How to Say, “No” In Difficult Situations

By George Halachev

The problems we have with productivity are not always due to lack of organization or time management. Sometimes it’s just because we commit to more things that we can handle. We end up spread out too thin, like butter scraped over too much bread, and lacking focus to finish what we started.

Often we don’t even make the conscious decision to commit to that many things, it just happens because we can’t say, “No.”

Here are some scenarios in which that happens often.

Your friend asks you for a favor that you hate doing, but you can’t say, “No” because he will think you’re a bad friend.
Your boss asks you to do a task you hate doing, but you can’t say, “No” because you’re afraid you’ll get fired.
Your partner asks you to do something that you hate doing, but you can’t say, “No” because you don’t want them to get mad and start an argument.

The two problems we’ll focus on here is when you should say “No” and how to say it to get the best possible outcome.

When you should say, “No.”

There are 3 types of situations where we should consider saying, “No”.

We want to do it but we don’t have time for it.
We don’t want to do it and there are no better alternatives
We don’t want to do it but we’re afraid of the outcome.

1) Know Your Availability

The first case where you should say “No” is when you’re already overcommitted and taking on more responsibility will make things even worse. The typical fear is that we’re going to miss on a good opportunity.

While this is true, think of what you might lose if you take on the challenge and you fail. Even worse, what if you fail not only the new responsibility but also the ones you’ve had before because you’re spread out too thin.

A great concept, in this case, is the opportunity cost. Most newbie investors think only about the gain. If there’s a high chance of success, they make the investment. They don’t consider the cost of the time and resources they’re putting in or the other available opportunities they can do instead.

So if you’re already booked a 100% think of the opportunity cost before saying “Yes” to something new. A good way to do that is to keep an always up to date calendar, to-do list, and budget. That way with one glance you can see if you can fit in the new opportunity without having to compromise something else.

2) No Better Alternative

These are the cases where you just don’t have a better choice and all other options seem worse. For example, when your boss says, “You either do this or you’re fired” and you don’t have another source of income.

These are the extreme cases where saying, “Yes” and sucking it up is fine. However, you shouldn’t leave it at that and accept the same thing over and over again. Work on coming up with an alternative solution the next time it happens.

Next time your boss goes into, “My way or the highway” mode, maybe you will have an alternative source of income and you’ll be fine with being fired.

3) Fear of the Outcome

This one is an emotional problem. We intellectually know that saying “Yes” in some cases is bad for us, but we just can’t bear the pain of saying “No”.

Those are the cases where you know you’re not going to get anything good out of it. You’re doing it just so you don’t hurt somebody else’s feelings or avoid a conflict.

Why is it so hard to say, “No”?

A big part of the problem is delaying the emotional pain. Even though we know that saying, “Yes” to something we don’t want is bad long term, sometimes we can’t bare the pain so we delay it. We rather suck it up, do something unpleasant to avoid the pain of disappointing someone.

As a result, we get to deal with more pain for doing something unpleasant, but it’s delayed. Since we’re not going to experience it in the moment it doesn’t seem so bad than saying, “No” right now.

None of this is conscious of course, that’s just how our subconscious mind works in the background. It does anything it can to avoid and delay the immediate pain.

So how do we deal with it?

Make the Decision In Advance

Be proactive about it. Don’t wait until the moment you have to say, “No” to make the decision. A lot of the things that we have to decide are recurring and happen over and over again.

If it’s something your boss is making you do, it’s probably not for the first time. If it’s your partner making you take out the trash, it’s probably not for the first time. So you can do some preparation in advance and figure out a good solution for when it happens next time.

How about figuring out an alternative way for the work to get done and offering that solution to your boss? Or trading the responsibility with one of your colleagues for something that you like more? How about hiring someone to help with the cleaning in the house so you don’t have to take out the trash?

These are just simple examples, but the point is that you can come up with a more intelligent solution when you’re thinking about it in advance. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself just because you don’t want to offend the person asking.

