We live in a world of notifications, distractions, pings, reminders. It really affects the way we do our work on a daily basis. It also affects how we are in the present moment, and it affects what we want to achieve in our life. These notifications, these distractions, these pings hold us back a lot of times from accomplishing the things we want to accomplish in life.

We’ve noticed this for several years now and it’s getting worse with the demand on our attention. Everytime there’s a notification or a ping or a reminder and we get distracted, it takes up to 15 to 25 minutes to get back to that flow state of where we were previously before we were interrupted. I’ll talk about flow state in another video, but that really derails your progress when you’re working on the things you’re working on, your life, your business, passion project, a hobby, whatever it is.

When this happens, we get to the end of the day and we feel stressed out because we felt like we just spun our wheels. We are extremely busy but we’re not getting anything accomplished. We feel scattered, just defeated, at the end of the day. And this is, problem is going on. It happens to all of us. Some more than most.

Here are some things that you can do to improve your productivity and be more present with whatever it is that you’re working on and when you have both of those, you can then accomplish what you want to accomplish in your life. So when you’re more productive, you’re working on the things that matter, and when you’re more present and being intentional with your time, now with those two forces combined, you can really achieve great things.

The first thing that you can do is get into a deep focus. Like I said, removing distractions, removing pings, removing notifications is important for you to really focus on a project. What we recommend for you to do is to time block a specific task. So say you want to answer emails. Okay, well rather than being jumping in and out of your email platform all day long, how about you set 30 minutes or one hour just a day, to just focus strictly on email for that 30 minutes. And then you focus on email or that 30 minutes to one hour, whatever it is, and then you’re on to the next piece, and then you don’t touch email until the next day where you set up another 30 minutes, hour, whatever it is.

Or let’s say you’re working on some creative project and you really need to focus on creating this presentation. Set a timer for an hour and focus strictly on the presentation. Don’t let anything else come in. You’ll get further along by being focused on that one project rather than spending five minutes jumping into something else, replying to text messages, scrolling the news feed, and then 25 minutes more worth of work but you’re not really getting momentum, you’re just now being reactive. So that’s one things that you can do.

Also if you’re new to this, do what is called the Pomodoro Technique. What this is is where you set a 25 minute timer and you work on one specific task for that 25 minutes. After that 25 minutes is over, you set a five minute timer. From that five minute timer, that is your rest period. Go grab some water, use the restroom, go outside, get some fresh air, let the dog out, whatever it is, then come back and set another 25 minute timer. And you’ll run another series of just being focused on that specific task for 25 minutes. Rinse and repeat that a couple times throughout the day and you’ll get so much more done and accomplished.

Another thing, like I said turn off notifications, put your phone in another room, that is really helpful, especially when you’re working on say like a writing project and you need to get a good chunk of writing done. Take your phone, put it on airplane mode, put it in the other room, and really just focus on writing, whether it’s at a desktop, laptop, whatever it is.

Another thing that you can do in order to improve your productivity and also feel accomplished, which is what we aim to do by the end of the day, we always sleep better at night when we feel more accomplished. Have you ever worked on a project and as you’re working on something, you’re constantly thinking about something else that’s happening or that you should be working on or things that need to get done? Or everything else that, on your plate?

What happens here is that we aren’t connected with the work that we’re doing, because we’re in our head about everything else that needs to happen. Where we need to be, agendas,  just everything else, an upcoming meeting, whatever it may be. When this happens, it’s because we’re not focused on the most important task, most times.

The quickest way to get out of your head and into a task to get it done and accomplished by focusing on the most important task at that time. Rather than focus on the little things like replying to an email, a few emails or just like pretending to be busy, we’re sort of putting off our pushing off that important task. This is called eating the frog, this is why we try to accomplish the most important task first thing in the morning, so it doesn’t take up anymore brain space, where if everything else where to go haywire for the rest of the day, you’d still accomplish the most important task and it will be the most important piece of the day regardless if you kept working or not.

Another thing that we do is time block the whole day, so going back to that Pomodoro technique. Just take 30 minutes segments and really map out your day. Visualize where you’re spending your time, if you have a meeting or a couple calls, block those in, and then you can see, okay, where am I going to meditate today? Oh, I’m going to meditate here between 7:00 and 7:30. I’d like to go workout. Well that’s right after meditation. So that’s a good hour of the morning already taken up.

Now it gets into work time and you know that you have some calls scheduled or some meetings. Well, what can you fill in between those meetings where in most cases, it would’ve just been wasted time? This really helps you see white space on your daily calendar, and if you have everything broken off on half our segments, you can really be intentional with your time by having now white space on there.

Another tool that we’ve recently launched is a tool called Dawn. It’s an iOS app. It’s in beta right now, not everyone can access it, but depending on when you’re watching this video, I believe the URL is dawnapp.co. What that does is that takes up your to do list and your calendar and mashes them together to create the perfect day for you and actually the perfect week.

We custom developed a machine learning, artificial intelligent algorithm that smart schedules your week for you based on what’s on your calendar and everything that you need to accomplish that week or that month. So that’s really, really cool.

So get started, time block, turn off distractions and really start being intentional with your time and not hopping back and forth to do multiple things. I hope this video was helpful. So thank you everyone for watching, bye.

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