Your BIGGEST Productivity Mistake

Getting this right will make you more progress than ever in less time, but if you get it wrong you’ll never succeed in anything.

I've tried several of the 'ultimate morning routine'. I'll save you some time and tell you they don't work. You put in a lot of effort to get a marginal energy increase.

The productivity space is full of hacks and techniques and most of them don't even work.

Fuck your pomodoro technique. Fuck your morning routine.

The real problem the people who look to these tactics have is with their brain. They need to learn to focus. The more you focus the more your focus muscle grows.

People believe they need to add things into their life, and that's the reason they're not successful. This is completely backwards. Do less to get more.

We'll cover:

1. Doing less to get more

2. Morning routines

3. Deep work

4. Nightly routines

The most successful people in any field don't do more than you. They don't have more in their life, they have less.

The most successful people's lives are simple. The best MMA fighter only trains, eats, and recovers. The best salesman only sells. He takes sales calls all day. The best businessman only works.

None of these people juggle 3 sports, tons of friend groups, and several hobbies.

Everything in your life spreads you out a bit more. You have finite energy and time. When you add too much into your life you get spread so thin that success is impossible.

Everybody has the same amount of time available to them. It makes sense that successful people in a discipline allocate more time to it and less to everything else.

If you want to be more successful you have to remove stuff from your life

Think of an entrepreneur running 10 businesses at once waiting to see if one gets any traction. The reality is all of them could work just not all at once. When you're only giving 10% of your time and energy to something how can you expect to outcompete someone's 100%? Business is competitive, you'll never win with only 10% effort..

When you remove stuff from your life (do less) your time and energy get freed up to improve in the areas that matter (get more).

Doing less to get more doesn't mean less work. It means more work in fewer areas.

Everybody thinks they need to add more, and that's why morning routine and stupid productivity hack videos are so popular.

The morning routine you NEED to go through to be productive is a crutch. If you can only perform when you meet these elaborate conditions you're easily outcompeted.

The 3 hour routine you rely on going through is the opposite of productive. It's a waste of time that you could have spent working.

Here's the most optimal morning routine for productivity:

Wake up, Brush teeth, Work.

Productivity is defined as output over time. It is a measure of efficiency. Ideal productivity is as much work in as little time as possible.

Deep work is how you do this. Cal Newport has an entire book on the subject of Deep Work.

Deep work is a simple but powerful concept.

It is a 60-90min bout of 100% focused work on a single task.

Sit down and for 60 minutes give 100% of your attention to the task at hand. You must have the minimum amount of distractions in your environment. It's necessary that you work with your phone in another room. Don't skip this part. If you can't go 1 hour without your phone you're a bitch.

The human brain can only focus and work on a singular task at any given moment. Multitasking is a myth, it's just alternating your attention between tasks. Every task switch makes the brain switch gears and is an inefficiency.

When you commit to doing deep work you'll get more done in 1h than most people do in a day.

Many successful people start their morning with several deep work blocks. Namely, Alex Hormozi, Hamza, Andrew Huberman and Jodie Cook.

Implement deep work into your routine, it is one of the highest leverage habits you can adopt. Work on the important task during these working bouts.

20% of the inputs create 80% of the results (Pareto Principle). These inputs are the primary focus of your deep work blocks.

When you first implement this habit make sure to do it sustainably. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Start with 1 deep work block in the morning. Then move up to 2 blocks, and so on.

Make an audit of 1 week in your life and write everything you spend time on during that week. Yes it's time-consuming, but it's effective. Compile the activities into buckets, and sacrifice all the activities which don't aid your goal.

If you don't sacrifice for your goal, your goal will become the sacrifice.

Another powerful tactic is planning your entire schedule nightly. Before you go to bed write in a journal or notes app. Write each hour of the day out and the associated task.

By doing the practice it saves a lot of decision-making and decision fatigue. Each day at any time you'll know exactly what task to do.

You'll find the time when you get distracted and lose productivity is when task switching. This problem is completely circumvented when you already know what task is next. It avoids thinking about it, considering what's best to do, getting distracted by your phone, and starting to scroll.

Plan the next day every night.