7 Highly Effective People Reveal Their Favorite Productivity Hacks

Hello and welcome to the Active Growth Podcast, episode 19. Now, this episode is a special episode, and it was a real treat for me to do this. We got the whole marketing team together, that is basically the Thrive Themes marketing team and the Active Growth team, together in one place in Thailand, and we managed to all sit around a table and do a group podcast.

Shane Melaugh

The topic for this podcast was simply this: I asked the question to everyone in the group, what did you do, what helped you do better in this past year? So, what resources, or tools, or strategies did you use that helped you be a better marketer, learn more, learn faster, make progress, or just be more effective?

Shane Melaugh

I asked everyone to go through their notes and basically take some time to review the past year and ask themselves, what made the biggest difference? So, this is from a whole group of people. These are the hot tips. These are the things that have moved the needle, that have made a difference for this group of marketers.

Shane Melaugh

One of the reasons it's really interesting to hear from this group of people is that they all work remotely, and remote work is work in hard mode. Every entrepreneur and digital nomad has experienced this, right? You have no fixed working times, no boss breathing down your neck, no clear structure. It's like, this freedom can basically be terrifying, and it makes it super difficult to be productive. Remote working is the heavyweight class of productivity and creative work.

Shane Melaugh

And so, what these people that you're about to meet have to say about this topic, this is tested in the most difficult circumstances. What works for them will definitely work for you.

Shane Melaugh

Here are some of the things that we'll be covering, and that you'll discover as you listen to this episode: You'll hear about our strategy for creating useful and easy to understand content, even when the content is about highly complex topics, and how we can write about highly complex topics, and explain highly complex topics without getting overwhelmed or spending too much time on it.

Shane Melaugh

You'll also learn how you can use this same strategy to learn things faster for yourself, and to be a better teacher, which is really important if, for example, you do online courses.

Shane Melaugh

We'll also get into how sleep has a super profound effect on productivity, and on your ability to do creative work, and the different strategies that everyone in the group has developed to get enough rest, and to basically maximize this sleep effect.

Shane Melaugh

You'll hear about how to create systems that remove friction from your workflow, and how it can make a surprisingly big difference to how much time you spend and your ability to focus and work effectively, even though these changes can be really, really tiny. And talking about tiny changes, one of the things that comes up several times is basically small nudges you can give yourself to keep yourself on track, or also keep your team on track if you work with a team, to keep everyone accountable and keep things moving smoothly. It's often small changes, small nudges, that have a large effect.

Shane Melaugh

And also, a funny part in the podcast is, how to use good old Pavlovian conditioning on yourself to make yourself more productive, and to take your work environment with you.

Shane Melaugh

All that and much more coming up right now. You can get the show notes for this episode, with all the notes, a quick summary, and resources, links, and so on at activegrowth.com/19. Activegrowth.com/19. You can also go there to leave a comment, we reply to all of the comments, and you can also leave us a voice message there that may get featured on a future episode.

Shane Melaugh

So, with that said, let's get into the episode.

Shane Melaugh

My name is Shane Melaugh.

Matt Totten

Matt Totten.

Miquel Malet

Miquel Malet.

Dave Danzeiser

Dave Danzeiser.

Stephanie Kelly

Stephanie Kelly.

Hanne Vervaeck

Hanne Vervaeck.

Alexandra Kozma

Alexandra Kozma.

Shane Melaugh

So, big team here, let's get started right away with Matt.

Shane Melaugh

First we'll hear from Matt. Matt has been doing a lot of writing on the Active Growth blog, and he's basically been doing the heavy lifting of finding marketing tools, and comparing them and testing them, doing this in-depth testing, that I used to do but no longer has time for. And of course, he also does some work for Thrive Themes. This is just my marketing team, basically, so everyone here works for Thrive Themes, and some of them also work for Active Growth to some extent.

Shane Melaugh

All right, let's hear from Matt.

Matt Totten

The thing that has helped me ship more and ship faster is, I tend to be an extreme perfectionist, and I tend to blow the scope of my projects way out of proportion. I'm always collecting details, and going down several rabbit holes, and so whatever project I do just sort of snowballs into something that's not super useful at the end.

Matt Totten

So, one of the things that the team has really helped me focus on is really keeping the scope of my project super small and focused, and with a specific use case in mind. And so, this keeps me on track as I work through something, to not get off the path too far before I come back, and then actually finish the project and get it in front of the group again, get other eyes on it as fast as possible.

Shane Melaugh

Can you give an example of how you would use a use case like this?

Matt Totten

Okay, so, a review we just did on payment gateways. There's a lot you can write about in terms of payment gateways, and there's several of them out there, so one thing we decided to do was, we're just going to talk about payment gateways for selling your first ebook, and that kept it super simple. It kept the application really focused, and that way I didn't just have to keep collecting details, details, details, and then figure out how to present it. It was just super focused, and it allowed me to collect the information about the different gateways, and put it into a post in a couple of days, instead of spending weeks researching.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, I think this is something in general, especially with complex stuff, so I did this thing about the email marketing tools where, that's also an example where there's so many of these tools, and they're so complex, you could write, I don't know, a 5000 word review for each one of them. And trying to make a comparison, and this is actually something I noticed as well, I started and then I noticed that my first outline was just, this is too much. It will end up being a piece of content with so much information that, what's the point, right? It makes it no less complex. If you're trying to decide which email marketing tool I should use, and you come to this massive post that tries to explain everything about everything, you're actually no further to making a good decision.

