“Changing Habits: How To Create Healthy Habits” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

Habits and how to create them.

All right, let’s learn about how to create habits that serve us in our lives and in our businesses. I did an interview recently with Tony Robbins, and one of the things that he said in the interview, and I’m paraphrasing, is that the quality of our habits and our rituals is the quality of our lives. Now what did Tony mean by this? He meant that if we don’t have high quality habits and we don’t make them into rituals, we don’t focus on these things and create them consciously, that a bunch of other stuff will sneak into our life. We’ll get distracted, our minds will get taken off on things, we’ll worry about stuff, and we’ll never get the important things done.

On the other hand, if we habitualize all of the important things and actually create conscious rituals around them, then all the other stuff will take care of itself. In fact, the more high quality habits and rituals you create, the more it kind of squeezes out all of that other stuff that distracts you from your life.

So the next question is how do you create habits? I saw an interesting piece of research recently that said that we only get a little bit of willpower in our lives and most of us just go through the same habitual things day-in, day-out, month-in, month-out, year after year. We kind of do the same thing, we think the same thoughts, and we have the same patterns with other people. In other words, we are creatures of habit, but most of us never learn how to change our habits with the little bit of willpower we do get. We don’t usually focus it on changing our habits. And that’s really the equation, that’s the magic formula, is to take the willpower that we get and focus it on making a new habit.

One of the things I learned from Tony Schwartz, the co-author of The Power of Full Engagement is that it’s important to only create one new habit at a time. If we try to create more than one new habit, what happens is we get all stressed out and freaked out and we just fall into our old patterns and we never actually do it. So one new habit at a time, that’s the rule, and what I’ve found works really well for me is to try to make the new habits earlier in the day. It’s a lot easier to take a habit that you’ve all ready created and that’s all ready running, and kind of move it a little bit later in the day than it is to create a new habit later in the day.

So for example, if you wanna focus your time in uninterrupted blocks, start by focusing the first hour of your day in an uninterrupted focused block, every single day where you’re working on something important, make it a habit, make it a ritual. In our company, one of the things that we do is our teams start each day with a little ritual of a 10 or 15-minute call. Each team goes through what’s going on in their world, what their problems are, what are the roadblocks and what are the updates. Everybody on the team reports in and it’s a ritual, it’s a habit, and it’s very high value because what it does is it synchronizes everyone, let’s everyone know what any news is for the day, what’s coming, and also allows people to connect up with each other in one place.

So they know that if I’m trying to reach that person, the longest I have to wait is until tomorrow morning, it’s a very high value habit. Now we do it as many small groups, and it has yielded tremendous results. To get this thing started took a lot of work, actually to do all of these, each one took a lot of work because everyone’s all ready in a routine and everyone says, “I don’t know if I wanna do it. I don’t know if that has any value,” and then after a month or six weeks of doing it, everyone can’t imagine doing it any other way because it just becomes a routine, it becomes part of the deal.

Now it would be a lot easier, by the way, if we wanted to keep doing that but do it later in the day. It would be a lot easier as a team to take that and move it to 4:00 p.m. instead of in the morning than it would be to start it off at 4:00 p.m. Why? Because later in the day, more things come into your life, it’s harder to get things done, harder to keep yourself focused, and you’ve burned up a lot of your willpower. So to start habits, start the habit immediately. My friend Wyatt Woodsmall says, “There’s only two rules for creating a habit, start now and don’t deviate.”

So start right now, don’t start in a week or two weeks, start right now, start today or start tomorrow, start tomorrow morning. Plan out the new habit that you want to create, put it into place, and start doing it immediately, and then don’t deviate. Whatever you do, make sure you do the new habit every day, you have to do it every day for at least 30 days for it to catch, for it to become a part of the way things are, and for you to feel pulled into it. So there are a couple of techniques for creating new habits in your life. Put them into action now and notice the results that they help you achieve.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.

The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable, free video trainings and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity, all for free. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“Personal Productivity: How To Boost It For Success…” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

Productivity, the key to business and personal success.

Let’s talk about productivity, what it is, why it’s important and how to achieve it. What do I mean by “productivity, the key to business and personal success”? What I mean is that productivity, in this sense, is about results. It’s about creating actual, real world, tangible, measurable results. It’s not about just doing a bunch of work and pretending like you’re getting a lot done or trying to look like you’re getting it done. It’s about actually getting results in the real world. I’m going to teach you a technique here for really maximizing your productivity. It’s a simple technique. Anyone can do it. You can do it starting immediately. I think you’ll see that it’ll dramatically increase your productivity.

The first distinction I want to draw is the distinction between activity and results. You’ll hear me talk a lot about this. You hear other experts talk a lot about it. It’s very easy to confuse activity with results – to get confused and think that a bunch of work equals a bunch of results. This is particularly a problem with people that you have working on your team because people that are used to working in the job environment, they’re just used to doing their job and getting a paycheck. In fact, in employee and job type roles, results are often the enemy.

I heard a great story about a mailman that went to work at the post office, and he was new. The guy that had his route before him worked on it for like 30 years. This guy came in, went through the whole route, and got done halfway through the day and came back and said, “I’m done,” and the other postal workers said, “Figure out how to take longer to do that because you’re making us look bad, and if you don’t, we’re going to make your life hell.” He said, “Oh, I understand.” These postal workers were used to just having a job where they get paid for time and not for results. They didn’t want to have that threatened because they were taking their time doing personal things and so forth.

Sometimes the job mentality can really corrupt results. So, how do you get around this?

The technique I want to share with you right now for maximizing results is very simple. It’s deceptively simple, but I think if you start using it, you’ll see it’s amazing. The idea is to start measuring productivity visually. Here’s what I mean: Let’s say that you want to lose some weight. Well, we don’t really know how much we weigh. We can’t really see it, and if we get on the scale every day, sometimes we weigh a couple of pounds more, sometimes we weight a couple of pounds less, depending on what we ate or we drank or the time of day or whether we have our clothes on or we just took a shower or whatever. It’s kind of hard to see. We can’t really get a feedback system that informs us.

