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?
⠀
Japan? America?
⠀
Those were my answers, but they’re not even in the top 5.
⠀
Every year, Expert Markets study the productivity of countries around the globe. Their measurement stick, however, isn’t hours worked per week.
⠀
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.
⠀
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.
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.
What Neuroscience Says on Why Self Improvement is So Effing Hard (and What to Do About It)
Everything you do, or experience, or think is affected by the expectations you already have.
Take your arms, for example.
With both arms intact, your brain works swimmingly. It sends signals to your limbs, they move, they provide feedback, and your brain breathes a sigh of relief that the cycle is complete. When you expect your arm to move and it does, your expectations are fulfilled. All is well.
But if one arm were missing, this feedback loop doesn’t close. A variety of sensations, including pain, can follow.
In a fascinating book Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran explores the world of neuroscience through people who have lost a limb. Patients experienced phantom sensations in an extremity that no longer existed; some as simple as a fleeting tickle, others as irritating as an un-itchable itch and, in the worst of cases, pain.
The patient’s brain, having sent a signal to the missing limb, would expect a response. Without receiving one, its neural pathways would get confused, causing severe phantom pain where none should be possible.
Ouch.
Or take relationships, for example.
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.
The Only Two Things You Need to Focus On What Matters
Mass confusion struck in droves, and baby turtles were scattered everywhere.
It was 9:30 pm in Topsail North Carolina and we were walking along the beach toward our beach rental home to hustle the kids into bed and watch as many episodes of Handmaids Tale as we could before becoming deliriously tired.
Ten minutes earlier, we had wandered passed two lines of people lounging in beach chairs. Some had beers in hand. All were chatting quietly.
On any other night, seeing people drinking and chatting on the beach would have been routine. But tonight, two extremely strange behaviors of this crowd caught my attention:
First, everyone was lined up the wrong way; not parallel with the water, but perpendicular to it. Two rows of people, arms width apart, beginning at the base of the dune and extending down into the ocean wash.
Odd.
Second, there was a strange excitement in the air. The kind of excitement you might feel in the moments leading up to a surprise birthday party; the quiet anticipation of a big event.
Come to find out, we were about to witness just such an event.
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:
41 Ways to Get Home Early Every Day This Week
The Night Before
1. Get 7 hours of sleep
2. Lay out daily clothes in advance
3. Block calendar for important work
4. Schedule commute time
5. Schedule breaks
6. Plan to deal with time obstacles
7. Schedule administrivia
In The Morning
8. Exercise
9. Eat healthy food that energizes you
10. Tell everyone when you plan to leave
11. When work begins, begin work (don’t get distracted)
For Meetings
12. Squeeze meetings together
13. Focus (or leave) meetings that aren’t productive
14. Reschedule meetings that start late
15. Hold stand up meetings
16. Decline meetings where you can’t contribute
17. Add buffer between meetings and tasks
Managing Tasks
18. Schedule important tasks
19. Prioritize urgent tasks
20. Delegate unimportant tasks
21. Delete the rest of your tasks
22. Limit emailing to 3x per day
23. Automate repetitive tasks with apps like IFTTT
24. Bundle similar tasks together
25. Set a timer for your tasks
During Work
26. Begin with the end in mind
27. Minimize distractions
28. Stick to your schedule
29. Delegate
30. Work on what matters
31. Focus with music
32. Work intensely
33. Take breaks often
34. Work when everyone else isn’t
Administrivia
35. Call instead of email
36. Send shorter emails… get to the point
37. Only read emails where you are in the to: line
Before Heading Home
38. Block time before you leave to clean up your day
39. Reduce and remove clutter in your workspace
Don’t Forget…
40. Add some greenery to your workspace (scientifically proven to increase productivity)
41. Sit, stand, walk, talk, act confidently
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.”
A Call to Focus (Pun Intended)
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting around 30 thousand spam calls a day.
OK, I exaggerate. But sometimes it feels like that.
Anytime an actual phone number shows up on my caller ID, I know it’s from someone I don’t know.
When my Mom calls, it says Mom. When my wife calls, it says Elaine. When a telemarketer calls…
How to Avoid the Attack on Your Time (While Simultaneously Getting More Done)
The Lure Effect: Why waking up early won't make you a millionaire (and all the other life hack lies)
It wouldn't have mattered if all 7 billion people on this planet were screaming in unison for my success. Nor would it have mattered how early I'd woken up that morning, how much water I drank, or if I'd eaten protein for breakfast. It wouldn't have made a bit of difference if I'd created a plan for my day, meditated, or drafted the perfect self-introspection piece in my journal.
I didn't know how to drive a stick-shift well, so it was unlikely I'd get it right. I would have stalled that son-of-a-bitch on the platform every single time.
Skills can't be faked.
Wanting to succeed is never enough.
And life-hacks won't give you some magical power to achieve more than you're already achieving.
