I started strong.
I got up at 5:40, meditated, planned my day, got the kids off to school, exercised, and was ready before 8 am.
This rarely happens, but when it does, my day goes well.
Just not this day.
7 Essential Elements of a Yearly Planner
By the end of this article, I’m going to give you a digital version of a yearly planner for free. One I’ve spent the last decade refining and tweaking and tailoring based on a 360 degree, science-backed productivity system focused on improving all seven important aspects of my life.
It’s been so powerful for me that I wrote a book about it, have written countless articles about it (this being yet another), and have spent the last few years meticulously drawing out every month, week, and day in my paper notebook with a ruler and pen.
Why it’s so powerful is the purpose of this article. And it comes down to these seven essential elements:
The Single Most Effective Thing You Can Do to Produce Consistently Measurable Results
Can I tell you something?
I took the day off to home school my kids and I'm about ready to pull my fucking hair out.
Not because of my kids.
They're troopers. They're working hard. They're dealing with this shitty #covid19 hand better than many adults.
No, I was frustrated because I didn't know how long each assignment would take, didn't know when they'd get tired, and had no idea how to move them through their planned education. As such, we failed a math test, spent twice as long as we should have on history, and I missed feeding them all lunch.
Tonight, I'm recommending my wife to sainthood.
Now, with a bit of perspective, I see exactly what went wrong.
I had a plan, but I didn't have a schedule.
OMG. Can We Stop With The Morning Routines Already?
Pain shot through my back.
Shocking, excruciating pain. The kind that takes your breath away.
It started mid-spine and radiated outward, wrapping around my ribs, then upward toward my neck.
I gasped for air, dropped my dumbbells, and collapsed to the ground.
It felt oddly good to lie there on the cold concrete of my basement exercise room. If I stayed still, I could regroup and take account of what happened. But the slightest twitch brought immediate suffering.
Even breathing hurt.
Had I warmed up before working out, I could have avoided twisting my back muscles into a tangled hammock. But I dove right in, curling heavy weights completely cold.
Over the next two weeks while my back muscles healed, I’d live to regret it.
Moving as deliberately as I’ve ever moved in my life, I attempted to get up. And, with every painful move, I could hear my trainers’ voice in my head: “You’re old as fuck bruh. You gotta spend the time getting your muscles ready so you don’t hurt yourself.”
Lesson learned.
One Behavior Separates the Massively Productive from the Disorganized and Overwhelmed
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.
What the Most Productive Countries in the World Have In Common
If I asked you which country was the most productive in the world, what would you say?
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Japan? America?
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Those were my answers, but they’re not even in the top 5.
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Every year, Expert Markets study the productivity of countries around the globe. Their measurement stick, however, isn’t hours worked per week.
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Rather, they calculate hours worked divided into income generated toward the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, how much dough the average citizen earns per hour of effort.
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Which makes sense.
What Einstein’s Most Famous Equation Says About Maximizing Your Productivity
In 1905, Albert Einstein showed us that time, energy, mass, and speed are intertwined.
The faster you move, the more energy you need.
The faster you move, the slower time passes for you.
The faster you move, the more your mass increases.
Reaching maximum speed, the speed of light, would require an infinite amount of energy and would mind-bogglingly, for you, bring time to a halt.
His formula, E=mc^2 mathematically describes how these principles apply to our physical world. But the concepts ring true for our daily life too.
Bust your ass too hard, and you’ll fall into bed exhausted.
Bust your ass for too long, and seconds will feel like minutes.
Bust your ass for too hard and too long, and you’ll feel as though you need an infinite amount of energy to go on. The “weight” of your work will become unbearable. You’ll burn out, falling to ground zero (or below).
You don’t think of Einstein’s equation while at work, but you feel the ramifications of overdoing it. You know deep down which tasks suck your energy and which tasks recharge it. And you instinctively know when it’s time to call it a day.
As it turns out, these feelings are key to maintaining the intricate balance between Einsteins four variables—time, speed, mass, and energy—which in turn is the key to becoming maximally productive.
The 7 Best Ways to Hustle Hard, Stay Productive, and Still Sleep Like a Baby Every Night
It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?
The constant hustle. The endless grind. The relentless push to overachieve.
Every other social media post seems to have some self-improvement quote floating over a well-dressed celebrity, hustle-guilting you into working harder.
They tell us to never stop, never surrender.
They tell us to wake up at 5 am, exercise, side-hustle for a few hours, then put in a full workday and side-some hustle some more before hitting the sack.
The Unsexy Way to Make Massive Progress Toward Your Goals
They finally got three outs.
After 45 minutes of disappointing hit after hit, the opponents’ pitcher finally ended the inning by picking off our third base runner.
The runner wasn’t upset.
Our team of 10 and 11-year-old boys had scored an impressive 15 runs in the bottom of the third inning completely dominating the opponent and going on to win by eight points.