Building Healthy Boundaries

You know those people that seemingly have “come take advantage of me” written all over them? We tend to call them pushovers and people pleasers. That happens if a person doesn’t have healthy boundaries.

Having boundaries means being clear what you’re willing to do for other people and what you’re not. It also means you have to clearly define it in advance. It’s not really a boundary if you start building it when someone asks.

A good principle to use for the boundaries is to make sure it’s a win-win. If you help somebody out you should also be a winner. That doesn’t necessarily mean always wanting something in return, but making sure that what you give is worth it.

Doing something for a friend that you hate doing is a lose-win. Working on tasks that you hate doing is a lose-win.

Make sure you set boundaries to automatically reject all requests that are a lose-win. If you don’t let everybody know what your boundaries are, they will try to take advantage of you.

Rejecting other people seems harsh at first, but it doesn’t have to be. Make sure you communicate your motives well. Let the person you’re rejecting why you’re doing it. Help them find a better option and let them know what you are willing to help them with instead.

That way it won’t look like you’re throwing a hissy fit or you’re just in a bad mood. People will learn that you have strong boundaries and will respect you more for it.

Improve Your Focus by Eliminating External Stimuli

By George Halachev

Focus is one of the main aspects when it comes to productivity. Even if you have great goals and you’re very organized, you can’t get much done if you don’t focus on it for extended periods of time.

The more focused on your work you are the more efficient you’ll be. Meaning you’ll need to spend less time working and you’ll have more time enjoying your favorite things.

In this article, instead of talking about how to increase focus directly, I want to talk about eliminating the things that rob us of it in the first place. And instead of focusing on the obvious superficial stuff like e-mail and social media distractions, I want to go to the core of the issue — all external stimuli.

Types of Distractions

As far as our attention is concerned we have two types of distractions: external and internal.

The internal distractions are mostly the things that bounce around in our brain like random thoughts, memories or dreams. That’s what most meditation practices tend to focus on: disciplining our monkey minds to be more focused and calm.

The external distractions are things that we pick up from the surrounding world through our senses. They are the things that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

The more of that sensory input we get, the higher the chance is that we get distracted and lose our focus. The more input we get the harder we have to work to stay focused and ignore all the distractions. Luckily, taking care of the external input is much easier than the internal one. You don’t have to sit under a tree for 25 years to be able to create a focused external environment.

So instead of working so much on how to stay focused while there are so many distractions around, let’s nip the problem in the bud and start eliminating those before they even happen. Let’s take a look at each of our senses individually and how we can limit the number of stimuli that get through.

Sight

Our sight is by far the biggest bandwidth input that we have as humans. We can take in much more information through our eyes than the other senses.

But along with that all-important information also comes a lot of “junk” that we don’t need. And with that junk come a lot of distractions and interruptions every day. So how can we filter out the visual junk out of our working place so we can minimize the distractions?

If you are at your workplace right now stop for a second and take in everything visually (if not picture it in your mind’s eye). Focus on the objects on your desk, on the wall, on the floor, on your computer desktop, in your browser. How many of these things actually help you every day? Do you really need it every day?

The more junk you have all around you the harder time your brain is going to have focusing. The more work it has to do to filter out all the important things from the clutter. Why not save your brain the work by always decluttering and cleaning your workplace?

Hearing

That’s another sense through which a lot of junk comes in. Our brains have to work extra hard to filter out the unnecessary things we hear as well.

Luckily this one is easier to deal with since most people don’t actively need it for work. Our sight is critical for most jobs out there and we can’t get anything done effectively if we completely block all the input. Not so with hearing, most people won’t be any less effective if they completely block it.

The great thing is that when you block it completely, all the clutter that comes through our ears is gone. Again that’s a lot of work that your brain doesn’t have to actively do. Instead, it can reallocate that brainpower somewhere else.

For me personally, that is one of the biggest factors for focus. When I put in earplugs or a good pair of earphones I can actually feel a physical relief. I’ve done it for so long now that when I put on my earphones it’s a queue for my brain to go into a focus mode.

