افزایش بهره وری

CHAPTER TEN

INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity can be boiled down to one word, focus. There are two types of focus you need in order to master productivity. First, the ability to manage distractions so that you can focus moment to moment on the task at hand. And second, the skill of focusing on what’s truly important to you in the big picture, so you don’t waste your day on stupid stuff. We’re gonna explore both types of focus then we take a look at the latest research on the subject. And finally you’re gonna learn how to use the five second rule to master the skills of focusing your time on what’s most important and managing distractions as they pop up.

Get serious about managing distractions

Look managing distractions is like following through on health goals. You’re never gonna feel like it. You just have to make yourself do it. You already know that being addicted to your phone, texting, and answering emails is a distraction, but stopping it can feel impossible. Even though you know that you should turn off pop-up alerts, silence your phone and stop checking email every five minutes, I bet having this knowledge, cause we all do, is not changing your behavior, is it? You still looking at your emails. You still answering your pop ups. You still got the reminders on. And I could spend literally the next 10 hours of this book, burying your ass with research about how bad this is. And guess what? That’s not gonna change your behavior either. This is where the five second rule comes into play. You don’t have to want to do it. You just have to push yourself to do it.

So first things first. Can we agree that distractions are not good for you. Seriously, you’ve got to make a decision that you’re gonna remove distractions. Interruptions of any sort, any sort, an email, a phone call, a text, a pop up, whatever it may be, they are a kiss of death for your productivity. Research shows, for example that open office spaces, yeah they look really cool, don’t they? They are a nightmare for focus. Checking email, you know checking email is such an addictive thing? Have you ever read anything about this? It’s interesting. There’s a word for it, that you’re gonna start seeing pop up all the time and behavioral researchers have realized that the addictive quality of email is the exact same psychological makeup as the addictive quality of pulling a slot machine lever. It’s a concept called random rewards. The reason why people set a slot machines and they pull and then they look and see what comes up, and then they pull and then they look and see what comes up, is every third or fourth pole, you got a good one. And so you keep pulling. Psychologically you’re looking for that next payout. Same is true with email. Let’s say every seven or eight gonna blow and then every once in a while I get kind of a good one, right? Somebody sends a funny video or maybe there is a compliment from somebody at work. Random rewards, it’s a psychological principle, is the reason why you can’t help yourself but to continue to interrupt your important work by checking your email.

So, first you gotta decide, you know, maybe it’s not the greatest thing that I’m constantly distracted. Let me give you another example. Have you ever sit around and talk to a friend and you got some really important that you want to talk to them about and they keep looking at their phone? It’s annoying, isn’t it? Really annoying. I’m not talking about just when you’re chitchatting but when you’re actually trying to get somebody to pay attention to you. Your brain is the same way. When you got an important work, your brain really wants you to pay attention. Every time you check email, you surf the web, you check out YouTube, you fiddle around with something, you’re not paying attention to what’s important. So I cannot stress this enough. You gotta make a decision. Hey, during those time blocks, I gotta concentrate, I gotta remove the distractions. Then, and this sounds so dumb to even have to say it, the next step is you gotta remove them. I’m not claiming this is rocket science. I’m also not going to tell you that it’s easy. I think sometimes the simplest things in life are the hardest things to do. But I promise you that if you use the five second rule you’ll actually do it. When you start to remove distractions and you’re able to focus on the moment to moment, things that actually matter, you’ll have no idea how much this is going to help.

