Gaining Momentum: A 4-Step Process for Starting Every Day Productively - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

all right so how many times have you woken up just in time to get out the door and rush off to class or or a part-time job or whatever it may be and you go through your day and then you get home and you realize that yeah you got everything that had to be done done you got your classes done you went to work you did all that but you ended up leaving a lot on the table still you had lots of tasks and goals and little things you wanted to do and they just kind of piled up and never got done and you know day after day this keeps happening and all it's doing is causing you dress well a lot of people have that problem I had that problem and today I want to share with you a four-step process that I've been using to set myself up for a more productive day and you can use this just practice it every single day and it gives you momentum it makes the rest of your day more productive and as you get better at it then every day gets more and more productive uh along down the road so let's get into it number one plann the night before so youve probably already got everything that you need to do in a task management system like Trello or one list or whatever it may be maybe just a notebook where you write down due dates and projects and everything and it kind of just it's a big long list of everything that you've got coming up in the next few weeks or months uh Etc and that's great but realistically on any given day on a day scale very you know very magnified scale you can only get one you know two or three things done uh two big projects three two or three big projects so uh looking at this big task management system is just kind of a you know a stopper you just look at it and you freeze up and doing that is uh not very good for your productivity so it's better to have a separate daily list where you keep two to three things that you know you need to get done that day and you make this every single day and rather than making this in the morning when you've already got your morning routine to do and you've already got classes to rush off to do this the night before when you're relaxed when you can sit down and you can have a clear vision of what needs to be done the next day write it down and whatever system you like I honestly like to use a whiteboard it's right on my wall I can wake up I can see okay it's Tuesday I need to do this this and this I'm going to get these things done anything else is extra it's icing on the cake and uh that's cool but I'm going to get these three things done and if you plan that the night before it helps you to stay calm when you wake up in the morning it helps you to get everything else done and you know what you need to do and honestly I almost feel like I'm beholden to my past self when I wake up uh if I wake up and I try to set everything I need to do in the morning then I'm like oh it's just you know me planning and I I can get very stressed and very confused by it but if it's already set up the night before I'm like these are things that I set in the past and I am almost obligated to my past self to get them done so it helps with my motivation so number two the second step in the process that helps you have a more motivated uh productive day is the clear to neutral technique and this is a technique developed by my friends over at Asian efficiency. comom which if you find the link in the show notes to the blog post that goes along with this video you'll find a link link to their blog which is very good but the clear neut neutral technique or CTN is essentially a technique that helps you clear everything from your plate it helps reduce the friction that is involved with getting into any new task so the big one for me is closing down all the tabs in my browser when I'm finished working for the day because if I don't do this then the next day I wake up I sit down on my computer to work and I realize oh crap I have 15 open tabs and every single one of them represents something I could be doing usually all of them are research for projects or people I could be contacting or cool new tools I want to try out and if I have them all up in the morning it just sort of creates a jumble in my brain and all the planning I did the night before all that productive planning is sort of lost because I'm now confused and I want to jump into 15 other different projects so clear to neutral is a technique that helps you avoid this problem and you can use it for anything else you can use it for like cooking uh after you finish cooking at night you can make sure to wash the dishes right away so when you wake up in the morning the kitchen is clean spotless and ready for you to cook breakfast without any friction so that's the second technique and those two techniques are usually practiced the night before so these are sort of end of the day techniques that help you translate into the next day the last two techniques on the list are things you do in the morning and the first one is waking up early now you don't have to wake up arbitrarily early but I think it's a good idea to wake up early enough that you have some time to relax some time to sort of get your bearings for the day and practice a morning ritual which is the fourth technique but I want to talk about waking up early first so if you can uh convince yourself to get up early in the morning have some time to relax you won't find yourself rushing out the door stressed and just trying to catch the bus now how do you get up early this is a question I've been asking myself for years and I tried tons and tons of different techniques and sometimes they would work for a few days and eventually I would sort of my my sleepy self would hack the way through them and I would stay in bed but I have found one that works 100% of the time and I've been doing it for about 5 months now and I actually use Twitter to force myself to get up so this is a technique you can steal from me if you like I use a Twitter scheduler called buffer which you can find at buffer app.com and every night I schedule a tweet that is set for 6:10 a.m. that says hey it's 6:10 I'm still in bed I'm lazy if you reply to this tweet then I will send you $5 and then there's a little disclaimer that says you know limit five and if my alarm clock Mal malfunction I have the right to uh you know say that I was honestly going to get up but this is a technique that has been working for 5 months so I would never lie because I know that that would forever break the technique and my alarm has never malfunctioned they make sure to check my phone so for 5 months straight I've been getting up at 6:00 a.m. on every single weekday and having some time in the morning to be productive before I get into my work so this is a thing that you can try if you want to get up in the morning and the fourth technique which I mentioned earlier is having a morning ritual getting up early gives you you time to have a morning ritual in which you can practice some productive habits that sort of give you a little bit of a momentum boost to like push you into the harder work of the day but also help you uh also help you make some progress on some smaller goals so what I do in the morning is I get up I make sure to make breakfast to make a healthy breakfast with some spinach and some eggs I go for a walk and listen to a podcast so I get a little bit of exercise get some sunlight and also listen to a podcast and educate myself a little bit and then I come back and do some pull-ups and push-ups I read for about half an hour take my vitamins and I'm good to go so once I've started my work for the day I already have all these things behind me they're all very productive habits and they've given me uh a bit of momentum to start working on the really hard stuff like writing or making videos or whatever it might be so try that out and if you want a a good tool for tracking these little habits and sort of giving yourself a little more motivation to do them I recommend using habit RPG it's sort of a a geeky tool that lets you level up a character and get experience points but I really like it especially for the reason that you can partner with other users and go on quests and if you don't do your habits then they lose health and then they come yell at you so I use it with my roommate and it's actually a really good motivational tool so that is a four-step process uh four different things you can do to at night the night before and then two first thing in the morning that give you sort of a foundation for having a productive day so uh if you want to get the links for any of the apps that I mentioned in this video or read like The overview for each part of the process then in in the show notes for this video or below in the description you'll find a link to the blog post that goes along with it uh if you happen to be on YouTube and you can check that out if you like this video then subscribe to my channel because there will be lots more videos coming uh in the future on making you a more productive [Music] [Music] student