Even if the sound is not a 100% isolated, the reduction of the volume still helps a lot.

Touch

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use the sense of touch to group all other senses that we experience through our cells like temperature, weight, pain, moisture, movement, etc.

Some of those are easier to limit or “turn off” than others. You can always close your eyelids and block the stimuli that enter through your eyes, but it’s not so easy with the sense of touch. Save when you are asleep, your sense of touch is always “on”. There is no physical switch that you can use like your eyelids to stop feeling touch.

So since we can’t directly turn off the sense, what can we do to limit the external stimuli instead?

Is the temperature in your workplace always optimal so you don’t get distracted by feeling hot or cold? Are your chair and desk good enough so you don’t feel pain or stiffness? Are your clothes comfortable enough so you don’t feel any irritation or chafing?

What are some of the other touch related stimuli that often distract you?

Create Your Own Filter

I’m not going to address taste and smell since those have much less impact in our daily environment, except of course if you have a co-worker who doesn’t like to shower very often. :)

Hopefully, by now you get the picture and you can think of your own examples for sensory inputs that rob you of your attention and focus.

The main idea is to filter out the external stimuli as much as you can, so your brain doesn’t have to. It’s going to take a lot less effort to figure out how to remove the stimuli completely, than for your brain to have to deal with those every day.

How to Reduce Your Annoying Daily Tasks with Batching

By George Halachev

Every day we have tasks that we really enjoy and look forward to. And there are also those tasks that we hate doing. Tasks that mostly feel like chores or boring administrative work like going to the bank, doing your laundry and buying food for your pet.

Those are not just annoying to have to deal with on a daily basis, but they also rob us of our productivity and focus. How much better would your days be if you didn’t have to worry about all those little chores?

Let’s look at some ways of how to handle those better so you can enjoy more distraction free time every day.

Weekly Batching

Hands down the most effective method for me has been to batch or group all the administrative and maintenance tasks in one big time chunk over the weekend. That time chunk of a few hours sure sucks, but after it’s done my weekdays are free for creative work.

The Advantages of Batching

The batching isn’t just about shifting the tasks around from one day to the next. If you create a good routine with all your chores batched in one you can find a lot of ways to optimize them and do them faster.

Another big advantage is saving that “ramp-up” time that your brain needs to get back to effective work after a distraction. Say you’re working on your big project, everything is going really well, you’re in the zone. But then you get a text notification saying that you haven’t paid your phone bill and you have to go pay it immediately.

Well even if the payment is online and it takes just a few seconds, you still got distracted. It would still take you a few minutes to get back to the same level of focus to work on your project.

A few minutes doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what if you have 10 of those administrative and maintenance tasks that pop up every day?

My Weekly Batch

I’ve been doing the weekly batching every Sunday for a few years now and I’ve managed to get about 90% of my administrative, maintenance, and chore tasks done in that time.

Here’s a list of the most important things that I do every Sunday.

Laundry

Wash, dry, iron and fold my clothes
Change the bedsheets
Change the towels

Cleaning

Dust, Vacuum, Mop all rooms
Clean the kitchen
Clean the bathroom

Grooming

Cut my nails
Shave neck, armpit, and chest hair
Shave pubes (eww, I know)

Electronics

Recharge Fitbit
Recharge electric shavers

Review My Budget

See how much money I have left to spend for the monthly budget
Collect all the receipts and write them in the budget
Withdraw cash from PayPal (I get paid via PayPal)

Miscellaneous

Clean my shoes
Tighten the braces (for teeth straightening)
Cook a pot of lentils soup for the whole week

Monthly Batch

Naturally, not all tasks need to be done every week so I batch those rarer tasks for the first Sunday of every month. That also coincides with the Weekly batch for the same Sunday, so I have to set aside some additional time to do both.

Here is my monthly batch.