Shane Melaugh

And so, yeah, I applied the same thing there, where it was like, to pick out specific, difficult use cases that I knew most of these tools would fail at, so that way I could reduce the group to the few tools that even had a chance of competing, right? And then, in the course of doing it, I noticed that AB testing was like, the killer differentiator, and so that really helped and crystallized that, where if you're in our audience, you're probably interested in more advanced marketing stuff, and this is how you make the decision.

Shane Melaugh

And I think that can be extrapolated into a general recommendation, right? On the one hand, if you create content, and on the other hand, just if you want to make decision about complex things, right? Base it on a use case. I think that's a pretty good way to turn complexity into something that's more graspable, maybe.

Hanne Vervaeck

And it's not just only easier to create it, and to keep that scope limited like you say, Matt, because yes, it does help to create that content faster, but it's also, it is more valuable for the reader, and I think that is something that many people forget when they are writing a blog post, or creating an e-course, or whatever, it's ...

Hanne Vervaeck

When you imagine learning Photoshop, for example, it's one of those things where it's like, you have to learn everything on Photoshop, it's super hard. And I remember that I bought an e-course, and the only thing that was teaching me was how to put an overlay on an image, and how to put text on that overlay, to make social media images in Photoshop. So, the fact that it was social media images in Photoshop made it much more bearable, where I would never have bought a full Photoshop course, because that wasn't ... I don't need to know how to tweak pictures, and make them look good, and take out whatever, the bags under the eyes of a portrait that I would never have taken in the first place.

Hanne Vervaeck

So, having something limited is also much better for the audience, and I think that's one of those things where, as entrepreneurs, we always want to put more, more, more, because that will add value, where actually, as the content creator, your role is to limit the scope, and to make it super precise so that you don't waste time for the people that you're actually creating the content for, and that they can go through your blog post, or your e-course, or whatever, and be like, "Yes, this is exactly what I wanted, this is exactly what I needed to know, and it took no more time for me to get through that content than it had to to answer my main questions."

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, I think this also a case of the curse of knowledge, right, where once you've learned it ... If you've mastered something like Photoshop, and you think, I'm going to do a Photoshop tutorial, you might thing that, oh, I'm going to start by, I don't know, explaining all the tools that are available in the sidebar, right? But actually, you didn't learn it like that. You learned it because you wanted to accomplish a thing.

Shane Melaugh

Or at least, I think that's the most effective way to learn it, right? You don't learn what each button does, and then once you know everything, then you start editing a photograph, right? It's like, you want to accomplish something, you learn how to do that one thing, and then slowly you build up a knowledge of tools.

Matt Totten

I felt like it gives me a good entry point, too, because I do tend to be someone who stays in the big picture type of thing, and I'm a perfectionist, so you're really ... what that's saying is you have a fear of judgment, so you just hold everything close to the chest until the deadline, and then you get feedback. And that's the worst thing to do, because the more feedback you can get, the better the product gets, and it sort of gives you a hyper focus, when you have that use case, to get that piece done, get it at least shipped to your team, or people you can get that feedback from, and then it leads to a better end product down the road.

Shane Melaugh

To clarify here what Matt's talking about here is, we do internally, we review each other's work, right? So that's the first step of feedback you can get, that's something you can get sooner. But I think even if you're just like a blogger, and you create your content, even there, the lean startup idea applies where it's much better to publish simple blog post on the topic, put it out there, see what happens, and then develop it over time than, yeah, like you say, you hold it close to your chest, work on it forever. It's something that we've also talked about on the podcast before.

Shane Melaugh

Next we'll hear from Miquel. Miquel is our video editor and animation designer, so whenever you see an Active Growth video or a Thrive Themes video, and anything cool happens in that video, it's Miquel's work. Especially the sales videos, is where you can kind of see him flex his skills, right? All these animations, most of the designs, are totally custom-made.

Shane Melaugh

So, he's someone you maybe haven't heard from before except if you have watched our "How to do the bubble effect" tutorial on Thrive Themes, but he plays an important part, like I said. Anything cool that happens in a video, it's his work.

Miquel Malet

So, in my case, there are two things that have been important this year. One of them is the way I dealt with getting stuck with creative work, especially when I have problems about doing animations for a sales video, for example. With Thrive Architect, I started having very high expectations of how good the video should look, and that kept me quite stuck, I don't know for how long, maybe a day or so, I didn't make much progress until ...

Miquel Malet

What I noticed was that I wasn't accepting the fact that what was coming out from me at the moment was something very crappy, and very, very, very simple. And once that hit home, it was very powerful to me to just build something that was very low, low quality, and then that allowed for better quality to come on top of that.

Miquel Malet

And that's been quite important for me in other areas, if I want to write something, if I want to make a video for my personal channel, I just start throwing ... making a brain dump, just throwing whatever comes to my mind, and then on top of that I can make something that I'm more proud of.

Miquel Malet

And the other thing which is indirectly related to creativity is just sleep. I noticed that if I go to bed late, and by late I mean around 12, midnight or so, the next day is going to be subject to a lot of stress in terms of, make sure that you wake up early, because if you don't, then you're going to have to shift a lot of things that you're doing during the day, you're going to have to push them back.

Miquel Malet

So, I noticed how that little adjustment made such a difference, where I felt ... It solidified more in the last month, where I would go to bed no later than half past 10, and wake up naturally between 6 and 7, even without an alarm clock, and then everything feels effortless. And it adds up when it's about making something creative, that if the stress is there, if there are some background processes in my head that say, oh, yeah, but now I'm going to have to push that for later, I don't know where I should have lunch now, and everything gets shifted away, that just doesn't help.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, you kind of said it's not related, but with sleep, it's like, there's nothing sleep isn't related to. Sleep is such a powerful foundation of being a functioning human. There's nothing it doesn't relate to.

