Tag: Goals

The Productivity Workout

The Productivity Workout

Want to lose weight? Is your goal to eat healthier? Trying to exercise more regularly? Many of us have goals and desires to live a healthier lifestyle but it’s hard because it doesn’t just happen. In fact, it takes a lot of planning, discipline and time. Becoming more productive isn’t any different.

I often hear people say that they want to get more done. They would like to be more organized and efficient. But they don’t do anything differently. It’s almost as if they feel or hope these things will just somehow miraculously just happen. If only.

Living a healthy lifestyle requires exercising 3-5 times a week, walking 10,000 steps a day, limiting calories to less than 2,000 a day of healthy foods. None of this happens without proactive planning and dedicated time and effort. Similarly, to increase your productivity and efficiency, you need to develop and follow your own productivity workout.

SET GOALS

To get started, you first need to clearly establish your goals. It’s not enough to just say you want to be more organized or productive. You need to be able to openly articulate goals that can be easily tracked and measured. As Yogi Berra famously said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.”

TOOLS

To improve your fitness, you may need an exercise coach, workout equipment, healthy recipes, a fitness tracker app and other tools to help you achieve your goals. Without these tools, achieving your goal will be a lot more challenging.

Similarly, you will need certain tools to help you become more productive. First, make sure you have one single calendar you use to schedule your time, including work and personal meetings, appointments and reminders. Also, make sure you establish and maintain a single to-do list to track your tasks. Finally, obtain a journal to keep your notes in one place for easy reference when needed.

DISCIPLINE

Now, you just need a plan to put your workout in action. Begin by scheduling an hour each week in your calendar for planning. During this time, review and confirm your appointments and meetings for the week ahead. Identify big items that need to be done and schedule them into your calendar to ensure they get done. For critically important items, schedule it twice. Be sure to update your to-do list.

Each day, either the night before or at the start of the day, review your list and select your top three priorities for the day. It’s fine for them to change as the day progresses because things come up and you can adjust. Also, feel free to eliminate tasks that don’t necessarily need to be done.

TRY THIS OUT: Find an hour this week and block it off to develop your own productivity workout. First, identify your goals and determine what tools you will need to establish to help you. Schedule time each week for planning and for setting your daily priorities just as you would set aside time to exercise.

Don’t Break the Chain

Don’t Break the Chain

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld popularized one of the most important productivity and habit forming techniques when he stated and restated, “Don’t break the chain!” He claimed that his secret to success was to write jokes every day. To ensure that he did so, he kept a big calendar and marked each day with a big red X when he completed writing.

Seinfeld explained, “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

This technique has proven successful for any behavior you want to instill or habit you might want to break. Simply set your goal and mark each day you achieve that goal. As the chain gets longer, you’ll see that you’re automatically motivated to complete the task at hand simply so you don’t break the chain.

I have integrated this technique into my task management app called priorigami. The concept is simple. Each day you select your top three top priority tasks and when you complete all three you are congratulated. The app keeps track of the number of tasks you complete each day noting the goal of three tasks per day. It looks great and feels good to see the chart when you’re hitting your goal each day.

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On the other hand, there are days when you’re just not that productive and you aren’t able to complete three tasks. In those cases, you “break the chain” and as you can see the results aren’t as satisfying or motivating. Looks like you came up a bit short.

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The reason this technique works is that it changes our focus from achieving some big audacious overall goal to the process of completing one simple thing each day. Instead of fixating on becoming a better writer, the focus is on making time to write each day. Or, instead of obsessing on losing 15 pounds, the focus shifts to making time to exercise daily.

Once you get started, you will notice that each day, the task gets easier and simply becomes part of your routine. In fact, research shows it only takes 21 days to create a new habit. So, if you try this and keep at it, in less than a month you will have also formed a new habit.

TRY THIS OUT: Identify something you want to achieve or change. Set a daily goal that can be easily achieved, measured and tracked. Get a calendar and a marker and place it in or near your desk or bathroom mirror where you will see it daily. Mark each day you complete the goal. How does it feel? How many days can you go before breaking the chain?

To Resolve or Not to Resolve?

To Resolve or Not to Resolve?

Another new year is upon us and we all get another fresh start. This time of year, 45% of us set New Year’s Resolutions to help us achieve our goals in the year ahead. So, does this tradition actually work?

While only 8% of those who made resolutions succeed in fully achieving them, people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t make any resolutions at all. So, why not give it a try this year?

The biggest reasons for failure are having too many goals, setting unrealistic goals, not keeping track of progress and forgetting about the goal or losing interest. Every one of these obstacles can be easily overcome if you are truly committed to making a change. So, how should you set your resolution this year?

First, select only one goal. It’s better to identify one thing and focus on achieving it versus picking several and not accomplishing any of them. Change is hard no matter what it is, so just tackle one thing at a time.

The top five resolutions people made in 2015 were to:

  1. Lose Weight
  2. Get Organized
  3. Spend Less/Save More
  4. Enjoy Life
  5. Say Fit and Healthy

One common theme each of these goals shares is that they are grand, over-arching and ambiguous. You will be a lot more successful if you set SMART goals. When setting a SMART goal, simply make sure it is:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Timely

So, instead of “Lose Weight,” set a goal to “Walk 10,000 steps a day and limit your caloric intake to 2,000 calories a day.” If that’s too over-whelming, start with one and then add in the other when you’re ready.

Instead of “Get Organized,” set a goal to “Download priorigami and use it to track tasks and set and complete your top three priorities each day.”

Instead of “Spend Less/Save More,” set a goal to “Limit weekly spending to $200 and save $500 a month.”

In 2016, I wanted to focus on fitness but I was very overwhelmed facing a big huge commitment to exercise so I started by dedicating at least 5 minutes every day to fitness. I wrote down “Five 4 Fit” and hung it up on my bathroom mirror to serve as a daily reminder of my goal. I am happy to say that by starting out small I was able to commit to my goal and now I’m exercising daily as part of my routine.

TRY THIS OUT: If you were to set one resolution for 2017, what would it be? How can you turn that into a SMART goal? Are you up for the challenge? How will you track your progress and reward yourself along the way?

Seeking 10 Incredibly Happy Customers

Seeking 10 Incredibly Happy Customers

When I decided to start my own business, the one thing I knew is that I didn’t know anything about anything. So, I started meeting with as many successful entrepreneurs that would make time for me. I figured I would try to learn as much as possible from those who have braved this path before me.

The one thing that was mentioned to me repeatedly was the importance of product-market fit and taking the time to make sure it was right. Since my background is primarily product management and marketing I understood this point immediately but also began to understand the criticality of this for a new start-up.

What especially hit home was David Cumming’s recent blog post claiming, “If You Can Get 10 Happy Customers, You Can Get 100.” Even though he was referring to B2B services, he states, “Getting 10 unaffiliated customers that are passionate about a product is incredibly hard. Once achieved, entrepreneurs have a strong foundation in place and can get to 100 customers using the lessons learned and momentum.”

So, my new productivity app is currently in development. Even though it’s just an MVP (minimal viable product) including less than 10% of the features I had dreamed up and planned for, my goal is to find at least 10 unaffiliated, incredibly happy customers who LOVE the product.

I realize this is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve but at least it’s a goal and it’s a measurable first step.

Stay tuned to find out when my new app is available and perhaps, just maybe, you could be one of my first 10 incredibly happy customers.