This is what Karen said when she took an hour, that’s what she did. She took an hour. She forced herself to stay focused and she reprogrammed her phone and her computer simply to remove pop-ups and email alerts. So that she when she was working on something in writing, she wouldn’t get interrupted. You have no idea, Karen writes, how much you have helped me. No idea. Every single day from the bottom of my heart, Thank you. Now I was talking about this with my high school-aged daughter Kendall. She loves social media. Oh my gosh, as she likes to say, you know her Instagram feed was nothing but French Bulldogs and supermodels wearing bathing suits. She just was constantly mainlining that. That and what her friends were doing. And she was spending so much time on her phone. What do you think it was impacting? School. That’s right, school. And it’s interesting because it didn’t matter to her in eighth grade, but when she got into ninth grade and she watched her sister start going through the process of college applications and she got a peek at what was coming down the pike, she had a wake-up call. She was like, oh my gosh. Holy cow. If I want to have some choices about where I go after high school, maybe I should pay attention to high school. And we got into this conversation because I said to her, one of the things that I’ve noticed is you spend an awful lot of time on social media. And as we got into it, she was able to admit. She said, you know, the other thing, too, in addition to its distracting her is that she was starting to feel insecure. Because she was constantly comparing herself to the social media posts of celebrities and supermodels in bathing suit websites and people that were doing nothing but traveling for a living. And it was making her feel like she was a complete loser.

Now, just like you and me, she knew that social media was making her less productive. She knew it was making her less happy. She knew it was making her feel insecure and she also knew what was actually important to her. Spending more time on her schoolwork and feeling better about herself. So I was shocked. This was not my idea, because you know as the parent if you suggest something, kids are biologically wired to tell you it’s a stupid idea. Kendall decided on her own and this surprised me, I would not have expected this of her. That the best way to manage the distraction of social media would be to get rid of the temptation. She didn’t delete her Instagram account, you can still find her on there but you know what she did? She deleted the app from her phone. She made it that much harder to check. That’s one of the things that you can do. It’s sort of like if you’re quitting cigarettes, do not have them in the kitchen cupboard in case you have an emergency. Get rid of them so that it becomes harder to get access to the things that distract you. This is why it’s important to turn off the alerts. It’s why it’s important for you to disable the pop-ups. This is why it’s important for you not to put those apps on your phone.

I’m gonna tell you something, I am a commentator for CNN. And so part of my job is to be at the ready if one of our anchors in Anderson Cooper or Don lemon or you know Chris Cuomo or Brooke Baldwin, if somebody needs me on their show, one of the things it’s really important is to be at the ready to step on the television and talk intelligently about news. Now there’s a very rare occurrence with breaking news were I’d be asked to jump onto the television with no warning whatsoever. There’s something catastrophic that happens where you get like an instant update on on some story that we’ve been followingand we weren’t expecting it. And typically if that happens to you, you’re standing in the fifth floor newsroom in New York City and they grab you and your on the set and boom, here we go. When more likely you’re asked usually have a half an hour or so, or an hour of time before you go on live television. So you get plenty of time if you are good at what you do. And believe me, if you’re on the payroll at CNN, you’re very good at what you do.

And what happened for me is I started to notice that all day long, all day long, you know what I would be filling my time up with? I would be tapping an app. I’d be reading the news. I’d be filling my head with all kinds of information about all kinds of stuff that I may or may not talk about just in case, like it was just this habit that I developed. And it was so distracted, all the time because I was constantly checking it because it was on my phone. And I made a decision as I was writing this book because I noticed it was really hard for me to sit down and focus. It was hard for me to sit down and get through a chapter of this book or look through social media posts and pick the ones that I wanted to share with you. And I realized holy cow! It’s because my, I’ve trained my brain to go to my phone every five minutes and open up one of the news apps on my phone. This is a problem. It’s impacting my ability to focus and so the solution ironically is exactly the same as what Kendall did. I removed every single news app on my phone except for CNN. Every single one. I turned off every single news notification on my phone, every one of them. Because I figured if it was important, somebody would call me. And if I was going to be on television, I would have at least 30 minutes to an hour to dig into the story and research and come up with something that would be valuable to say in 60 seconds or less. And I cannot underscore how that one half an hour where I removed apps, turned off notifications; I feel like I got my brain back, truly. And in some ways it made me even better at my job because when I’m called on, now I go deep. Instead of constantly dipping my toe in the water, all day long, all day long, all day long, all day long on the news, I know do deep research if I’m going on to talk.

