Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - How to be more Productive - Productivity Bootcamp Podcast | Clutterbug Podcast # 68

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

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Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. I'm Cass from Clutterbug, and today we're talking about productivity and specifically how to start your own productivity boot camp. So thanks again for joining today. We're talking again about productivity. And I think there are some myths and misconceptions about productivity. and specifically people thinking that in order to be productive, that they have to be really busy and really hardworking. And there's definitely a difference between doing productive work and doing busy work. We could spend all day mopping an already clean floor or reorganizing and putting our books in alphabetical order. And while we may think of that as a productive use of our time,

it's really not. Those type of tasks are busy work, not necessarily productive work. So I want you to think of productivity as the things in your life that you can do that will have the biggest impact on your goals. This is about achieving the things in life that we really want to achieve. It's about doing something that's going to make a big difference and hopefully in not a lot of time. So how do we do that? How do we be more productive and we only have so many hours in the day and this is why productivity is so important i do not believe that we should work all day long i am not a big believer in hard work i mean i i i shouldn't say that i think that it's great to work hard i don't think that we need to work all the time there definitely has to be balance in our lives and i think we can have the same results

by working a whole lot less if we're productive when we do work, if we're really achieving the things we need to achieve in a short amount of time instead of wasting time with busy work. So how do we do that? And what does that look like? Honestly, I know this is cliche and I say the same thing over and over again. But if you really want to be productive, the number one thing that you can do is a daily to-do list.

and if you really want to be productive and achieve all of your dreams and your hopes and all of those great things, you need to also have like a life list. Right. So let's start there. Let's start in your productivity boot camp. We're going to do it this week in the next seven days. I want you to do a few little challenges. The first challenge I want you to do is to write out a goal. Maybe you have more than one goal. Write them all down. I don't care. But at least pick one. Maybe it's to write a book. Maybe it's to lose weight. Maybe it's to organize your whole home. Maybe it's to start a business. Think big. Think of a big, giant, amazing goal. And I want you to write that down. Then something you can do is break that goal down even more into smaller chunks. So if organizing your whole home,

is your big main awesome goal, the smaller chunks would be organize the kitchen. It would be organize your bedroom. It would be declutter the basement. Organize the garage. Purge your kids' toys. Those are all smaller goals. So go ahead and write all of those down too. Now we can break that down even further and pick one of those.

Just one. One of those smaller goals that works towards the bigger goal. and now when you're doing your daily to-do list, and that's what your challenges for the next seven days too. I want you to write your big goal, and I want you to break it down into smaller goals, and then I want you to set an alarm in your phone every day right after you wake up to make a daily to-do list.

And I want you to put no more than five things on that daily to-do list. Maybe it's take the dog for a walk or do the laundry or something small, something attainable, not one of your big, huge, organize the whole kitchen, but I want one of those things, one of those five to seven things on your to do list to be working towards that smaller goal that you've chosen. So if it is organize your whole entire home and you've broken that down into smaller things like organize the kitchen, organize the garage, purge your kids' toys, on your daily to do list, I want you to take a small. step towards that. So maybe today it's organized the junk drawer. Purge your food storage

containers. Get rid of 21 articles of clothing from your bedroom. I want all of these things each day to be something that you can accomplish in 15 minutes or less. I want your to do list to be manageable and it's still going to have to contain the other daily things that you have to do in your life but I want you to pick away every day for just 15 minutes towards your bigger goal. This is exactly the method that I used for writing a book. The first time I've never written anything in my life, I was like, I'm going to be an author, this is going to be crazy, I'm going to write a book, I only had a couple of months to do it. So I said the big goal was I'm going to write a book.

The smaller goals were, okay, these are going to be the chapters that I'm going to or the things I'm going to talk about. And then every day, I wrote for just 15 minutes about one of those sections, one thing in one of those sections. And in under two months, I had an entire book written. And so that's the secret to productivity. That was a really productive use of my time. And so that's what you can do in this week.

Choose this week as your productivity boot. camp. That's what I really want you to accomplish. So I know you might be thinking, well, I have like a million cool things that I want to do and where do you start and oh my gosh, there's so many things that I want to accomplish in life. I want you to write it all down. It's called brain dumping. Write all your ideas down on a piece of paper and then number them from one till whatever, whichever is the most important to you. And you're going to have to pick one over another. And that's called prioritizing. And prioritizing. And prioritizing is another key component to productivity.

It's about looking at all the things you want to or that you have to accomplish and asking yourself, which of these is going to have the biggest impact on my life? Which of these is getting me closer to my goal the quickest? And those are the things that we're going to focus on. So for me and my business, this is something that I have ADHD. I have zero internal executive function. So prioritization is key for me to achieve things in my business. So this past summer, I had to, all three of my kids were home for the summer from school.