Car maintenance

Get fuel (one full tank lasts me for the whole month)
Check oil levels
Check tire pressure
Refill water tank
Carwash

Grooming

Shave legs
Shave nose hair
Cut toenails
Get a haircut

Update / Review statistics

Review my coaching business spreadsheet
Review my personal logs (weight, habit tracker, diet log)
Review my blog and mailing list statistics

Shopping

Buy big water bottles for the whole month
Buy cat food
Buy house supplies (toilet paper, soap, detergent, toothpaste, etc.)

Miscellaneous

Declutter home and office (throw away items that I’m not going to use anymore)
Empty my physical mailbox (lots of clutter and spam in there so I only check it once a month)

Share the Workload with Your Partner / Roommate

As common sense as it sounds, I didn’t think of this for the whole first year of living with my girlfriend. Yes, we kind of split the responsibilities in the house but there wasn’t a clear boundary. We would both end up doing some responsibilities at times, and there was no set routine.

It’s much better if you completely separate the responsibilities so you can just take that chore out of your mind. For example, my girlfriend takes care of all the laundry and I take care of all the dishwashing. So unless my girlfriend isn’t sick or swamped with work I can completely scratch off the laundry from my chore list.

Automation

Some of the tasks can be completely automated so you don’t have to think of them at all. Notice how there are no “paying bills” in my weekly or monthly tasks? That’s because all my regular bills and taxes are paid automatically.

A lot of banks offer that service for free nowadays, and if yours doesn’t you can always use services like mint.com

It’s still important to maintain awareness of your expenses, though, so I’d recommend reviewing your bill expenses every month. That’s part of my budget review task.

What are some of your daily tasks that can be completely automated? Usually, those are tasks that don’t require any creativity, they’re routine and they follow the same steps every time.

Here are a few very powerful tools that you can use for automation:

ifttt.com
zapier.com
imacros.net
seleniumhq.org

Outsourcing

This one would largely depend on how much your time is worth. It doesn’t make sense to do tasks yourself if you can afford to pay for somebody else to do it.

I used to do the cleaning myself when I was on a tight budget. But as my income grew, it didn’t make sense to clean for 2 hours every week when I could pay to have it done by somebody else. Instead, I can put those 2 hours/week into coaching work, which would make a lot more money than I would save by doing the cleaning myself.

You might not be able to afford it yet, that’s okay. But as your income grows, it’s worth reviewing your regular chores and see if you can afford to outsource the work.

• • •

The goal here is not to become a machine that does the same thing over and over again. It’s not about restricting and limiting yourself, even though it might feel like that in the beginning.

The goal is to round up all the annoying and unpleasant tasks in one big chunk, check them off and then enjoy your freedom for the rest of the week.

How to Stop Being a Pushover without Becoming a Bully

By George Halachev

Last week I got into a conflict situation and it got me thinking of how I could have handled it better. Here’s the story…

Pushover or a bully?

I started parking my car in a very tight spot and I knew I was going to bump the cars in front and behind to be able to get in. I’ve done it many times before and it never left any damage, so I was fine with it. I did several maneuvers, bumped the cars slightly and I was in.

When I got out of the car, there was a woman from the balcony above yelling something. So when I went over she says, “Don’t you feel a little insolent?! You bumped both cars a few times!!!”

I was caught off guard and went on the defense saying, “Yeah I circled the place and there weren’t any other places to park.”

She says, “I don’t care, you bumped both cars several times!”

I got a little mad myself and said, “So what? There aren’t any marks, come down and see if you want to!”

She says, “I don’t care, just the fact that you touched another car. Don’t you feel ashamed?!”

I say, “So what if I did? There are no marks!”

She just made an exasperated gesture with her hands, a disgusted expression and stormed inside her house.

At first, I was glad that I didn’t just give in to pressure, I stood by what I believed. It didn’t matter that I bumped the cars as long as there was no damage. But at the same time, I also felt it was a dick move because I didn’t respect the other person’s beliefs and feelings.

Which side are you on?