On the other hand, you can take a simple spreadsheet, like Microsoft Excel or like a Google spreadsheet, which you can get for free online with Google apps and weigh yourself everyday. Then, you put the weight in the box, click on the little charting button, and you create a visual chart. What happens is you see it going up and down. You see the variation. And this is in any process you measure. You see the direction it’s going. Is it going up? Is it flat? Is it going down? You can actually see it very clearly. The visual feedback does its own work. It builds its own awareness. It creates direction all by itself.

I use this technique, not only with a lot of different projects that I’m working on, but also all through my business. In fact, we measure dozens and hundreds of different variables and numbers and processes on visual charts, so that we all know what’s going on. If you look at a column of numbers, there’s no way to chart it in your mind. You can kind of figure it out, but when you see a chart, a graph with the actual progress, and you can see it’s going up, it’s going down. You can see any exceptions. The whole thing speaks very loudly. I think that this idea, what they call the visual display of quantitative information – in other words, the charting of numbers – is one of the biggest innovations that we’ve ever had as a SPECIES.

So, do you want to dramatically increase your productivity? Take the top three things that you’re working on, and figure out how to put them on a chart. Let’s say it’s a project you’re working on. Put down how many hours per day you are investing in the project – uninterrupted and not distracted…totally focused. Put it in the box every day. Do you want to track your sales, and make them go up? Put in the sales that you’re making every day for yourself or for your business, and chart it. You will watch it go up. Things that are measured improve.

There’s a great quote that my friend Joe Polish says a lot: “Processes that are measured improve, and processes that are measured and reported improve exponentially.” So if you really, really want to get a lot of juice out of this, start measuring your process and then start reporting it to someone else. You will see everything happens inside of you to make your process improve and to start getting a lot more results and to dramatically increase your productivity.

So there’s one great idea for increasing your productivity. Put it to work right now. Start visually charting and watch your productivity skyrocket.

Finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.

The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success and productivity all for free. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“Overcoming Procrastination – Here’s How To Stop Procrastinating” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

How to stop procrastinating.

Okay, so let’s talk about how to stop procrastinating.  Right now I’m going to share to two approaches to stop procrastinating.  These are two approaches that I use all the time, and are things that really work for me.  And there are many ways, and in some of the other videos here you’ll see some other ways to stop procrastinating, but these two, I really enjoy them.

The first thing to do to stop procrastinating is to stop trying to do things that don’t matter.  Stop trying to get yourself to do things that you know you’re never going to do anyway.  Give yourself permission to cross off the list all the stuff you’re never going to do anyway.  This just dumps a metal load off your brain, and you feel lighter.  You feel like, oh, all right, exactly, I’m never going to do that anyway, so why was I even thinking about it.  So first thing, get it off your list.

The second thing to do is instead of trying to create a big list of things to do every day, and remember to do the right thing when you’re supposed to is don’t even put yourself in that situation where you can procrastinate in the first place.  The way to do this is to create positive habits in your life.  Now, I’m going to go into how to create positive in another video, and you’ll also learn more about it at wakeupproductive.com, but for the time being, I’m just going to say right now, stop habitualizing, or ritualizing, or systemizing, or routinizing those things that are the most important things, and start doing them every day at the same time.  And what you’ll find is that, especially in the work arena, in business, if you will make rituals and routines out of the very high value things in your life, every day you’ll do them at the same time automatically because if you think about it, you already do the same things every day, at the same time automatically.

When we procrastinate what we’re usually doing is resisting doing something different than we normally do.  We have our routines that we’re in.  We’re all creatures of habit.  We like to do the same things at around the same times every day.  And when we’re procrastinating, what we’re doing is going oh, I don’t really want to do that thing right now.  Sometimes we don’t know why.  We’re coming up with a bunch of excuses.  And it’s usually just because it’s not a habit.  It’s not a routine.  It’s not something that we do automatically every day.

As an example, I struggled for years with trying to get my sleep, and my exercise, and my diet all in shape.  Well, that all changed when I built a simple routine where I go to sleep at the same time, I wake up around the same time, and then I do my exercise first thing, and then I eat a healthy meal first thing, and then I just made a routine out of that.  So I go to sleep, I get enough sleep, I wake up, first thing that I do is that I make sure that I get my exercise, and then I have a healthy meal.  And now I’m pulled into these routines every day, and I don’t have to worry about procrastinating because it’s a ritual; it’s something that I do the same every day.

Now, it takes 30 days or so to actually create a new habit, so you got to force yourself to do it at the same time every day.  At two to three weeks you’ll notice it gets easier and easier, and then at about a month you’re just doing the exact same thing every day.  You’re pulled into it.  You find yourself doing it automatically.

So there are two great techniques for eliminating procrastination that are counterintuitive; you may not have thought of.  No. 1, cross off your list all the things that you’re never going to do anyway, that you hate doing, that you want to do.  Outsource that stuff.  Hire someone online that’s a virtual assistant.  Hire someone locally that will come work for you for $10 an hour to just do that stuff that you’re never going to do anyway.  Get it off your list.

And second, instead of focusing on the procrastination, focus on creating routines and habits that you do every day at the same time, so that you do the important things, so that procrastination doesn’t even come up as a problem.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47 minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.  The video is worth $100, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and email address, and opting in.

Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity; all for free.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and email address to get it all right now.

“Prioritization – How To Do The Right Things In The Right Order” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

How to prioritize and how to make sure you do the right things, in the right order.

Okay, so let’s discuss how to prioritize and how to make sure that you do the right things in the right order. Most of us, me included, have way too many things to do, we’ve got a big, giant list of stuff to do and it just keeps getting bigger everyday, and we have no hope of ever getting all of it done, especially since more things get added to the list all the time. One of the things that I like to do is always keep about 120 to 150 percent as many things as I can ever get done on my list. The reason I do that is just so that I’ve always got stuff to do, I always have things to consider, and I can always prioritize things against each other, and I know that the lowest value things are just going to kind of drop off the list.