Hanne Vervaeck

It's not for nothing that it's torture to wake people up over, and over, and over, and over again.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. So, what I'd be interested to hear from everyone here ... For most of us, we know if we get an early start to the day, it's probably a very early start. It's basically better to get an early start, but how do you deal with the feeling in the evening? For me this is a problem, the feeling in the evening, I feel like I haven't gotten enough done, and it's very difficult for me to shut off, right, if I feel like I have to do this, that, and the other before I can go to bed. It's like I'm not ready to end the day. That's usually why I end up staying awake too long.

Hanne Vervaeck

I want to say something about the early start, because I stopped beating myself up over that. I'm not a morning person. I tried the Miracle Morning technique, I tried the getting up at 5:30 and getting your first work done immediately in the morning, and whatever. I'm a wreck at 2 in the afternoon when I'm doing that. It just basically makes me, yeah, productive, maybe between like 5:30 and 9 or something, and then I just, first of all I'm hungry, and then I crash.

Hanne Vervaeck

And even, one of the things that's valuable is having a social life also, and getting to bed at 8 limits your social life severely, especially if not everybody's an entrepreneur around you, and they actually have a ... I was going to say "real job." They have normal work hours, and they get home at 7:30, and so if you want to meet up with your friends ... In Paris, we meet up at 8, so that means I'm not in bed before 11. And for me, that's something that I don't want to compromise on that, because I think it's important, and so, yeah, I go to bed around 11, 12. I'm not burning the candles, or whatever, through the night, but that makes me wake up around 8, 9 in the morning, instead of 5 in the morning.

Hanne Vervaeck

I also, I don't put an alarm, and I stopped beating myself up about the fact that I'm not a morning person, and my day starts at 9, basically. And that's just ... I think that's also important, because you hear so much about the importance of early in the morning, whatever. Everybody has their own rhythm, and if it doesn't work for you, if you feel crappy when you have to tear yourself out of bed at 5 in the morning, and then you have to take a nap in the afternoon because you're just crashing, and then you're missing out on seeing your friends, might not be worth the whole Miracle Morning thing. That's my take on that.

Miquel Malet

Yeah, so it's really important to just look objectively at what works and try different things, because exactly for me, if I'm in Catalonia, it's like everything socially also just happens after 10. And if I go out for a dancing event, nothing happens before 12, and the peak of the night would be at 2 AM. So I said, that's fine on the weekends because then the next day I can wake up late, no problem.

Miquel Malet

But it's like, once I put it objectively, as you did, you find out that you're not a morning person, then you find out what works. For me, I was just stuck for a long time in just going to bed late from Monday to Friday, and then having this low level of stress there. But as you said, just find out what works for you.

Dave Danzeiser

To answer your original question of strategies to stop working, I guess, I make it very difficult to resume work. So, at one point, I did a road trip and was sleeping in the van, so once you went home, there was no wifi. We didn't set it up so that there was wifi. So, making sure that I set deadlines that were very hard ...

Dave Danzeiser

Another option if you're not living in a van, for example, might be to schedule a social event or some type of class or extra hobby that starts at 4 or 5. That also seems to make me more productive, because I know that I have to finish my work by that cutoff time, because then I'll be out for the reest of the night.

Shane Melaugh

You set a kind of hard limit, right? Because if you just tell yourself, I'm going to stop working by 5, but then at 4:30 you're like, oh, I'm still in the middle of something, and it drags on.

Dave Danzeiser

But yeah, especially if it's a social event where you know people are waiting for you, or you've paid for the class, or something like that, it makes it much easier to shut the computer.

Stephanie Kelly

And on the same vein for me, I've found really helpful is just setting a hard eight-hour limit, and just keeping track of the hours. I mean, I know we're all remote, and now we don't have to work a set eight hours, but for me it's just so much easier to keep it in that box, and really defend that box, and clock off at ... I know I can't dawdle during the day because I need to finish my stuff in the eight hours and do the work that's really important in that eight hours, because I can't just keep working after that eight hours if I promised myself that once I hit 5 PM, then I'm not allowed to open my computer.

Alexandra Kozma

I also got into the habit of waking up really early, and I make sure that I do my productive work before lunch, so I would have my best hours in the morning. After lunch, we're all a bit sleepy after lunch. Anyway, I try to make sure that then I work on things that don't require much productivity, more like the mechanical things. And yeah, I usually time it to either going out like he said, or to having dinner. That's when I'm ready to go out and have dinner, or just make time for myself, I turn my computer off, and then I'm not allowed to look at it anymore, and I also decrease the brightness on my phone, or I just have my Kindle after lunch ... after dinner, sorry, and just read a book and not touch my computer.

Shane Melaugh

All right, so, this is something I'd also love to hear comments from, because I think it's one of those things, it's actually a very Active Growth thing to talk about, stuff that you don't generally find on a marketing or entrepreneur blog, even though it can make a huge difference. So, I'd love to get some feedback, some comments of how sleep has affected your productivity, and also if you have these kinds of strategies for keeping yourself productive by having good sleep hygiene, basically.

Shane Melaugh

Next up, Dave. He is our Facebook marketing wizard. He spends a lot of time analyzing Facebook ads, creating Facebook ads, testing Facebook ads, creating complicated funnels of ads and retargeting ads, and so on so forth. And driving traffic, driving new visitors our businesses.

Dave Danzeiser

All right, so, I have two things that I want to talk about that have helped me ship more. The first one is documentation and setting up a system where, even though it takes a lot of work up front, I find myself doing a lot of tasks that are repeating, so I keep track of what I'm doing, and then make it extremely easy for me to repeat those tasks.

