21 out of 24 hours in your lives and the lives of people you admire look exactly the same. Everyone procrastinates.
Instead of motivating yourself to work entire day (which is humanly impossible), if you can just work on the most important task for only 3 hours every day, that would be roughly 1000 hours in a year.
Any of these things is possible in 1000 hours:
- 300-Page Book. You can become a best-selling author
- $100K-500K valuation Start-up. You can go from zero to first 1000 customers
- Learn 5 languages. You can learn Spanish, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi. Together with English, that would mean you can talk to 90% of people in this world in their first languages
- Perfect Fitness-Trainer body. You can reduce from 100kg to 80kg, or gain from 60kg to 80kg
- Build your Personal Brand. You can go from zero to 15,000 followers on your Instagram (as I have)
Now imagine you do that for 3 or 5 years! Where would you be?!
One tool I use to keep producing output day-in day-out is my 80% Productivity Calendar.
Here’s how it looks:
At the start of each day, you decide 2 important tasks you need to complete that day. Only TWO – it’s critical.
If we have 5 or more tasks on our To-Do List, we end up becoming overwhelmed, resulting in procrastination.
For the 2 tasks, one of those goes into your Most Important Task for the day. And second is your Second Most Important Task.
Your Most Important Task gets you 60 points.
Your Second Most Important Task is 40 points.
If you were able to complete both tasks, you give yourself 100 Total Points for that day.
Else 60, 40, or 0 points depending on your completion.
If you are unable to complete any task on the day, you can list it again as Most or Second Most Important Task for the next day.
Now here’s the best part.
Your goal for each week is to score at least 80% points.
This is extremely important. You are successful if you score at least 80%. Not 100%.
This is important because there will be unforeseen events. You will miss a task or two throughout the week. If you aim to hit 100% and miss one task on Tuesday for example, you are going to see yourself as failure and not work the entire week.
This 80% target is critical to know that you can always make a come back.
Or, in my case, keep producing high-quality smart content for my readers.
For each week you score 80%, you give yourself reward you’ve promised.
These rewards could be Shopping, Movie night, Drinks until dawn at your favourite club, Weekend road trip, or pretty much any experience that you love doing but feel guilty otherwise thinking you are wasting time or money.
Having this 80% Productivity Calendar and giving yourself that REWARD will make you enjoy it much more because you will feel that you have EARNED it.
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Bonus: Tim Urban has the best TED Talk (27M+ views) on Procrastination if you wanna dive deep in the mind of a procrastinator.
