One Behavior Separates the Massively Productive from the Disorganized and Overwhelmed
10 Minutes to 10x Your Output and Completely Control Your Day
It’s a terrible feeling.
Being exhausted from a day of constant activity but without a sense of accomplishment.
You move from task to task, keeping busy, but never really making progress.
As if exhaustion weren’t enough, overwhelm hovers overhead. Even when you finish a task. Even after you head home for the night.
That overwhelm is the last thing you think of before falling to sleep.
It’s the first thing you think of upon waking.
It just might be the biggest source of stress in your life.
You’ve tried many life hacks and productivity tips. Like aspirin, they offer some temporary relief. But this sense of overwhelm isn’t a minor headache; it’s a goddamn knife in your brain that leaves you constantly wondering how you’re going to get it all done, or whether you’ll ever get ahead.
It’s time you took the knife out and felt a sense of relief.
The same relief that massively productive people feel every day — a sense of accomplishment that comes from one behavior, which leads to killing overwhelm, getting organized, and getting shit done.
Why Massively Productive People Plan Their Day
“Why spend a thought worrying when you can invest the same thought planning a prosperous future?” ― Phumi Ngwane
Massively productive people don’t drift in the wind.
They don’t follow their fancies. They aren’t driven by random events throughout their day.
They plan.
They know that aligning their actions with their goals eliminates wasted effort and makes procrastination obsolete because they know what to do next and when to do it. With a plan, the work they do drives meaningful progress toward their purpose, vision, and goals.
And, because they’re busy doing meaningful work, it becomes difficult for others to interrupt and distract them.
Massively productive people don’t fatigue themselves by deciding what’s important every time they have a free moment.
They know what to work on.
They know when to work on it.
And they know how each task will move them closer to their goals.
As such, they don’t have to think. They don’t have to decide. They get right to work and are massively productive.
None of this certainty comes naturally. Nor does it come from experience. This type of productivity sure as hell doesn’t happen by accident.
It happens with consistently spending a few minutes planning every day.
Which you can (quickly and easily) do too.
10 Minutes to 10X Your Productivity Today
“Plans are useless. Planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Planning should not be a big ordeal.
Spending even 30 minutes planning out your next 24 hours is far too much time, especially when your plan will fall to shit the second you start work.
Schedules change. Tasks get reprioritized. And life happens.
So instead of a drawn-out process spent locking down every moment of your day, we’re going to use a 10-minute, 5-step planning process that will have you back to work before your coffee is done brewing.
Every morning, walk yourself through these steps without fail. By the end of the week, you’ll wonder how you ever got anything done without it.
Step #1: Empty Your Mind
That sense of overwhelm you feel? It comes from too many tasks overloading your mind.
Like a dryer full of shoes, every task you store in memory is tumbling around, making a lot of noise, and getting tangled with the others.
Massively productive people transfer these tasks out of their heads.
Not all of them. Just the loudest ones, which are likely to be the most important and most pressing tasks that need to get done.
Grab a sheet of paper, a pen, and unload your mind.
Anything that bubbles up gets its own line. And, once you’ve written 10, it’s game over. You’re done.
“But I already have a task list,” you say? Too bad. I have a task list too. And an app to track to-dos. They’re so loaded with crap they no longer help. So you’re going to write ten new tasks down today on a fresh sheet of paper to clear the noise of the past and start fresh today.
Don’t worry. You won’t work on all ten. That would be too much.
Instead, you’ll choose the top three based on specific criteria that will ensure maximum productivity.
Step #2: Pick Your Focus Tasks
Massively productive people don’t work on everything.
They work on the most important things.
They work on tasks that will move the needle, give them energy, and provide them with a huge sense of accomplishment.
Of all ten tasks, only a few will lead to massive productivity.
Which ones will move the needle on your goals? Which will give you energy? Which will give you a huge sense of accomplishment? Most importantly, which tasks will make the rest of your day, week, or month seem easy?