So one thing I’d like to give you permission to do and ask you to give permission to yourself to do is to let things fall off the list, don’t feel like you need to get everything done because you never will. You are going to die with a few things on your checklist, and that’s just the way it is, that’s the way life is. So when you give yourself permission to let a few things fall off the list, it makes prioritizing the important things much easier. I’d like to share an insight that I got from my good friend, Wyatt Woodsmall. He did a modeling project where he modeled 50 top entrepreneurs over in Europe and one of the things that one of the entrepreneurs said was, “First thing’s first, second thing’s not at all,” first thing’s first, second thing’s not at all, and I thought that was an interesting mindset. And again, this is a top entrepreneur, and what you find is that those that are highly productive, they can focus themselves maniacally on getting one thing done. And they know that if they can just get that one important thing done, then all of the rest of the things will take care of themselves and they’ll get done and in new time.

So prioritizing to me isn’t about really making a big list of things, and then saying, “Okay, I’m going to do this first and this second and this third,” although sometimes there’s busy work and you’ve just got to knock a bunch of things like that out. But in the big picture, prioritization is about identifying those things that have the highest lifetime value, and the highest dollar value, and making sure that you do those few things. So here are a couple of techniques for doing this. One of my favorites is to take the list of things that I need to do and try to translate each of them into some kind of dollar value, some kind of an amount of money that if I do that thing, it’s going to be worth. Now some things, if you do them, they’ll be worth an amount of money or they’ll pay off an amount of money once, and some things, if you do them, will be worth an amount of money, but they’ll pay off in the long term. It’s like the difference between spending and investing. If you spend money, you usually just get something back and you consume it now, whereas, if you invest, you get a pay off for the long term.

Now we humans, our minds and our emotional systems, they’re not designed to think long term, they’re designed to think instant gratification. We basically have a chimpanzee brain inside of us, and if you’ve ever studied primate behavior, you know that chimpanzees don’t have the ability to delay gratification and they have no impulse control. If an impulse comes over them to go eat a banana, they run over and they grab it and they just eat it, they can’t stop and wait. Well, we have a little bit of that impulse control and a little bit of that ability and we need to use it when we’re trying to decide on what to do. And instead of just doing the thing that’s urgent or the thing that’s ringing the alarm or the thing that seems like we’ve got to do it or the thing that looks like it’s fun to do. We need to stop and say, “When I wake up in ten years, 20 years, 50 years, what will I be glad that I did right now,” and then by assigning dollar values and looking at things long term, we can really get an understanding of what things will be worth.

I’ll give you a great example; let’s say that I’ve got three things on my list to do. One of them is to call back a friend of mine who called and said that they needed to talk to me. Another thing is to create a video like this one, that I’m going to put up on video sites and on my website that’s going to share information and teach other people how to manage their time well. And the third thing is I need to talk to someone who’s interested in buying one of my products. Okay, I sit down and I say what would each of these things be worth to me long term? Now, if I didn’t really take this mindset, if I didn’t consider it, what I’m probably going to do is go, “Well, that person needs to be called back, I’ll do that quickly. And then what I’ll do is I’ll talk to the person who’s interested in buying one of my products because they wanna buy something right now, and then after those, I’ll get around to making the video.” That’s probably the way I’d intuitively think of it, but watch what happens when I start assigning value to these three things. I look at the value of calling the person back. Well, they’ve probably got a question that I can answer any time, and in fact, no money and no value is going to come as a result of calling them back, they just want an answer to something. And then I’m going to take the next thing, and what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to take the third item and I’m going to put it second, for effect here.

This person wants to talk to me about buying a product. Now, they actually want to talk to me, it’s going to be a longer-term conversation. Intuitively I thought, I’ll call that first person back and just knock that out, and then I’ll talk to this person because it won’t take that long, maybe a little while. But when I ask what’s the value? Well, they might want to buy a product that I sell for $1,000.00 or $2,000.00 or maybe even more, what’s the value of that? Well, let’s say that 50 percent of the people that I talk to in person actually buy something and the average value is $1,000.00, well, that might be worth a $500.00 estimate right there. But now let’s talk about this video, let’s talk about making a simple, little training video that I’m going to put on video sharing sites and on my website that’s going to stay online for years, what’s that worth? Well, if I go online and I look and I see the other videos that I’ve put up and I see that every year thousands of people, on average, watch one of the videos that I’ve created and I do the math for every thousand people that watched the video. Let’s say one percent of them come to my website and they sign up for my newsletter and eventually they consider becoming a customer, and let’s say that every one of those people, these subscribers to my list are very valuable because they tend to be very high quality and they like our products. Say that each of those people is worth $25.00, well, now I’ve got from 1,000 people, I get $250.00 back, but wait a minute, I know that on average, 5,000 people a year will watch one of my videos.

So there’s $1,250.00 just the first year alone, maybe I make a conservative estimate and say that video will probably be good for five years, what’ve we got now? That’s $6,250.00, if my math is correct. That little video is actually worth way, way more than the other two items combined, and yet, when I thought of it intuitively, I would put the video on the back burner. Now you understand why I’m here making this video, of course, and why I’m not just looking at my list of people to call back and calling them back. In fact, I’ll tell you, I’ve become very difficult to reach by telephone, and I’m notorious for taking a long time to return phone calls. Why? Because it’s usually a waste of time, usually people just want to say hi and talk and yak about a bunch of things, and I’ve got better things to do like making videos that can help thousands and thousands and tens of hundreds of thousands of people. So when you’re trying to figure out what thing to do first and you’re trying to prioritize, make a list of the stuff that you need to do, and translate it into a dollar value. Force yourself to do it and think long term, think five years, ten years, 20 years. Once you get good at this, it takes a few seconds to do it. This video, I can do that math, I actually made that example up of those three things live while I’m talking to you here, I didn’t have it prepared, I didn’t figure all the math out before hand. You can just do it, you can just figure out, this thing’s worth $5.00, this thing is not worth anything, this thing could be worth $10,000.00, just write them down and quickly the most important thing will rise to the top.

