Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

Productivity for most of us is about getting the most results out of the time we spend trying to achieve the results.  Or another way to say it, get the greatest results and impact out of the least amount of time and/or effort.

Productivity comes down to making best use of your time, and making good choices about how to utilize your time.  In order to take all this stuff that we do and try to better understand it as it relates to productivity, here are 3 key lists that you can create and use to help you become more productive.

The 3 Key Lists

1. Key Things I Must Do

This list sounds really simple and basic, but it is surprising how many of us get caught up in activities that we did not ‘decide’ were things we must do.  In order to improve productivity, we have to have conscious thought about what tasks we are choosing to spend our valuable time on.  ‘Must’ is different than ‘should’ or ‘could’.  Must-Do things represent tasks and projects that you have consciously decided are critical to get done, period.  These are ‘if I do not do this _______ task/project, I will not get to where I need to go.’  When you bump many of the things you find yourself doing during the day against this criteria, you will generally find that you are doing many things that are not Must-Do.  This fact, by itself, is not a problem.  The problem comes in to play when you review all 3 Key Lists of your Productivity System.

Bottom line is you should have a “Things I Must Do” list which comprehends all the variables and priorities that your job/life present you.

2. Things I Don’t Like to Do, But Are Key to Get Done

Inevitably, when you are thinking about your Must-Do list, if you are doing this correctly, you will identify Must-Do items, tasks, and projects that you do not like doing.  The reason you do not like doing them is irrelevant.  Bottom line is you don’t like to do some of the Must-Do critical tasks and projects.

The key aspect of this ‘Must-Do But Don’t Like to Do’ list is that you need to find someone or something else to complete these tasks/projects.  If you do not find alternative methods to get these tasks/items completed, then they likely won’t get done or done soon enough.  If you are like me, I procrastinate on things I do not enjoy doing.  I trick myself into thinking that the task is tough or time consuming, and that I need a bigger time slot for it than I have right now; or that it will require more research or pre-work than it really will.  Since you don’t like doing the items in this category, we all will tend to stay away from these items or put them off.  But that does not make them any less important on the Must-Do list.

The key for items falling on to this list is a little bit of time spent being creative about how someone else or something else could complete the task for you is time well spent.  Instead of grinding on the task itself, brainstorm how it could be completed some other way.  Obviously, if the task can be delegated to someone else, that is the easiest route to take.  But many times, we dwell on the task needing to be done that we don’t like to do vs. thinking ‘who else or what else could do this for me?’.

3. Things I Like To Do, But Should Not Be Doing

This is the toughest list to create, but arguably the most important list that negatively affects our productivity.  This list is made up of the tasks and projects and activities that we really like to do, but they do not bring substantial value to you or the company.  Essentially, they are not Must-Do items, but they are attractive to you like a ‘shiny object’.

These ‘shiny object’ tasks and activities can chew up a tremendous amount of time, and prevent you or your team from completing ‘Must Do’ critical and high value projects.  I see very capable people ‘justify’ these Like-To-Do tasks into the day’s agenda.  If they are repeat type of tasks, then they can become a bad habit within your daily schedule.

Thinking in terms of these 3 key lists of activities/ tasks/projects, helps to serve as a neutral check and balance for your time.  They serve as a good audit and pulls you out of the forest to see the bigger picture and ensure you are making best use of your time.

At minimum, just thinking about which list or category the task or project you are working on falls into will help you become more productive.  Eliminating just one chunk of time each day that would have been devoted to a ‘Like To Do, But Should Not Do’ task and replacing it with a ‘Must-Do’ critical task can increase your productivity substantially.

Be Your Best,

Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford in Racing Simulator

Recently I went to a car show where a company that designs and manufactures very high end racing simulators was demonstrating one of their simulator units.  I was looking on with some degree of curiosity and they asked me if I would like to give this thing a try.  I have never raced on a track for real.  This simulator was as close to the real deal as you are going to get without being in a real race car out on the track.  I am not sure exactly what this piece of equipment costs, but it had a large number of 0’s in the price tag.

To give you an idea of how realistic this thing is, they have mapped with precision all the actual major race tracks across the United States and some from around the world, so you are driving at an actual race track of choice and seeing around you what you would see at the real track.  Beyond the realism of the track and setting, the driving cockpit with all the equipment is patterned from real race cars, right down to the shifter, clutch system, brakes, steering wheel.  And to go one step further, it has all the movement and feel of driving a race car (bumps, rattles, wheel spin, leaning, etc…).  You can select the precise type of race car (Indy car, NASCAR type car, etc…).  Couple this all with a screen that wraps around you so that you can see through your peripheral vision what is going on out to the sides…It is very realistic.  This level of racing simulator is used by top professional race drivers to keep sharp and prep when they are not out in the actual race car.