Dave Danzeiser

And so, an example of this is, when I'm creating Facebook ads for example, every single ad set, I will use a different audience, and so part of creating the ad campaign is creating these separate audiences. And now I know in my head, it's very easy to go and type Facebook.com, go to the ad manager, open up the audience, and then create the audience from there. But with the documentation, I'm able to just have a link straight to the audience, and I don't spend a lot of extra RAM trying to remember, okay, where do I have to go for this? I just click a link, it opens, and I'm right where I need to be.

Dave Danzeiser

If I need to save images, for example, I'll put a link in the checklist that takes me straight to Google Drive, right where I need to save that folder, and so I don't have to open up a tab, Google Drive, find the right folder. It just makes things simple. The takeaway from that is, make your work as easy as possible so you don't spend your creativity doing these tasks that take up a lot of RAM, that you have to think about doing.

Dave Danzeiser

The second thing is creating systems of working that I know work for me. One thing is, I will find systems that will work for a while, and then run out, and when they stop working, being sure that I have something up in the background to take up the slack when, for example, Deep Work stops working and I find myself no longer productive, I can switch to another technique.

Dave Danzeiser

Another thing that has worked me is kind of an environment change. I will make sure that after four hours of work, I have another café to go to, for example, and the important part for that is knowing cafes that I can go to that meet certain requirements. For me, it's very important that they take credit cards, so that I can just keep a tab, I don't have to keep going up to the counter and paying cash every time, I can just keep it running. If it's in the morning, I like inexpensive coffee and I like soda water. If it's in the evening, I like healthy food.

Dave Danzeiser

So, as soon as I need a location change, again, this goes back to the documentation idea again, that you don't have to think of, oh, where do I need to go that has the good wifi and has healthy food? I can just immediately pick up and go there. So, I find that extremely helpful.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, so, one thing that strikes me about this is that you're also eliminating potential distractions, right? I think this is one of the things that can really hurt productivity, that we generally don't think a lot about, right? You think, well, like you say, I have to save my image somewhere. You open a browser, go to Google Drive, and navigate through a bunch of folders until you're there. It seems like a trivial thing, but actually it's something that can have a high cost, a task-switching cost, right?

Shane Melaugh

So, switching between doing this work that I have to focus on and then doing something even something super mundane like navigating through a bunch of folders comes with a task-switching cost where then switching back to something you can focus on can take a long time, right? There have been studies on this in some cases that suggested even after a minimal distraction like checking your phone, it can take up to 15 minutes to get back into the groove of full productivity.

Shane Melaugh

And so having a direct link to a thing instead of navigating through a bunch of stuff, I think, can really save on that task-switching cost, and also it can save on just potentially getting distracted, right? Because on your way there, you open your browser and you see your suggested websites, or whatever the browser presents, and all of the sudden you're on Reddit or something. Or, I think the phone is especially dangerous for that. You want to check the time, but then you see 50 notifications. Next thing you know, you're in a conversation with someone.

Shane Melaugh

So, having these kind of shortcuts past the potential distractions, I think, can actually be really valuable, even though it might seem like a very simple thing.

Dave Danzeiser

Yeah, and further on that, the documentation is very nice for when you do get distracted inevitably. That 15 minutes is extremely cut down if you've been running a checklist and you reopen and go back to what you were doing, and you can immediately look like, oh yeah, I had just created this audience. The next step for this is to start writing the copy or the headlines, for example. I don't have to rethink, what have I done, have I named this correctly yet? It's all in the checklist and I can just immediately ... or not immediately, but it doesn't take me as long to get back into it.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think checklists are one of those nonsexy productivity hacks, where it ... It is insane, because yeah, we've all published I don't know how many blog posts, so we're supposed to know what to do when you publish a blog post, but we still have a checklist to go through. And it's one of those things, I think, where when you talk about RAM, that's super important, because if you have this checklist, you don't spend any of your thinking power on doing those repetitive tasks. You're just following the checklist and being like, okay, add social media image, okay, publish this, post this, whatever, do this. And the fact that you don't need any brain power for that opens up the opportunity to do Deep Work on the really important stuff, rather than spending your brain power on that?

Hanne Vervaeck

And it also ... I agree with Alexandra about doing the less Deep Work in the afternoon, and if you have a checklist, that's actually reducing, somehow, the deeper work to more shallow work, and you can do it without being super concentrated, because the checklist just takes away a lot of that concentration that you would need to do it otherwise.

Shane Melaugh

And we can link to a story here about how checklists are being used in the medical world, because yeah, it's definitely not the kind of thing where it's like, I know how to do this, I don't need a checklist. In surgery, with surgeons, probably the highest-trained, most expert among professionals, right? Surgeons will increase their positive outcomes and decrease their negative outcomes from surgery by huge margins by having a checklist that runs through the mundane stuff like, did you wash your hands? Did you forget your scalpel in the patient? This kind of stuff. It makes a huge difference. So, it really isn't something that, I need a checklist until I know how to do something, and then I don't need it anymore.

Hanne Vervaeck

I guess Matt can give an example for the pilot stuff, right?

Shane Melaugh

Yeah.

Matt Totten

Oh, yeah, in terms of aviation, it was a lesson learned very early on to start using checklists, because there are so many things going on, and the price of failure is so great that the entire aviation industry uses checklists, from creating the airplane to the actual pilots, so they don't forget anything.

Miquel Malet

That's even if you've been a pilot for decades, right?

Matt Totten

Yeah. In fact, they say the two most dangerous times as a pilot is early on when you don't have any experience, and then later on when you have a ton of experience, and you get complacent. And I'm always, if I ever hear a pilot say, "Well, I have 8000 hours, blah blah blah," I'm like, he's dangerous, and I watch out for that guy, because he lost the humility about it.

Shane Melaugh

Next we'll hear from Steph, and if you follow Thrive Themes' blog, then you've probably seen her in some of the videos she's made, or read some of her posts. And apart from the content marketing, Steph has also been in charge of member happiness at Thrive Themes, so she makes sure that we keep producing cool, bonus content, valuable extra content, and things like that for our loyal Thrive Themes members.

Stephanie Kelly

My one ... It's already been mentioned, or come up in conversation, but it's about finding a work routine and environment where you're most productive, and then defending that with your life. There have been several examples that I can think of and mention now. We're working together in Thailand for a little bit, and we decided to have a morning meeting at 9. So, I'm a very early riser, and I like to get up and start work by about 7 AM, and I find I am incredibly productive in the mornings, but once it hits lunchtime and I eat something, it's all over.

Stephanie Kelly

With this work meeting at 9, it was ... I would get up, start work at a café, and then have to pack all my stuff up, come back to the office, and then we'd have our meeting which would be about an hour, and then I'd have another maybe hour of work, when I have to go to a café, set up again, and then pack up again for lunch, and I was incredibly unproductive in the first two weeks we were doing this, and eventually took the step to ask to change the time of the meeting, because it was just really not working for my schedule.

Stephanie Kelly

Now, not everyone is going to be able to do this, and change meetings, but you can work out ways where there are less interruptions to your day. But it's like Hanne was saying, some people are productive in the mornings, some people are productive in the evenings. That's all fine, and I would recommend trying to figure that out for yourself, and not trying to change it.

Stephanie Kelly

Not feeling guilty that you can't get up at 7 and bust out a really productive morning, and then you're off for the rest of the afternoon. If you're a night worker, you're a night worker, that's fine. Put processes in place where you can start your work when you're most productive, and just be okay with that. Just accept that and make that part of your workday.

Stephanie Kelly

Another example is when you are remote, it's so easy to ... I have a friend who loves doing brunch, and obviously I want to hang out with that friend. Because I'm remote, I can choose my own hours, so I fell into the trap of going out to brunch with her a couple of times, and then the rest of my day would just be ruined because I missed those important hours for myself in the morning.

Stephanie Kelly

So, again, the hard lesson was just, do not make an exception to this. Just know your hours, know when you're most productive, and really, really defend it.

Matt Totten

This, to me, sounds like the importance of routines.

Stephanie Kelly

Yeah.

Matt Totten

And for me, actually, for the sleep thing, I kind of view myself as an addict when it comes to lack of sleep. It's so easy, it's just ever since I was a teenager, I developed a really poor sleep habit. So, I feel like the value of a nightly and morning routine that I stick to without question is really important for a recovering sleep-deprived person like me. Otherwise, it impacts the productivity, and then the time you're actually working, you miss out on those ideal work times.

Stephanie Kelly

And an addition to that is knowing the work environment that's best for you, and also protecting that. So, a place where there's going to be limited interruptions, because if you get interrupted in that prime time for you, then it's going to mess up the rest of your day in terms of work.

Stephanie Kelly

For me, a big one was good wifi, and I was also doing road trips through the State in a van, and we'd have a different café every single day, and that I found really, really difficult, because half the time the internet wouldn't work, and then you'd try and make it work, and kind of sit there for another hour or two just playing around with this bad internet, and your productivity would just be shot by the end of that.

Stephanie Kelly

So, I think people would probably be moving around less, so go the extra mile to find a café that has really good wifi, or a home work environment that has really great wifi, were no one's going to come in and ask you questions, or interrupt you during your really, really productive time.

Hanne Vervaeck

I want to add to that, good gear. A slow computer is a disaster. We were talking about switching from things, right? So, only yesterday, I was working on this Excel document, and it just had 17000 entries, it was a huge document, and I had to change something, and for some reason, my computer was struggling, which usually, it doesn't do it, but I think 17000 entries was a bit too much. And I would do the Excel document, and then have to go to something else, so I started creating a landing page. Which, then I switched back to Excel after ten minutes, it was still calculating, so I went back to my landing page, and I didn't manage to finish that document because it was just, it was so slow.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think, if you have a bad computer, if your computer is what you're working on all day, those seconds when you have to wait ... And the problem is, we hate waiting, everybody hates waiting, and at that point what we do is, we open another tab. And that's where you end up on Facebook, or on Reddit, or on whatever other thing it is for you, watching cat videos on YouTube.

Hanne Vervaeck

Or even you don't know anymore why you opened that tab, that's also one of those things. You open a tab, you have to wait for it to load. In the meantime, you're like, I'll check my emails. You go back to the tab, and you're like, wait, why did I open the website? Oh yeah, I was going to check lead generation forms. Okay, lead generation forms, click on it, wait. And it's like, no, that's such a hassle.

Hanne Vervaeck

So, yeah, slow internet for sure, but also slow computer, or gear that's not working is one of those things.

Shane Melaugh

I think this is the ultimate digital nomad problem that you're describing. You can lose so much time going to a place, only to find out that they have wifi, but it's terrible, and then you try to struggle with it and so on. So, that's also for me ... When I arrive at a new place, finding a workplace that has good wifi is a super high priority. I'd much rather be in a place where maybe it's more expensive, or they don't have good coffee, good tea, or whatever, but they have good internet, I'll go there every day.

