Hello everyone and welcome back to keep productive YouTube channel, it is Francesco here today
I'm joined by a very special guest. We have Michael Hyatt in the house. It's great to have you Michael
Where are you joining us from?
Thanks Francesco. I'm in Nashville, Tennessee
Is it good weather?
It's terrible. It's about minus 4 Celsius right now and
For us that's very cold. Call this day. We've had so far this year
Sounds like a coat day
It's better right today, it's been a bit rainy here say not the best of starts but a fairly good one at least
You know for those who don't know who you are already Michael it'd be perfect if you could introduce yourself
Sure. Well, I spent most of my career in the book publishing industry
Worked about in every department every part of book publishing, but I'm an author a speaker
I've got an online membership community and created a lot of online courses
a couple New York Times bestselling books
And yeah, the most recent book is your best year ever but the book that's just about to come out is we're recording
This is the new book called free to focus
Yeah, it's it's quite an exciting book
I mean you you guys send me an advance copy and I'm enjoying it as I said to you before super slow reader
But I'm thoroughly enjoying it
and obviously
yeah, obviously all of your books before have been
Really? Well put together. So it's gonna be quite excited when I could imagine
Thank you. And obviously for that like what was your inspiration?
For this one, obviously, I know when obviously to start a book you you had a few moments where you realized
Focus needs to be the focus
But what sort of inspired you to do this book?
Well a couple things really one of the things I noticed in my own life. Is that all the you know?
The plethora of productivity tools apps and books and all that
Wasn't really leading to a decrease in time that we spent at work
but in fact was multiplying the complexity in the amount of time and it worked plus with the advent of social media and
Texting and all kinds of apps, you know people are losing their focus and I notice it in my clients
I noticed it in myself and
It's and it said that focused work where we can really move the needle at our business and our personal life and accomplish
What matters most and without that focus we're just distracted?
you know where our attentions in a thousand different places and nowhere at once and I really wanted to remedy that so was
making myself the project at first which I began about 10 years ago and then applying it to my clients I've got
Thousands of people that have gone through the free to focus course now
so we've had a lot of input from real clients and
What's worked for them and what hazard so it was all of that kind of wrapped up together and probably the biggest
Motivating force was I thought to myself how could I achieve more by doing less?
because so often
our premise is the only way to accomplish more is to do more and it's what I call the hustle fallacy and I think it
leads to a lot of burnout a
Hundred percent. Yeah, and I think I'm like as a Remus Burke and a couple of other books in the same topic
it's it's solely dawning on me because I I
Was so very similar to a lot of people when they get started with the business or an opportunity to you
You just put so much time and energy into it and it it doesn't sort of come back
necessarily
Muttering you just need to make sure it's the right time and attention you're spending on
one of the questions I was obviously
that this sort of idea of focus is is so important and
Procrastination itself is obviously riot. Do you have any like tips for people that are
Lacking in that sort of that focus and are able to sort of we channel themselves
Yeah, well part of it is I think you've got to get off the dopamine
addiction
that is presented by the
Complexity of all the different apps that were trying to run, you know multitasking. I can remember back when that was
Heralded or esteemed as something that you would aspire to, you know to be able to multitask
That was a good thing because there's too many things to give singer focus any one thing you got to be able to multitask
Right. Well, it turns out all the science says that that's crazy. We can't actually multitask. All we can do is time slice
So we move from this task to that task and in the interim
What happens is what Cal Newport the author of deep work talks about we have sort of this attention residue
Where our attention takes a while to catch up with the new focus
So it's incredibly inefficient and it's not conducive to focus at all
So in order to be able to stay focused
We've got to be able to close down all the other apps
We got to be able to turn off social media and only use sort of the bare essentials
It's sort of like the the minimalism is that in maximalism
we've got a we got to pare it down to focus on the things that are truly important and avoid that that
Dopamine hit that happens with our biochemistry when we encounter a problem
It's difficult to solve what we're trying to create something anything. Let me just check Facebook for a minute
I'm gonna jump over here to Twitter and the truth is that's what's at war
with us being truly productive and the big social media companies know that they're fighting for your attention because they're
Repackaging our eyeballs and our attention and they're selling it to the highest bidder in terms of advertisers
So that's what we're fighting against. So we got to be smart about it. We got to be intentional. We gotta have a strategy
Definitely and in the boat q1 you outlined this methodology this this step-by-step process
Three steps right and maybe you could give a brief overview of your what they steps up
Yeah, well surprisingly the first step in the whole process
I call simply stop and the idea is that we have to stop
we have to formulate a vision for what we want out of productivity and
So often productivity is seen as the endgame and in my view in my system. It's a means to an end
So what's the vision of what productivity is going to get us and from my perspective?
The only thing that I want is I want more freedom. I want more freedom to do the things
I love the things that I'm good at the time to spend with my family time to cultivate and nurture my help
So formulate is the first part of that stop module
The second thing is to evaluate to actually evaluate where we are in relationship to that vision
You know what?
Are we spending our time on are we spin out the times a time on the things that energize us?
Where the things that drain us and I've got a tool there that we can talk about in a minute if you want to call
The freedom compass. So let's evaluate the third component of that first
Stop section is all about rejuvenate
Now that seems like an odd title to rejuvenate
But as it turns out your level of rest the nutrition the exercise you do all of that has a greater impact on your productivity
Than almost anything else and that's because productivity is more about managing your energy then
Actually managing your time and a lot of people get this confused. So that's the first third of the book
That's about stopping
The second part of the book is about cutting
Once you've got a clear vision once you've evaluated where you are once you're rested
Then you can go in and start whacking all the stuff that doesn't fit your vision for productivity and we do that through
Three chapters one is eliminate what can just go away?