Tomorrow morning carve out time, we’re gonna talk about this a little bit later in the chapter, but this will change your life, it will give your brain a gigantic, thank you for giving me space to think about that shitt that’s important, instead of all this stuff that’s popping up on your phone. You know, in Kendall’s words, this is what my ninth grader said: After deleting the Instagram app, it dawned on me how unimportant this stuff is to my life. When those apps were on my phone, it was an involuntary action to click on it and look. Now that the apps are gone, I don’t have the urge to look at it ever. Isn’t that interesting? You know if you’re driving down the highway and traffic’s moving along, do you have the urge to look around in case there’s an accident? That some, no. But if you’re driving past an accident, it’s tempting. It’s right there in front of you. This is why it’s so important, and by the way, distractions are not only in the form of technology and social media. Sarah found that her clutter, so the garbage all around her was a major distraction in her life. Do you have one of those desks at work where there’s just piles of unfinished stuff everywhere? I’m telling you right now,it’s distracting you. She decided to take action when she learned the five second rule. She said that she used the rule to be emotional hoarding and 54321, donated, recycled, sold and trash so much stuff. Here’s what she wrote: I’m using the five second rule to declutter my life. I’m an emotional hoarder, and it was becoming problematic. So when I’m clearing through my junk, I make a choice in five seconds, and sure enough it works. I’ve donated, recycled, sold and trashed a lot of things in the past few weeks. Now it feels amazing. Not to be bogged down by useless stuff.

I told you at the beginning of this book, you can change your life in five seconds. And that’s because in five seconds, you can make a decision. And decisions have the power to change everything. By clearing through her junk in five second decision, Sarah now feels amazing. Distractions bog you down whether they’re physical or they’re technological. So if you find yourself getting distracted like Kendall was by social media or me, by the apps and the notifications on my phone or Sarah by her surroundings; that moment, that moment of awareness, I want to grab on to it. That is a moment of power. It’s a moment when you wake up and now it’s time to shake up your environment. 54321 remove the distraction. It really is that simple. But we don’t stop to do it and the rewards are so powerful. Now, the harder and more important thing to master, after you kinda get rid of this surface level distractions is I want you to master the second type of focus and that’s big picture focus. There’s one thing that I’ve use the five second rule to do that is increased my big picture focus like nothing else. And that my friends is being a boss. A boss about my mornings. From now on I want you to own your mornings. Taking control of your mornings is a game changer for productivity.

The way I did was simple. I created a morning routine and it’s a routine that makes me feel like a million bucks. Alissa found after she implemented her own morning routine. She started to rule her days like a boss, too. Here’s what she wrote: Okay, I’ve become a little obsessed with Mel Robins and her five second rule message. I love it and I’m practicing her rules, getting up early. I hate that. But I want to love it. Eating breakfast (coffee, I don’t normally eat). Not touching my phone till after I’ve cleared my mind, setting my intentions and ruling my day. Now, one thing I do want to say to Alissa is that for seven years now I’ve been using the five second rule to get out of bed, I still hate it. You may never be a “morning person”. I am not a morning person, but I am a boss of my mornings. Big difference. See, I think a morning person is somebody that just springs out of bed like a jackalo, right? You’re so excited to be up, and you wake up feeling fresh, and your breath smells good and ooh, let’s get the day started. That is not how my day goes. I’m more like a wildebeest that has to roll out of bed and I’m really not a human until I have a cup of coffee but I don’t have to be a morning person in order to become a boss of my morning. I don’t have to like getting up early in order to understand the power and the impact that taking control of those morning hours, what that will have for your life, for the amount of money that you make, for how you feel about yourself. This is so critical for you to get.

