Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Do Everything You Want to Do

if you're wondering how so many successful people seem to be able to achieve so much with the time that they have this lesson is for you. I want you to make time for everything you want to do without the overwhelm, without the imposter syndrome. Without the mental blocks in this lesson, I'm going to share some real strategies that are going to help you with making time to get your work done efficiently, but also give you the opportunity to fit in. All the things that you want to make time for here is how to make time for everything you want to do first. It's time for you to give yourself permission. I know that can sound really odd and scary to have a conversation with oneself to get some permission, but it's so important that it comes from you were constantly looking outward and trying to find all of the reasons and the people in the case studies and the examples of why we should be able to go after the life we want and who's going to give us the authority to do it. But nobody is goin...

g to hold your hand and get you there. The only person that will be with you every step of the way is you. So I want you to ask yourself what would you do if you were unafraid? Because you may find in these answers that if only you took fear out of the equation or at least addressed fear as a real thing and said that is okay. I am fearful because I must explore it. That you will start to unpack what it means to give yourself a real permission. The experiences of others and what you learn from them will be valuable to you. But it will still never get you all the way there, Give yourself permission. Next. We need to get clear on your goals. I want you to just let loose with a list right now. This is the Warren Buffett strategy for prioritizing, make a list of 25 things that you want to do, go ahead and just list it all aspirational. Maybe things that you've been meaning to get around to that are just right there, or big lofty things. Just Write it all down. Do you have a list of 25? You're gonna want a list of 25? Okay, Because now you're gonna circle your top five, that's it. You can't have more than a top five. It may have been easier to write your list of 25 than it is to come to the conclusion of what the top five are. Take the time you need. But once you're done, you're gonna have to lists here, you're gonna have a list of the top five things you want to do. And you're gonna have a list of the bottom 20 things you wanna do. You can take that list of those bottom 20 things, crumple it up and throw it in the trash. Your list of five is the only thing that matters. Five big things on your list of things you want to do is quite enough. Look at that list. Can you imagine doing each of those things? Can you visualize it? Can you see it happening? This is why we need to limit what we want to do. There's a million things we could, there's a million things people say you should. But is that going to compel you know? But if you have a focus list of the top five, that could move you and that's what we're trying to do here. When you're thinking about those words, how do you make time? How am I going to make time for everything I want to do. Have the list of everything you want to do in front of you and have it be a list you can stay focused on because now when someone asks you to do something and you think does that match what's on my list? The answer of no comes up a lot quicker and more easily when we can speak from confidence that that's just not on the agenda right now. I cannot give my time away because this is what I must do. So now, with your priorities in mind, the things you have to do, the things you want to do, and as you're trying to figure out how to make time for everything that you want to do and that you have to you've got to track your time. I am a huge proponent of time tracking. There's a lot of different ways that I love to do it in my own life. And in my own career I'm going to share a lot of those strategies with you as well. But I think from the beginning, the first thing that you should do if you're not already to get acquainted with time tracking is track what's already happening. So if you're not already in the habit of putting things maybe on a calendar other than outside appointments, like a doctor's appointment or a coffee appointment, start adding everything to your calendar. Start adding when you work on a project to start adding. When you watch television, start adding when you have a phone conversation, start adding commute times, start looking at where all the pockets of time in your life are going and where they're going to. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about time blocking, which is going to help you start to understand how you optimize all of these things that are on the calendar. But if you're having a hard time trying to figure out when you get to do all these cool things you have planned for yourself, the best thing you can do is start to figure out where the weaknesses are in, where you spend your time, what can go, what's got to stay and how we work with it all now. What's going to be really useful when you are tracking your time is to not kid yourself about what you're doing during that time and that's why you're going to stop multitasking. I'm gonna make this really easy for you. Multitasking doesn't even really exist. So it's going to be very easy to stop doing. We confuse multitasking with task switching a lot. We think that computers can multitask but they actually are the ones that tricked us into thinking multitasking was a real thing. While they're actually task switching as well, as fast as the computers are, they're just faster at task switching than the human brain. So when we stay focused we're not going to multitask, in other words, have too many things going on at one time because what's happening is we're never really focused on one thing, we're switching between one to the other to the next, whether it's I'm in my inbox now, I'm checking twitter now I'm working on a project that I'm checking instagram, it's never simultaneous, it is always coming out of one mode and into the next and it's very hard to get deep into your work if you are barely in it and coming out to do something else. So yes, stop multitasking. More importantly, stop task switching. Another big thing when it comes to making time for everything you want to do is ask for help. This has been one of my greatest weaknesses in my career that I have continued to work on and as I went along year after year and stop trying to convince myself that I was the best at everything and that I was going to be able to do everything faster instead of training somebody else I've been able to achieve more than I could ever do with my two hands And my one brain asking for help sounds like a lot right, because we just had a conversation about how to say no. In theory when someone might be asking us for help. So how are we going to turn around, started asking for help. It's okay to get to know because it's okay for you to give a no and it's okay for somebody else to give a no as well when we focus asking people for help that we know are the best at what they do and and for who they do that four and we want that person to be us and we work on what it means to work in a collaborative way together that is beneficial for both of us and therefore equate to the best results ever. Those are moments that asking for help is amazing. Those won't be every time we ask for help. But the other times are the times we can practice that. We didn't actually have to I know I can cook dinner by myself. I know I can load the dishwasher by myself. I know I can clean the house by myself. I know I can do a lot of things by myself. Do I have to No, if I ask for help, do I get a couple of extra minutes, maybe an hour into my life That I can now allocate towards something that's in my top five. Yes. So if you want to get better at asking for help in the areas that are going to move your passions and your dreams forward practice asking for help when it is not as critical because you get