Two things about this score were surprising:
One, we lost against the same team in a walk-off hit just an hour earlier.
And two, out of seventeen plays that inning, only one was a home run.
19 Tiny Office Changes to Make Work Drastically More Productive
You are only as productive as your environment. So let’s get your main work environment, your office, as productive as possible.
Here are 19 tiny changes (with affiliate links to products that I’ve personally used to enhance my productivity) that can do exactly that. Try one, or try them all. The more changes, the more you’ll find you have the clarity, focus, time, and energy to work on what matters.
3 Simple Steps To Stay On Track When You’re In a Tired, Unmotivated Funk
Maybe it was just because it was Monday.
Maybe my weekend was too hectic.
Maybe it was because my kid woke me up three times: once to complain that he couldn’t sleep, once to tell me his stomach hurt, and another to puke.
Whatever it was, I stumbled out of bed feeling like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich marinated in a bag of Nickelodeon gak, trampled by a herd of bison, and left out in the sun to dry.
A glance at my calendar told me that I had more meetings than a millipede has legs giving me one and only one time to exercise, one and only one time to write an article, and zero times to take a seven-hour nap (which is the only thing I was contemplating doing).
Today was gearing up to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
11 Ways Camping Can Help Your Productivity
A Massively Productive Day Starts with These 3 Things (the Night Before)
It’s a fact.
Waking early is NOT correlated with success.
The proof is in the research.
According to the Huffington Post, “nearly 50% of self-made millionaires wake up at least three hours before their workday actually begins.” [1]
Okay, that’s not a lot of research, but read that quote again if you need to. While it suggests rising early contributes to success in a matter-of-fact tone, less than half of self-made millionaires are early birds. Which means the other half aren’t.
This article goes on to list a dozen or so wildly successful business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs who wake up before the crack of dawn, as if this is correlated to their success.
It’s not the only one.
Self-improvement gurus publish dozens of listicles daily on the benefits of rising before dawn. Success experts scream of the benefits of an early start. We even hear of historical figures like George Washington who “the sun never caught in bed.”
All this pressure to set an early alarm, get your ass out of bed, and get moving before the rest of the world... its enough to make you want to try.
But when you do, you feel groggy, cold, and it takes you an hour to warm up for the day. Then, when afternoon arrives, sleepiness strikes, and it’s all you can do to keep from nodding off (let alone get anything done).
If the point of waking up early is to crush your day, why does getting up early suck so much life and productivity out of you?
And, if getting up early is not correlated with success, what truly makes a successful day?
I’ve got three answers to those questions, and they all start the night before.
5 Simple Ways to Find Time for Yourself So You Can Worry Less, and Relax More
There are 24 hours per day and 168 hours per week.
That sounds like enough time to finish your work and have time for yourself. But, as the end of the workweek draws near, you often find yourself with an unfinished to-do list and having spent very little time on yourself or the activities you enjoy.
This is fine on occasion. Nobody is perfect, nor should be.
But if this scenario repeats week after a week, you may soon find that your life has become all work and no play. Something which is a chilling thought by itself.
To help you strike a proper work-life balance, here are five simple ways that should help you find time for yourself and let you enjoy life more:
How to Avoid the Attack on Your Time (While Simultaneously Getting More Done)
The One Thing Successful People Do To Have a Massively Productive Day
How To Break a Funk and Refocus on What's Important
Yesterday, I was high on a big fat doobie of accomplishment, a productivity monster crushing every activity with aplomb. Today I woke up to a sick wife and daughter, a migraine of my own, and two sons who had to finish last-minute school projects that rivaled NASAs space shuttle development program in size and scope.
I felt defeated, exhausted, overwhelmed, and wishing for my day back.
When this happens, you can recover in three ways:
10x Your Success Rate With This Monthly Planning Process
Whenever there’s a new month, there should be a new plan.
With a fresh month, you’ve got 20 or so whole working days in front of you.
You weren’t thinking of just winging it, were you 😉?
You already know this, but “winging it” is not how you achieve your goals. That’s not how you’ll finish this year a success.
People who wing it often wonder how they worked so hard and yet don’t find themselves where they want to be.
On the other hand, high-achievers use every new month as an opportunity to do two things:
What You Need This Weekend to Operate at Peak Level
I know you.
You’re already thinking about working this weekend.
You’ve got a shit-ton to do, mostly from random crap that piled up this week, but also from everything you couldn’t tackle due to last-minute meetings, an unprecedented number of emails, and constant interruptions from, ahem, Instagram and other social media notifications.
A Solution to Overwhelm and Disorganization
Overwhelm manifests when you have too much to do.
When, for example, you have multiple projects, dozens of emails, texts, meetings, and notifications from everyone who wants a piece of your time.
The problem isn’t with any one of your projects. Nor is it with the distractions.
The problem is that it’s all…