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Hello, and welcome to your weekly tip. Today, I’m going to talk about productivity in roughly four to five minutes. I know you’ve read and implemented systems around productivity your entire life, yet frustratingly, you are still struggling to maintain your game consistently.

What am I doing wrong, you ask? As when you look around your social feed, you see many people starting side gigs, growing their incomes. While you barely have time to breathe.

The industry for collaborative tools that enhance your productivity is projected to grow 14% year on year, folks, this has become a very lucrative, ongoing problem to solve, the more information rich our world becomes, the more we need a better way to play the information game.

We need clever and creative ways to engage that multi dimensional computer known as our brain. COVID has introduced to us this concept of remote work, which has created a new dimension of challenge for all of us. The entrepreneurially minded among us, tend to develop more quickly, tools and practices that help them to stay focused and protect their mental space.

One of the big topics around that is boundaries, which we’re going to get into later on in the podcast. But there are five ways that you can start thinking about boosting your productivity game, as an inner exercise. So the first is robust tools and systems.

The most famous work on productivity comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework, and Brian Tracy’s Frog Digestion Experiment. Eat that frog, right, you remember that one? These models are fantastic, but I must point out that they work only for what you do for yourself. If you’re working with customers, collaborators, other service providers and teams, you need to leverage your productivity influence on them too.

There are tools out there that can help you leverage influence if used well: clickup, Asana, are two of my favourite tools. The best systems for delivering influence, however, are designed by emotional intelligence skills on top.

We’re going to get into emotional intelligence through a series of episodes later on in the podcast. Let’s talk about mental models and mindsets, easily, this is productivities best kept secret, and makes up for most of the 80% of great ideas you’re probably not following today, being able to identify the mental models you use when completing most tasks, and the mindsets you have, opens the door to documenting it, studying it and improving it.

Elon Musk talks about first principles, Warren Buffett talks about the five hour rule, Jeff Bezos talks about being a day one company. These are mental models that they are actively using to navigate their days and their ways of being. What models are you actively using? And are they deliberately employed. I love the work of the late Tony Buzan. He’s the master of mind mapping. And it’s a great way to get clarity on how you think about something, to take this to the next level, build your models from these maps. I think this is a really great exercise to help open your mind and your frame, of how you can reassess how you’re executing things that are important to you today.

Let’s talk about the motion motivators. So Simon Sinek has become synonymous with the word why? Because it is the fundamental reason we improve anything at all in our lives. In this context, why do you want to be more productive? For some of us it’s because we get a payoff from the status quo as it is. We draw energy, status, self actualization from being the busiest, the one who’s bulb never goes out, trust me, I know that person, and in many ways I’m still that person except for one thing. I realised when I became an entrepreneur, that how you spend your time, is how you spend your money. What’s stopping you from being motivated to make a change? It’s probably because you don’t understand what it’s costing you.

The thought productivity burner we seldom acknowledge, is decision making friction. It’s the reason Mark Zuckerberg wears the same T shirt every day, or why Steve Jobs did before him, decision making exhausts the brain. The central idea of friction reducers, is to allow the brain more bandwidth to spend energy on what’s really essential. The last but not least, is the mental health factor and the skill of hyper focus.

I associate this with my favourite sport – tennis. So when I watch Nadal and Djokovic play against each other, it’s like a masterclass in hyper focus. Both are healthy and physical. It takes a combination of patience foresight, power, precision, for any points to register against the other. This is what we want for our brains. Short sprint’s with many regroup breaks, mastering hyper focus, taking deliberate action and taking deliberate self care. Are you ready to change your productivity game? If you want to get into this topic a bit more.

Have a look at my website, www Katherine Ann byam.com. See you soon. 

This episode was brought to you today by the courageous career club. Have you picked up your own copy of; Do What Matters: The Purpose Driven Career Transition Guidebook? To find out how you can get your copy, as well as resources that go alongside it, visit my website, www Katherine Ann byam.com or engage with me on the socials. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.