Stop! Wait a moment!
Do you want to change your life? Join me on my 50-Day Life Transformation Challenge. Get involved! It won't cost you anything except a few bad habits.
And this is my website where I mostly write about solving problems.
Find out more about me.
One thing drives me absolutely crazy: the unimaginably large amount of consumption. I'm not talking about societal consumption as a whole, since everything about that has already been said.
If you want to change, you need to know where you want to go. You need a very concrete idea of what should be. Merely wishing for change leads to aimless wandering. Aimlessness leads to dissatisfaction, which then reinforces the desire for change.
A process of change can only begin once you have a very concrete vision of your goal.
Here is a simple method: Imagine your life in the future and write it down.
Consider multiple time periods and ask yourself the following questions:
You can read 5 books on increasing your productivity and achieve exactly the opposite: namely, nothing. Reading a book means you're not starting a project. Productivity equals zero.
Important point for me. I used to think too much about WHAT I was doing instead of just doing it. I rolled every decision back and forth for too long instead of just getting started.
Wrong, because that way you're doing the fourth step before the third.
Look:
Actually, succeeding is quite simple: just do what you believe needs to be done and everything will be fine. It just doesn't work, and it's definitely not because you don't know what to do. At the start of my productivity challenge, I spent a lot of time on strategic planning. I asked myself how I even know which path to take and how can I be sure it's the right one. I thought all along that I just needed to find the right path and everything would be fine. That's precisely the misconception.
Running shares many parallels with life. The experiences I've had while running often translate to both my personal and professional daily life.
If you start out faster than your usual pace, you’ll quickly reach a point where overexertion forces you to stop. Good pace management is therefore essential. Find your own limit to be fast, but not so fast that you overexert yourself.
Only a few days are left in my productivity challenge, and I would like to share an insight as a small interim conclusion: Do the work!
You can read hundreds of self-help books, talk to countless coaches, write a journal, try relaxation techniques, tightly schedule your day, and so on. Ultimately, however, you must do the work to make progress. You have to tackle things. You have to become a doer, and the secret here is incredibly simple: Do your work!
One thing has become particularly clear to me on my journey down the rabbit hole of productivity: the fact of how important it is to get things done. Okay, admittedly, this doesn't sound very surprising. What is surprising about it, however, is the why. Of course, things ultimately need to be done to make progress. But above all, it's also about continuously proving to oneself that one is making headway. It's about gaining self-assurance in the certainty that one can complete something.
An observation: One writes differently when thinking that the nonsense will be read by someone else. Okay, any half-talented thinker will come to this realization as well - nothing special.
Right now, the idea of optimizing every aspect of my life fascinates me. For example, I can think of three things that are not optimal and I want to change, and then take concrete steps to improve.
There's one thing that has catapulted my productivity to an entirely new level: radical planning. I have developed my own way of dealing with tasks and planning my day, and here's how I do it:
My approach, which I call "radical planning," is based on 2 important pillars:
The first step, task capture, is the most important and simultaneously the most challenging. There is a crucial rule that must be meticulously followed:
