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How much time do you think we have? How often do we actually think about that while spending a typical day? In spite of being aware of our limited time on the planet, we keep wasting the majority of it away in sections of our workday without even realizing it. So, when you think you achieved 90% of your targeted productivity level, you actually just touched about 70%, because you might still be unconsciously wasting time in tiny little junk blocks of your day.
In this article, we are going to talk about things that you can do to achieve more in the limited time you have in your day, inspired by Matthew Dicks. Matthew Dicks, is someone who has experienced two near-death experiences in life; one was a ridiculous car crash, and the other was being held at gunpoint at the age of 22. These experiences basically edged him to learn the instinct of survival—how to be completely broke, work at McDonald’s, and become a best-selling author and a world-champion storyteller.
“I was sure that I was going to die, and at that moment, I was not filled with fear, or sadness, or anger. The only feeling I was filled with was regret, and I was 22 years old, and I had failed to achieve anything with my life, that I had planned to do,” says, Matthew Dicks.
But here, we want to talk about seven actionable ways you can achieve more in life.
1. Parking Lot Work Practice
The first thing that you have to learn here is that productivity is not pretty. For instance, when students are making their notes, they usually tend to make them in the most elaborate or decorated way. But what this approach says is that productivity does not really have to be pretty. You may understand this better here: a man, while waiting in parking or at a traffic signal, who knows he is going to be stuck there for a long time, simply starts working on his laptop on the novel that he’s been working on for a long time.
During World War I, people were found scribbling in their journals about the things that they would do when and if they survived the war. So thank God the writers of the 19th century didn’t need Starbucks, smooth jazz, and two-hour blocks of time to get their work done. The point is that there is no perfect place to work, especially when you have a chaotic life. You might wait for a very long time.
2. Lilypad Method Work
The method suggests that the only failure for a creator is to stop making stuff, which could mean creating art, working on your business, learning that code, or figuring out your next YouTube video, or anything. But sometimes, these creative processes might feel a little too overwhelming, especially while you’re working on something massive, like preparing for an important exam, filing a really important application, or trying to crack a really important interview.
Normally, doing a task requires you to break it into a sequence of events that have to happen in a particular order to complete that task successfully. But the Lilypad method recognizes that you can simply jump around to complete a task.
For instance, a writer told Matthews that she wanted to write a memoir but didn’t know where to start. He suggested she start with some of the memories that she might want to include in the book. To that, she was confused and asked him, “Don’t you have to start a book at the beginning? And he was like, no. As long as you see your goal and have the stepping stones in front of you, you may touch each one of them, but not in a particular order. What’s important is to just start and write Chapter 50 if that’s what you can do today.
So, think of these tasks as Lilypads scattered around in a lake, and consider these as the little steps that you would need to take to complete a task or your work. So, on days you have more motivation, you may touch and cover longer distances between lilypads, whereas on days with low motivation, you may come back and touch the smaller and nearby lilypads to just move in that direction, and you still make progress.
In an interview with a scientist,
He always works on five or six books right now. He chooses one project, whichever he feels more aligned with. So what you really need to ask yourself is: when it comes to pursuing your goals, how might you be able to start in the middle rather than in the beginning?
3. Purposeful Approach
Productivity does not mean work, hustle, or money. It’s actually the thing you should be doing more of, not having to do. The way you need to think of productivity is to maximize the number of hours spent doing the things that will give you more hours to do the things that actually matter to you.
And this is why soft goals are quite important. Figure out the things that are quite important to you; they may or may not be productive, but they need to be critical to you and very satisfying and fulfilling. One person wants to watch the most wonderful 50 movies in the world. This can be productivity too, which can be done if the work is more
4. 100-Year-Old Plan
This tip suggests that you should always ask your 100-year-old self about something that you are doing now, and no one else. For instance, if someone is writing a book but his son comes and asks him to play, one path is that he continues working since he needs to be disciplined. But the other path is when your 100-year-old self goes to play with the kid because the kid might not have time to play with you tomorrow. This will also help you avoid any multitasking.
5. Minutes Mindset
He was meeting someone who was writing a book. She was supposed to meet him at McDonald’s, but she was late, so she sat down and started describing the book. So how much have you started writing? You were seven minutes late today. And he used those seven minutes to show her the number of sentences he wrote in them. And this approach is wonderful if you really think about it.
Not 24 hours, but 1440 minutes.
The author tells all the creatives that each minute of your life is precious. For instance, every ten minutes might not be enough to write a chapter, but they are enough for me to re-read the last three paragraphs I wrote and see if they are okay, or actually write five new beautiful sentences. This is also how different YouTubers are able to manage different accounts and content creation while being doctors.
Not at all saying that there should not be any time to relax or time to sleep off. They are completely essential for you to have a balance at work, but you need to be able to fill in those blanks in your hours. Like, do you need it to be 5 exactly to start something? What if you just started now?
6. Piano Precedent
What this concept basically says is that the more structured and strict your planning is, the more chances there are that there will be something in the universe that will come to ruin it. I’m not saying that planning is not good; in fact, planning will actually help you survive those harsh weathers of fate, but what you need to understand is that your plans and your fate don’t always go hand in hand. There are other factors determining it that are completely out of your hands. So, what you need to be mindful of is that your plans always have a sense of flexibility and scope to improvise and adapt according to your fate.
A quote from the book says, “Five-Year Plans are inviting the universe to drop a piano on you.”This means that the more structured your planning is, in terms of the years you want to plan, the more inevitable it becomes for it to not happen for you. So, be really mindful of that while making a five-year or ten-year plan, for that matter.
Read about what stressing out can do to your brain.
7. Horizon-Habit
Now, you’ve probably heard of SMART goals for your work, which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. The problem with setting these goals is that often we set them for something that’s out of our control. Now, what can be done here is horizon-setting. For instance, you want to be a musician, so you need to put musician on the horizon and look for different streams that will lead you there, like being a producer or a technician, getting a job in the event industry, playing like a DJ, being a music teacher, and so on. This method basically gives you freedom and relativity to understand which stream aligns with you while you grow.
Our work goals are ultimately just the destination. They don’t actually help us get there.
Also, here are some ways you can work on your procrastination to achieve even more in 24 hours, especially made for workaholics.
All in all, we really think that picking up on these seven actionable items will build up your productivity and make you achieve way more than before. Please read more such articles that we wrote on enhancing productivity here and leave a comment below giving us feedback.