better at looking outside of yourself for those resources that will be able to help you. We talked about this one before. Making time for everything you want to do is assigning the environments of which you will do them in. Where will I do my morning routine? Where will I do my best work? Where will I go when I'm focusing on my side hustle? Where will I go when I am working on my passion or practicing the piano or doing the thing assign the environments in your brain because again, we are now not only gonna make time schedule that moment to happen, but nowhere to go. And this is where again we get those boundaries that we need to encourage us to stay in the mode that we need to be in during the precious time. That we have another important piece of advice when it comes to making time for everything you want to do is making time for self care. And when I say self care, I really mean this very, very loosely, almost like I mean a morning routine very loosely because self care is all about what's right for you. So this could be something glamorous and wonderful like having a spa day or It could just be something simple like 20 minutes of quiet time. We are constantly trying to be productive and do all the things being able to do that effectively means also slowing down. So no what self care and me time looks like for you and make sure that you're making those moments happen as well. Okay. You have your list of top five, but we've got to chip away at those top five on a day to day basis and we can't give ourselves so much that we never get anything done to do. Lists are basically worthless, right? If you look at your calendar and you look at your to do list, if they don't look similar, that's another testament to the fact that your to do list is not going to be the most useful thing for getting things done. We can use it to our advantage. But here's how we need to just have a list of no more than three priorities for the day. You might have a task list that's a little bit longer than that. That has to get done in that day. But what are the top three priorities and how many of them are going to go toward your list? There are five big things you want to do, remember the Good morning moment of mastery. This is the opportunity that you have to sneak in a little bit of time toward one of your big goals by focusing on it as a priority. Sure, you've got another list of things you gotta do people you've got to show up for today. Those are tasks that have to get done. Are they one of your top three priorities is at the end of the world, if something got canceled or moved or postponed, it's okay that your priorities are not always the same as the tasks that you have to get done for the rest of the world, but have three. So it's possible to focus on what you need to do and what you want to do while you're taking into consideration what's on your calendar as you're tracking and what's on your priority list. There are a few non negotiables that you need to know about. You got to eat, you gotta sleep and you've got to have a good morning routine. Those, in my opinion, are the non negotiables. Okay? You have got to start the day on your terms after you've had enough rest and we've got to make time to nourish our bodies a lot of times what we eat plays a role in how focused we are and how fuzzy our brain is so we can do all this planning to no end. But if we're not taking care of our bodies and being as healthy as we can with, you know, a little bit of something, something nice and good and delicious every once in a while, that's not necessarily our our greens and our vegetables. We can have it all, we just can't have it all at the same time. So how you eat, how you take care of yourself is going to play a role in your productivity, take that into consideration as you go through the rest of your plans. The next thing I recommend when it comes to making time for everything you want to do is get into the habit of writing everything down. We don't want to feel like we are limited with our plans and our creative and our imagination, because we have this rigid list of things we want and we have to stay focused on this, we can still let our minds wander. We just need to give those ideas a home. They may not be something that happened right now. We don't want to forget them. We want to be able to think about them in the future. We want to be able to look at them as we brainstorm into where we want to go. So when we get into the habit of writing everything down, something really cool happens in the book. How to write smart notes. The author writes about the cigar nick effect. He says, open tasks tend to occupy our short term memory until they are done. This is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Z. Garnett's follow up research about writing, we also know that we don't actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them all we have to do is write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That's right. The brain doesn't distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note by writing something down. We literally get it out of our heads. So this is where your to do list is not a to do list, It is a note list, your allowing the tasks, the ideas, the things to come out of your head. When you write them down, you're giving them a home and at the same time you give your mindset the opportunity to go back to what it was doing, to focus on the goals in front of you. It's really, really, really hard to not give in to shiny object syndrome when you can't not forget what you've been thinking about, because you never gave it a place for a future thought. I don't want to forget that. So I'm gonna keep it here and then I'm not gonna be able to truly focus on my goal in front of me. That equates to a significant lack of focus that will keep everything from getting done. So when we are in the habit of writing everything down, we have the opportunity to do everything we want. But we do it at the time. That's right for us. Give your brain a break, write it down the moment you think, write it down, keep a journal, keep a notebook. Whatever the case may be, If it's a note in your phone, it's up to you. That's a little distracting for me. So I like a notebook, but it's all about what works best for you. Let your brain be able to check it off the list because you gave it a place and if you want to make time for everything you want to do, you cannot be afraid of taking small steps. It's funny how we often hear, oh, I just did a little bit of this and every day I practiced or every day it added up and every day it compounded into something big. But we never take that advice because we see ourselves doing such big work. Then how could something so small feel so big to us? It's the constant showing up. It is the execution, it is the journey. So next time you say, I don't want to do that, that feels too small. It feels like it's not enough. There's gotta be something bigger, better, stronger, faster. Give the small step to try and then keep giving it a try over and over to see the results in the end. And finally my advice for making time for everything you want to do is to trust the process. We are not here just for a destination. Everything we do maybe working toward a goal, but it is also what we learn on the journey that makes us wiser as we go forward and also makes us so much smarter at determining what we actually want. There are so many things around us trying to tell us all the time what we want. Ask yourself the question instead. How do you feel? You feel like you could just like drop everything right now and go do all the things and go after the life you want? Good. We unpacked a lot here from focusing on tracking your time to writing everything down to having your core list of five. There's so many things you can do right now to help you get focused on making time for everything you want to do. But most importantly, giving yourself that permission is the biggest thing you could do right now. Now that you've got some really grand plans, we've got to move into the next lesson so that you can leverage time blocking into your productivity lifestyle.