Once I sat down and they had done a little bit of training with me for a few minutes, I was off racing.  At first I thought I was going super fast — until they showed me that I was actually going pretty slow by race standards…so they helped my ability to increase speed on the track.  It was so realistic that you actually feel nervous and scared to crash the car.  You feel all the sensory affects that you would on a real track, so all this information coming at you tricks your mind into believing you are really out there.  After about 5 minutes, I started to get a better feel for what the car could do on the track.  And then…I do not remember anything but 100% racing on the track.  I do not remember 

anyone around me (and there was a big crowd of people watching), I don’t remember consciously sitting in this ‘game/simulator’ vs. it feeling as if I was sitting in a real car, and I don’t have a feel for how much time I was sitting there other than what they told me after I asked them.  It was a lot longer than I thought it was.  Simply put, I was in ‘the zone’ for about a 20 minute period (felt like 3-4 minutes max).

I relate this story about the race simulator not because of how enjoyable it was (although if you get a chance to try something like this — definitely try it), but rather to emphasize some key points about mental focus and concentration.  My mental focus and concentration while driving this racing simulator was at an incredibly high level.  Plenty of scientific research has shown that our productivity and capability to accomplish things is much higher when we are in these extreme concentration and focus ‘zones’ or states.  In other words, you can accomplish significantly more in a shorter period of time when you are in a distraction-free, highly motivated mental ‘focus’ zone. It’s not so much about the time devoted towards creating the results, but the amount of focused time.  Your focused and distraction-free time really is your most valuable asset, which is a small subset of your total time.

If you ever pay close attention to how much 100% focused, distraction-free time you create and utilize during a regular day — generally, you will be very disappointed.  But the good news is that it does not take much of that kind of time to accomplish a lot.

This state of mental focus and extreme concentration (also linked to job/life happiness and satisfaction) is described as the state of “Flow” by a leading expert, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Mee-hi Cheek-sent-ma-hi-ee).  Csikszentmihalyi identifies a few critical elements to achieve the state of “Flow”: the activity should have a sense of discovery and creativity, have a reasonable element of challenge to it, straddle the space between anxiety and boredom, and have dynamic or ever-changing complexity.  Sounds a lot like doing the racing simulator!

The Flow zone, or maximum concentration and mental focus, can be achieved in your work and important projects vs. just the ‘fun’ stuff or hobbies.  When you do get into that level of concentration and focus, you can accomplish a massive amount of quality work and results in less time, the time goes by much quicker, and your sense of satisfaction / accomplishment is higher.

The trick is to create this high focus, distraction-free, ‘Flow’ state in order to get more done.  Not an easy task with all the distractions coming at you in today’s world.  Creating high focus, distraction-free zones of time requires effort and practice.  The first step is simply to assess how non-focused your time currently is, and identify the causes of distractions.  Just doing this first step will put you way ahead of the pack.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

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

Todd Gifford With Kathy Ireland

I know, I know.  This is starting out like something you may not think you want to read or think has zero applicability to you.  But I can assure you that you should keep reading.  Recently, I had a chance to meet and listen to Kathy Ireland, Supermodel and founder and CEO of Kathy Ireland Worldwide, a $1.5 Billion (with a “B”) company.  Kathy was featured in the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for 13 consecutive years and on the cover of many magazines, but that is not why I write about meeting her.

Bottom line is Kathy Ireland is an extremely sharp and successful businessperson, and her story and success philosophies are something we can all learn from and apply in our own situations.

Kathy Ireland has faced many set backs on her way to major success.  The thing that strikes me most about her is that she has an unbelievable tenacity and relentlessness about her.  You do not see that in her upbeat and positive personality, but you can feel it in her resolve.  Going way back, she responded to a paper route job ad ‘for boys’ when she was 11 years old and was told “you are never going to last”.  She won Paper Carrier of the Year.

Some of Kathy’s key philosophies she lives and works by:
> Under Promise and Over Deliver
> No Excuses Ever
> Ask Powerful Questions
If the answer is ‘no’, ask ‘why?’; If the answer is ‘yes’, ask ‘how?’
> Don’t Hesitate and Don’t Give Up
> Be Very Specific on What You Want
Define how, when, why, where, what, and how much.

Kathy also feels that ‘action’ is super important to everything.  One great quote that Kathy said about action when I was listening to her speak was: “Imagination without Implementation is Hallucination.”