Shane Melaugh

And that's also one of the things, when I arrive in a new place, that's one of the first priories, is to find at least one place like that. And a tool that can help with that, by the way, is Wifi Map. We'll link to that in the resources. It's basically ... It can show you a map, and it's like crowdsourced wifi passwords from coffee shops and things like that. But one of the good things is, you can filter them by speed, so you can be like, only show me the fastest connections. And I will go out of my way to go to a place that has fast internet, because it makes such a big difference.

Shane Melaugh

Next is Hanne, and if you listen to this podcast, you know Hanne. She's the boss, she is in charge of all of the people that you've been listening to in this episode.

Hanne Vervaeck

For me, one of the things that's important is not just to ship a lot of things, but also to have my team ship a lot of things, and I think two main things that really helped with that is having everybody set their own weekly goals. So, at the beginning of the week, everybody of the team decides what they are going to accomplish by the end of the week, which allows to think about what you actually want to do that week, what would be feasible with the time that you have on hand, what fits into the bigger plan of the monthly goals, and the yearly goals.

Hanne Vervaeck

And having everybody also choose that goal, so that ... Yeah, it's important that it's not somebody else telling, like, you have to finish this by the end of the week, but actually coming from every team member, being like, I want to finish this by the end of the week. I think that has been super helpful in shipping, and in knowing what we are supposed to ship by the end of the week.

Hanne Vervaeck

And on that same note, having daily updates. At the beginning of the day, setting out a very clear expectation of what you will do during that day. And there will always be stuff that doesn't get done, but if at the beginning of the day you were like, I'm going to do A, B, and C, and at the end of the day, you're like, I did half of A, nothing of B, and nothing of C, then you have to think about what you did with your day.

Hanne Vervaeck

And you have to be very honest about that with yourself. Nobody is actually asking you what you did, but it's like, what did you do? Did you find that working on project D was actually more important than the other things that you set out that day, or did you go down a rabbit hole, and did you get lost, making a blog post way out of scope, or watching YouTube videos because you started with that one tab that was interesting, and actually that was good for the topic you were writing or researching.

Hanne Vervaeck

And the same holds true for the weekly goals, right? At the end of the week, if you have to say like, oh, I did this or I didn't do this, then you have to think about why did you not do something, and did you do something else that was more important?

Hanne Vervaeck

And those two things are also just invaluable, because yes, having a great environment, having good habits, having good sleep and all of that, I believe that's necessary to getting something done, but knowing what you have to do, and how you will get there, and if it's realistic to get there, is also very important, and often missing for many entrepreneurs. Because they dream about what they will be able to do, and they don't set out being like, yeah, I'm going to finish that ebook, or I'm going to ... Something very specific and tangible, where you can say at the end of the week, yes or no.

Hanne Vervaeck

There's nothing in between. Yes, you published that blog post; no, you didn't publish that blog post. Yes, you edited that video; no, you didn't edit that video. Yes, you made those Facebook campaigns, or no, you didn't make those Facebook campaigns. And there's no fooling around, and at that point you just have to be super honest with yourself, being like, well, yeah, no, I actually didn't do that much this week.

Shane Melaugh

I think this an antidote to, I'd say, the task management system that we default into if we don't have a system, which for entrepreneurs, you have a choice about what to work on, you have to make decisions about what to work on. The problem is that if you do task management by inbox, or task management by Slack, as it would be these days probably, that's a huge problem, right?

Shane Melaugh

You basically open your inbox, or wherever you get your communications from in the morning, and you let that dictate your day. Oh, someone is asking for this, and there's an emergency over there, and so on. In the end, you can work all day, but you haven't actually moved towards your goals, and this system of deciding, what do I want to have done by the end of the week? What do I want to have done by the end of the day? Is an antidote to that, where you can say, all of this other stuff that's coming at me is also important, but here are my priorities.

Hanne Vervaeck

And then the moment you link that with the moments during the day that you're most productive, that's where this becomes super powerful, because you can be like, yeah, the three things that I really want to get done this day, I have to get them done before lunch, or I'm most productive writing, whatever, between 8 and 10 in the evening, so that's when I will get that thing done. But yeah, coupling those two things with being very clear about what you want to accomplish, and knowing yourself, your habits, your body, and the way your mind works, to actually get those things done at the most productive moments of the day.

Matt Totten

I feel like, just because we also do the daily update on the tasks we want to get done that day, if I do get distracted, that will be the first thing I go back and look at.

Hanne Vervaeck

It's almost like a checklist.

Matt Totten

Yeah, and then you just go back, and you're like, oh yeah, this is the most important thing right now, and that's very helpful.

Hanne Vervaeck

Or even when you're getting bored a little bit, or getting annoyed with something, it's like, what other task did I have that I can actually start working on, which would still bring me closer to those weekly goals?

Stephanie Kelly

And I've found it really helpful in figuring out what I can achieve in a day, because say, write a blog post is very ambiguous, and you never really know, but by setting those goals for yourself and then seeing if you measured up to those goals, in the future you're kind of aware of, oh, writing a blog post takes me two days, and then you can schedule it in a lot easier.

Shane Melaugh

Next we'll hear from Alexandra, and Alexandra, you've probably seen her if you check out our show notes, because the posts that our show notes are on are usually published by Alexandra. She is in charge of the podcast, so she does all the editing for the podcast. She writes the show notes, makes sure that we mention, we add all the links that we mention in the show, and so on.

