Welcome to the Week Two lesson Make Productivity a Habit. Temporary vs Permanent Productivity Many students get in cycles of temporary productivity. This is where they tell themselves they re going to work hard, and they succeed for maybe a week or, even if they re lucky, a couple of weeks, and they re really working hard. But then they fall back to old habits. They stop being as productive. They stop getting things done. They lose much of the progress that they made before. For a lot of people this is a constant cycle. Force themselves to be productive for maybe a few days, a week, a few weeks, and then they slip back. It s never a habit. What we want to do is we want to make our productivity systems, whether it s weekly/daily goals or fixed schedule productivity or some other system that we re discussing in this week, we want to make that system a permanent habit. We want to make it so that you don t have to think about doing it. That is just how you do your work and how your live your life. To do that, however, it helps to see how we can make habits and the most common reasons people slide back into inefficient systems. Let s go right ahead into this. Why Do You Backslide on Productivity? Why do they not make productivity permanent? Why do they only engage in these temporary cycles? There are a couple of reasons that people backfire, but these are the most common that I've witnessed in my years of running programs like this to help students and learners. 1) The better system was not held consistently for long enough. Making a habit takes a long time, and it requires a lot of consistency that sometimes people don t recognize. When they re making their productivity systems in the beginning, they apply them inconsistently and as a result they don t hold them for a long enough time for it to be truly habituated, meaning that it still requires mental reminders, mental effort to engage in. We don t want to do that. We want to make this system so that you don t even have to think about it, it s just part of what you do every single day. 2) The better system has unresolved drawbacks that trigger reversion. This is inevitable. I can t give you a system that has no possible drawbacks. Many times, even if you have a system that works really well, if you find yourself in a new situation, you're going to have to resolve those drawbacks as well. This is the thing that happens when you set up habits which are relatively fixed in the flexible situations of your daily life. 1 of 6
I can discuss some of these possible drawbacks in other lessons in this course, and I can even suggest to you what to do about them, but ultimately it s going to be up to you to monitor the system, notice these drawbacks, and elegantly create solutions for them before they become overwhelming. 3) Productivity is unsustainable and leads to burnout. The third reason is that the productivity that they re engaging in is unsustainable and leads to burnout. This is another common problem, that when people think of creating a productivity system, they imagine this epic level of productivity, they push themselves way too hard, way harder than the system even dictates, they get a lot done, but then they start to burn out. Because they associate working too hard and being burned out with the system itself, when they do burn out, they tend to give it up entirely. How can we resolve these issues? No. 1: Insufficient Consistency/Duration Let s look at the first one. The first is insufficient consistency and duration. This is the simplest cause of failure to form any habit. It s because the behavior simply was never habituated. People generally underestimate how long it takes to form a habit. Forming a habit can take as much as 60 days. This was in one study that took a bunch of different habits and ran people through it and asked them when they felt like it was automatic. For some people, the average for habits was about 66 days, but certain habits took a lot longer. It wasn t only that there were different people who took longer, but certain habits took longer. Some habits took as much as 250 days before they felt fully automatic. I don t know what it s going to be for you. Maybe you use this productivity system and after 21 days, it feels like you don t even have to think about it. Maybe for you it s going to be 200 days. I don t know. But what I am suggesting is that most people underestimate this. They pick short periods of time to hold what I'll call a minimal habit, meaning that they pick a habit that is too intense, too elaborate, and they don t hold it for long enough, so that when a little hiccup happens and they get derailed, it s hard to get back. Of course, the solution here is to sustain the habit consistently for longer periods of time. I recommend setting 60 days to write your weekly/daily lists. That s it. You don t have to do any more. If you have to not use the list, if you don t use them, if you don t follow them, you don t get everything completed, that s fine. If you break the rules sometimes and you add more tasks, that s also fine. We don t want to do that, but that s also fine. The idea here is that the only thing you're committing to for this entire 60 days is simply to have the habit of at a certain point in the evening, every single day, you're writing your daily lists. At a certain point on the weekend, you're creating your weekly lists. That s it. Nothing else. By setting this habit for 60 days, and admittedly it s a simple habit, because writing lists is not hard, if you set this habit for 60 days, it s going to be much more likely that you ll continue it. This weekly/daily list creation is the backbone of this system. Although there are some times when you have to make modifications, when the 2 of 6
system isn t working properly, the No. 1 failure I've seen is that a lot of people tell me, I was using that system, I was writing my weekly/daily goals, but I'm not doing it right now, and there s no reason for it. That s what I recommend. The No. 1 problem is insufficient habituation and the No. 1 solution is to set 60 days to do this minimal habit of writing the weekly/daily lists. Once again, don t make the commitment harder than this or you ll sure fail. No. 2: Unresolved Drawbacks The second most common source of failure is that there are situations where the system isn t well suited for. Because of these situations, you revert to an earlier habit or an earlier system, and if these situations crop up frequently enough, you may abandon the system altogether. A good example of this is that weekly/daily goals is not the best system for handling interruptions that you need to handle this day. If you are doing learning tasks and you have a task that you go to your classroom and the professor says, You have to do this by tomorrow, but it wasn t in your daily goals, you can add it to the daily goals, but not only are you violating the whole principle of not adding things to the daily list, but now you've added things to the list and now there s too much work, you can t finish all your daily goals, what do you do? Do you swap them out? The problem isn t really with this weekly/daily goals system. Usually there are good ways of handling it. One way to handle it could be that you could take a swap of an item of equal value, of equal estimated time. Another could be that you could add it and simply give yourself the ability to delete an item at the end of the day. There are lots of different ways that you could handle this particular challenge. If you know there are going to be interruptions, but you're not sure what they are, leave space in your schedule for them. The point being here is not that these challenges or these drawbacks are fatal flaws in the system that make it unusable, but rather if you don t think about them, if you're not conscious about what is the issue going on here, it s easy to get into situations where it s difficult to maintain this system, because you haven t developed a workaround. Once again, resolving these issues is not usually hard once you identify them and spend a few minutes thinking about it. The solution here is simple: For the first 60 days, I want you to add a new task to your weekly list, and that is to review the system. Review the system and note complications that prevented you from using it effectively. These can be simple things. They can be things like interruptions interrupting your weekly/daily goals, it could be that you weren t good at estimating how much time certain tasks took. It could be that even though you were setting the goals, you were procrastinating a lot, and it was resulting in not having a lot of time to relax at the end of the day. Interesting. 3 of 6