Another way to think about prioritization, by the way, is to prioritize the three things in business that are the things that create all the value, and those are marketing, products, and relationships. Now we don’t have time to delve into those three in this short video, but I’ll tell you right now, marketing, products, and relationships is where all the value is created and all the money is made. So prioritize to the top of your list, creating, marketing, and sales, and doing marketing sales. Creating products and services, things that people will buy and continue to buy long term, and building relationships specifically with those people that can help you grow yourself and your business. So these would be partners in business, these would be team members that you’re going to hire; these would be people you’re going to collaborate with on products and services. In other words, those that are going to help you grow yourself and your business long term: marketing, products, and relationships. If you prioritize those to the top of the list, you will wake up far more productive in the future.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable, free video trainings and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity, all for free. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“How Do I Take More Time Off?” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

Let’s talk about taking time off, and why it’s important, and how to do it. Something that I’ve learned from the masters is that the more time off you take, the more productive you become in the rest of your work. Now, I know that this sounds like it almost couldn’t be true, but work with me here for a moment. Our bodies, and our minds, and our emotions they go through a cycle where they produce effort, and they produce results, and then they kind of recover. And they need to go through this cycle. It’s the nature cycle of things. It’s the way everything that’s alive actually works.

What most of us are doing in this modern day and age is we’re just burning ourselves out by working all the time. And we don’t notice it because it’s not obvious, but the quality of our effort, and the quality of our results is going down. And this may sound simple, but the way to take more time off is to actually schedule it in advance; to actually make that the highest priority thing that you do.

One of the things that I’ve discovered over the last few years as I’ve started scheduling more time off, and really trying to separate the time that I spend working and focused from the time that I spend off and recovering, and rejuvenating, is that when I go away for a few days, or I go on a trip somewhere – I was actually just gone for a week, and I was completely unplugged from the internet, from the telephone, from everything. And when I come back, I can see everything differently.

Leonardo da Vinci said take some time off once in a while, and go away from your work, and when you come back you’ll see it differently; you’ll have a different perspective. And often times, when I come back from even just a day off – a full day without any focus on work, I’ll see the answer to something that had been perplexing me for a long time because I just got outside of it, and now I’m kind of looking at it whole.

So if you want to take more time off, take more time off, and watch how it actually increases your productivity. Go to your calendar right now, and mark off a couple of days to take off. Maybe it’s a weekend, maybe it’s a couple of days during the week depending on your schedule, but mark a couple of days, and just take them off. And completely unplug, and do whatever you need to do in order to take that time off.

Tim Ferriss tells the story in his book The 4-Hour Workweek about how he decided that he was going to go away from his business, and he was going to be gone, and not check his email for like a month. And all the preparation to get ready to set his business up, so he could take time off made him think in a new way, and it turned out that by doing all these things, and by taking time off his business actually increased. It’s a lesson that we could all learn. When you force yourself, when you make yourself take time off and when you schedule it, it makes you think differently. It makes you put things in place. It’ll actually increase your results in your productivity. So start taking more time off. Start scheduling your time off. Start putting it in your calendar. And watch your productivity skyrocket.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and email address, and opting in.

Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity; all for free. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and email address to get it all right now.

“How Do I Balance My Work Life With My Family Life?” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

How do I balance productivity with free time and family time? Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity training program.  If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com and enter your name and e-mail address.  You can watch this video worth $100.00, for free.

Okay, so let’s talk about how to balance high productivity with free time and with family time.  One of the questions that I get a lot from people is, Eben, you talk about all these great ways to focus and eliminate distractions and interruptions, but I’ve got a family, and I work at home or I work a lot and I’d really like more time off with my family, I’d like more time to recover.  The good news is that the more time you take off and the more time you take with your family, the more productive you will actually become.  Now this sounds counterintuitive, right? That sounds like it doesn’t make sense.  The more time I take off, the more productive I’ll become, and the reason why this is true, and you can prove it for yourself very quickly and I’ll tell you how in a minute, is that we’re overworked, we’re working more and more and more hours.  We’re draining ourselves, we’re actually overworking and over tasking ourselves to the point where doing more actually gets us less, if that makes sense.

So what we need to do is we need to take control of this addiction to our struggle and addiction to workaholism and take more time off.  One of the things I’ve learned from a great teacher named Dan Sullivan, who does a program called The Strategic Coach that you might wanna check out.  He recommends taking free time in blocks of 24 hours, where you actually unplug for a full 24 hours, and in his research, what he’s discovered is that the super high performers, the athletes and the entertainers and those that make the big multi-million dollar incomes, that that’s how they live.  Actually take these blocks and it’s usually more than 24 hours, it’s days and weeks, where they’re just relaxed, recovering, time off, and then when they’re working, they’re completely focused.  Now that’s kind of on the macro level, and on the micro level, one of the things that you can do throughout the day is take breaks, take short, intermittent breaks so that your body can kind of recover and it can rejuvenate itself so that the focus is there for you.

Now there’s another element here that I wanna incorporate, which is the family question because a lot of times there’s an aspect to this, which is hey, I work from home and I do a lot of work at home, and my family’s around.  And they just come in and they interrupt me and they think, oh well, you’re at home so you’re probably not really working.  Now what I’m going to say might sound a little funny at first, but go with me here.  If you really wanna have high quality family time and your family’s around you a lot or calling you a lot, you actually need to train your family, you need to train them that they’re going to get better, more, and higher quality time with you if they don’t bug you all the time.  Now, the training with your family is only going to go as well as you do it.  In other words, if you’re consistent and you have clear boundaries, and you just persistently keep reminding them and training them and asking them to not interrupt you while you’re focused.  With the promise that they’re going to get more high quality time with you if they don’t interrupt you, then the equation will make sense, and they will see the benefits that come from it.

