it is possible but big enough that it is still motivating.
- Set a long-term goal (it should be in a 12-month range). This should be something that you obsess and feel excited about when you get out of bed.
- Find the metric that you will track (It should be multiple metrics: money earned, followers gained, weight lost,…).
- Set your monthly milestones, and understand that progress comes exponentially. So don’t expect to grow linearly. The first few months will have less progress than the following ones.
- Set your weakly performance actions (examples for a blogger would be: reading a book, writing a post,…).
- Set your weakly goals. The same way you did for your monthly milestones.
Now that you know how to set goals, the next step is to create your yearly roadmap. Write down the 12 following months and how many weeks each of them has. Then fill out your roadmap by following the above-mentioned steps.
6. Fast from food
For the first 2-3 hours of the day don’t eat and just focus on your work. Your mind works best fasted.
7. Eat the frog
Do the hardest task of the day first. This is an easy insurance against procrastination and failure.
8. Flow state
Focus is a fundamental part of being productive and for that reason, I suggest you watch the video bellow. It goes in-depth on how to achieve flow state.
Make your time table
I will teach you how to create a perfect daily schedule. You need to be realistic whilst creating it but also a little bit ambitious. The goal isn’t to create a schedule that you simply can’t follow but it looks cool; neither is the goal to create a useless schedule that gives you a bunch of free time.
Using all the previous knowledge (Presence and Purpose, Principles of Reality, Mindset), create a schedule that will revolve around it. For an exact step-by-step guide, here is a short video on how to do it.
Below, you will find pictures of my daily schedule and habit tracker. The important thing to realize is that they are coherent, and yours should be aswell.
Make your habit tracker
Here is a list of habits I believe everyone should add to their routine:
- Morning/night journaling (you can find out more about this in Reading and Journaling)
- Reading (you can find out more about this in Reading and Journaling)
- Writing essays (you can find out more about this in Reading and Journaling)
- Meditation (you can find out more about this in Breath and Meditation)
- Cold showers and Wim Hof method (you can find out more about this in Breath and Meditation)
- Working out, posture, and stretching (you can find out more about this in Weekly Workout Routine)
- All of the actionable steps from Pitfalls of Modern Life
- All of the sleep habits (you can find out more about this in Sleep)
- All of the habits from Jaw and Diet
- Self-talk/affirmations from Principles of Reality
- Visualization exercise from Principles of Reality
- Failure visualization
If you would like any additional ideas on which habits you could look to implement there is a great book called “Tools of Titans”. You don’t need to read it but it could be of great help for sure. As you continue developing and learning, keep upgrading your routine as well. This routine is not a one-and-done kind of thing, it should be constantly changing and adapting to your lifestyle and needs.
Below is an example of a habit tracker that you could use. It should be a simple printable page or a written table. One thing you should keep in mind is to never reset your habit tracker because you skipped a certain habit for a couple of days. Don’t try to deceive yourself. You will grow the most by sticking to a single habit tracker for a month and then analyzing how you did.
Below is a summary of the book “Atomic Habits“, to help you build habits that stick. It will also serve as a summary of topics that we covered previously so I highly encourage you to watch the video.
Conclusion
By creating a goal roadmap, daily schedule, habit tracker, and essential few you’ve built insurance against procrastination.
The goal roadmap serves as the direction in which your life is going and gives you a broad look at the things you need to do. Your daily schedule represents a rough framework for what you should do at any given time of the day. The habit tracker is ordered in exactly the way you should go about your day. This way you always know what your next task for the day is. Finally, your essential few serve as a filter to determine if what you are doing is worth doing.
By using these four in combination with the to-do list that you create at the end of each day, you have built a foolproof system against procrastination.
The final step is to combine all of this into a single Word or PDF document. In your document, you should first write a long to-do list. These tasks are not supposed to be something you can do immediately, but rather mere ideas that you want to finish in the span of 12 months. I use this to collect all of my ideas and future improvements connected to my goal. Then, add your goal roadmap, daily schedule, habit tracker, and essential few. You also can add anything else if you think it would be useful.
If your goal is, for example, business-related, there are many more things you could add to your document like “My Dream Avatar” or “Value Ladder”, but we will discuss these topics in Making Money chapter.
One additional tip is to try using CherryTree software instead of Word or PDF. It is a note-keeping tool and I highly recommend it as it is very simple to use and well-organized.
Actionable step:
- Create your own Word or PDF document.
Once you have done all of the actionable steps, move on to the article Virtues of an Overman.