So just as Alyssa said, when you create a morning routine and you actually follow it, you set your intentions, you get yourself organized over and over. I’m gonna guarantee something, you are going to trigger a chain of events that are going to shock you. I owe my morning routine to Duke University Prof. Dan Ariely. He gave me the inspiration and that little scientific kernel that I needed, in order to be inspired enough to get my butt out of bed, continue to do it and do something productive with my mornings. Here’s what you need to know from Prof. Ariely. According to him, the first 2 to 3 hours of the day are the best hours for your brain. Let me say that again, the first 2 to 3 hours of the day are the best hours for your brain. So if you pop out of bed at 6 o’clock, your peak thinking, your peak productivity, it’s going to be from about 6 to 9 o’clock in the morning. That’s it. The best time for your brain, the first 2 to 3 hours of the day. If your household is anything like mine, most mornings are pure chaos. And the problem is, is do you really want to chew through the best 2 to 3 hours for your brain doing a bunch of mindless crap? I don’t think so. I think your dreams are way too important for that. I mean for me, the moment I wake up, I gotta feed the dog, you gotta get breakfast ready, you gotta get three school-age kids out the door. That can take an entire hour out of that precious 2 to 3 hours that I got. When I read this research and I thought about what my mornings actually looked like, snoozing and you know, least an hour of prep to get out of the house, I realized I’d better get serious. I want to build a multimillion dollar business. I want to get the best shape of my life. I want to do a bunch of things that really light me up. I’d better get serious about how I spend my mornings if I want the rest of my days to really be amazing.

And so I started to get up a little bit earlier. So I had time to focus on my big picture goals before the day hijacked me. Now, I’m gonna walk you through my morning routine and it is critical. This is the reason why I can get so much done, truly. It is the secret to my success. That and the five second rule. But the morning piece is absolutely critical. So here’s my routine. Number one: when the alarm rings, I get up. The alarm rings, I get up. That’s number one. Now, we went over the importance of this when you learned about the wake of challenge. The alarm rings, get up, the end. What could be more simple than that? For peak productivity, though, you should never, I mean never hit the snooze button. This is something I learned that’s brand-new that I learned researching this book, and boy oh boy, when I explain it to you, is it going to answer a big mystery and a big misconception about the snooze button. There is actually a neurological reason why you should never ever hit the snooze button. Now, you know, I’m gonna explain it to you, know that getting a good night sleep is important for productivity, right? Well, I bet you didn’t know that how you wake up is not only as important, it’s actually in some cases more important than how you sleep. Scientists have recently discovered that when you hit the snooze button, it has a negative impact on brain function and productivity that can last up to 4 hours. It’s called sleep inertia. I’m gonna explain it to you and you really need to pay attention. This is one of these changes that really changes everything about how you think about what you’re doing.

So first of all, here’s what you need to know about sleep. When you and I fall asleep, we sleep in cycles. And cycles take about 90 to 110 minutes, okay? So all night long, you’re sleeping in these 90 to 110 minute cycles. One begins, it goes from 90 to 110 minutes, it ends. then another one starts, 90 to 110 minutes, it ends. And another one starts, 90 to 110 and so on and so on. About two hours before you’re about to wake ups; so let’s say you wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning, at about 4 o’clock in the morning, your body’s gone through 4 or 5 sleep cycles; now it goes into a different mode. It goes into a 2 hour mode where it’s going to slowly start to wake your body up. It’s bringing your body from this state where you’re going sleep cycle, sleep cycle, sleep cycle, into a mode where now you’re like thawing out. You’re kind of slowly coming back so that when your alarm rings or if you didn’t set the alarm cause it’s the weekend; when your body is ready to wake up after about 2 hours of kinda thawing out, you’re ready to start your day. Now that’s all well and good but if you now hear the alarm, you wake up, like me, you’re stressed about your life, you don’t want to get up so you hit the snooze button, guess what happens? When you hit the snooze button and you now drift back to sleep, what do you suppose your body now thinks it’s supposed to do? Your body after you hit the snooze button and go back to sleep, guess what? It goes back into sleep cycle. How long do those take? 90 to 110 minutes.

Have you ever had that experience where, you know, it’s the weekend and the alarm goes off and you just turn it off? And you go back to bed? Ever notice how you wake up and you’re like, oh shitt, I slept for like 90 minutes. I just meant to doze off for 10 minutes. You always sleep for over an hour if you turn off your alarm. That’s because you started a new sleep cycle. Here’s the problem with the snooze button. The alarm goes off, you hit the snooze, you fall back to sleep, your bodies now and a 90 to 110 minutes cycle and then boom, the alarm goes off 10 minutes later. Well, here’s the problem, physically you can wake up and get out of bed; mentally, the cortical region of your brain, it cannot shake itself out of a sleep cycle. You’ve now screwed yourself. You know how you have those days at work where you’re like, god, I’m just so tired, I just can’t wake up, that’s a medical condition that’s called sleep inertia. How is it that people get sleep inertia? By hitting the snooze button, starting the sleep cycle and then interrupting it again 10 minutes later and forcing themselves to wake up. If you find that you are constantly tired, I guarantee you it’s not because you’re not getting enough sleep, it’s because you keep hitting the snooze button. And you are starting the sleep cycles, interrupting them and causing your brain to operate in a condition where it can’t wake itself up. It’ll take your brain about four hours, scientists say, in order to come out of sleep inertia, seriously. I mean, it makes a lot of sense when you actually start to think about it.

So, I’m dead serious. The alarm goes off. I don’t care how tired you are. You get out of bed, not negotiable. It is going to blow for about 4 minutes but by the time you’re done brushing your teeth, you will be awake. And what you won’t be, is you won’t be setting yourself up for sleep inertia and 4 hours of no productivity because you started a new sleep cycle. Here’s another trick that I do sometimes. This isn’t every morning but if I’m super super tired or maybe I do have to wake up but I’ve only had 4 hours sleep, I use a trick that Tony Robbins taught me. Tony believes in these immersion baths. I have a cheaper way to do it. It’s called a cold shower. It is the worst thing in the world. I am such a sissy about it that I will turn on the water to freezing cold and all I have to do, I won’t even get my head in there. I’ll stick my arm and that’s literally enough freezing cold water on the arm and the shoulder and that’s enough. And boom, you’re awake. It’s weird. Really works if you need a quick trick but do not go back to bed. After I’ve gotten up after the alarm rings, next I walk into the bathroom and I turn off the alarm. Here’s another trick I want you to steal for peak productivity. My husband and I, we do not sleep with the phones or alarm clocks in our bedrooms. There is a no phone rule in our household, in the bedroom. Where’s the phone, you might ask. It’s in the bathroom. It’s close enough so that I can hear it if like CNN’s calling and they want to , because sometimes they call in the middle the night to see if I can jump on a morning show or something, but it’s far enough away so that when the alarm rings in the morning, I have to get out of bed to go turn it off.

Now here’s the other reason. The main reason why it’s not the bedroom is because I understand the hardwiring of human beings. If something is near you that’s attempting, you’ll grab it. If I have that phone on my nightstand, you know what’s going to happen? I am going to grab it without thinking. I’m gonna lie in bed at night and I’m gonna read emails. I’m going to hit the alarm and turn it off and then I’m gonna lay in bed, then I’m gonna check the news and I’m gonna read emails and I’m gonna look at tests and I’m gonna see social media. And that’s before I even get out of bed. And I know that you’re guilty of the same thing. If the phone’s within reach, it’s easy to grab without thinking. Do you realize that a majority of adults read emails before they get out of bed in the morning? I think that that’s kinda common sense at this point that most people think that people are reading emails in bed in the morning. Here’s a study that should really wake you up. Deloitte recently did a big research project on this and in the project they found that a-third, a-third of adults and half of people under the age of 35 are waking up in the middle of the night interrupting their sleep. Third of adults, half of people under the age of 35 wake up in the middle of the night to check their phones that are sitting right next to them. And half them probably don’t even remember that they’re doing this. So when I put my phone in the bathroom, I make it impossible for me to succumb to a temptation of grabbing it and reading it. And I’m also setting myself up for a great night sleep and more importantly in the big picture on procrastination; I am putting what’s important to me and my goals. I’m giving them a fighting freaking chance to become the top priority of the day. Because if I start reading email and I start reading news and I start looking at social media, you know what my brain just got flooded with? Other people’s crap.

