Hey, what's up, guys?
So this is another episode of Five Lessons,
which is a little mini show here
on this channel where I take useful lessons
from a book that I have read recently
and share them with you, and on today's episode,
I'm going to be sharing some lessons
from The Productivity Project,
which is a book that tries to cover productivity
in kind of a general sense.
Now, I haven't read a whole lot of other books
that are huge overviews of productivity.
I've definitely gotten into more specific books
on things like habits, but I haven't really read
any of the other general productivity books out there
so I can't really make a comparison here.
That being said, I really enjoyed this book
and I wanted to provide you with
five of the best lessons that I took from it,
starting with the first one,
which is actually the subtitle of the book:
Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time,
Attention, and Energy, and that's really
Chris' main idea in this book,
which is that productivity is the product
of managing your time, attention, and energy equally,
and these three resources are vitally important
and they are all equally important.
Now in past generations where people
worked in factories or when they worked on farms,
time was the most important element.
You punched in at the right time,
you did work that wasn't incredible mentally taxing,
didn't require a whole lot of creativity,
and there weren't a whole lot of distractions
to kind of pull you away from that work,
so time really was the most important aspect.
But today, more of us are doing creatively
demanding work that requires a lot more knowledge,
requires a lot more brain power, and because of that,
our energy and our attention are just as important
as our time, and I think this is really important
to think about deliberately because time management
is probably the aspect that is most asked about
and most focused on, but when you have
a productivity problem, it's just as important
to ask yourself, "Am I managing my energy correctly?
"Am I managing my attention correctly?
"Or am I trying to put in too many hours
"and trying to brute force my way to more productivity?"
And learning this and kind of integrating into your life
will help you to do things like
take more regular breaks,
to pay more attention to your health,
to sleep, to get more hydration,
to go exercise.
Even though these things take away
from the raw amount of hours you can work,
they're going to make you more productive.
So lesson number one, this is the big overview
of the book, when you're trying to make
yourself more productive, try to consider
all three of these factors.
So the second lesson that I wanted to share
with you from this book is that
there are six procrastination triggers,
basically facets or aspects of a task
that make your brain more averse to doing them.
So the six triggers are whether a task
is boring, difficult, frustrating,
unstructured or ambiguous,
lacking in personal meaning,
and lacking in intrinsic value,
such as it's fun or it's intriguing to do.
So the next time you find yourself procrastinating,
you can sit down and ask yourself,
"For this task that I don't want to do,
"which of these triggers are present?
"Is it boring?
"Well, maybe I can change my location
"and go to a coffee shop that makes it
"more fun to work on.
"Is it frustrating or is it unstructured?
"Well maybe I can break it down
"into some concretely defined steps,
"and then tell myself this is the very next step
"to work on, I have a very clear vision
"in my mind of what the road is forward,
"and now I can start working on it."
The third lesson that I took from this book
is that each of us has our own
individual time during the day
where both our energy levels and our ability
to focus are highest.
It's not the same across the board,
and Chris calls this the Biological Prime Time,
and he discovered his own Biological Prime Time
through the results of two different experiments.
First, he took the often cited advice
that the early bird gets the worm
and tried an experiment where he woke up
at 5:30 AM every single morning thinking,
"This will obviously make me an all-powerful
"productivity robot."
And the results of that experiment
where diametrically opposed to those expectations.
Chris found that, number one, he absolutely hated
getting up at 5:30 in the morning,
and hated going to bed as early as he needed to
to get up and get enough sleep,
but also, it really didn't make him
any more productive than he usually was.
So he scrapped that experiment
and did a second one where he recorded
his energy levels at each hour throughout the day
for a certain number of days.
And what he found that was for him,
between 10 AM and noon, and then five PM
to eight PM, his energy levels
and his ability to focus were highest.
So, as a result, he now considers that time sacred
and he tries to schedule his most important,
most challenging, and most boring work
during those hours.
He doesn't put meetings there,
he doesn't put any sort of like
maintenance tasks there.
All those tasks are relegated to the other hours
when his ability to focus is a little bit lower.
Now the fourth lesson from this book
is a really interesting one that I had actually
not heard of at all before,
and it's that our future selves
are actually the same as strangers
to our present selves' perception.
Chris talked to a UCLA researcher
who put people in brain scanning machines
and asked them to think about strangers
and then to think about both their present selves
and their future selves.
And what he found is that when people
think about strangers, they actually have
the same brain scans, the same activity
in the same brain regions as when they think
about their future selves.
And by contrast, when they think about
their present selves, their brain scans
are quite different, which shows that
when we think about our present selves,
we do not consider the same limitations,
the same stresses, the same stuff we're going through
right now, even though, logically,
we can tell ourselves that the future
version of ourself will probably
be going through those same things.
So what Chris actually did is he used
an app called Aging Booth to create
an old-looking picture of himself,
basically himself in several years,
and he put it up on his wall.
Now, I did that, and I'm probably
not gonna put this on my wall,
but it did teach me to start to deliberately think
about what my schedule's going to look like
a few weeks in advance because,
if I don't think about it deliberately,
I can think, "Oh, my future self
"is going to be totally carefree,
"there's nothing gonna be going on.
"Sure, I'll take that meeting in two months
"or three months," even though, logically,
I can look at my calendar three months ago,
I can look at my calendar now,
and I know that my schedule does not
get less busy over time.
The opposite is true.
And the fifth and final lesson
from this book is actually something
that Chris learned himself from David Allen,
the author of another book called
Getting Things Done, and it's to have
an addition to your task list,
your to-do list, a waiting for list.
Basically, a list of all the things
that you're waiting on someone else to do
before you can take action on it
or before it can be finished.
So if somebody owes you money
or waiting for someone to respond to an email,
maybe you're waiting for a package
to be delivered, these are all things
that kind of weigh on your mind,
they're things that have, sort of,
a part in your life, but you can't
do anything to resolve them right now.
So it's good to have a separate list of those things
and to check it maybe once or twice
a month at least, just to make sure
that for everything where the ball
isn't currently in your court,
it does come back and it doesn't
slip through the cracks.
So, those are five of the lessons
I learned from The Productivity Project.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book
and I found that it was a pretty good overview
of many of the different problems we face
when trying to be productive.
If you want to see other recommendations
I have for books that I think every student should read,
you can check out my Essential Books for Students list,
which you can get to by clicking
the card on the screen right now
or the link down in the description.
Otherwise, hopefully you enjoyed this video.
If you did and you found it useful,
you can give it a Like to support this channel.
Also, if you want to get new tips
on how to be a more effective student
every single week, you can click the Subscribe button
right down there, and if you'd like
to get a free copy of my book,
which is about how to earn better grades
and study more effectively, you can click
the picture right there and I will
send one to your email.
If you'd like to check out the last video
in the Five Lessons series,
you can go right there.
It's a video on The Power of Habit
by Charles Duhigg, which I absolutely love,
and if you'd like to find the full article
for this video with some more tips
and extra resource links,
click the Full Article button right there.
If you want to connect with me,
I'm most responsive to smoke signals
so you're gonna want to build a big bonfire,
but don't do it in the middle of a forest,
otherwise Smokey the Bear is gonna have
some choice words with you.
Anyway, thanks for watching
and I will see you in next week's video.