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It is your personal narrator, and read some of the best blogs I can find covering personal development, minimalism, and more. And today's a continuation post from yesterday, so if you are new here, then I'd recommend at least going back in one episode to episode 316. Otherwise, this episode's not going to make a ton of sense, but better yet, if you subscribe to the show, you can start from episode zero and listen to 318 episodes and optimize your life that way, too. Either way, works for me.
Alright, that's enough of an intro. Let's get to part two of this post and continue optimizing your life. Productivity 101, part two by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com Number four, log your time usage. For a few days in a row, keep track of where all your time is going.
From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, log your time usage. Whenever you switch activities, write down the time and the new activity. You don't have to go high-tech here unless you really want to. A pen and paper works just fine.
At the end of each day, take note of where your time went. You're sure to notice many inefficiencies, so it won't be hard to find areas for improvement. If you're like most people, don't be surprised to discover that 50 to 75% of your time each day is essentially being wasted. You'll likely discover that you spend way too much time on low-priority tasks, you succumb to too many distractions, you task switch way too often, and you waste a lot of time online.
Don't be yourself up when you see how you did. Use this information to make improvements, not to blame yourself for wasting time. Try different approaches to managing your daily routine. Try some experiments to see if you can boost your efficiency.
The mere act of measuring your time usage will probably raise your productivity more than enough to compensate for the time logging activity. So even if you don't make major changes based on what you learn, just log your time usage to raise your awareness. You'll find that what gets measured gets improved. Even if you've done time logging before, it's a good idea to return to it every few months, at least once a year.
You'll discover that new inefficiencies and bad habits spring up like weeds and you need to pull them out from time to time. Number five, use timeboxing. Timeboxing is a great way to deal with tasks where you'd otherwise procrastinate. With timeboxing, you only commit to working on a task or project for a fixed length of time, normally 30 to 90 minutes.
10 to 15 minutes is perfectly acceptable. Once you get past the first 15 minutes, you'll often want to stick with the task. Timeboxing is a good way of coaxing yourself through the initial task resistance. You tell yourself, it's only 30 minutes.
How bad could it be? I can handle anything for 30 minutes. But then when you get through that first 30 minutes, it's easy to keep going. This past weekend my kids and I decided to clean out a closet under our staircase.
The closet was overloaded with waist-high piles of stuff. There was a Star Wars marathon on that day, all six episodes. So if we could work on the closet until the end of one of the episodes, a fixed period of time, about an hour, then we could stop and work on it some more at another time. No one wanted to clean out that closet, but at least we could make a reasonable dent in the task.
What actually happened is that we got so into the task that we finished the whole closet and completely reorganized it, including installing some shelves. That took us three to four hours. Then we did another closet, and then some drawers, and then another room in another. Then we proceeded to clean out and re-organize the garage.
By the end of the day, we'd put in a solid 12 hours of home decluttering and re-organizing. Erin was at a conference that day, and when she returned home around APM, she said she thought she had the wrong house. She didn't recognize the garage when she pulled the car in. This momentum even carried into the next day, with Erin and the kids doing more home organizing for several hours.
This was a major project, and if we thought about putting in 18 to 20 solid hours into it, it would have seemed too overwhelming. But timeboxing was a great way to get started because we could say to ourselves, it's only an hour. Then we can stop. You won't always want to go longer than the initial time period you decide upon.
That's perfectly fine. You must give yourself full permission to stop. You can always kick off another timebox period later and make another dent in the task. If you keep working on it little by little, eventually you'll finish.
These are all pretty basic productivity tips, but they're very effective. These are proven winners that have visited the test of time. When it comes to productivity, simple habits tend to be much more effective than complicated systems. You just listen to part two of the post titles Productivity 101 by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com.
I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers in their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins. Plus it used to cost $499 right now.
It's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. And by the way, as of now, Steve's most recent blog post says that he's going to Disneyland, but for 30 days straight is a very strange life experience to write about. That's happening soon, October 25th through November 23rd.
So if you happen to be at Disneyland, look for him and say hi for me. I might have to go to Disneyland one of those days too now just to see if I run into him. And I'll stick about making a little spreadsheet for time tracking, which was point number four in today's reading, but it would be so basic. It's not even worth doing for you.
If you want to make a spreadsheet instead of doing it by hand, you can have two columns, column A for the time and column B for description. That's it. And I do recommend trying out this experiment of time tracking. I had to do it as a homework assignment at business school eight years ago.
But yeah, I don't remember if we wrote down what we were doing every time we switched tasks or we checked in every 15 minutes. That's a different way to do it. But either way, it's super enlightening and I recommend trying it out. If you do it every 15 minutes, you can use an alarm clock and you can quickly take note of what you're doing on a smartphone or write it down.
If you do it by task, like every time you switch to a new task, you mark the time and what you're doing. And I think it's a little more mental effort because you need to remember to do it. That's the hardest part. And it's actually a bit of a meditative practice.
So whichever you're comfortable, try it out. I guarantee you, you'll learn something. And that should do it for today. I'll just briefly mention that if you want to help keep this podcast going, you can visit oldpodcast.com slash support.
And there are a bunch of different ways to help out. I'd greatly appreciate it if you could check it out. Again, that's oldpodcast.com slash support. Thank you for listening to the end.
And I'll see you tomorrow with Minimalist Monday with the Minimalist where your optimal life awaits. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily podcast, which is a lot like this show except more focused on personal finance. Justin hand picks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Ramit Sadie, Mr. Money mustache and more.
And I read them to you five days a week. So if you enjoy this podcast, come on over and subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily too. And together, we'll optimize your financial life.