If you’re the kind of person that feels like you never find the time for the stuff that’s important to you. If you feel like you can never say no. If you feel frustrated because you can’t make headway on projects that matter, one of the most important things you can do, put your damn phone in the bathroom, do not have it in your bedroom. You’ve got to figure out how to find time for yourself before you check in with the rest of the world. So now the next thing that I do. So we’ve gotten up when the alarm rings. We’ve walked into the bathroom, we’ve turned off the alarm. You noticed what I haven’t done yet? I haven’t looked at my phone. I might have turned off the alarm, have not checked it yet. Have not read it yet, have not picked it up yet. I use next 3 to 5 minutes of time to wash my face, floss my teeth and then I just sort of let my mind wander. I start thinking about, alright today, today, what is it that I really need to do today for me? Forget about what your job once, forget about your kids want, forget about your spouse needs a view. What do you, you, your life, your goals, your business, your dreams, what are things that are important to you? I don’t want you creating it to do list. I want you thinking about things that matter. Like what one the big things that you never find time to work on. I want you to think about those. And then I want you to think about just 2 things. What are 2 things that you could do today to forward that book that you want to write. What are 2 things that you could do today to forward that job search? What are 2 things that you could do today that could really help expand that business that you’re growing? What could you do on something that matters to? And usually this is the stuff that you don’t feel like doing, by the way. That’s why you never get around to it.

What I do next? So I got these 2 things in my mind. Well, I get dressed, I make my bed. I walk into the kitchen. I pour a cup of coffee. Have you noticed what I haven’t done yet? I haven’t picked up my phone. I haven’t looked at my email. By the way, my phone is still in my bathroom. When I go out into the kitchen, I have a cup of coffee. I leave my phone in the bathroom, why? Same reason as not putting it on the nightstand. If it’s sitting next to me on the island or at the kitchen table, I will pick it up and I will look at it. I am, I am just like a dog. If there is a bone there, man; I’m chewing it. I’m the same way with the phone. That’s why I leave it in the bathroom. I’m setting myself up for success. This is not only important, it’s essential. The moment you check email, you read the news, you surf social media, someone else’s priority is going to jump in front of yours. Do you think Bill Gates lays in bed andreads his email in the morning? No. Do you think Oprah does? No. Do you think Richard Branson is lying there in bed reading your emails? No, he is not. The reason why is because they got stuff to do. They know that what they’re up to, is more important than anything that could be in that inbox. That’s why you gotta find time to put yourself first. So you must not check email until you plan your day.

That one rule right there, no phone in the bedroom. Do not check it, plan my day first; that is a discipline that is become a habit that is a hallmark of why I can build multimillion dollar businesses, seriously. I’m not to be doing that if I’m looking at what Zappos has on sale, okay? That’s not helping me. The scores from last night’s game, not going to help you with your goals. It just not. You got to get serious about your priorities. So the next thing that I do in my cheapo day planner, I just write down the one, two or three things I thought about when I was brushing my teeth. These are things I gotta do today. There are important for me. Why I write them down? But yes, I am almost 50 years old and so I forget things if I try to hold him upstairs. But more importantly, research coming out of University of California, 42%, 42% more likely for you to stick to your goals if you write them down. There’s science behind this. And there’s a commonsense reason if you write them down, you probably gonna see them and then you’re going, oh yeah, I forget about that. Because I just checked the scores and then I forgot about what was important. I just looked at the sales at Zappos and I forgot about what’s important. Having them written in my planner means I’m gonna see them.

