Not Today

Not Today talks about what it really means to be productive and presents nine effective strategies to achieve higher returns on your work input from the perspective of two entrepreneurs who are used to working hard.

The theory sounds simple – you now have to split your time into four categories and this is how you’ll get everything done. In practice, we tend to spend all of our days into the mandatory and empty categories, instead of doing more of the first two.

If you want to kickstart your productivity journey, you’ll have to motivate yourself more. Start by writing down your goals and break them into smaller chunks called objectives. Then, find motivation in each objectives by tying your goals to a why and a how and getting specific in terms of what steps you’ll take to accomplish them.

After you have everything written down, it’s time to set up a strategy and use the power of prioritizing. Start with investing time and prioritize your daily GIA (Greatest Impact activity), which is a productive practice that will serve you the most in the long run.

For example, you can learn about allocating funds for your retirement fund, or master a new skill. The other important aspect of this strategy is to reengineer your habits. Identify unproductive habits and turn them around. For example, if you have the habit of staying inbed til noon, force yourself to get up and tale a walk instead.

Just like Mike and Erica, we all have personal challenges to stress over. Sometimes they take much of our time away and mess up our schedule. Other times, we fall prey to distractions such as emails, pop-up notifications, phone calls, people entering our space, etc. The key message here is to stop being distracted and manage your time properly. In theory, you have to spend as much time as you can in the treasured and investing categories, while mandatory time should be kept under healthy parameters. Work to live, and not vice versa. As for empty time, try to eliminate that as much as you can. Altogether, the key is to obsess over your time. When you try to do mandatory time but there’s other priorities to take care of which you can’t always postpone, such as playing with your child, it’s best to do that and find another moment to take care of work. However, make sure that you come back to the mandatory duties. The key isn’t to have everything figured out, but to be aware of these four categories of time and take each day one by one to see where everything fits in your schedule. Another important aspect is to learn when…