But you have to do it.  You’ll notice that most people that own dogs, right, they don’t own the dog, the dog owns them and they do whatever the dog wants to do.  In fact, I was – this is funny, I was looking out my window, I live in kind of a high rise building, and I was looking out my window a couple of days ago, and I saw these two people walking down the path together and each of them had a little dog.  And they were walking, obviously going somewhere, and the dogs saw each other and started kind of pulling over towards each other, and as soon as the dogs met, the two people stopped, and then the dogs kind of did their thing and sniffed each other, and kind of played a little bit.  And the people didn’t really interact with each other, they just kind of watched the two dogs doing their thing, and then after a while, they said, “Okay, come on, it’s time to go.”  And in that moment, I realized, wow, that’s really what we do with our families, with our friends, with everyone in our lives.  We kind of go along in our life and if they want to do something, we just kind of stand there and go, “Okay, whatever you wanna do is fine,” and I realized that those dogs owned their owners.

The owners weren’t doing it because they wanted it, they were doing it to just kind of – that’s what the dogs wanted to do, and it wasn’t like the dogs were having a relationship or running around and playing or really getting anything out of it, they were just kind of sniffing each other and doing their thing.  And the owners just kind of ideally were like, “Okay, whatever you wanna do.”  Well, again, family, friends, coworkers, same thing happens.  If we let them, they’ll interrupt us and distract us and get us on their agenda with all of our time.  Whereas, if we set clear boundaries, we say, “I’m going to work during these times, I’m going to stay focused, but I’m also going to take a lot of time off and I’m going to spend a lot of quality time with you,” our productivity actually goes up.  So here’s what to do; right now, get out your calendar, get your family in the room, talk to them, and schedule some time with them.  If you don’t have a family and you wanna do it with your friends, schedule some time with your friends, put that time where you’re going to spend high quality, you’re actually going to invest high quality time in your relationships and those you love.  And you’ll find you’ll come back so much more rejuvenated.  Now make sure when you’re in that time with them, that you’re not checking your e-mail, you’re not looking at your phone, you’re not checking your voicemail, you’re not looking at your computer, totally get rid of that stuff so that you can recharge and you can allow your body and your emotions to do their thing. So if you really want to balance productivity with free time and with family time, then use these techniques that I’ve just shown you.  I think if you use them, you’ll find your productivity will start to skyrocket.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.  The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in.  Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable, free video trainings and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity, all for free.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“How Do I Stop Procrastinating?” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan



How do I stop procrastinating?  Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive time management and productivity training program.  If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com, and enter your name and email address.  You can watch this video worth $100.00 for free.

All right, so let’s talk about how to stop procrastinating.  I have a confession to make to you.  I am a natural born procrastinator.  I can make up the most beautiful and complex and real sounding excuses for why I don’t do things right now that you’ve ever seen.  In fact, when I sit back and I just watch my mind come up with excuses for, “Oh, that can wait.  I can do that later,” it’s really amazing to me.  I’ve actually created a couple of tools that I use for myself to make sure that I get things done.  I’d like to teach them to you right now.  One of them is an inner game thing, and one of them is an outer game thing.

The inner game thing that I do to eliminate procrastination is I come up with the reason why I’m doing something, and I really turn it up, and I make it into a big deal.  In other words, I really get in touch with the payoff for doing something.  What this means is let’s say I want to work on a business project.  I want to create a new product, or I want to build a relationship with another person.  Instead of just saying, “Oh, yeah, if I create a new product, it’ll probably sell, and we’ll make some money,” or, “I’d like to have a relationship person, and if I have a relationship with them, it’ll be really cool,” I really challenge myself to think through and brainstorm all of the great things that will come as a result of taking action.

Now, I’ve also noticed that great procrastinators are usually also great brainstormers because procrastination is about coming up with excuses for why you’re not doing something and actually being very creative.  If you focus that creativity just for a few minutes, even, on the big payoff or the outcome that you’ll get if you take action, and you make that into this huge win or this jackpot in your life, at some point, it’ll tip the scales, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from taking action.

Let’s say that I’m thinking about creating a relationship with a particular person.  I say, “Yeah, I’d really like to know that person and maybe do some work with him someday.  Nah, that’s not that interesting.  I know a lot of people already, and I’ve got a lot of things on my list to do.”

But if I say, “I’d like to meet that person and get to know them.  What are all the benefits that could flow from that?  They have a network of people.  Who in their network would I like to meet?  Oh, this person and that person.  Wow, it would be amazing if they introduced me to this person.  You know what else?  That person and I, we could work on something together.  We could collaborate on a book, on a project together, and if I collaborated with them on something, I’d learn so much, and I’d be able to build a relationship with them.  Wow, that sounds really interesting.  You know what?  I could work with them and some of the people in their network, and maybe we could get a networking group together on this topic.”

At some point, after thinking about it, I go, “Okay, I’ve got to do it right now,” because the procrastination mechanism is almost turned around and used against itself.  The same creativity that you use to come up with reasons why you’re not going to do something now or why you should wait for later are used to come up with all the great things that are going to happen if you do take action now.  So use that creativity of yours to think of all the great outcomes, to really think big about what could happen if you take action.  Eventually, it’ll just pull you into action.  That’s the inner game technique.

The outer game technique that I use – and this is probably the most powerful technique that I use on myself and that I’ve ever used on myself to get big things done.  It’s a simple technique, and it goes like this.  I make a big promise to a lot of people, and I put a deadline on it.  I make a big promise to a lot of people, and I put a deadline on it.  If you’ve seen any of my video training programs or any of my audio training programs, chances are that these programs were made from a live training of some kind either at a seminar or on a webinar or a teleclass, etc.

What I know is that if I want to create a new product, and I want to make sure it gets done, I can write an outline of what the product is going to look like, and then I can tell a whole bunch of people about it, invite a bunch of people.  I even market these things and sell tickets to them, so that people can attend the live filming or the creation of it.  Once I get the commitments and ten people sign up, and then 20 people or 50 people or 100 or hundreds or even thousands, then that clicks something in my brain.  It’s that part of me that knows that social pressure is good, and it just gets me into action.  And you know what?  I always perform.  When there are people counting on me, and when I know that they’re waiting for me – like I’m going to show up, and there are going to be 50 people that are going to be waiting for me, and they’re going to have high expectations, that knocks over all the dominos that make sure that I get things done.