Alexandra Kozma

Yeah, one of those things I wanted to say related to the wifi issue that you were mentioning, Steph, is that when you can work on a task that doesn't necessarily require internet, or you can somehow work around it, I try to make sure I turn the wifi off. Like say, even for a blog post, that you would collect all the resources that you want to use, or have everything open on your computer, and then turn the internet off. So, you have everything that you need for that, and just use a Word document or Evernote to write the article, or I always have a notebook with me, actual paper and pen, and I like taking notes and planning how I would build a page or something.

Alexandra Kozma

And this way, when I turn the wifi back on, I just need to execute. I need to do what I already came up with. Because I find that when I need to do something creative, that obviously involves some thinking, especially when you have the block, that's when you can either start going down the rabbit hole, and just waste a lot of time, open all those windows that you don't actually need, you just think that maybe you might need them ...

Hanne Vervaeck

That never happens to me! Ever!

Alexandra Kozma

That you just have open thinking maybe that one sentence might be useful for -

Hanne Vervaeck

That's why you never close your computer, because then you lose all those tabs. Right Dave, you know what I'm talking about.

Dave Danzeiser

Certified tab hoarder.

Alexandra Kozma

Yeah I'm one of those! But I figure that if you have them open it's fine, but turn the internet off so that you can't have more open, or can't go to places you didn't want to, and then just turn it back on.

Shane Melaugh

There's another way to basically prevent these distractions, to prevent the problems that usually get us off track. I think that getting offline for periods of work is a pretty hardcore implementation of that, right? But that's also something that Cal Newport recommends in Deep Work. He basically, I think it's almost part of his definition of Deep Work, is that it happens offline, disconnected.

Shane Melaugh

Which I do think can be very, very difficult if you're working on an online business, but you make a good point. I mean, there are certain tasks where, if I sit down to write some copy, I do not need to be connected to the internet for that, right? And really, being connected to the internet can only have negative consequences. It can lead to distraction, but it's not going to help me write copy, so in that case, it's a really good step to just be like, nope, for the next hour, I'm offline, I'm doing this.

Alexandra Kozma

And even if you can be super focused and not go on pages you shouldn't and all that, when you're in the zone and the internet cuts off, you're like, ah, I'm losing it. But as you said, Shane, a few minutes ago, that when you're out of the zone, it takes, you said, 15 minutes to get back, and it just wastes a lot of time for me.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think it's also one of those things where we think we have to be connected all the time, because we think we have to multiple things at the time, which is definitely not true. It has been proven, and this is from a woman speaking, so we're supposed to be good at multitasking. Multitasking is bad. If you want to get stuff done, if you want to ship things, don't multitask.

Hanne Vervaeck

And I think especially with writing blog posts, we feel as if we have to do the research while we're doing the blog post, while we find the best synonym for that exact word we are looking for, while we also find the images online. And I think what Miquel was saying about having that crappy first draft, which we talk often about on content writing too. It's, in your first draft, you can have "TK, find best image here." And TK because then you can search for it.

Hanne Vervaeck

But it's one of those things that you learn, where it's like, to find a source, for example, can make you go down the rabbit hole very, very quickly, so if you're offline at that point, you just, you cannot do it, so that's perfect. And then you can just be like, oh yeah, I remember something, like this Google research for saying that you need 12 points of contact before making a sale, and then you just put in there, "TK, find source, Google research."

Hanne Vervaeck

And you continue writing, and you continue with your Deep Work, and you continue with out being distracted by research, by images, by synonyms. I think that's a good one, because that thesaurus is very important, always open.

Alexandra Kozma

Yeah, another thing I use for my productivity that might not work for everyone, but for me it works super well, is actually music. I kind of train myself to listen to the same kind of music when I'm in the creative Deep Work mode, or even actually in the morning when I wake up, I have a playlist I put on while I'm getting ready for the day, and then I start working, I put another playlist on. Because I'm so used to it that I only listen to that kind of music in that situation, it kind of triggers the habit that, okay, this is work now, and when I'm not working, I don't listen to that.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, so, it's interesting. Basically, you've conditioned yourself with music. And I think that's actually really interesting for anyone who is the digital nomad types, you're moving around. A great disadvantage of all the moving around is that you can't set up your perfect productive environment. You can't take your work environment with you.

Shane Melaugh

And environment is so important, it's so important for being productive, that it's one of the most powerful triggers, basically, of being productive, is if you go to the same environment, same time of day to do the same kind of work. This is a form of conditioning, but I think it's interesting, while we can't do that when we're moving around all the time, you can take your music with you, right? You can take ... You have this element of environment.

Shane Melaugh

So, you can try and take it to the next level using smells. Smells are apparently the strongest triggers, so maybe smell chocolate every time you work, or something like that.

Alexandra Kozma

How do you travel with that?

Shane Melaugh

Funny story, my school history teacher told us this. She says, if you're studying for a test, then smell an orange while you're studying, and then during the test, put some orange smell on your wrist or something, and smell it for memory recall. So, I tried this. I was like, this isn't working, I don't even get this. And then turns out, two years later, I was diagnosed with no sense of smell.

Alexandra Kozma

Yeah, one of our professors told us that we should chew gum, but not this typical minty flavor, but like a fruity flavor gum that you wouldn't normally, while you're studying, and then while you're writing the test, you should chew the same kind of gum.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, that's interesting. So, that's something I've never done, but maybe I'll try it now.

Hanne Vervaeck

The music, definitely. I also have a work playlist, it's even called "work playlist," and it start with the same song, of course. I do start ... I don't shuffle that playlist. It's very important, it stays in the same order, and it starts with the Overwerk, Rise from Overwerk, and the rhythm is good, there's no lyrics, because I cannot work when there's lyrics in the music, and so it's very ... the moment I hear that song, I'm like in the zone, and that's, yeah.