Now, the next thing that I do is, so I write down the two things I need to do, then I write down why. Why do I want to do this? Why would I possibly want to reach out to literary agents today? Why would I possibly want to get to the gym today? Why does this matter to me? Having that, that why statement, makes my goals feel so much more important. Now, I don’t use my electronic calendar and the reason why is because if I put it in the electronic calendar, this little two things I’m gonna do today, I’m not can see it. I’m a visual person. You gotta find a way so that you can see it every day. The two things that are important, why you feel like you should do it. Now, the next thing that I do. So we’ve gotten up when the alarm rings. We brush our teeth, turn off the alarm. Think about what’s important. We leave the phone in the bathroom. We haven’t checked it yet. We go in. We kinda plan out the two things we’re gonna do, the reason why we’re gonna do it.

Then, I take 30 before 7:30 AM. 30 before 7:30 AM. What is that? Well, 30 minutes before 7:30 AM. The reason why I do it before 7:30 AM is because my kids leave the house at 7 AM and so those 30 minutes between 7 and 7:30, those are kind of the moment, the first moment that I got amidst the chaos in the morning to actually do anything that is substantive. So I plan out and often execute the most important things that I gotta do first between 7 and 7:30 AM. I call this 30 before 7:30. Now I use this time to plan my day. And I also use this time to start working on those things that I thought about, the two things that are most important to me. Here’s the deal, you cannot do this planning session at work. And you know why. The second you walk into work what happens? You get hijacked. You cannot do this planning session after you’ve checked email. Why? The second you look at email you’ve already got stuff you gonna do. Your stuff’s no longer is important. You’ve just lost the priority game.

Productivity comes down to the ability for you to put your stuff first. So if you have to do this at your home, if you have to do this at a coffee shop, if you have to do this on the train into work or a bus into work or sitting in your car in the parking lot, that’s where you do it. If you can’t find 30 minutes, find 5. The discipline here is around getting up, thinking, writing down a couple things that are important, carving out a little bit of time to just make some progress and doing all of that before you check your phone. Prof. Carlsson studied how CEOs get so much accomplished. You know what she found out? The secret of every high-power executive that you know. They work at home before they go to work. The average CEO of a publicly traded company, says that they can only find about 20 minutes of time uninterrupted at work. And I guarantee you, for you, it’s even less. Because they at least have an assistant that keeps people away. So I am dead serious about this. You’ve got to remember because of Prof. Arirly, let’s go back to the beginning. Why did we even start this in the first place? The first 2 to 3 hours of the day are the best hours for your brain to focus on the tasks or goals that advance your professional goals. It’s when your best thinking happens. It’s when your high speed of processing happens. It’s the time of day before you’ve been bombarded by thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of marketing messages. It’s when you’re your freshest, you gotta fight for this.

You will never feel like you’re making headway on anything that’s important until you start to make that stuff important enough to find a little bit of time for your happiness. You’ve got to protect this, you gotta fight for. Finally, this was a really interesting piece of research that I found that I started to implement that’s made a big difference in my life balance and and in how effective I am. So we’ve woken up on time. We have turned off the alarm, brushed our teeth, thought about you know, what’s important to us. We’ve left the phone in the bathroom. We’ve gone into the kitchen. We’ve had a quick cup of coffee. We’ve written down what’s important. We’ve carved out five minutes, 30 minutes, whatever we can to make some progress. Now before you pick up your phone, there’s a final thing I want you to do. This is what I do every morning. Plan your quitting time. When are you going to stop working today? What time are you going to stop working? You’re gonna put that on your phone. You’re gonna stop answering work emails. You’re gonna actually, I don’t do fully unplug, I would never expect you to do that, but at what time are you gonna to stop working? So that you can actually be a human being, enjoying yourself. It is so important that you do this.