Basically, every product that I’ve ever created and launched was created using this one technique.  I’ll tell you, it is very powerful.  I would probably have accomplished 20 percent or 40 percent as much if I hadn’t used this technique of committing big things.  Actually, you know what?  I would probably have accomplished 1 percent of what I’ve accomplished if I didn’t set expectations for other people.

Here’s what to do right now.  Make some big pictures.  Use your imagination to create a big why – the outcome that you would get if you will take action on your high priority.  Then, the next thing to do immediately is make a big commitment to a lot of people.  I don’t care if it’s sending an e-mail to 10 of your friends and saying, “I’m going to do this thing by this date.  You know what?  If I don’t do it, I’m going to give each of you $100.00 in cash.”  Use accountability that way.  If you’re in business like me, and you like to create products or like to create video trainings, invite a bunch of people to the training.  Do a free teleclass and invite a bunch of people to it, so that you have to be prepared, and then just record the teleclass.  Or create a live business training and charge for it and make money from it.

Either way, take these two tools that I’ve given you, and put them into action now, so that you can stop procrastinating, and you can start getting things done.

Finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in.  Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success and productivity all for free.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“Small Business Productivity (And How To Maximize It)” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

Business productivity and how to maximize it.  Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity Training Program.  If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com and enter your name and e-mail address.  And you can watch this video worth $100.00 for free.

Okay, so let’s learn how to maximize our business productivity.  Productivity is a hot topic right now because most of us can’t figure out how to get it or achieve it or create it.  We’re deluged by more communication and more distraction and interruption.  We’ve got more to do than ever, and somehow, it feels like we’re slogging along and just can’t get anything done.

And yet, we know if we can be more productive in business that that’s where all the rewards are because that’s how we create more financial security and more monetary success.  To me, business productivity comes down to a few key issues, and here they are.  No. 1) Minimizing and eliminating distraction and interruption.  No. 2) Focusing on the high value activities.  And No. 3) Creating habits and routines so that we do the right things every day.  So let’s take these in order.

First, distraction and interruption.  Distraction and interruption are probably the biggest robbers in this day and age.  In other words, they’re the things that steal the most money, time, energy, quality of relationship from us. We don’t even notice it.  We get distracted.  We get interrupted.  We also multi-task a lot, which is actually kind of self-imposed distraction and interruption.  It turns out that when you focus on one thing for an extended period of time that you get a lot more done.  I mean dramatically more done than if you are distracted and interrupted.  I like to imagine – you know, I live here in Los Angeles, and let’s say I wanted to drive down to San Diego.  It might be 100 miles or so from where I live in San Diego.  Now, I can drive out and get on the freeway, and I can drive straight to San Diego, 100 miles.  It’ll probably take me, with traffic, something like an hour and a half, maybe two hours driving at a leisurely pace.

Now there’s another way I can go.  I can take surface streets from here to San Diego.  I could go down a surface street and stop at the stoplight and go to another one and stop and go to another one and stop.  And there’d be places where I probably had to take the freeway because there was just no surface street to get me from here to there, but how long would it take if I took surface streets as far as I could?  It would probably take me like six or eight hours to get to San Diego.  Plus, while I’m driving all these surface streets, I’m going to get distracted.  I’ll be like, “Oh, that looks like a cool place,” and I’m going to stop and look at it.  Or, “You know what?  I’m hungry.  Look at that.  I’m going to get some food.”  And that’s going to increase it even more.

Well, this is what distractions and interruptions and multi tasks do for our lives.  Instead of getting on the freeway and just cruising straight there in one shot, we get interrupted all the time, and we have all these things that come in.  And we have to keep stopping and starting and stopping and starting.  So if you want to really increase your productivity, if you want to increase your business productivity, eliminate distraction and interruption.  Eliminate it physically, emotionally, and logically.  Physically set up your environment so you’re not distracted and interrupted.  Turn off your phone.  Turn of your text messages.  Turn off your instant messenger and your Skype. Turn off your e-mail.  Turn it all off so that no information can come in and interrupt you.  Train your family.  Train the people that you work with.  Train those around you that you’re going to be focused, that you’re not to be interrupted for multi-hour periods so you can focus for multiple hours at a time.  You might say that’s not realistic.  It is realistic, and in fact, it’s the only way.  That’s the only way out of this is to focus in uninterrupted blocks of time.  So eliminate distraction and interruption.

The second thing I mentioned was to focus on the important things.  If you’re going to increase your productivity, you have to stop confusing activity with results, and you have to do those things that actually get the most results.  In business, it’s so easy to just do a bunch of stuff that seems like it might get some results. I mean we can look great while we’re creating reports and clicking around in Microsoft Excel and writing a bunch of e-mails and talking to people about what we’re doing, but actually going and doing the things that are important, the things that make money when it’s all said and done, that’s a much bigger challenge.  In business, I’ve discovered that there are three things that make big money.  Those are products, marketing, and relationships.  Products, marketing, and relationships.  Products is creating those things that people buy.  It could be products.  It could be services.  It could be continuity programs.  Whatever it is that you sell.  But creating those things, creating more and more new products and services, that’s one of the things that creates lots of value for your business, makes money, and creates high lifetime value and creates assets for your business.

The next thing, marketing, and this is everything that you do to market, sell, merchandise your business and your products.  So creating sales letters, creating videos, like the video that I’m creating right now.  Talking to customers.  Talking to potential partners about doing deals.  Okay?  This is marketing.  That’s the – that’s kind of the essence of marketing is doing the things that actually brings in customers.  And the final thing is relationships.  And I’m not just talking about any relationship.  I’m talking about those relationships that yield the highest return on investment, and in business, those relationships are relationships with partners who help you sell your stuff.

Your partners that will market and sell your stuff to their lists, to their customers, etc.  Your relationships with your employees and your team and your contractors.  Those are the people that do all of the things that make the money.  Relationships with your best customers.  Fostering relationships with long-term customers.  So products, marketing, relationships.  If you’re not investing 80 percent of your time on products, marketing, and relationships, then you’re wasting your time and you’re not going to create a lot of business productivity for yourself.