It all depends on what your belief about the car bumping thing is. If you feel like bumping somebody else’s car is no big deal as long as it doesn’t leave a mark, you’ll probably think that it didn’t matter and the woman was being unreasonable.

If on the other hand, you get pissed off when you see somebody bumping your car, you’ll probably think that I was being a dick.

But both of those perspectives are limited and superficial. Both of them are only considering one point of view, not both.

Why make it such a big deal?

This specific situation is not important since the whole thing is going to blow over in a few hours. Both the woman and I would have forgotten about it on the next day. But it got me thinking about all the other conflict situations that we face in life.

What do you do when you have a strong belief and it differs from the people that you’re communicating with? Do you ignore your own values and beliefs just so you don’t upset other people and respect their feelings? Do you always uphold your values and beliefs even though it would mean that other people would feel hurt?

In the first case, you’re being a pushover. In the second case, you’re being a bully. Neither of these extremes is a good option. It has to be something in between. But how do we find a good balance of both? And since every situation is going to be different, what do we use to guide us to make the right decision every time?

That’s where principles come in.

Principles

What is a principle?

A fundamental assumption or guiding belief.

In other words, it’s one of those beliefs that define how you see the world or who you are. What you believe is good or bad, right or wrong. A belief that you use to guide your decisions and actions in life.

It can be a principle that you came up with yourself, or you picked up from somebody else. For example, “Don’t kill.” Or “Don’t steal.”

If the principle is solid it should work well in all situations without exception. It should be reliable to use in all situations as the default option.

Why principles?

Why go that far? Can’t we just trust ourselves to make the right decision in the moment?

It sounds good in theory, but in the heat of the moment, you don’t have time to think analytically. Whatever decision you make is most likely going to be influenced by your current emotions and awareness.

In the example above I felt like I was being attacked for something that I considered perfectly normal and I went on the defense. From that point on the whole conversation was lost because we were in a fight, instead of trying to resolve the conflict.

The whole situation might have been much better if I relied on solid principles instead.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

One of the most solid set of principles that I’ve found are the Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Be Proactive
Begin with the End in Mind
Put First Things First
Think Win-Win
Seek First to Understand
Synergize
Sharpen the Saw

The ones that apply the most to this situation are: be proactive, seek first to understand, and think win-win.

So let’s see how each of those principles could have helped to make this situation better.

Using the principles

Be proactive

Being proactive is the first of the principles not by accident. It means to take action instead of waiting for something to happen to you. It means actively looking for a good resolution to the conversation.

That was my first mistake in that situation. I didn’t look for a way to make it better. I just reacted on impulse.

If you’re not proactive you’re not going to look for principles to make the situation better in the first place.

Seek first to understand

This is the second principle that I didn’t uphold in this situation. My first reaction wasn’t to listen and try to understand the other side. My first reaction was to get defensive and try to protect my belief: bumping other cars is fine as long as there is zero damage.

From that point on the whole conversation was about each side trying to prove their point.

How much better would the whole thing have gone if I started with the question, “Why is she upset? Why does she care about it so much? How can I make this a win for her as well?”

Think Win-Win

The third principle is about looking for a deal where both parties come out as winners. That means not sacrificing your own win and not accepting the deal if the other person is going to lose.

In my situation, the first part of the equation was good. I won. I got to park where I wanted to. I got to stick to my belief and I didn’t back down.

But the second part of the equation was all wrong. The other person lost. The car got bumped, she didn’t feel heard, and she felt like I didn’t care at all.

It’s a win-lose situation. And since one of my principles is only going for win-win situations, it wasn’t a win for me after all. It was a loss. Which is exactly why I felt bad about it.

I left the other person feeling worse.

• • •

That’s three of my core principles that I ignored in that interaction. No wonder I left feeling shitty about it.

The whole thing is already over and I’m probably not going to recognize the woman if I saw her again, so not much I can do about that particular case. But what about all the other similar situations that are going to happen in the future?

