 Hello, everyone. This is George Cao. Welcome to the joyful productivity session. Actually, you know what? I need to start over. I need to start over. What I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to make sure that to attend to watch this session, click here now. OK. One, two, three, four, five, six. Right now, if you're on the Google Plus event page, the one with the boats, go ahead and look at the comment I just posted, which says to watch the session, click here now. And what happens is it'll bring you to a YouTube video screen, and you're going to see something different. But whoops. On the right-hand side is a way to post comments. So go ahead and do that if you don't mind. I would love to see your comments there. And what I'm going to do is quickly close a bunch of my tabs. See here. And then I'm going to start the event over. OK. Give me a second here. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. I just got off another call, and I should have planned better for this. So thank you for your wonderful patience. It's the first time. First time we're doing this here. OK. Oops. OK. All right. So let me actually start over. OK, so let me take a deep breath. Oh, let me actually close the door. And by the way, the reason I'd love for you to comment on the YouTube video on the right-hand side is because the comments will be kept as part of the YouTube video in the future, and it actually helps to increase the search engine optimization of the video. Whereas this is something you might not know, comments on Google Plus events. Right now, Google Plus events is still very not search engine optimized. So yeah, Google Plus events pages are not search engine optimized at all. So all the comments there don't help with that. So you can go and comment. And I see Tami is there. Thank you. And Shrana Gatti and I think it's maybe Tim. I don't know. Jyoti? Jyoti? Jyotir, maybe? Thank you very much. Thank you. OK, so I am going to take a deep breath and get started. OK. Welcome, everyone, to the joyful productivity coaching program. So this is a four-week series where I'm going to be walking you through the most important principles that I know to create a work life, but also a personal life that is filled with both joy and accomplishment. And isn't that wonderful to be able to get the things done that you really want to do most in the world, to be able to get all the things done you most want to do in the world, and to do it with calmness, with confidence, and with joy. So here we go. And by the way, I'm going to give you the link to these slides soon. Those of you who are watching this live video don't have the exact link to the slideshow yet. But actually, you can probably go to joyfulpro.com. OK, it's not up yet. But those who are watching a replay, you should be able to go to joyfulpro.com and find it. But those watching the live video with me, sorry, the slideshow isn't available right now, but you'll have it in the future. You'll have it probably in the next couple of days. OK, so let's go on to the second slide here. This is the simple map, the visual map that we're going to be walking through in the next four sessions, today included. Today, we're going to cover awareness as the first principle. In the second session, we're going to cover simplicity and priorities. In the third session, we're going to actually cover priorities and balance, because balance is actually a really big one. In the fourth session, we're going to cover balance and commitment. So we're going to go this way. And today, we just have time to cover awareness, and that's really important. Let's go on to the next slide. And I want to remind you of the vision and the commitment of this program. Now, some of you are actually in the private coaching program that I'm facilitating. And some of you are watching this video. You may have found it on YouTube, or someone else told you about it. And if you're just finding this video and getting the content, I encourage you to do your own program. If you want to join ours, great. But if you can't join ours because financially, or some other reason, please just get a couple of friends with you who are interested in these topics and do the program just with your friends. What's most important for me is that these videos are shared as far and wide as possible, and as many people have their lives genuinely transformed for the better as possible. So that's my commitment in these free videos. And the vision for the program itself is to have deeper joy and greater productivity in both your work life and in your personal life. And the commitment, if you are either doing this with your friends or doing this in a coaching program, is to follow through with this program. And how do you follow through? Simple. You watch all four sessions. Each session is just about half an hour long. It's half an hour to 45 minutes long. Oh, by the way, attend to or listen to the Q&A calls. This is for those who are in the actual coaching program that I'm facilitating. But I also do monthly free calls that you're very welcome to attend and ask about joy for productivity. You want to just attend my monthly free calls. You go to my website, georgecao.com. OK, georgecao.com. Oh, actually. I just recently updated my website, and it's not even updating right now yet. I just updated a few days ago. OK, all right. It's not showing up correctly. But by the time you're watching this video, the website itself is going to update in the next 24 hours. So by the time you watch this video, you should be able to go to georgecao.com. And then on the navigation bar in the upper right, you'll be able to click on More and then click on Monthly Call. And you'll be able to sign up for my free monthly calls. OK, so do the daily check-in is the next part of the commitment. And this is so important. Don't do a daily check-in at the very least. Do a three times a week check-in, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, for example. If you're doing this with your friends, please only get a couple of friends who are committed to doing either a daily check-in with you or a Monday, Wednesday, Friday check-in. And by check-in, I simply mean doing an email. So if you're doing it with three other friends, then you