And then the final thing is to focus your time.  Focus it in uninterrupted blocks and create a habit of doing this. This is the most important one of all.  Remember, I said earlier that with distraction and interruption, we’re getting distracted and interrupted.  We can’t make that straight shot to San Diego.  Well, the way to get on that freeway to San Diego to make it so you get a lot done and you stay focused is to make it a habit.  As an example, when you first start work every day, instead of checking your e-mail and your voicemail and getting a bunch of distractions and interruptions, go to work for a few hours on the high priority things, which are, as we just discussed, products, marketing, and relationships.  Put the highest value things first.

And then go get distracted and interrupted.  If you’ll just focus on those three things:  Eliminating distraction and interruption; focusing on products, marketing, and relationships; and then focusing your time in uninterrupted blocks on those high value things – again, without distraction and interruption – you will watch as your business productivity will skyrocket.  So get to work on them now.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47 minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in.  Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the tops experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity all for free.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.

“How To Set Goals And Accomplish Them” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

How to set goals and accomplish them. Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity Training Program.  If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com, and enter your name and email address, and you can watch this video worth $100 for free.

Let’s talk about how to set goals, and how to accomplish them.  Goal setting is one of the most talked about areas of personal development, self-help, etc.  And it’s also one of the things that people do the least.  Everybody’s heard, you need to set goals, you got to set goals, set goals and you’ll accomplish them, but most people don’t do it.  Well, I think there are a couple of reasons why we don’t set goals, and I think that there are a couple of simple techniques we can use to actually set goals and accomplish them.

Why don’t we set goals?  If we know they’re so important, why do we avoid it?  Well, there was a book written several years ago called Stop Setting Goals if You Would Rather Solve Problems, and it’s a book by Bobb Biehl.  In the book he talks about this idea that most people are not motivated by setting goals.  Something like 80 percent of people when you say set goals, their eyes glaze over and they go, “That doesn’t sound fun at all.”  But if you say to them, “I have a problem.  Can you help me solve it,” or, “here’s a list of problems we need to solve,” or, “can you find some of the problems we can solve,” these people leap into action.  They love solving problems.  They don’t like to set goals; they like to solve problems.  And then only maybe 20 percent of us are really motivated by goal setting.  So if we just recognize that a lot of us would rather solve problems than set goals, that just frees up a lot of energy because we go, “Okay, it’s not just about goal setting.  There are more ways to look at this.”  So that’s kind of one-way to look at it.

Another reason why people don’t set goals is they just don’t know how.  They never learned the technique for setting goals.  And I’d like to introduce a technique to you right here for setting goals that I think you’ll find very valuable.  When instructed to set goals, or make a list of all your goals, what most people do is they take out their pen and paper, and they sit there and they look at the paper, and they say, “Okay, I wanna be happy,” or, “I wanna make some money,” or, “I wanna get a raise,” or, “I want my wife to stop nagging me,” or whatever, and they’re not really into the reality of what would happen if they created a vision for their life, if they created an outcome that they can see clearly, and then they made it happen.  They’re not in touch with all of the other implications that that would have on their life.

A much better way is to use this powerful tool called your brain and your mind, and use them to help you set goals.  Before you ever pick up the pen and paper and actually write your goals down, it’s so important to use again, this vast tool that you have to imagine what your life would be like if you had or accomplished certain things, or had relationships with certain people.  If when I say, “Okay, give me a list of all your goals,” instead of taking out a pen and paper, and writing down a big list, and saying, “What do I want,” you just stopped, and you closed your eyes, and you started to imagine different scenarios in your mind.  What if I accomplished this outcome?  What if I had a relationship with this person?  What if I was able to achieve this?  What if I got this thing in my life?  And then ask, what are all the other things that would happen afterwards?  What would that lead to?  What would that trigger?  If I imagine that that’s a domino in my life, what other dominos would that one knock down automatically?

And what you’ll realize is that by thinking about it for a while, and just using your imagination, using your power to think big, you’ll come up with some great goals to achieve.  Most people just try to go right to, “I got to write down the goal that I want.  I wanna a new car,” and then somehow it’s going to happen automatically.  It’s not about that.  It’s about asking, if I get a new car, what will happen in my life?  And when you ask if I get a new car, what you might realize is, well, I’ll get a new car.  I’ll get into it.  It’ll be enjoyable to drive. I’ll be able to show off to other people.  I’ll enjoy it.  But then you realize, a month or two later, I’m going to get used to my new car, and I’m going to be making a bigger car payment.  And you know what, I’m going to lose the thrill of having it, and it really isn’t going to mean anything to me, except spending more money.  The car I have is fine.  You might realize that.

On the other hand, the goal might be to build a relationship with a particular mentor in your life, and you might start thinking about that.  What happens if I build a relationship with that mentor, and you’ll realize yeah, I’ll develop to the next level, I’ll learn a whole bunch of things that I wouldn’t have known before, they’ll introduce me to other influential and powerful people.  I’ll be able to get mentored by some of their friends.  That’ll increase my income, my personal satisfaction.  You know what, that’s a really important goal.  That’s something that I really need to figure out how to do.

So step one in setting goals is to use the power of your mind to imagine all the outcomes that would happen.  Next, if you relate it to the idea of being a problem solver, take the goal that you’ve set, or the vision that you’ve set for yourself, and make a list of all the problems that you need to solve in order to reach the goal.  My mentor Jerry Ballinger taught me that for problem solvers, a great mental exercise to do is to go out into the future, and imagine that the goal has been reached.  Imagine that you’ve completed the vision.  You’ve gotten there.  And then look back, and ask yourself what are all the problems that I had to solve on the way there?  And that can become a very useful way for problem solvers to find a list of things that they need to do in order to reach their goal.

So goal setting and problem solving, they’re like two different muscles, and we want to work on both of them.  We don’t want to just jump to making a list of things we want.  We really want to use our minds to figure out, if I reach this goal, what will it mean to me?  And once we have found a goal that will just explode our lives in the most positive way, and that will really bring us more, and more, and more of what we want, then we want to really think about that.  We want to consider that seriously as a goal to set for ourselves.  And then once we’ve set that goal – we’ve chosen it, we then want to back track and we want to say, okay, now, I’m going to go out into the future.  I’m going to look back and I’m going to say what were all the problems that I had to solve on the way to creating this goal?

