How Can You Be More Productive? Top 5 Tips | Smarter Fa… — Transcript

Here's my five tips for becoming instantly more productive. Tip number one, when you're on your way to work in the morning, picture your day. Build a mental model of what's going to happen throughout the rest of the day by telling yourself a story of what you expect to occur. That will make you more sensitive to paying attention to the right things and ignoring the things that you don't need to.

Tip number two, look for choices that make you feel in control because that will generate self-motivation. For instance, when you're replying to emails, start each email just by typing a sentence, any sentence at all, that asserts that you're in charge. By deciding where you want to have lunch or by saying yes or no, anything that makes you feel in control will make it easier to get all those emails done.

Tip number three, when you're writing a to-do list, always start by putting at the top of your to-do list some big overarching stretch goal, some ambition that will remind you of what to do next.

But then underneath, create a subgoal that's a smart goal, something that's specific and measurable, achievable, realistic, that has a timeline because that's going to give you your plan. It's going to tell you what your first step is and once you have a first step, it's much, much easier to get through everything else on your list. Tip number four, when you're in a meeting today, try and just on a pad of paper keep track of who's spoken and how often they have. You want to try and get psychological safety in a team to make it effective and one of the key ingredients of that is does everyone get a chance to speak up in roughly equal proportion? It's hard to keep track of who's talked and who hasn't. So, when a meeting starts, just make a quick list of who's in the room and as each person talks, just check them off and by the end of the meeting, you'll know do you have psychological safety? Do you have equality in conversational turn-taking?

And if so, your team will be much more effective. Tip number five, when you encounter a new fact or lesson or something that you want to remember today, force yourself to turn to someone else and explain it to them. Now, that's not for their benefit, it's for yours because research shows that when we force ourselves to vocalize what we just learned and explain it to someone else, we're much more likely to remember it over the long term. Information becomes stickier when we have to interact and use it.

But then underneath, create a sub goal that's a smart goal, something that's specific and measurable, achievable, realistic, that has a timeline because that's going to give you your plan. It's going to tell you what your first step is and once you have a first step, it's

much, much easier to get through everything else on your list. Tip number four, when you're in a meeting today, try and just on a pad of paper keep track of who's spoken and how often they have. You want to try and get

psychological safety in a team to make it effective and one of the key ingredients of that is does everyone get a chance to speak up in roughly equal proportion? It's hard to keep track of who's talked and who hasn't. So, when a

meeting starts, just make a quick list of who's in the room and as each person talks, just check them off and by the end of the meeting, you'll know do you have psychological safety? Do you have equality in conversational turn taking?

And if so, your team will be much more effective. Tip number five, when you encounter a new fact or lesson or something that you want to remember today, force yourself to turn to someone else and explain it to them. Now, that's not for their

benefit, it's for yours because research shows that when we force ourselves to vocalize what we just learned and explain it to someone else, we're much more likely to remember it over the long term. Information becomes stickier when we have to interact and

use it.