The obvious thing here is that if I didn’t want that to happen again, I just stop doing it. But that way I will feel defeated. I will feel like I’ve given up on my own beliefs. However, if we go deeper, bumping the cars is only the belief on the surface.

The deeper belief is that I want other people to respect my beliefs and my boundaries. And I am the one who sets the boundaries for myself, not other people. So if somebody else doesn’t care about these boundaries, that’s not relevant. It doesn’t give them the right to cross mine.

Similarly, if I don’t have the same belief that other people do, it doesn’t give me the right to cross their beliefs. It’s their boundary after all. My house, my rules kind of thing.

So the end result is the same, if I can’t park without bumping the other cars I’ll just keep looking for another spot. But now that I know the principles behind it, I feel much better about it. I know that respecting other people’s boundaries is much more important to me than occasionally missing a parking spot.

How to Make Important Decisions in Your Life

This was a simple situation that didn’t really matter in the long run. But it’s a great example of what usually happens in conflict situations. Instead of using principles to guide our decisions we react on animal instinct.

What if the situation was really important? What if the outcome will change your life in a major way?

What if you and your partner are raising a kid and you don’t agree on which school to send her to?
What if you and your business partner disagreed about which way your company is going to go in?
What if your boss forced you to do a move to a position that you don’t like?

Are you going to be proactive about it or just let the situation unfold?

Are you going to try to understand where the other person is coming from or just try to get your point across?

Are you going to be a bully/pushover? Or are you going to look for a win-win deal?

We’re faced with important decisions almost every day, decisions that change our lives in the long run. If you have a set of tested principles it’s much easier to make the right choice.

You don’t have to analyze the situation every time, you just know that you have to be proactive. You know that you have to try to understand the other side first. You know that you’re always seeking for a win-win.

Protect Your Productivity by Focusing On Fundamentals

By George Halachev

Imagine that you have a beautiful brand new Ferrari. The car is tuned to perfection. Every little detail is optimized for maximum performance. It’s the best piece of engineering that you’ve ever seen.

And then also imagine that the tires are worn out. There’s not enough oil in the engine. You’re using cheap fuel and you have an old battery that dies every day. How well do you think that Ferrari is going to serve you?

There are not a lot of people that treat their cars like that. Yet we treat our own bodies in a similar way and expect them to perform well. We don’t take care of our body’s basic needs and wonder why we’re not focused or motivated every day.

If you really want to improve your productivity you have to stop focusing only on productivity tips and tricks. Organization, time management, and apps are only going to take you so far.

If you instead focus on improving the fundamentals of how your body works, you will get a much bigger return on investment. After all, no matter how good you are at managing your time and staying organized, you won’t get much done if you’re physically sick or an emotional wreck.

So let’s explore what the fundamentals are. What are the basic things that your body needs so that in return it can give you focus, energy, and motivation?

Food

Most diets are optimized for losing weight but what about energy and focus? Are the foods that you eat every day making you more or less energetic? Do you feel clear minded after a meal or sluggish and sleepy?

I’ve noticed a huge change in productivity when I eat clean and healthy food instead of fast food junk. If you haven’t noticed it yourself, do a simple experiment. Try to do a few hours of productive work after having a huge McDonalds lunch. And then try the same thing after a well-balanced, organic meal. The difference in focus and energy is huge.

That is just the short term effect of course. But in the long term, the food tends to also have a cumulative effect, just as it does with gaining unhealthy weight. After a week of eating healthy organic meals, you will expand your capacity for focus and energy.

The food that you eat is the fuel that your body uses for energy. Just like the Ferrari, your body isn’t going to perform well using low-quality fuel. So instead of only focusing on foods that don’t make you fat, what about making sure that they’re good for maximum performance too?

Water

A well-hydrated body is like a well-oiled machine. It makes sure all your body systems are working well.

It’s such an easy and simple fix too. It only takes a few minutes per day to drink enough water. Yet many people are having trouble maintaining that habit. Here are a few tips that will help you get your much-needed H2O every day.