I still had to do housework, make dinner, grocery shop. I also was writing my third book and I only had two months to write the entire book. It was 60,000 words. I also had to work on my YouTube channel, and I was also creating my very first online course, all at the same time. And that included, you know, replying to emails and comments and all of the other things that went along with my day-to-day job. It was way too much. So I had to prioritize which of these things is going to have the biggest impact on my life. Cleaning the house was not one of those things.

So that was put on the back burner. Right? I had to just, that was not my priority. So I had a whole summer of a pretty messy house. I'm not going to lie. But the kids picked up the slack and my husband picked up the slack and I asked people to come in and help me. Every time I was like, okay, I could film an extra YouTube video this week or I could take that time and work on my course. Which one of these is going to have the biggest impact on my life and get me closer to the goal? And the answer was the course. So while I wanted to do it all, especially this podcast, this podcast, I love doing podcasts. But when I'm looking at all the things I have to accomplish and prioritizing, this comes lower on the list. Sorry guys, but that's the truth. But this is the secret to being productive. This is the secret to, in two months, creating an online course and writing a book at the same time, while being home with my three kids and watching them and playing with them,

and engaging with them all summer long and running my business at the same time. That is how you can achieve massive amounts of things. It's because you're really focusing your time and energy where it matters. And so come up with your idea, come up with your big fat, amazing dream, break it down into smaller parts than every day. Make yourself write a to-do list and take a small chunk of that goal. and tackle it. Prioritize that list. Do the thing that's going to have the biggest impact first. Get it out of the way. It's called eating your frog. It stops the procrastination. And it gets you so much

closer to actually achieving your dreams. So yeah, that's the secret sauce, you guys. And so I want you to think of this week as a boot camp. I want you to do these three things for me. I want you to write down all your big awesome ideas and your goals and the things you really want to accomplish. I want you to break those down. Then the second thing I want you to do is prioritize and choose one of them. And the third thing is I want you to set an alarm in your phone to remind yourself every morning the first thing you do is make a to-do list for your day and prioritize that and pick one small thing that's going to work towards that bigger goal that you've written down for yourself. And you're going to see pretty amazing things happen for you.

This is so many entrepreneurs I've met and I've talked to so many successful people follow this simple but exactly the same recipe for their life. And it doesn't matter what it is you want to do. It doesn't matter if you want to start a blog or start a YouTube channel or just spend more time with your kids. Maybe you want to, I don't know, start teaching yoga. Maybe you just want to take yoga, right? It doesn't matter what your goal is.

This is how you're going to achieve it. You're going to write it down. You're going to break it down. You're going to prioritize it. And you're going to schedule yourself 15 minutes every day to work towards it, doing one small thing to achieve that bigger goal. And can you change your life in full? 15 minutes a day? Yes, you absolutely can. Can you write a book in 15 minutes a day? You can write

three of them. I am here to tell you that is the truth. Can you organize your entire house in 15 minutes a day? Absolutely. I am proof that even the messiest person can do that. Can you start a business talking about something you love and completely replace not only your own income but your husband's income and support your entire family working part time doing something you love in just 15 minutes a day? Absolutely. I am proof that you can do that. And the secret is those three things, writing down your big, giant goal, prioritizing it, breaking it down, prioritizing it, and scheduling yourself time to work towards that goal every single day. Secret sauce, my friends, So try it this week. Think of this as your productivity boot camp. And if you're already doing these

things and you're like, I'm not seeing the success. It could be that again, you've got too much on your plate. You haven't broken them down into small enough little chunks. And so you're not actually accomplishing the things that you want. And the prioritization is number one. It does suck. It sucks. It sucks to let go of the things that you would rather do or you feel that are important in order to make time for the things that really are important. And that was a challenge for me. It was a challenge for me to let go of the housework. It was a challenge for me to let go of the podcast and the YouTube videos in order to focus on the things that were going to have the biggest impact. But now I can come back to these things.

And those other more impactful things are done. and it didn't really take a long time and I'm so glad that I did them. I'm so glad that I looked at the bigger picture that I took time to prioritize and I made time to actually focus on completing those small little tasks. So productivity boot camp this week. Grab a piece of paper right now. I want you to stop listening to this podcast. Grab a piece of paper.

Brain dump your big, amazing, awesome idea. break that down into smaller things that you have to do in order to achieve that big, amazing idea and then prioritize all of those smaller goals and make yourself a daily list, doing something small to achieve one of those goals. A little bit every day adds up to a lot. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you next time when we talk more about productivity. life shortcuts and how to get organized for your style. We'll see you then.