Most of these situations, if you get these problems and you identify them, it only takes a few seconds to think of some possible solutions you could try out to resolve them. Once you have this task of reviewing this system and identifying problems, now you can either easily brainstorm solutions of your own, or if you can t figure out how to solve particular problems, you can ask the community and we can suggest either how to fix the system or maybe suggest alternative systems that might be able to help you. Again, this doesn t work if you don t identify and consciously deliberate over these issues. Very often what happens is that a solution is available and it doesn t even require much thinking, but we get into situations where we think, It s not working, and I haven t thought about why I'm having this friction, and how I can resolve it. No. 3: Unsustainable Productivity The final one, unsustainable productivity. Working hard is good, but you need to be able to relax sufficiently. And I do mean relax sufficiently. It s easy to get into the habit of thinking, Now that I've got this productivity system, I'm going to work myself as hard as I can, get tons and tons of stuff done. This is especially true if you have a demanding work schedule, if you're facing hard classes that you're not sure if you'll do well in, you might have this temptation to use the productivity system almost as a tool against yourself, to drive yourself to work really hard, but much harder than you would be working normally. The difficulty here is that this results in burnout. When you drive yourself too hard, you work too many hours at too high an intensity, you start to burn out, and then when you burn out you flip back to less efficient methods. What s happening is that you associate this productivity system with working too hard, so you don't like it and you give up when really the productivity system should be with making your workload easier, making you have to work less so you have positive emotions associated with it, and you're more likely to continue it. The solution is that when you're getting started with a productivity system, don t aim to get more work done than normal in the beginning. Just try to get the work done that you are normally doing week to week, but within the new system. This reduces the cognitive load of the new system, and it also prevents this problem that people engage in, Now I'm using a productivity system, so I can suddenly do five times as much work without getting burned out. That s not true. It might be true that in the long run, if you keep up this system over months and years you can build up. Just like training with weights, once you start a new workout system, you can train with weights and get stronger and stronger. However, if you go to the gym, you re trying a new system and you try to lift the heaviest weights in the room right away, you're going to hurt yourself and you're not going to want to go back to that workout routine. The problem wasn t with the workout routine. The problem is you were trying to do too much too fast. What I recommend doing is figure out how much work you're doing right now, make an estimate of how much you're doing each week, and then set that as your starting point. If you do this system correctly, and especially 4 of 6
if you are relying on inefficient habits to begin with, you might find that you're able to do the same amount of work, but it feels really easy. That s good. That s what you want to have as a starting point for this productivity system. And then, only increase the workload when it genuinely feels too light, and even then, you want to increase it slowly, so only adding a little bit at a time. And if it starts to feel exhausting, and it feels like it s hard to continue and sustain the productivity and you're doing more than you were doing before, you might want to ease back and not try to raise it as quickly or not try to change the workload at all. The idea here is that productivity systems can make you more efficient, but sometimes they can make you more efficient at burning yourself out, and that is not what we want to do, and I want to stress that the feeling you should have after using a productivity system is, Wow. I m getting the work done I didn t normally, but with a lot less procrastination and a lot less stress, and much more free time to relax. When you can feel like that, you know that productivity system s working. Start Your First 60 Days Today A habit begins with a single step. To make productivity a habit, I want you to start yours today if you haven t already. Commit to starting the weekly/daily goals system, along with the important steps noted here, for 60 days. If you can keep it for 60 days, my guess is you ll be going a long way to doing thing more properly. Just as a reminder, what were those three steps that we talked about to overcome the common pitfalls? The first is simply do not commit to too much at once. For now the only thing you should try to remember is to keep the lists. Just make the habit of writing the lists every day. Don t focus on, Well I added tasks today so therefore I'm not doing it properly and I need to start my 60 days over. Don t worry about, I made a list, but I'm not actually working and I didn t do any of the work that day. Don t worry about that. Just make the habit of writing the lists. That only takes usually five to 10 minutes every single day. It s not too much time. You definitely have time to do it. The only thing that s holding you back is that it s not a habit, so you need to start doing it now. The second step obviously is to set one task in your weekly list to review the system. Give yourself 10 minutes every week to quickly think over the past week, what problems were you having that prevented you from using it efficiently? Were you procrastinating too much in the day? Were you not using the list because of some interruptions that came up? Did you feel you had to swap items out too often? Think about these problems and think about how you can resolve them. Usually the solution becomes obvious or at least a potential solution will come to you once you identify it and think about it. Finally, don t set more work than you're doing right now in the beginning. The goal should be to feel, I m doing what I normally do, but I'm doing it a lot easier than it normally feels like, and only when you feel like that should you start building up to more complicated and more difficult schedules. 5 of 6
If your first reaction is, I got three times as much done, and that was exhausting, that s going to be a road to burnout, and it s going to be hard to keep using this system once you negatively associate it with it having this impact on your personal life. 6 of 6