How much is enough?

The popular advice is 8 glasses/day, but I think that’s a BS answer. There are so many variables when it comes to how much water we need that a fixed amount isn’t going to cut it.

For example, on days that you eat a lot of junk and dry foods, you’ll naturally need more water than when you’re eating juicy fruits and vegetables. And what if it’s a hot day outside and you’ve been sweating all day?

Instead of having a fixed amount every day, a great way to find out if you’re drinking enough is to check your urine (eww, I know.) If most of the time it’s crystal clear and doesn’t have an odor it means you’ve been a good boy/girl! On the other hand, if it’s yellowy and it stinks, it means you need more juice in the tank.

Always have a bottle with you

In the living room
In the bedroom
In the car
In the office

Don’t rely on your willpower to make the right decision in the moment. Even if you’re thirsty you’re likely to ignore the instinct if there is no easy source of water.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night feeling thirsty and I was too lazy to go to the kitchen. And the result is always the same, in the morning I wake up feeling groggy and dehydrated.

So be prepared. Just a few minutes of prep time and having a full bottle nearby will help a lot to make the right decision.

Little sips

If you’ve been dehydrated pretty much all your life, it’s going to be hard to start drinking a lot of water. Forcing yourself to drink a lot is only going to make it harder. Pretty soon you’ll feel like you want to puke.

So take it easy. Ramp it up one sip at a time. Even if you don’t feel like drinking force yourself to drink just one little sip.

Also, don’t start by trying to get to 3 liters on day 1 just with little sips. Start with an easier daily goal and step it up every day.

Exercise

That’s a tricky one. If you’ve been exercising regularly and skip a day, it will feel like any other day, except that seemingly you will have more time to do more stuff. Which logically makes you more productive because you don’t “waste time” with exercise.

That’s a big trap that most people (including myself) fall into. It’s a tricky one because we don’t notice the decline of productivity right away. It’s gradual.

When we stop exercising our bodies start to perform more and more poorly with each passing day. After two weeks you might wake up wondering why you’re not feeling like doing anything today and you don’t have any energy at all.

A good analogy here is the Ferrari’s battery. If you want your battery to work well you have to use the car so it can get charged often. Also, if you want your body to have energy use it often to make sure all your systems work well.

Sleep

All of the fundamentals above are critical to staying productive, but if I had to pick one that has the most impact, it is sleep. It’s by far the most common challenge that I run into when I work with people to increase their productivity. It’s the amount of sleep that they need.

It’s the same misconception as with exercise. We don’t want to “waste” our precious time sleeping when we can get a something productive done. And in a similar way, it becomes a tricky situation because we soon get used to the sleep deprived state. Our performance is reduced but we don’t even notice it anymore because it’s the same every day. It becomes our base experience.

A good way to think about sleep instead is like your maintenance time. Just like you have to set aside some time and effort to maintain the Ferrari, you have to also give your body the time it needs for maintenance.

• • •

So if you feel like your productivity sucks even though you’ve done a lot of work on time management and optimization, check your fundamentals. Make sure you take care of the basics first and then work on using the best apps.

If there is more than one fundamental that isn’t up to par, start with the worst one. That’s probably the bottleneck to your productivity.

How to Make Daily Plans That Will Actually Come True

By George Halachev

So why make a daily plan in the first place?

You will be more in control of your day.
You will get more done.
You will be more efficient with your time.
You will have more peace of mind.

Or at least that’s what productivity experts tell you.

Most of the time, however, it doesn’t work out that way. Most of the time we make daily plans and it’s a total clusterfuck. None of the tasks on your list get done and there are a bunch of new ones that popped out of nowhere.

That used to happen to me all the time when I tried to make a plan. After a while, I just gave up and thought that planning is pointless since things never happen as planned anyway.

However, it’s not that planning doesn’t work. I just didn’t know how to do it.

Planning is a Skill

The first wrong assumption that I had is that planning doesn’t require any learning. I thought it was just about writing down your tasks and prioritizing them.