Miquel Malet

It's ACDC for me.

Matt Totten

Yeah, it is.

Shane Melaugh

Nice.

Dave Danzeiser

I'll oftentimes play the same song on repeat, over and over and over again, and just use one song, and it's very helpful for me because, since it's the same song, I start zoning out, I don't pay attention to it, and then I also kind of lose track of time. I find when I listen to a full album, when I hear the song repeat, all the sudden I'll have this check-in and be like, oh, I listened to the whole album, that's exactly two hours and 12 minutes, and then I'll have that concept of how long I've been working, which sometimes derails me.

Dave Danzeiser

Whereas if I have the song on repeat, my brain even loses track of how often it's gone by, and so then you just come out, you've been listening to Adele, "Someone Like You," for seven hours. It's great.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, so, kind of related to this is, I generally don't listen to music when I'm working, or only rarely, but I did get some good over-ear headphones last year, and one of the main criteria I picked them for was just good sound isolation. So, sometimes, because I'm working in a café for example, sometimes I'll just put on my headphones and not listen to music, but it just gives me the silence, right?

Hanne Vervaeck

We were laughing about this the other day, because we were both sitting in a café facing each other, with Steph, and having our earphones in, and so usually when you want to say something, you look at the other one, and you wait until they take the earphones out. And we start talking, we're like, yeah, you don't have music in there either, do you? It was because it calms down the ambient noise, basically. Especially if people are talking too loud next to you.

Stephanie Kelly

I find it's the same as the music. If I put my headphones on, it signifies to me that it's work time.

Matt Totten

I will just add, because I've worked from a lot of co-working spaces, and if you have over-the-ear headphones, it's super intimidating for people to come up and distract you. They will leave you alone. So, it has that benefit, as well.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, every time I see you with the headphones, I'm like, should I talk to him? It's true.

Shane Melaugh

And finally, here's my own contribution to this topic. I'm not going to introduce myself here, because that would just be weird, so here's me.

Shane Melaugh

One of my new things this year has been, I'm getting more into Trello, and I now use Trello with several different boards as my main task management tool. This is actually something I was going to share in some posts, my exact system, but one of the important things ... One of the big challenges in my work is that there's so many things coming from so many sides. There's so many demands, and I'm kind of involved in so many areas of the business that ... The thing I talked about before, where I can be busy all day without really having done anything, or just kind of putting out fires. I'm solving problems everywhere, but I'm not doing something that moves the business forward.

Shane Melaugh

And so one of the things that has helped me deal with this is that, in Trello, I have one column in my personal board which is like my big picture priorities, and I have no more than three cards in there. There's just three big picture things, it's like, these are the big picture things that I want to focus on, and this is like my constant reminder. So, in my productive hours, these are the areas I should be working on, or if I finish something, one of the more distracting types of work, and I'm like, okay, what should I do next? Then that's where I go to.

Shane Melaugh

So, I have, it's like a lighthouse, right? These are not specific tasks, do this by then, but they're just more big picture, aim yourself in this direction, kind of reminders. And this has really helped me. And also the idea that it's limited to three, so that's like the Kanban idea, where if I want to add a new priority, if a new priority comes along, I have to remove another one. So, I either have to finish something, or I have to be like, okay, one of these things is actually less important, I'm going to remove it and put this new priority on the board. That's something that has helped me just calm the chaos.

Shane Melaugh

All right, and that wraps up this group episode. I hope you love this as much as I do. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I learned a few great things from it. I'm happy to share this with you, and I hope you are happy to receive it. Please let us know your thoughts. Go to activegrowth.com/19 and leave a comment there, you can leave a voice message there, and of course we also appreciate it if you leave a review on iTunes, or Apple Podcasts, I guess it's called now.

Shane Melaugh

I have a couple of footnotes before we end this episode, a couple of points. First of all, Alexandra mentioned about working offline, and Hanne made a comment about how we usually think that we have to be online when we really don't. And one thing that came to mind here that I just wanted to mention in case you're not aware of this, Google Docs and Google Drive work offline. So, if you use Google Docs for your writing and note-taking and things like that, as I do, then know that you can install their desktop thingy, which is called Backup and Sync by Google Drive or something like that now. Whatever, by the time this is published, they'll probably have rebranded again. But just get the downloadable desktop thing for Google Drive.

Shane Melaugh

It will sync your Google Drive content to your hard drive, which is cool anyway, but anything that you have synced, you can work on offline in your browser, so you can work on your documents and spreadsheets and so on in you browser without an internet connection, and it will save, and it will simply synchronize the next time you get online, which is really, really good.

Shane Melaugh

And another note, we mentioned writing TK. When you do writing, that whenever you insert a note for yourself, that you use TK. Now, the brief explanation of this is that TK is simply a letter combination that doesn't exist in any word in the English language. So, if you simply write TK and then your note, you can then search your document for TK, and find all of your notes. It's a reliable way to find all notes that you've inserted in your text without having to do any fancy formatting. You don't have to, I don't know, you don't have to do anything complicated to make sure you don't miss any notes in the text. So, that's why we use TK.

Shane Melaugh

We'll also link to a video which is the source where I got this from. I don't know the original source, but the source where I got this from is an interview between Tim Ferris and Neil Strauss, and Neil Strauss explains his writing strategies. It's a great interview, it's a great interview to watch or listen to, and there you can get a more detailed explanation of using TK in your writing.

Shane Melaugh

All right, and with that, thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this, and I'll see you in the next one. Go to activegrowth.com/19 to leave a comment and join the discussion.