When I start my day, I determine what time I’m gonna stop working. And having a deadline does two really important things. Number one, it’s gonna make you way more intentional with the time that you have. And number two, it’s gonna make you believe it or not more productive. There’s a principle called Parkinson’s law. And here’s how that principle goes. Work expands to whatever time that you give it. So I want you to give your workday a deadline. And a deadline is really important for stamina and for mental health. I want to give you an example about Parkinson’s law that happens to me right now. What’s fascinating is that, you know, I’ve talked a little bit about CNN and when I’m asked to write for CNN, I often get two types of requests. So as we recording this book, we’re near the end of the year and so CNN has asked me if I will submit an article about predictions for the following year. And they’d given me a week to do it. How long do you think it’s going to take me to write this article? They’ve given me a week. It’s gonna take me a week. I’m gonna think all week about it, I’m, you know, gotta kinda contemplat it. I’m gonna be kinda noodling it a little bit. And then I’ll probably sit down to write it a couple hours before it’s due. That is an example of Parkinson’s law.

Your work, that projects that you have, they expand and fill the amount of time that you give to them. Now, let’s contrast that with another example. If CNN were to call me or success magazine were I’m a contributing editor were to call me as soon as you know, right now and say oh my gosh, Mel, we need an article of 500 words in an hour on this topic. Can you do it? I’d say yes. How long would it take me? An hour. Same length article by the way is the predictions on 2017, but I was given a week so it’ll take me a week. If somebody gives me an hour and we shrink the amount of time and I suddenly have a deadline, my work will actually fit into that deadline. You can use that to your advantage. And a deadline is important because I think more than ever we do not take enough time to take a break from work and actually enjoy ourselves; to take a break from work and give our brains the breathing space in order to refuel itself so it can do its best work tomorrow. Now, look, I’m not gonna lie. There are plenty times where I set a deadline in the morning, and 8:30 rolls around, I’m like, no, no, I’m not done.. Now I’ve gotta 54321, turn off the computer, shut it down, stop working. And it happens more often than I’d like to admit that I have to do that.

But setting a deadline has been a really cool concept that has changed things for me. Using a daily routine, it’s help me in ways that are really hard to describe. It’s how I put my priorities ahead of putting out fires. I used to be the kind of person that was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Nowadays, with so much that I have going on, not only can I not afford to be, but I don’t want to be. I always every single day, make a little bit of progress on something that’s super important to me. And I feel way more in control because I’m owning my actions from the moment the alarm rings. And I have a heck of a lot more clarity about what this day is about and what I, what is important to me. Because I’ve defined it. It’s really that simple. You know this. The problem is, life has a way of just creeping in and pulling you in a different direction. If I notice that I’ve, you know, lost track during the day or in getting distracted, that’s a moment of power. 54321, flip open my cheapo day planner, take a look at what I wrote down and I get back on track.

Now, I want you to try this: get up when the alarm rings, turn off the phone in the bathroom, leave it there, don’t check it, think about what’s important to you, write down the two things that are important to you, write down why, find 30 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever you can find before 7:30 to work on and plan your day, plan your quitting time then, watch all the damn cat Videos that you want, seriously. And see what happens. I’m telling you, it’s simple. It’s obvious and it works. Customize it. But by all means 54321 and do it. And when you do the work to be the boss of your day, it is an incredible game changer. I wanna leave you with this. Christie wrote me this after trying this: I have learned that I can push myself to limits I never thought possible. I’ve learned it is as simple as 54321. Thanks Mel. The five second rule is a real game changer. I have learned that no matter what you want if you work hard enough, it will and it can happen. I’ve met some of the most amazing people that have achieved the highest rank possible within our company and I have learned so many tips and tricks to work my business. My mind is spinning and on fire. It’s been a real game changer. Guess what? Now it’s your turn to change your game.