You know really doesn't hurt anyone if it just disappeared. Secondly. What can we automate?
I mean the tools I know you're you're deep into all kinds of tools software tools
But it's amazing what we can automate today and put on autopilot
But one of the things I talked about that's not software per se but is rituals
Automating ourselves put it ourselves on autopilot
So we don't have to think so much about setting ourselves up for example for a productive day
and then I also talked about delegation and
Delegating is one of the most important tools
If you're gonna scale yourself if you're gonna grow your business
If you're gonna expand your life then in the final third of the book I talked about finally Act
You know, how can we consolidate our activities? So we think through like an ideal week, how can we mega batch?
How can we set ourselves up for I call it the three by three strategy where we have three important goals for the quarter
three important priorities for the week and
three must do tasks for today and then I talk about how do we deal with all the distractions how we deal with the
Interruptions and all the stuff that we typically think
about when we think of productivity so in a nutshell
That's the book and that's what it looks like
It's really good so far and I think what's quite nice about it is it's got laser actionable examples
And like I think I just started to stop
that
Step and the amount of statistics there in it that scare me like the ones are you colluded about like social media exactly
I'm like, oh, no, you know it can be it's massively dangerous and all this side of stuff, isn't it?
It really is dangerous. And and I think that we have to acknowledge that we're totally outgunned
we've got social media companies like Facebook spending literally billions of dollars figuring out how they can hijack our
Neurocircuitry our biochemistry and keep us engaged because their entire business model
really is dependent on us spending as much time as possible on Facebook and
Instagram no different Twitter. No different Facebook just happens to be you know, the big kid the big bully on the block
But that's where we've got to be intelligent. We've got to take that control of our life
Otherwise, you know, it's kind of like the matrix, you know, we're just kind of in a pod
Being drive by these robots for some nefarious in and we got to be smarter than that, unfortunately
there's a lot of software out there where we can use software to fight software and
Regain our attention and our focus and accomplish. What's what's most important for us?
Yeah, definitely very very scary stuff. But on the topic of software, obviously, that's how I first
Spoke to you. I reached out to you was on the topic of notion
Obviously that is something that you're very interested in there moment on you. I
Am you know I talked about notion in particularly just software in general
Notion, okay
yeah, so notion I I had a
infatuation with it initially and then a love affair and
Announced a maturing relationship, but I was intrigued for the moment
I tried it and and mostly because it kind of put the fun back in software and gave me tools to create software
Or at least solutions that didn't require a lot of program and of course
You know this because we talked about it before we we started recording is that I've been an Evernote fan for years
I think I I originally came on board with
Evernote back in 2008 right after they launched I've written a ton of articles on Evernote and I really thought that notion
was the Evernote killer I don't think that anymore but
They do some similar things
But I do love notion. It's it's getting there, isn't it?
It's just like you said a few things away a few features away for sure
No, but it's obviously great here that you've been sort of playing around in that space, too
and so my final question is
Would like when somebody reads this book
And I think sometimes one of the tricky things is trying to convince other people as well to endorse these sorts of things
you know whether somebody has
Wants to try and convince a friend or a relative or a wife or or a husband
Do you have any tips in terms of approaching them about this sort of strategy or you know good quality?
learnings
Sure, why I guess I would say to people who?
Are trying to convince a friend to read the book or maybe they're thinking about reading the book for themselves
I would just say how is your current productivity system working out for you? Do you feel overwhelmed?
Do you find yourself procrastinating? Do you find yourself?
increasingly
Less likely to focus because your attention is scattered in a thousand different directions. If so, this book is written for you
I would say for people who have read Cal Newports book deep work or his new book digital minimalism
this kind of takes what I think is in his case a lot of theory and really good theory and
Applies it in a really practical way
but if you want to achieve more by doing less
because because I really believe in the thing that motivates me Francesco more than anything is helping people win at work and
Succeed at life, you know, I'm not willing to compromise my personal life for the sake of my professional life
But I'm also not willing to throttle my ambition
Professionally for the sake of my personal life and I really believe that you can have both but and this is the key
You've got to restrict your focus. You can't be focused on everything. I can't rember who it was
It might have been Greg McEwan who authored the book essentialism. You know, he said
You can achieve anything you want. You just can't achieve
Everything you want so you've got to narrow your focus and this book is really designed to show you how yeah
It's gonna be a quite an exciting book. I think definitely and
Where can ever find yourself and the book after this video?
Yeah, we can find me at michaelhyatt.com and you can find the book at free to focus book.com
and so we've got a lot of
special goodies on that site
If you order it, and you just have to go back and give your receipt wherever you bought the book there
Give us the number we'll give you the bonuses lovely coupley brilliant. And do you plan on releasing like an audible Edition as well?
Yes, the book is will be out simultaneously on audible
I recorded the entire thing myself and it was the out on Kindle so every format possible
Fantastic, that's brilliant. Well, thank you so much Michael and take you know
get some of your wisdom on I think what is something that's gonna be
Quite a big focus in the next couple of years is getting our focus back
Well, thank you very much for your time
Frankie Francesca