That is certainly the first step, yes, but the process doesn’t end there. At least if you want the planning to be useful.

The main skill that we have to learn when planning a day is estimation or prediction. We’re essentially trying to set a bunch of goals and trying to predict how our day is going to pan out. How much time and effort the tasks are going to take. That requires some practice and learning to be able to do accurately.

Here are a few tips that I’ve picked up over the years that help me get better at estimation and make plans that actually work.

Time Your Tasks

A great way to start improving your prediction skill is timing your tasks. When you start planning your day just put a simple time estimate next to each task. For example:

Get to Inbox zero (60 mins)
Write a blog post (120 mins)
Lunch (60 mins)
Nap (30 mins)
Do my laundry (30 mins)

Keep it simple. We don’t want this to get tedious. After timing all your tasks, you can quickly add them up and see what the total is. The total in the example above is 5 hours.

The first time I did this for my daily plan the total was 24 hours. 24 hours worth of tasks that I somehow thought I was going to get done in a 8 hour work day. It was a huge overestimation.

So writing everything down and timing it brings you one step closer to reality.

Break Tasks into Smaller Steps

Another huge problem is that we usually underestimate how much time an individual task takes. Our brain just ignores all the little details and complications that come with a task and comes up with a very unrealistic deadline.

For example, I have a task to go pick up my new driver’s license from the DMV. Off the top of my head, that task is going to take about 30-40 minutes.

But if I try to break that into smaller pieces it might look something like this:

Go to my car (5 mins)
Defrost it, since it’s winter (5 mins)
Drive to the DMV (20 mins)
Stuck in traffic (10 mins)
Find a place to park (5 mins)
Wait in line at the DMV (10 mins)
Drive back home (20 mins)

So after breaking it up, I think a more realistic estimate would be 75 minutes. Almost double of what I thought it was going to be initially.

The more you break down a task into smaller pieces, the easier it’s going to be to predict the total time.

Of course, you don’t have to write down all these little details into your to-do list. That’s just going to make it tedious to manage and very cluttered. You can do the break down on a separate piece of paper or file that you trash after you’re done.

Plan for the Unexpected

Another mistake that we often do is thinking that we’ll have a 100% of our work day at our disposal. If we have a 8 hour work day, we tend to plan for 8 hours worth of tasks. As if nothing unexpected is going to happen.

That’s rarely the case, though. There are always new tasks and complications that come with every day. Especially if you have a boss and he’s the one who gives you more tasks.

Your unexpected time depends on the type of work you do and how much control of your schedule you have. It might be 30 minutes or 5 hours. Since it’s unexpected, it’s not going to be very accurate anyway, so you might as well pick an average time for every day. Your plans will be more accurate with the average unexpected time than planning for 100% availability.

Plan for the Downtime

Another way to be more accurate is to figure out what your effective working time is. That means you have to subtract all the activities that you do during the day that aren’t work related. For example:

Lunch (60 mins)
Talking on the phone (30 mins)
Taking breaks (40 mins)
Going to the bathroom (20 mins)
Commute (60 mins)

A good way to figure out your effective working time is to use a tool like Toggl to track your work for a few days.

When I first started tracking my time with Toggl I was shocked that I had less than 4 hours of effective work in a 8 hour work day. No wonder my daily schedules never worked.

Practice, practice, practice.

Even with all these exercises, sometimes you will be way off. By default, we humans are not very good at predicting time. So don’t worry if you suck at it in the beginning.

Something that you thought was going to take 5 minutes might take 2 hours. That’s fine. You’re just practicing. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.

The more of these exercises you do the more you’ll develop your estimation skill. After doing it for a while you’ll start developing an intuition about it. Even without writing anything down you’ll intuitively know that it’s a very unrealistic plan because you’ve seen it fail before hundreds of times.

When you’re new at this, it’s safe to say that you can double any time prediction that you make for a task. You’ll probably be closer to reality that way.