Kathy Ireland tried and failed at many businesses, but she continued to ‘educate’ herself.  Kathy Ireland Worldwide Corporation was started with selling a pair of socks.  In 1983, Kathy was a pregnant, aging model.  She got a job to model ‘socks’, as there were not a lot of jobs available at the time.  She had an idea that she could bring value to selling socks and apparel, not as a celebrity endorsement, but truly bringing value to clients.  She had many doors slammed in her face, but she took the perspective of keeping an open mind to those that had criticism for her.  She stayed relentlessly pursuing the idea and she finally broke through.  Today, Kathy Ireland Worldwide sells 100 Million pairs of socks a year, and a whole lot more.

She has faced many set backs even after her company took off and became successful.  But with each set back, Kathy has held firm to her values and persevered.  She advises: “Document your values, because they will be challenged.  Some of your boundaries will be un-liked, but you need to stick to your values.”  Kathy said she received a tremendous gift from her modeling career — which was the ability to handle rejection.  Her motto:
‘No’ means: ‘OK, now we are talking’.

Underlying this relentless and tenacious core is a person who believes that you have to be open to listening to the people you are dealing with and think about things the way they are thinking and feeling.  Treat people like you treat family members to be successful.

Kathy is successful at combining a very positive and nice personality with an unbelievable spirit of tenacity and perseverance.  One of her personal favorite quotes is from Vince Lombardi, coach of the World Champion Green Bay Packers during the 1960’s: “Winning is not a some times thing — it’s an all the time thing.  And so is losing.”

You want to be careful to judge this book by its Supermodel cover.  Kathy has become an ultra successful business person not by her good looks, but by her ability to listen to people, being open to criticism, having massive perseverance and tenacity, and a exercising a giving attitude.  On the giving side, Kathy has done a tremendous amount of philanthropic work for many different causes.

Her last comment was: “all you give is all you get, so give a lot.”

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

I really don’t make ‘New Year’s’ resolutions per se. For whatever reason, I tend to make many of my resolutions (aka ‘Goals’) throughout the year as I identify them as something that I need to accomplish.  Most of us do make New Year’s resolutions, though, in late December and early January, and really, regardless of when I make mine — they are basically the same as New Year’s resolutions/goals scattered throughout the year.  Well, it’s April, and how are those New Year’s resolutions going for you?  For most, they are a long past distant memory or abandoned, getting lost somewhere between late February and mid-March.

If this is you, you are not alone!  Goals are tough things to stay on top of, particularly the challenging ones.  I thought I would list some ideas this month that seem to work well for me to stay on top of my goals or resolutions.  Not perfect, but they help immensely.

Setting Goals without Passion
There are times when I will set a goal for something, but it is because of someone else or some other circumstance beyond my personal passion for doing so.  This is a recipe for goal abandonment.  Without personal passion behind the resolution or goal, there will be no built-in persistence.  Pick goals that you are at least mildly obsessed with.  If you have to take on goals that others are selecting for you (like at work), then find something within those goals that you are passionate about, and that really motivates you.  Put that next to the goal or translate the stated goal into your motivating element.

Allocating Time and Energy
Many goals are set or resolutions are made without any thought to allocating proper time and energy towards accomplishing the resolution.  It sounds pretty basic, but time needs to be carved out and schedules/routines need to be changed to address the new goal.  Writing down that clear change in your schedule helps a lot.  When I was training for my triathlon last year, I had to stop doing certain things in my normal routine to make time for that training schedule.  Which leads me to my next point…

Your Goals Should Drive Your Schedule…
not the other way around.  But on many days, the reality is that our ‘schedule’ drives what we do.  It is easy to complete a day that was nearly entirely driven by what other people wanted vs. what you wanted to accomplish.  I have those days myself and they are sometimes unavoidable.  But I generally recognize it when they happen and I work hard to get back to focusing on ‘my list’ of goals to drive what my schedule looks like.

Measuring Progress
As I talked about in a recent article about the ‘pedometer’, it is really important that you know where you are at in relationship to the achievement of your goal, and to keep that progress status constantly in front of you.  A pedometer hooked to your belt makes it really easy to know at any point in time how many steps you have taken that day.  Other goals are tougher to measure progress, but you have to put a system of constant measurement in place to keep yourself accountable to the goal.  How can you make your progress easier to see daily?  Goal or resolution abandonment happens a lot simply because ‘out of sight, out of mind’.  Unless you have created a habit around the goal, you need that constant reminder and accountability.