Circle those tasks, but no more than three.
These are your top priorities for the day — your focus tasks. You’ll focus on getting these three done above all else.
As for which one to work on first, take a tip from the fantastic productivity and prioritization book, The ONE Thing and ask,
“What’s the ONE thing I can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary?”
If that one thing doesn’t come to mind immediately, don’t fret. You’re going to schedule these tasks in another step. But not before you ensure nothing will block your path forward.
Step #3: Kill Your Dragons
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again
Like you, massively productive people have ambition and drive.
But they know that’s not enough.
Even the most ambitious people fail when unanticipated obstacles block their path — “productivity dragons” can foil their great intentions and hard work.
Most of the time, with a little forethought, you can bring those dragons to light, which gives you a chance to avoiding stumbling into them in the dark.
Which is what we’ll do now.
For each of your three focus tasks, ask yourself who or what could get in your way.
Is it Instagram? Or your ever-growing email inbox? Or maybe a colleague who always swings by your office and talks your ear off for an hour after lunch?
These distractions destroy your ability to perform. They are obstacles to a productive workday. They are dragons that, if unaccounted for, will stop you dead in your tracks or, at worst, eat your ass for dinner.
Recognize them. Plan to avoid them. Or kill them.
On the flip side, massively productive people don’t do everything themselves. Many tasks can be automated or accelerated or assigned.
Ask yourself, who has done this before that could push me in the right direction or guide me down the quickest path to success? What tools are available to make this task easier? What tools are available to automate this task completely? Or, if it can’t be automated, ask yourself if you must be the one to work on it. You may be able to assign it to someone else, freeing up time to focus on other important tasks.
Step #4: Schedule Your Day
“A plan is what, a schedule is when. It takes both a plan and a schedule to get things done.” — Peter Turla
If you stop at step #3, you’ll have prioritized your task list and feel clear about what you should do.
But you won’t actually get anything done.
Without scheduling the tasks you intend on accomplishing, life will get in your way.
Colleagues and customers will fill your calendar with meetings. Urgent tasks will fill your day with miscellany. Procrastination will fill your free time with busy work. All the good intentions, plans, and prioritization in the world won’t help you get things done if you don’t block out the time to do the work.
And massively productive people block out time to do their most important work.
You can too. Consider when you will have the energy and motivation to do each task, how much rest you need in between tasks, and how you will balance challenging or draining tasks with energizing ones. Then, with all that in mind, schedule a meeting with yourself (literally) for each focus task on your plate.
Treat this meeting as sacred, and do the fucking work.
Step #5: Do The Fucking Work
For each of those tasks you scheduled, do the fucking work.
Treat that time as sacred.
Just as you wouldn’t skip out on a conference call with an important customer, don’t skip out on the time you’ve scheduled with yourself.
Massively productive people don’t compromise on getting important work done. They may shuffle around their calendar, but they always prioritize time to work on their most important tasks.
When else would they do the work?
When else would they have the time to actually be productive?
So Get Planning
It’s the one behavior that massively productive people do to eliminate chaos and disorganization from their every day.
And it doesn’t take much.
You’ll make progress toward your goals instead of fielding interruptions by the needs of others.
You’ll end your day with a sense of accomplishment.
You’ll leave behind that sense of overwhelm and disorganization.
You’ll be working on what matters.
And while this may have sounded impossible before, you now have a simple, 10-minute planning process that will help you design a day to get 10x more done than you ever would have before.
About the Author
Michael Mehlberg
HUSBAND, FATHER, ENTREPRENEUR, BUSINESS STRATEGIST, AUTHOR, FITNESS NUT, ORGANIZATION FREAK, PRODUCTIVITY JUNKIE
I help high-achieving entrepreneurs organize their brain and schedule so they can organize their life and business.
Subscribe to my free, weekly newsletter on personal excellence and business mastery that one client called “The Owners Manual to an Awesome Life.”