To use the technical term, this video is about how to get a butt load of work done.
Now, the definition of a standard butt load has been in dispute for years but regardless,
if you're watching this video you probably feel like you have that resting on your shoulders.
As somebody who went from being an overly involved college student straight into being
an overly ideal laden, content creator, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call me; I feel like
I always have a lot of work resting on my shoulders, and I tend to get a lot of it done.
Which leads to the question I get emailed often, how do you get so much work done?
Well, let's move back a little bit first into this perception of how much work we have to
do.
When people ask us how we're doing what's the answer we usually give them?
That's right, it's usually just I'm so busy.
The word busy is just so commonly uttered from our mouths, and I want to challenge you
on his assumption.
What does busy really mean?
Now for all the crap he gets, Thomas Edison actually said something pretty smart on this
subject and I'm going to read it off my phone real quick because I didn't memorize it, "Being
busy does not mean real work, the object of all work is production or accomplishment and
to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence and honest
purpose, as well as perspiration; seeming to do is not doing."
Now that's something you should really take to heart.
How much of your time is seeming to do and how much of it is actually spent doing and
getting real things accomplished; producing real work of real value?
For the past few months it seems like I've actually been able to produce a lot more work
than I used to in the past.
If I look through the archives on my blog it seems like for a couple years I was only
putting out maybe five things a month at most.
Now, I'm creating videos almost every week, I'm doing my podcast every week, blog posts,
episodes of Listen Money Matters; another podcast I'm a part of, and I wrote a book
in a few months which just came out a couple of weeks ago.
How was I able to increase this output and go from just being busy all the time and feeling
sorry for myself about how much work I had on my shoulders to actually getting things
done?
Well to be honest, I could attribute this to a lot of factors.
Motivation, habits, planning, time management, task management, efficiency, delegation, hiring
people.
There's all sorts of things that go into getting work done on top of just the simple discipline
of sitting down and working.
I could devote videos to every single one of these topics, and many of them will get
videos in the future, but the topic I want to focus on in this video is the act of planning.
Specifically daily planning.
What we want to get away from here is this feeling of being busy and not actually getting
a whole lot done.
Not really focusing on any specific task you have to do.
You're probably familiar with some of the common cases where this happens.
You're in the library, you've got all your material out in front of you, but you don't
really know which thing you should study so now you're on Facebook.
Daily planning alleviates this problem because if you do it right you know exactly what you
should be doing at any given time.
For instance, my morning routine is a form of a daily plan.
The moment I wake up in the morning I know exactly what I need to do.
I need to come to my apartment, I need to turn off my wake up alarm that I talked about
in another video, and then I need to immediately meditate, go into my seven minute workout,
go for a walk, make breakfast, read books etc.
I know exactly what I need to do and as a result I do it.
Morning routines are incredibly important, but I want to talk about the actual daily
plan that encompasses your specific tasks that you need to get done.
Whenever I get a new task that needs to be done, at some point in time it goes straight
into To Do List.
To Do List is the to do app of choice that I use.
There are a lot others out there, but it's the first point of contact for any task I
have.
It is not the only place where tasks end up living in my system.
On Sundays I create a weekly plan in a paper notebook; really simple, and write down exactly
what I want to accomplish that week.
Then when I wake up in the morning and go through my morning routine I have a habit
which is to simply create a daily plan.
On that whiteboard right over there I write my daily plan every single morning, and I
put the day of the week at the top and then I write down the six to seven, maybe eight
if I'm feeling really productive that day, things that I need to get done.
I don't stop there though.
I try to estimate when each task should be done by.
I'll put a dash and then I'll put the time.
When I'm estimating these times I try to take into account a fudge ratio.
This is a concept I wrote about in my book and basically it's taking the time I estimate
to get things done, and applying a little bit of a buffer to it because we are very
bad at planning for things that go wrong or very bad at planning for inefficiencies, and
we tend to take the best case scenario as a guess for when we estimate times.
Now that I have this daily plan, I have a list of tasks in the order that I need to
do them.
I have an estimate for the time that each one should be done, and now I know at any
given time what I should be doing.
Once I'm done with my morning routine I jump right into the first one and try as best as
I can to get it done by the time I estimated.
Seeing it right on the board next to me reminds me that, that's what I should be working on.
I don't let myself get distracted by other things.
It's not to say that I'm absolutely perfect about getting the list done every day, but
combined with other productivity techniques that I apply to my life like habit tracking,
and commitment devices, and the Pomodoro technique, and things like that; it's actually really
effective.
My output has gone from here to here.
I'm not exactly sure what those are, but there's a gap.
The lesson is clear here.
If you want to get a lot of things done you need to plan your day out in advance and then
stick to that plan.
Doing so will let you know what to focus on, on any given moment and you'll spend a lot
less time feeling busy, but not getting much work done.
Thanks for watching this video, and I will see you in the next one.
Well hello there and thanks for watching my video.
I'm getting massive loads of work done with daily plans.
Now if you want to learn more about effective planning I wrote an entire chapter about it
in my free book on earning awesome grades, and you can get your own copy by clicking
the picture and the book right there.
If you want to get more videos every single week on being an awesome college student,
studying better, building habits and whatnot, then click that big red subscribe button,
and you can also find a summary and links to anything I talked about in this video by
going to the companion blog post which you can find by clicking the orange button right
there.
If you missed my last video there's a clip of it playing right there.
Lastly, if you want to suggest topics for new videos or connect with me you can either
follow me on Twitter at @TomFrankly or just leave a comment on this video.
See you in the next one.