It’s never too late
Regardless of whether you have let a goal or resolution slip away, today is never too late to get back on that resolution.  You made the decision one day in the past that a particular goal was important to you and that day or the next day you were pursuing it.  There is no reason, even if you have abandoned that goal, you can’t decide to go after it again…starting today.  Maybe this time you change certain aspects of how you approached that resolution originally and create a new strategy.  New is exciting and fun.  Same goal, new approach.

Investing in Success
Along the same line of refreshing a goal in a new way that was abandoned for some reason — think about ‘investing’ additional resources to aid your efforts towards achieving the resolution.  This could be getting more education about the topic, getting a helper or coach, investing in a tool or aid, or whatever.  Notice that I use the word ‘invest’ vs. spend, because whatever this added resource may be to help you achieve the goal, look at it as an investment in your success, not as an expense.

I hope some of these ideas will bring some dead New Year’s resolutions back to life for you!

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

Every one wants to get more done, whether it is at work, at home, with their kids and family, with their team, club, or hobby, etc…

The problem that most people experience is the feeling of ‘more to do and less time to do it in’.  The reality is that the amount of time we have is an absolute constant: 1,440 minutes per day, 10,080 minutes/week, etc…  The only thing that changes is our choices of what to do during our time, and (and this one is overlooked biggy) how effective we use our time on the things we choose to use it for.  This ‘effectiveness’ of time concept just does not get much attention for whatever reason, but really is the key to unlock the vault to getting more done.  Research has shown over and over that a smaller amount of high quality focus time on a given task or project is far superior in terms of output and results than a greater amount of lower quality or poor focus time.

How to Burst

If you buy into the smaller amount of effective time is better than a larger amount of less effective time concept, then the real trick is how to make your time spent more effective vs. simply trying to reduce the number of tasks or projects you are tackling.  In theory, if you make your time more effective, you get more done in less time.  If you get more done in less time, then you can accomplish much more in the time you have.

Bursting is a simple concept to help make your time spent more effective.  Essentially, bursting is a technique where you break down your awake time into pieces or chunks.  You then take those chunks of time and you make them as productive and effective as you possibly can.  With that said, you acknowledge that you are not trying to chunk down and burst your entire day.  You are shooting for maybe 2-3 hours per day of bursting time where you are at peak productivity and 100% focus and concentration.  Research has shown that, on average, most business managers achieve less than 1 hour of truly productive time during a day, and closer to 45 minutes.  This research includes even the most successful managers and executives.  If you can create 2-3 hours of peak productivity time each day, you are creating a massive advantage for yourself.  Obviously, if you are successful at creating 2-3 hours of burst time, there is nothing that says you cannot go for 4+ hours.

Bursting Tools

The first tool to use for bursting is a simple kitchen timer.  I have talked about using kitchen timers before to help with focus.  When you go into burst mode, you are setting the timer to start and go ‘up’.  Essentially, you are going to measure and hold yourself accountable to achieve max concentration and a distraction-free burst zone for as long as you can up to 60-90 minutes.  At 60-90 minutes of full concentration, your brain requires some rest to remain near peak performance.  The only reason for the timer is to be able to show yourself how much time you are really achieving at max productivity.  The first couple times you try this, you may not get past 10 minutes without becoming distracted off the task.  Another tool is anything that blocks out chatter/noise that is a distraction to 100% concentration.  Could be a fan that drowns out chatter, or could be playing some classical music at a low volume.  Another “tool” is knowing when your most productive time periods are during the day.  Could be early morning, could be late in the day.  As much as you can, you want to match your burst zones with those to leverage your body’s natural clock.  The overall goal would be to get 2-3 solid burst zones in each day.  More is a bonus.  If you truly measure and are honest with yourself, accomplishing the 2-3 solid burst zones every day is challenging.

“Reverse Bursting”

Another technique that I personally use a lot, but did not have a name for it until I heard about bursting is ‘Reverse Bursting’.  Essentially, reverse bursting is where you set your timer for X number of minutes that you are going to allocate to a task or project.  You start the clock ticking down, ensure you have a distraction free environment, and when the clock hits 0, you are done working on it.  I have found that when you place this artificial ‘deadline’ in the amount of time on the clock, you can move through tasks faster.  You figure out ways to get the task done or largely done with the set amount of time.  The most effective way this works is if you really stick to the ‘deadline’ you set with the timer.  When the clock hits 0, you move on to another task or project.  This is also, by the way, a great method to use for meetings to keep them short and productive.

It is amazing what you can accomplish in a well-executed burst period, and it is easy to see why just achieving 2-3 solid burst periods in a day can create major results.  Try it.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford