Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

Based on a lot of reading about and interacting with many successful people, here are 7 ‘productivity drain areas’ that we all should work hard at avoiding if at all possible in order to drive the greatest results we can.  Some of them are pretty obvious, but some others not so obvious.  And finally, there are a couple in this list that will be down right challenging to break away from because we have habits built around them.

1. Doing the wrong work

This one seems too simple and obvious, but could, in fact, be the most difficult productivity drain to avoid.  This involves not setting good priorities, poor ranking of projects, and generally not being prepared for each day with what is most important to get done that day.  Another aspect of this is the pressure to adopt popular behavior vs. exercising effective behavior.  Finally, allowing your day to be highly dictated by other people’s emergencies can be a huge productivity drain.  This is not to say that emergencies are not important, however, just because something is an emergency to someone else, does not automatically mean that it is an emergency to you.

2.  Failure Environments vs. Success Environments

Many people have extremely challenging work environments that position them to be unproductive.  We have to do everything we can in order to create a work environment where you can achieve outstanding concentration and focus.  Distractions are plentiful, so it is critical to attempt to do everything you can to create a disruption-free work space.

3.  Poor, Undisciplined  Work Habits

What I have found is that the most successful people I know (the ones who would I would think of as not needing improvement in this area) are the ones that constantly challenge themselves the most and are the hardest on themselves with respect to work discipline and work habits.  The areas of focus are:  (a) avoiding jumping around from one thing to another (aka “multi-tasking”) and disrupting their work rhythm, (b) creating 100% distraction free time zones/slots where phone/email/people disturbances are avoided, and (c) not letting unscheduled activities disrupt their work flow.

4.  Not Having Rules for Those You Interact With

This is a challenging area, because we all want to be courteous with people, and not viewed as callous.  However, by not creating your own ‘rules’ of interaction and work flow, your time can be sucked away by ‘time vampires’.  This requires the ability to create and enforce productivity rules, have an intolerance to time wasters, have the ability to say ‘no’ occasionally, and you must be OK with receiving some criticism for your productivity methods.

5.  Unwillingness to ‘Buy’ Time

The unwillingness to buy time is essentially about not understanding the value of your time or devaluing your time.  By not truly understanding the value of your time, it negatively impacts your decision making about how you use your time.  An example of this would be where you choose to do something yourself (because you either think you can do it better than someone else or you enjoy to do that particular task), but a more effective strategy would be to have someone else do it.  I catch myself doing this occasionally.  By valuing your time at full value, you quickly determine that you could be utilizing your time better in many situations.

6.  Mental and Physical Fatigue

I am sure you knew this one was coming at some point in the list.  But really, this one is huge, and most of us burn the candle at both ends on a daily/weekly basis.  Not being in top physical condition (physical and mental power), dramatically lowers your productivity.  The irony here is that fewer high productivity hours will out perform many more unproductive hours.  Another aspect of this that many people don’t pay attention to is understanding what your highest personal productivity time zones are.  Everyone is a little different, so determining the times during the day you are at your most creative and industrious level, and then leveraging these time zones, is big for productivity.

7. Staying Stuck vs. Swift Sword

This is the productivity drain that is caused by the inability to recognize when you are in an unproductive situation or unwillingness to exit unproductive situations.  This is sort of a distant cousin to #4 above, where there is constant pressure around you to do certain things.  There are times when these things are clearly unproductive and it requires some confidence and self-reliance to exit those situations gracefully.

I have found this to be a pretty good productivity drain checklist to review periodically and make sure you stay in top ‘efficiency shape’.

Be Your Best,

Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

I discuss habit creation and getting rid of bad habits quite a bit.  Habits control a lot of our day, our behavior, and decisions.  So, it stands to reason that creating new ‘good’ habits and eliminating as many ‘bad’ habits as we can would serve us well.  I do a lot of reading and research in the area of habits, and one of the common themes or ‘silver bullets’ that nearly all experts agree on with respect to creating change is something that very few people are willing or know to do.  Drum roll please…Record Keeping.  Wow, I know that was a let down!

Record Keeping
The fact is that awareness of your actual behavior and performance in any given area is crucial to helping you implement change and create new habits.  Awareness starts with tracking and measuring current and future results.  Tracking means that you log data on a consistent basis.  No emotion — just the facts.

Why Does Tracking Progress Facilitate Change?
You have probably heard the expression: “You achieve or succeed at what you measure.”  Regardless of what level of performance the data is (good, bad, neutral, etc…), logging the data and reviewing it does several very important things.

First, there is a very powerful sense of confidence and control that you feel when you are logging data associated to the thing you are focused on improving or focusing on.  Even when the logged data is not particularly good, it still provides this same feeling of control about the future.  I believe this phenomena has to do with transforming abstract into black and white.  When you log or track the data, it provides a sense of demystifying or simplifying the issue.

Second, tracking and recording progress allows you to carefully and precisely ‘ratchet down’ on your target.  With actual data being tracked, you are able to determine what incremental improvement is needed each day/week/month to achieve your goal. 

Third, good record keeping allows you to see your progress and your improvement, which might otherwise go unnoticed.  Positive change results can be very difficult to see or feel daily without hard data that you can look at over a time period.  This is the ‘proof’ that you need to focus on the ‘gain’ and not the ‘pain’.  Success = hundreds or  thousands of little successes stacked on top of each other—not overnight success (there is no such thing).