I want to say one more thing here.  If you really wanna make it so that you reach your goals, ask yourself the question, what conditions do I have to set up in my life so that the outcome I wanna achieve, or the goal that I wanna get is going to happen automatically.  If I set up these conditions, it’s just going to happen automatically.  It’s one of my favorite questions because it takes you up a level, you go meta, you zoom out, and you’re looking at the situation whole.  And instead of just saying all right, how do I get this thing, you’re saying, what conditions do I have to set up in life?  And conditions can be relationships with people.  They can be setups, so that that you do this one thing, and it causes this other thing to happen.  Conditions can be a lot of different things in your physical environment, emotional, relationships.  And when you ask, what conditions do I set, so that the goal happens automatically, it just causes you to think on a different level, and I think it’ll help you reach your goals a lot faster.  So you use the techniques to set goals, and watch yourself achieve them quicker than you thought possible.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones, just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47 minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and how to make yourself dramatically more productive.  The video is worth $100, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and email address, and opting in.

Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity, all for free.  Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and email address to get it all right now.

“Time Management: What It Is And Why It’s Important” – Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan

Time management. What it is and why it’s important to do it. Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity Training Program. If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com and enter your name and e-mail address, and you can watch this video worth $100.00 for free. So let’s talk about time management, how to do it, and why it’s important.

First of all, I want to share a quote with you that I got from Steven Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Steven is a genius, and he says, “Time management is a misnomer. The challenge is to manage ourselves.” See, you can’t actually manage time. It runs at the same speed whatever you decide to do, so you can’t really manage time. But what you can do is learn to manage yourself. The big challenge in this day and age is to manage ourselves. We are dealing with all kinds of challenges that we never had to deal with before. Al Reese and Jack Trout who wrote the book positioning, they said in that book that we live in the world’s first over-communicated society, meaning that there’s too much information and communication coming in. Now they wrote that book back in 1980.

Think about that for a moment. They said that we’re in the world’s first over-communicated society before the internet and before everyone had cell phones and before everyone was dealing with instant messenger and all of these direct access 24/7 ways to get in touch with everyone, anytime, everywhere. So if we were the world’s first over-communicated society then, what are we now and what does that mean? Well, where we are now is we are completely drowning in communication. We’re drowning in information. We’re drowning in distraction and interruption. We’re overloaded by all the things that are happening.

And in order to confront this, we have to realize that we can’t do everything, we can’t look at everything, we can’t see everything. We can’t take advantage of every opportunity. We have to become very selective. When we talk about time management and productivity, what we’re really talking about, again, is self-management and getting ourselves to do the things that are the important things. What you’ll find in life is that if you just focus on a few key, important things and do them over and over and over, the rest will take care of itself. If you eat simple meals of healthy food, do a little bit of exercise everyday, health just takes care of itself.

If you invest quality time, one on one, in an open dialogue on a regular basis with people that are important to you, the relationship will take care of itself. That’s the way things work. But we don’t do these things. What we do instead is we eat a bunch of snacks and junk food and forget to exercise, or we say I’ll do that later, or we buy the food that has the thing that says low-fat on it, and you think, “Oh, that means that I won’t have to do any exercise.” Or we make a quick call, and we say, “Hey, how are you doing? I love you,” and we think that that’s quality time. Or even worse, time that we’re spending with people that are important to us. We’re checking our phones and our Blackberries, and we’re looking online and text messaging. We’re really not having that deep, quality connection.

That is what destroys health and relationships. Well, same thing destroys productivity. It destroys getting results in business and in our lives. When we focus on just those few things that are important, and we figure out how to get ourselves to behave to focus on those things, that’s when life really turns around. Interestingly enough, I’ve discovered that time management really comes down to setting conditions in your life that make it so that you can’t do anything but focus on the important things. It’s not about making a list of things to do and then doing the right things, although that can be important sometimes. It’s about setting up your life and your environment so that you automatically do the things that are important, and you don’t have the option to do other things.

Examples include when you first get to work in the morning, don’t check your voicemail and your e-mail. Work for a couple of hours on your most important project, and work on something that has a high lifetime value. Something that is going to make a lot of value, create a lot of money now and in the future. What do most people do? They come in, they check their e-mail, voicemail, and they see what everyone else has on the agenda for them. Another thing to do is to set aside entire days. Entire days of time where you’re only focused on the things that create the most value and bring in the most money so that you’re not checking your e-mail. You’re not checking your voicemail. You’re not doing any of that stuff. You might check your e-mail and your voicemail once or twice during that day, but only for a little period of time.

The rest of the time, you’re just solely focused on getting something done. Another thing that we need to train ourselves to do is invest time in focused, uninterrupted blocks. Now this is an idea that all the great time management gurus teach. All the way from Peter Drucker back in The Effective Executive. The modern experts like Dan Sullivan, Jim Lare, and Tony Schwartz who wrote The Power of Full Engagement. Very important to just focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Cultivate the ability to focus your mind. And when you’re focused on one thing for an extended period of time and you block out all the distractions and interruptions, and I mean turn off the phone, turn off the computer, turn off everything else, you don’t have anything to do but that one thing.

So time management, what it is, it’s about managing yourself. Not about managing your time. It’s about learning how to develop healthy habits and rituals so that you do the right things everyday. And counter intuitively, it’s about setting up the conditions in your life physically, emotionally, and logically so that you’re forced to do the right thing, and you don’t have any other options. So get to work right now doing the right things every day and blocking out, creating an environment that blocks out any distractions and any interruptions so you just stay focused. If you just do that one thing, create an environment that blocks out distraction and interruption and keeps you focused on those few important things, you’ll watch your productivity start to skyrocket immediately.

And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused. Learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time, and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable free video trainings, and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity all for free.

Just go to WakeUpProductive.com. Enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.