could just start an email thread with the three of them and check-in. And I'll suggest to you what to check-in on at the end of this session. I'll summarize what are some things you can check-in on. And by the way, thank you so much for those of you who are commenting actively on this video. Now, if you're live and commenting, the comments will be on the right-hand side of the video. If you're watching the video after I've already recorded it, the comments are located below the video. And what I would love for you to do is to please actively comment as you watch this video a couple reasons why. Number one is that it encourages me when there are more comments on the video. It makes me want to keep doing this and do it with more gusto. And secondly, when there are more comments on the video, the search engine optimization for this video is more optimized, which means that more people are likely to find this video on YouTube or on Google. And that would really help me to get the word out about this content in this program. So thank you so much for your comments. And the last thing is engage in the forum. Now, actually, I'm going to put this in parentheses, because those who are in the private coaching program, we have a private forum. Those who are watching this live, what I mean is simply comment below the video is a forum for those who are watching the video to help each other and to encourage each other. So if you have any ideas that come to you as you're watching this video, any ideas that come to you, go ahead and comment below if it's related. Or another thing to comment below is whenever you hear me say something that is interesting and that is useful for you, that's encouraging for you, please summarize what you just heard in just even a couple of words. As you do that, in a comment, others who are watching it will remind them of what was said during this video. And it can become kind of like collaborative note taking after a little while. OK, so finally, the values of this community that really we're creating here with this series. My opinion, my hope, is that the values of this community will be openness, supportiveness, and love. And let me just share with what I mean by that. Openness meaning you really are open to learning. Whatever is shared in these series, you're really open to the ideas to say, hey, maybe I could try this to see if it works. You're also open to other people sharing. Please don't ever say, well, that person's sharing is not that they're wrong or whatever. No, we're open to other people's ideas. And open to your own ideas too. If any ideas come to you as you're watching this, be open to what you might say intuition is suggesting to you. The second value is supportiveness. And this is particularly both supportiveness for yourself but also supportiveness for others. So as you are transforming yourself through this program, I'm going to be suggesting practices to you. I'm going to be suggesting certain things, certain metrics for you to track. Be supportive of yourself as you change, because change happens gradually. So be always, always be supportive of yourself. Don't ever blame yourself, oh, I'm not changing fast enough. Oh, I failed today. No, always say, hey, I failed today or I failed this afternoon. But failure means I can learn something from it. So I'm going to be supportive of myself and ask, hey, what can I learn that I can do differently this evening or what I can do differently tomorrow morning? And same thing with other people. If you find someone else sharing in the forum that they feel bad that they didn't do something or they didn't practice something, be supportive of them. Say, hey, you know what, what can you learn from it? And know that change happens gradually and that we are all here for you. Okay, supportiveness is really important. And finally, love. I think I just put that word love in because I think it represents both openness and supportiveness. And it's just a nice way to end the value statement. Openness, supportiveness, and love. And thank you so much for those of you who are commenting on just kind of reiterating these values and how it's helpful for you in the comments section. Thank you so much. So let's go on. So what we're going to cover today is the principle of awareness. So before you can be joyfully productive, the very first thing, really, is you need to practice awareness. Practice awareness of yourself. Well, what do you be aware of? You be aware of four things is what I'm going to be suggesting to you. Be aware of where your time is going. Okay, what are you, you know, where is your time going? And what are you scheduling with your time, okay? And when are you going to do certain things? So sort of awareness of time, okay? You be aware of time. Because here's the thing, now I know that a lot of us are on a particular spiritual path. You know, all of us are on different spiritual paths. And some spiritual paths say that, hey, you know, eternity is the reality. The reality is that all is one, which means a past, present, future, it's all one. So there's only now, right? Now that is true, that's absolutely true. On the other hand, my belief is that we have incarnated into this life to experience linear time and to learn from it. So it's not, you know, my suggestion to you, it's just only my suggestion, is not to confuse eternity and the oneness of past, present, future with the learning from linear time. You and I can learn from the fact that we can use linear time as a measurement for how we are acting, how we are growing, and how we are learning from the past and how we can plan for the future. So be aware, be conscious of linear time and what you can learn from it and how you can utilize linear time to bless the world and to further your own growth, okay? Second type of awareness is activities. Be aware of what you are doing within linear time, okay? Be aware of, you know, even every several times a day, just kind of check in, present, hey, what am I doing right now? And is this activity helpful? Is this what I plan to do? Is this most supportive, okay? The other thing to be aware of is information, particularly where you put information. I have gotten to a point where I pretty much know where I put every piece of information that comes to me. Someone suggests an idea to me, okay, I know where I'm gonna put it. I see a link online onto an article that I wanna read. I know where to put it. I don't feel pressured, you have to read it right now or keep my tab open so that I don't lose that article. I'm gonna be teaching that to you and I hope that you will try practicing that so you'll feel so calm throughout the day because all the information coming to you, you'll know where to put it, okay? And finally, we're gonna be practicing awareness of thoughts, emotions. Your thought life, basically. Your thoughts are what bring forth certain emotions. Now those things are actually separate. What's interesting, sometimes you feel emotions but it's because you haven't been aware of what thoughts have been going through your mind that have been causing that emotion. Some thoughts are so subtle to you. So being aware of thoughts, more and more aware of what thoughts are going through your head because those will create certain emotions, okay? Ready to go? Let's go on to the first awareness, which is time. Let's go on here. So you can see here, you're gonna see at the bottom of most of these slides what principle we're talking about, what part of the principle and kind of what that part of the principle's about, okay? So first principle is awareness of time and this is a practice that I want to encourage you to do. And I try to do this actually as often as I can, especially during my working days, is to track my time. Okay, so track your time. Now I know that if you're watching this video, you cannot click on these links but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put these links in the description area of the video. So below the video, when you read the description area, you can click on see more or read more and then I'll put all the links in the description area and if you get a link to the slideshow which I'll also put in the description area later, after I record this, you'll also be able to come to the slideshow and actually click on these links. So why is it important to track your time? Now what I'm not saying is that you track your time every day for the rest of your life but what I am encouraging you to do is at least several weeks of every year, at least you track your time every working day. And what I mean by tracking your time is literally starting from the beginning of the day, you say, okay, what am I doing right now? Okay, how long did I do it for? Or you might even say, I wanna do it for this long and let me see how long I do it for. So for example, if I track my time from the very beginning of the day, I would say, I would wake up and I would say, all right, I'm doing my morning hygiene. So I would say morning, I would write down morning hygiene. And then after I finish my morning hygiene, I'll say, all right, the time is now this and I'm preparing breakfast now. I can prepare breakfast. After I prepare breakfast, the time is now this. I'm gonna be eating my breakfast and doing my morning checklist, which includes things like looking my calendar, processing just really quickly my email for the day, that kind of stuff, track your time. And there are a couple of tools I wanna recommend to you. In fact, I was just doing some more. The tool that I have been using and loving is called A-Time Logger. And you can go to A-TimeLogger.com. Now, A-TimeLogger currently, as of this recording, is only available for iPhone and iPad. He is, the programmer is actually putting together an Android version, but it's very beta right now. So you can go to A-TimeLogger.com to see what the, and look at this blog to see what the latest update is for the beta version. If you don't have an iPhone, if you don't have an Android phone, then what you can do is use, go to toggle.com, toggl.com, toggl.com is something you can use on both the computer and a mobile device. I just discovered this today and it looks pretty cool. I haven't used it so I don't really know, but it came out, came up on a very, very top of a Google search so I know that lots of people are linking to it. Another one is formassembly.com slash time dash tracker. Just like you see here, formassembly.com slash time dash tracker is another one, but I think that's just for computer only. And finally you can do this just on a piece of paper. So if you want to carry like a note pad with you, or like a sticky note pad with you, like a smaller one, carry that along with a pencil or pen with you all day long. You can put it in your pocket, you can put it in your purse if you're traveling, going somewhere. And just any time you remember, pull it out and say, what am I doing right now? What's the time? What am I doing right now? And what this does, let me tell you why this is so, so important, to practice tracking your time, even just a couple of weeks in a year, when you start tracking your time, it's not so much that you track it perfectly. That's not the point. Okay, again, the point is not to track your time perfectly. The point is that when you start tracking your time, even imperfectly, you start developing the muscle of your time awareness. Let me say this again. The purpose of tracking your time, now, there's an advanced purpose of tracking your time, which is actually to see where your time goes and then to plan your day more intelligently, okay? That's a more advanced purpose. But the basic purpose of tracking your time, no matter how bad you are at tracking it, is you practice the muscle of time awareness. Remember that, okay? Now, another practice is to remind yourself to track your time, okay? And you can remind yourself, if you use a time logger, it has a reminder function that you can set to beep you every half an hour, every hour, whatever you want to set it at. It'll beep you to say, hey, are you doing this right now like you have tracked it? Okay, you'll remind you basically to track your time. On the computer, on the Google, you can search hourly reminder windows, you can get a Windows computer on a Mac, you can search Google, search hourly reminder Mac, and there are computer reminders that remind you basically every hour or something to say, what are you doing right now, okay? Now, something that's interesting is I encourage you to include distractions in your time tracking. So don't just track your most glorious, noble activities. Plus, your time tracking is not shared by anyone except yourself. You're not tracking this for the world, you're tracking this for yourself. So include your distractions, whatever your distractions are, watching videos, researching the internet, searching Facebook, track that too, because again, the purpose of tracking your time is practicing the muscle of time awareness, okay? And more advanced purposes, if you use things like a time logger or toggle or whatever tools like that, you can actually give you reports on where your time went. Now, that's a more advanced purpose. We could talk about that in our Q and A course if you're interested. Okay, let's go on to the second part of time awareness, which I call time-based buckets. This is the awareness that you don't have to do everything now. Now, that might sound funny, but the truth of your brain and my brain is that when we get an email, for example, we think we have to respond to that email now or we have to read that email now. I'm using email as an example because that's something that all of us have to deal with, okay? You don't have to read or respond to an email now or even today. Therefore, you don't have to keep it in your inbox. What I recommend that you do, okay, which is what I've done and I've given you suggestions here, is to set up email folders. Set up an email folder called 1.0, space tomorrow. Set up another email folder called 1.1, space Monday, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Also set up additional email folders called 2.01, space January, 2.02, space February, et cetera, et cetera. So what that does is when you get an email, when you're processing your email, okay, and you see an email that you say, that's an interesting idea. I might want to consider this, but I don't have to consider it today, right? I can consider it, let's say today is Tuesday. I don't have to consider it again until Friday. Put that email in the Friday folder, in the 1.5 Friday folder so that it's out of your inbox, okay? Then when Friday rolls around, you can go to your 1.5 Friday folder and process those emails. And the beautiful thing about this is when you get an email but you don't, you kind of glance at it first and you know it's not urgent and important, but you want to think about it some other day, when you look at it again some other day, guess what? You've gotten some perspective just because distance creates perspective. Remember this, distance creates perspective, okay? Oh, by the way, those of you who are watching this video live as I'm recording it, if you don't see the comments updating, you may need to refresh that comments page. Do a control R command R or click the refresh button to see all the recent comments. I just did that and saw wonderful comments from you know, Shoranagati and Tomar and Diane and Tammy are commenting very actively. Jiu-Jitsu as well, thank you so much. So, but those who are watching the video just after I've recorded it, that you know the comments should, actually the comments might, there might be real-time comments you're missing so you can refresh every couple of minutes if you want. Okay, so let's see here. So this is an example of not having to do everything now. Another example is when you get an idea that you want to do, you don't have to do it now. You can put it on, you can put it on your calendar. This is time-based buckets. It's basically another way of looking at it. It's your calendar is a time-based bucket, okay? Your calendar itself is a time-based bucket, a series of time-based buckets. If you get an idea, but you say, you know, I don't have to do it today. I don't have to do everything today. I'm gonna revisit this idea again on Friday. You can put that idea on your calendar for Friday. So think about this idea again. Okay, think about what the next step for this idea is. That's called putting it on a time-based bucket, okay? Okay, let's go on now. Again, I'm happy to cover more during Q and A call, but I do want to just kind of get the foundation of the information is. And the other thing I want to encourage you is, I'm not asking you to do every practice that I share with you. Think of these sessions as like a buffet menu, like a buffet and you just take the dishes that are most attractive to you and you just consume and be nourished by those dishes. So at the end of the session, I'm gonna ask you just to pick one practice you're gonna do from the session and pick one project you're gonna do or pick one metric you're gonna track, okay? So these are all just ideas for you to think which ones you wanted to do, okay? Let's go on to the next one, which is the second awareness practice, which is activities. Just being aware of what you are doing and how you can do it more efficiently. And one way to be more aware of your activities is think about how you can batch what you're currently doing, how you can batch what you're currently doing. Here's what I mean. Every time you switch an activity, you are losing, you are draining energy and you're draining focus. For example, if I'm processing my email and suddenly I get a ping on Facebook that someone commented on something I wrote and I switch over to Facebook and started looking at Facebook, guess what? I have just lost some energy, lost some focus. I've lost some momentum. It's kind of like every time you drive a car, you certainly turn another direction and then turn back to the original direction. You're losing, that's why you're losing some tires every time you're doing that. You're also losing your own energy by turning. Do you see what I mean? Every time you switch an activity, you are losing momentum, you're losing focus and you're losing energy. So the ideal thing is to keep doing the same activity as long as you can until you lose the energy of doing it until you're done with it or until you're kind of really, really tired of doing that thing and then go on. Don't keep switching things every five minutes or every 15 minutes. You can typically do something for at least 15 minutes. Some of us can do it for 45 minutes or some of us can do it for even longer. Batch your activity. So for example, I have a set time twice every day to respond to email. I don't, okay, I should say, I actually look at my email throughout the day. I look at my email maybe two, three minutes every hour but I don't try to get my inbox to zero every hour. I get my inbox to zero once a day. My morning email processing is just looking at what is urgent and important that I really need to respond to before I go on with my day. Let me suggest to you, get, if you're going, if you're practicing inbox zero, if you're getting your email down to zero on a regular basis or every day, do that at the end of your day because at the end of your day you have more motivation to end your day. You see what I mean? You have motivation to end your day and so you'll be more efficient getting your email to zero at the end of the day. If you try to get your email to zero at the beginning of the day, you'll do it too, you'll do it way too long. Use your natural motivation. So batch your email response once or twice a day that you're processing and getting it to zero. Feel free to check your email throughout the day but just for anything urgent and important, okay? Another one, another example. If you have, if you're working on Project X, let's say, you're working on a particular project, every time an idea comes to you for Project X, do you stop whatever you're doing and then work on Project X again? That's very inefficient. What do you do instead? Create a document on your computer or open up a notebook called Project X and every time an idea comes to you for Project X, don't just go, let me stop what I'm doing and work on Project X. No, you write that idea in the Project X notebook or the Project X document so that the next time you are working on Project X in a batched way, you pull out the Project X notebook or pull open the Project X document and those are all your ideas there, okay? Same thing, for your social media notifications, do you check your Facebook notifications every moment and every day? Oh, let me show you an example. When I go to Facebook, look at this, I have 67 notifications. Why is that? It's because I don't check every, five times a day what this notification is. I check maybe a couple times a week so I can go through them real quickly. You see what I mean? That's another way of batching it as an example. Another way, if you log your spending receipts, do it once a week instead of logging it every day, saves time, you know. Another thing, when you want to talk with someone about something and you have a, let's say you have a regular meeting with a teammate, every time you have an idea, do you shoot an email off to them? Well, you could but you might bother them too or do you call them up every time you have an idea? No. Create a document called Agenda with Tim or whoever your teammate is. Agenda with Brenda, you know. And then put that idea in the Agenda document with Brenda and then when you come to your weekly meeting, say, hey Brenda, I have these five things I want to talk with you about. And again, distance creates perspective. So when it comes to that meeting, you're looking at the Agenda document, you go, actually items two and three are no longer relevant. I figured it out myself. You see what I mean? Very helpful to batch things. Let's go on to the next one. Another thing about awareness of activities, whenever you feel like being distracted, write that idea on some kind of a notepad which you empty every day. What I mean is at the end of your day, part of your end of day routine should include empty your scratch pad or notepad ideas. And how do you empty it? Whatever ideas are there, you put it into the appropriate project document. You see what I mean? Batch everything. Or you schedule into your calendar to say, think about this idea on Friday or next Wednesday or whatever. And then get back to your schedule. So that's how I do my day, is I have a schedule for my day on what I'm gonna work on, for example, this lecture. I'm gonna work on this lecture from three to four. If other ideas come, I'm not gonna drop the working on this lecture and do other things. I'm gonna write it down on my notepad and get back to working on this lecture. You see what I mean? Okay, let's go on. Third awareness is awareness of information. By the way, we're almost done with the ideas. Very simple. Awareness of information. Okay, and here on this slide, now you can pause this video if you want to get a good read on this slide. And that's a great thing about having this video, right? But let me just kinda talk you through it very briefly and then you can pause it later if you want. Smart information management is to have a place for everything in your life. Even if the place is simply, someday maybe, I'll think about this. I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna ignore it right now because if the universe wants to get your attention about an idea, I have found, and it may or may not be true for you, but I have found the universe, if it wants to get my attention on something, it'll send me that idea in at least three ways. This person will email me about this idea or this thing that I should attend. Someone else will email me or say, hey George, you should check this idea out or attend this event or whatever. I'll tend to get it more than once. I'll tend to get it three times or more. Same thing, so let's look at what kind of buckets. If something comes to you and it's important, again, that's the key word, important, okay? Any important information should be placed in a project bucket, okay? Again, something is important based on your own metric, based on your own criteria. Do you think something's important just because you heard about it once? Well, it may be if your whole being and spirit says, yes, what's such a great idea? If your being is telling you, oh my God, that's something I have to write down, then that's important. Usually though, I wait until something gets my attention more than once, usually three times or more, then it's important. Then it merits putting into one of the project buckets. And each project bucket should be connected to its time slot, okay? Actually, I'm gonna put that at the end of the slide here. As we're looking at the updated slide, we'll, okay. So, what do I mean by project bucket, okay? Okay, contact information, okay? This is a very simple example. Whenever someone gives you a new phone number, do you just write it down on a notepad and go hopefully I'll remember this phone number in the future? Well, some of us do that, and that's not a very efficient way. When someone gives you a phone number and it's someone that you wanna contact again, what do you do? You go to their contact, you go to your address book and update the phone number. That's an example of a project bucket for that person. You see what I mean? Someone, or someone tells you what their birthday is, do you just kind of write it down as a random mobile? I hope I remember this important person's birthday. No, you go to your calendar actually. You might wanna put it on your calendar at that person's birthday, or you go to your contact information. No, okay, let's say someone tells you what their kid's names are. Again, if it's an important business contact or a personal contact, you may want to put it in where their contact information is. Do you see what I mean? Agenda documents, same thing. Next time you talk to someone, you know, do you have ideas written down, okay? Email templates. When you find yourself sending the same email again and again and again, it's a good idea to just copy and paste that thing into an email template document. Every time you have to respond to that email with a similar response, you just go and copy that. So you might have a folder on your computer called email templates. And every time you're processing your email, open your email templates folder. You see, simple, but it's smart. Project documents. So for example, every time I work on the joint for productivity program, or every time I get an idea about the joint for productivity module, do you think I just randomly put it on a notepad and throw it away somewhere? And one day I hope I remember, you know, I put on some notepads and my ideas. No, here's what I do. I have a draft. I have a draft slideshow where I throw all my random, I'm just showing you this. This is a draft for joint for productivity series. And if I have some random ideas, I'll just kind of throw it in here and I'll develop it over time. Whenever I'm working on my joint for productivity program, I'll go to my draft module and I'll keep making some progress on it. Just a little bit of progress every time I work on the module, okay? Or a lot of progress if I can make it. You see what I mean? So I have a project document. For me, it's a slideshow. That's my project document. For you, it might be an actual document or it might be a folder or whatever it is, okay? Now, by the way, I saw a comment about contact information. What do I do? I put it in Google Contacts. That's a very useful tool. You can just go to google.coms, I think, slash contacts, okay? And then you sign in and you see your Google Contacts. And your Google Contacts will be basically synced to your Gmail. It'll be synced to your Google Calendar. If you have Google Voice, which I use, which is a Google phone line, it's synced to your Google Voice as well. It's all synced. It's called Google Contacts. That's what I love using. You can also export it to an Excel if you need to. So that's what I do. Anyway, Quadrant 2, those of you who are familiar with time management may have heard of Quadrant 2. This is referencing what Stephen Covey made popular. Quadrant 2 represents important but not urgent. So I have some time scheduled on my calendar called Quadrant, well it's not really called Quadrant 2, but that's really what I meant. That's basically some time that you put on your calendar every week. It could be an hour, it could be more than an hour, where you work on projects that are important to you, but not urgent. If you don't have time set aside every week to work on projects that are important to you, but not urgent, you probably will never work on those projects because it's not urgent. You see what I mean? So have a Quadrant 2 task list that you call Quadrant 2 document. You put your Quadrant 2 ideas on there. Every time you work on, every time that Quadrant 2 comes around, you start working on those things. Okay, media lists. Do you have a document to track the books you want to read? The way I track it is I track it in Goodreads.com. I think it's Goodreads.com. It's a good place to track books you want to read. Videos you want to watch. I have a folder on my computer. Let me see if you can see it. Yeah, videos, I call vids. And basically every time I see a YouTube video or whatever, I drag it into that vids folder. I don't, whenever you see a video you want to watch, you just watch it right then and there. Many of us do, and it's a terrible switch of activity because you start getting lost in watching videos. No, whenever you get a video, you want to watch someone email something to you. You feel like you want to watch it. You see something on Facebook. You put that video in your folder called videos and that's maybe you want to watch it over dinner. Maybe you have every single time you eat dinner, you go to your videos folder and you watch the next video or watch whatever video interests you, you see. Articles you want to read, same thing. I have a learning folder. I put all my articles that I want to read into. I have tons of stuff, tons. It just goes on and on, but it doesn't matter. My learning time is during my lunch time. I eat lunch alone because I work from home. So during my lunch, I go to my learning folder and I read an article or watch a video or make some progress on a course that I bought. You see what I mean? Same thing with audios I want to hear. I listen to my audios during my afternoon walk. I take an afternoon walk Monday through Fridays and that's where I load audios I want to hear onto my iPod or whatever iPhone I have, but for you might be iPod or whatever MP3 player and that's when I start chipping away the audios I want to hear. Monthly review, quarter review, year review. This is a document you keep for yourself to say every month, at the beginning of every month, I want to think about certain things. I want to review my life purpose, for example, or I want to think about the three major projects I'm working on in my business and how each one is going and what the next step is. So you might want to do a monthly, quarterly year review. If you don't want to put something in a bucket, it's not important enough for you. So if you found some idea and you don't know where to put it, if you can't think of what project document to put it in, it's not enough, and if you don't think it's important enough to put it in your calendar to think about next Friday, it's not important enough for you. You might even want to, if you can't bear not to put ideas everywhere, okay, you might want to create a digital document called someday maybe and put random ideas in the someday maybe document because you can always search it. If it's a computer document, you can do a control F on that document to find a particular word in that long, long document. If you put it on the notebook, you can't search a physical notebook. You have to read everything or glance at everything. Now, here's the important part that I want to share before we go on. Each project bucket should be connected to a time slot in your calendar. Here's what I mean. If I have three projects that I'm working on in my work and each one has a project document and I'm throwing ideas in that project document, if I don't have time set aside in my calendar to work on all three projects, guess what? Those three projects aren't gonna get done. So I may have like, let's say Tuesday, I'm gonna quickly show you, I don't wanna freak you out with my calendar, okay? But let's just say, every Tuesday afternoon, I prepare for this series, okay? From three to four, I prepare for this series. If I don't have a calendar appointment set for myself to prepare for the series, guess what's gonna happen? The time that I set for this series and come around and have all of nothing prepared. So my every project document, okay? Every project I have some time slot in my calendar maybe it's just one hour a week, maybe it's three hours a week. Set time, regularly occurring your calendar for each of your important projects. And then when that project time comes around, you open that project document and you make some progress. You don't have to do the whole project, you just make some progress, okay? All right, let's go on. Finally, the fourth type of awareness is thoughts and emotions. And I just wanna encourage you very simply to practice throughout the day, check in. And throughout the day, it could be every time you hear your clock chime, maybe you have an hourly clock that chimes or maybe you set up a computer reminder that chimes every hour or something like that. Throughout the day, check in. How is your thought life? How are your, and you can know how your thought life is by checking your emotions. How are you feeling? Are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling tight? Or are you feeling depressed? Are you feeling frustrated? That's your thought life. That's the thoughts that you haven't been corralling and you haven't been controlling, okay? And then gently return to love. Gently return to love. In fact, there's a Facebook status update that I made recently. I'm just gonna show it to you real quick. I know I made it quite recently. Okay, here it is. If we understood the power of our thoughts, we'll regard them more closely. If we under, and this is being written by someone who had a profound Bedi-Edi, had a profound near-death experience that brought her, I mean, if you believe it, okay, I happen to believe in this kind of stuff, but you could just say she had a profound philosophical experience. But it brought her to a spiritual realm where she was able to see the thoughts that people were having. Like thoughts that people were having were kind of like light beams coming out of their head or if it's bad thoughts, it was like goo. It was like slime coming out of their heads and affecting the environment, the thought environment around them. If it's positive thoughts, it was like light beams blessing the environment around them. It was negative thoughts. It was like slime, goo, oo, coming out of their mind, brain, and affecting, infecting the. So she wrote, if we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them much more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, which even greater than our thoughts, the words that come out of our mouths spiritually, energetically, it's like either blessing of light or like dark ooze slime that's affecting the people around us and even infecting the invisible spirits around us and drawing either positive or negative spirits to us. Okay, again, you can see what my beliefs are. But if you don't believe that kind of stuff, just say that thoughts and words you have will powerfully shape your neural pathways. That's another way of saying it. If we understood the awesome power of words, we prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words, we create our weakness or our strengths. So therefore, our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. Okay. Remember that. Throughout the day, check in and gently return to loving thoughts. For me, what are loving thoughts? I basically have four types of thoughts that I do throughout the day. Gratitude, trust, excellence, enjoy. So gratitude's very simple. I give thanks. It's something small. Whatever's around me, I can give thanks for. You know, I give thanks for this computer that allows me to communicate with you with the world. I give thanks to the floor that is stable. I don't have floors with holes. I'm so lucky to live in a house where I can walk safely without falling into holes. Some people don't in this world. You see what I mean? I mean, literally, give thanks to whatever is around you as many as you can and you return to a place, oh my God, I'm so lucky. Gratitude. Trust is, my personal belief, and I'll talk about this in one of the future sessions, is that the future for every single one of us is secure. This life is an adventure in the context of eternal perfect security. I'll talk about that later, but trust. Therefore, you can trust whatever's happening to you is going to be, it's gonna turn out amazingly well. And if it's not turning on amazingly well, it's not yet finished completing its process yet. It's gonna turn out amazingly well forever, so trust. Excellence and joy, I basically try to approach everything I do like a performer. I invite you to think about this. Everything you do, no matter how boring it is, when I'm doing something boring, I was doing, I filed a tax extension, so my taxes are due in October. I was doing some taxes this weekend. It was so boring to me, because I do my own bookkeeping. It was so boring. But I remember being a performer and being a craftsman in my work. So as I'm doing bookkeeping, checking this spreadsheet with that spreadsheet, I go, how can I do this with as much elegance and with as much joy as possible, like a performance. Okay, like a performance. Throughout the day, check in and gently return to love. So as a summary of where we are, today we talked about various practices and the principle of awareness. Powerful practices that if you apply them, I believe will change your life. Next week, we're gonna talk about simplicities and priorities. And then, if we got to that, we'll talk about priorities and balance and then balance and commitment. As a reminder, the vision of this program is to get you to a place of deeper joy and greater productivity. And please commit. If you really want that kind of change in your life, you've got to commit with following through this program, which again, is doing the following things, right? And then the values again, as you engage in the forum, remember openness, supportiveness, for yourself and for others and love. And finally, here's what I recommend, implementing and tracking. Okay, what's here's what I recommend. This is your, you could think of it as your homework, but I think of it as implementation. Basically, if you actually want to get results from this program, it's probably not enough just to watch the videos. You've got to implement. So here are the three things I recommend you implement. So I encourage you to pick one project this week to complete, okay? And just please only pick one of the following three or whatever other project you saw in the slideshow. Just pick one, because here's the thing. These videos are uploaded to YouTube and will be available for you as long as YouTube is around. And I mean, as long as I keep these videos up, I tend to keep them up for a long time. So rather than trying to implement many things at the same time, this is important because please, please listen up. Instead of trying to implement many things at the same time, please only implement one thing per category, okay? Because growth happens, sustainable growth happens gradually. So you're setting yourself up for more success if you do it more gradually, more gradually, more gradually, okay? So just decide on one of these projects completely a week. Just you're setting up yourself more success. Either decide one activity you can batch and plan when you're gonna do that batch activity or set up your time-based buckets or set up your information buckets based on all the slides that I've given you. The metric to track this week, okay? And by tracking, I mean, you track it yourself but also check in. What I mean by checking in daily is with your accountability team. If you're in our private coaching program, you've been assigned an accountability team. If you're doing this with your friends, you assign yourself an accountability team. So checking with them by email every day, okay? So pick one of the things to track. Either how many hours you time-tracked the previous day. So how many hours you tracked your time. How many times you found yourself distracted by some idea or interesting link or whatever and then brought yourself to the present task. That's something to track too. That's a very cool thing to track because every time you track something, you are practicing the muscle of being more aware of that thing in the future. And by the way, my cat is, my cats are with me in this room so you might hear them. Third thing you might track is whether you did your batching the previous day. Whether you did your, because if you're gonna batch activities, assuming you are, did you do your batching the previous day or did you do your thing all throughout the day, okay? The other thing to, as part of your daily check-in is your thought life. So as part of your daily check-in, notice now, I think all of us probably has at least some negative thoughts throughout the days. If you had zero negative thoughts at all throughout your entire day, you would be floating around, I mean literally on the clouds, you wouldn't even be human anymore, okay? All of us, part of this life's purpose is purifying our mind, purifying our mind all the time, despite all the environment around us. So you, I really believe, I mean, even if you think you're so pure and positive, you do have some negative thoughts that are somehow hindering you from being totally feeling love and confidence throughout your day, okay? So share what is, notice what the negative thoughts are because if you do your daily check-in, what does that mean? That means you're practicing the muscle of tracking your thought life. If you, and you'll start to notice, okay, hey, I just had this negative thought. Write that down, because then you can check in with your friends, you know, the next day, right? So share one negative belief or thought, okay? That hindered you the previous day, if any. And then, besides doing that, also share what's one thought that could counter that. Okay, that could bring you back to love and empowerment. Makes sense? Okay, so finally, oh by the way, you can't see the slide because it's meant to be shown on a dark background. I should change that in the future. But I have a three-question survey that I really, really appreciate that you take. It really means a lot to me when you take my feedback survey because I have no idea really how I'm doing until, or if I'm really serving you until you tell me. So please, please, once you get the slide share link, please click on the link and I'll also put the session's feedback link in below the video. Thank you for being part of the series. I'm so glad to have you as part of this larger community. Thank you for all of your comments that you're making below. I so appreciate them. And I look forward to being with you in our next session or on a Q and A call coming up. Blessings to you. I'll talk with you in the next part.