The Fundamental Difference Between Good Habits and Bad Habits
Another key observation about habits that experts note is this:  ‘Good’ Habits are typically about long term objectives (health, wealth, family, security, etc…), while ‘Bad’ Habits are typically about short term gratification.  Please think about this a little bit, because this is a very important distinction to understand.  There is an underlying ongoing battle inside each one of us over the ‘short term’ vs. the ‘long term’.  Back and forth we go, thinking of the short term, and then thinking of the long term.

There are exceptions, obviously, but many times short term gratification decisions or actions contradict or harm our long term goals.  It is the proverbial ’I want some chocolate now and it makes me feel really good for a couple minutes…but harms my longer term goal of shedding a few pounds.’  Clearly there is a good balance to be struck, but if you can focus most of your thinking and actions on the longer term picture, your habits will tend to be in the ‘Good’ category.  This is one reason why it is so important to have your short, medium, and long term goals documented.  Clear short term goals that roll up into long term goals give you a fighting chance to win the battle against bad habits.  Providing yourself with clear daily, weekly, and monthly goals makes it easier to manage the bad habits and create good habits.  Add in some good progress tracking, and you are in the driver’s seat to accomplish a lot!

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Michael Masterson With Todd Gifford

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity recently to finally meet and talk with someone that I have admired for many years — Michael Masterson.  Michael is a business guru and a massively successful business person, as well author of several Best Seller books on business and life success.  Michael Masterson is someone that has demonstrated the ability to get a massive amount accomplished and create success from scratch multiple times over.  In short, he is someone I listen to.

Michael Masterson believes that taking action and speed of action have a lot more to do with success than skill and ability.  The principles apply to everything, regardless of the field or endeavor, work or personal life.  He talks a lot about the things affect our ability to take action, like procrastination.  He dives into these concepts deeply to unpack them to allow us the ability to develop means to conquer the problem.  Procrastination is a huge issue in terms of productivity, and bigger than most of us realize.

An Easy Way to Measure Procrastination’s Impact

If you want to get a taste of how procrastination is affecting you directly, just maintain a written To-Do list of just the most important critical things you want to get done each and every day.  Keep the list short such that you believe it is possible to get 80-100% of those things accomplished during the day.  The next day, you have to write down all the key/critical things you want to get done again during that day.  And again the next day, etc…  This is a very old fashioned approach, on a notepad with a pen, and certainly is not as ‘efficient’ as maintaining your To-Do Critical list on a computer.  BUT, it is very telling of how procrastination dramatically affects your results.  Watch how many times you have to repeat key or critical tasks and projects on that To-Do List that you did not even start.  If you measure this for a while, it is an eye opener.

 The 2-Headed Monster

Everyone, including the most successful, deals with what Michael Masterson calls the ‘2-Headed Monster’ on a daily basis with respect to procrastination.  One of the monsters is “perfectionism” and the other is “those little chores”.  We all like things to be as good as they can be, which creates a feeling for the need to be perfect to begin.  Unfortunately, the pursuit of perfection (aka—paralysis of analysis) kills just about every good idea that comes along.  In seeking what your mind feels is “perfect” is not really perfect, and perfect simply does not exist.  The amount of effort required to get to the ‘perfect’ level from ‘good enough’ is overwhelming and draining — not to mention the time involved to get there.  The irony of seeking perfection vs. good enough is that  even after all the effort/time invested beyond ‘good enough’, it usually made no difference or it may actually harm the result.

 Those Little Chores

The 2nd Head of the 2-Headed Monster, ‘those little chores’ are a major roadblock and instigator of procrastination.  They are sneaky and deceptively harmful to productivity.  They create the illusion of productivity while killing your productivity.  We convince ourselves ‘need to do this asap’ and ‘got to do that first’, when none of these items make it to the Most Critical Items that Must Get Done Today List.

 One of Michael Masterson’s Best Seller books is “Ready, Fire, Aim”.  Obviously with that title, you can get the feel for how Masterson believes things should be done.  But don’t misinterpret “Ready, Fire, Aim” for “Fire randomly at will”.  The key is in the firing when ready, and doing your “aiming” AFTER you fire.  Essentially, Michael is contends that spending time aiming after being ready, and before firing is harmful to success.  In other words, if you do not get going when ready, you may never get going, or going too late and waste a tremendous amount of time.

Proprioception

In skeet shooting, they now teach people to ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ not ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’.  The pros teach the hobbyist to ready the rifle against your shoulder, bring it up to your eye and shoot — they don’t want you to aim.  They have found that aiming actually decreases accuracy because the brain is already programmed to make the adjustment for movement of the object you are shooting at.  By ‘trying’ to aim, you are trying to manually replicate what the brain does automatically.  The same principle applies in many other daily mundane activities, like throwing paper into a waste basket, pouring pop into a glass, or catching a ball.  This natural ’aiming’ sense that humans have is called proprioception.

Masterson recommends to ‘fire’ when ‘ready’, and then ‘aim’ (or improve on what you are doing) after you get going.  The getting going IS the toughest part.  It’s a great lesson and principle to apply and get much more accomplished faster.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford