034 What Are Your Best Productivity Habits/Routines? – ProductivityCast

This week, we discuss on ProductivityCast the importance of productivity habits and/or routines. What are your best productivity habits/routines? And, we ask that of each of the ProductivityCast teammates. Spend some time thinking this week about how you can level up your productive habits and/or routines. And, let us know about them in the comments! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory, please visit http://productivitycast.net/034 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Productivity Habits/Routines Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade Art Gelwicks Show Notes | Productivity Habits/Routines Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Tiny Habits program (BJ Fogg, PhD) Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results by Stephen Guise RescueTime Todoist Persistent starting (The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play by Neil Fiore, PhD) IFTTT Evernote Instapaper Raw Text Transcript | Productivity Habits/Routines Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is h:mm:ss.ms to h:mm:ss.ms (e.g., 0:00:00.000,0:00:04.000 starts at 0.00 seconds and ends at 4 seconds in the cast's audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome back everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith and I'm joined here today as always with Augusto Pinaud and I have with me Art Gelwicks and Francis Wade. Today we're going to be discussing one of my favorite topics to discuss, which is habits and routines and why you should have a habit or routine and what some of the criteria are for a good productivity habit, and a routine. And then what I thought would be really fun is for us all to go round robin and choose our what we believe is our best productivity habit or routine and, and then we can kind of each discuss with one another why we've chosen that as our best habit or routine. So let's start off with what any of us believe are maybe a criterion or criteria for having a productivity habit, and or routine. And I'll just get started with this particular in my particular flavor of how habits are developed. I really believe that habits are developed through the stringing of existing habits. So I really do believe that productive routines are the way in which you establish new habits, let me make this or sensical for everybody. So if you think about starting a habit, everybody talks about how habit development is very difficult, it's true. And you have people like Stephen guys, and BJ Fogg, who have talked at length about how to reduce the habit size to really help you get started. I think those are really great techniques, tactics. But as a strategy on the whole, I really do believe that the routine the stringing of habits to one another that are already existing is the way that you really develop stronger habits. So all of these tactics involved on top of the strategy of using an existing routine, I think, is really, really powerful. So that's my big thing is like, if you want to, you know, drink more water, well, choose points in your day, when you naturally are going to already be walking by the water cooler, and or say, Okay, before I leave for lunch, I'm drinking a glass of water. Or when I get back from lunch, I drink a glass of water, now you have something that's natural anchoring your day, it's already happening. So that's the trigger for you to be able to do that next thing. And then you can make it a tiny habit, or a mini habit, or whatever you want to, in terms of encouraging yourself to make that part of your routine. But I think it's the I think it's the routine. It's the well worn path and your existence that makes it easier for everybody to be able to sort of continue with the role. Augusto Pinaud 3:05 I'm a big proponent of habits. And, and I agree with you, it is important to identify transition point as places where you can help with the habits and where you can do things. If you do not, don't walk necessarily true to that water cooler talking about water. Well, what are the transition points that you normally do that can help you. So for example, well, you know what, I tend to walk out of the office at noon perfect then before that. And if you take lunch pretty much at the same time, you know, in a semi regular way, then make sure before you walk half a glass of water, or fill up the water when you came back in. I've been saying, for example, for years, for the weekly review, I recommend people to go outside of their place. So in my particular case, I go to a coffee shop, okay, and get a coffee that I normally drink, espresso, no milk. And when I get to the coffee shop for weekly review, I get a latte, okay. And the reason is, is something completely different than my traditional routine, but at the same time acts as a trigger, that's something different needs to happen. And those kinds of things. As soon as I do that, over time, my brain has clicked to say, Oh, we are going to do thinking right now we're going to dip think we're going to review what we have been doing. And all those little things really help to make those things more powerful. Francis Wade 4:50 Well, what makes for a great habit in my sort of day to day practice is that it's a an activity that doesn't get triggered or doesn't, doesn't get started out by an external event. It's something that happens from inside of me, like, for example, getting feeling hungry, and then having lunch. So a good habit for me that doesn't require outside and outside remainder. It's something that's in my experience in my control, either in my psyche or in my physiology, but it's something related to my internal state. And that triggers the activity, then once the activity gets going, it sort of has this effortless feel to it, that once once I once a trigger don't start, it's easy to execute. It feels familiar, it doesn't require a lot of attention. It's as if my mind could almost go to sleep. And they're my body or my brain, or my my tongue, or whatever it is that's engaged in the habit just keeps going and going and going without any any input of extra energy. Art Gelwicks 5:57 Well, for me, habits, probably one of the hardest things to create, because I have a tendency to break them very quickly, they develop on their own. So for example, I have a morning habit of doing a specific sequence of steps each morning, once I arrive at the client site. And if I don't do those are, if I don't have the opportunity to do those, everything feels off kilter. It it's a level set, for all intents and purposes for me to to know that, okay, this is the, the jumping off point into the day. And if, if I could equate it to something, if you've ever watched like a swimming race, it's that series of steps. And they, they step up onto the platform, they stretched it, they all basically, they do the same thing, and then they hit the water, and then they swim. So for me, that's, that's what this has to be, I just find that I can't force myself to develop one, they, it just kind of develops on its own. If it's working. If it's not working, it falls apart and goes away. Unknown 6:57 Great, Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:59 great. Those all great criteria for building productivity habits and routines. And so I'd like to now go around and for us to each choose kind of our favorite are what we consider our best productivity habit or routine and, and why you while you use that, why that routine works for you, you know, and maybe why you believe that routine has helped you be more productive. And so I'm going to pick on you first to gusto Okay, so what's your favorite, what's the best habit or routine you've invested into your or implemented into your productivity system, and, and how is it benefited you, Augusto Pinaud 7:41 you know, for for many years I've been I've been talking about this the best habit I have implement, or one of the best if not, is the use of two browsers. And why I have four year says that one should work on a browser on play on a different one. So for example, if you do work, do the work on Chrome, and then you go and do personal research or play in or whatever you do on the web on safari, or Firefox. What that had allow me is to Kip when I'm working, you know, completely focus on work, people don't notice how quick they open another tab, and then they start, you know, fooling around on the web 45 minutes happened, and you were will what I just did on the last hour, well, do you really work 15 minutes and full around the other 15, the other 45 when you separate the browser and you only do work corner browser and then do only the rest of the things you're doing the web on another one, what allows you to do is to keep yourself a lot more focus. And you tend to be a lot more efficient than when you do everything of the same browser. Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:59 So good. So how did you how did you get yourself a tuned to using the two different browsers because it is so easy to just open a new tab I for one, and I'm interested in doing this,...