 Check one, two, three, check one, two, three. All right, thank you very much. Okay, thanks. All right, well, let's go ahead and get started. So, welcome everyone to nurturing a productive lifestyle. Now, if you guys are anything like me in terms of your work day, it's not uncommon to sort of reach the end of your work day and look back and think, man, what did I actually get done today? If it's anything like me, I can name like a meeting or two that I went to, but what did I actually accomplish? What goals did I meet? What important things did I set out to do? Did I actually do? And so, when I noticed that, that's when I started looking at different productivity techniques, different things that I could do to change the way that I think about my work day in order to sort of life hack to improve myself, to improve my performance. And so, that's when I started researching productivity and proposing sessions like this so I could have talks with people about productivity. So, let me start by introducing myself. My name is David Neenam. I'm the developer advocate at Pantheon. The thing I love about working as a developer advocate at Pantheon is that my job goes two ways. I'm going to be the advocate for our developers to other people at Pantheon, but I also get to take everything that I know as an employee of Pantheon and share it with developers as well. So, I get to spend a lot of time just sharing everything I can to help the developer experience be as smooth and easy as possible. So, I want to start by sort of dispelling something a little bit. So, first of all, I'm going to be going through a number of different productivity techniques today. I'll be talking through the benefits of them and how to use them effectively. But I want to start just by telling you that there's really no, like, one-size-fits-all solution. There's no silver bullet. There's no diet pill of productivity that's going to fix all your problems. And so, what this means is that it's really important that you start by thinking about this as building your own productivity strategy. You know yourself better than anyone else, most likely. And so, it's up to you to think about the techniques that I'm talking about today. If you go out and read and research, think about those productivity techniques. Think about how they apply to you, what they sort of tweak in your brain about how you think about things, and then personalize it. Make it your own. Change it into something that will be even more effective for you. So, for some people, this might mean being very strict with yourself about certain limitations or rules. Maybe you have to have a reward for accomplishing whatever thing you're setting out to do. Maybe that motivates you. For other people, maybe you need a certain level of accountability. Maybe you need to involve people in your process so that you can be accountable to them. Or maybe you need a little bit of public accountability. Personally, I've been blogging about my processes that go through productivity. And so, I have sort of the public, whomever reads my blog, to keep me in check. So, as part of this also, when you're personalizing, you're kind of taking these plans, building something that works for yourself, it's also important to note that you will change over time. No technique, no matter how perfect it is at any given point, will work forever because we all change quite a bit. Whether it's a small change, maybe you complete a project and are about to start a new project. Or maybe it's a big change where you get married or have a kid or start a new job. Regardless, we change and therefore we need to be prepared to keep our plan flexible and make changes along the way. Related to that, no one plan is going to work forever and we need to prepare for when that plan actually stops working. We need to have some sort of a contingency. We need to plan for that, expect it, and have other things in mind to really end up growing the plan, to make it better with all the things you've learned so far. And growing is also true as you learn new techniques. You know, maybe you hear this technique, one of the techniques you like today and you go and listen to another talk maybe tomorrow and you pick something else up and so you can adapt and grow and make the plan as good as it needs to be. Alright, so with this in mind of building your own plan, let me start with the first technique. So the first technique is the Ivy Lee method. So Ivy Lee was a rather dapper gentleman who lived in the late 1800s, early 1900s. He was known in his time as a productivity expert and he really became known as the father of modern public relations. So as part of his experience, he became well known in this industry and was approached by a gentleman named Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab is not the sort of financial guru that we all know as Charles Schwab today. This was another gentleman, but he was very wealthy. He was running a company, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which at the time was the number two largest steel organization in the entire world. They were making Navy ships and all those things. And so Schwab approached Mr. Lee and said, I want you to improve our team's productivity. I want to be able to do more in our day for all of our executives. And Ivy Lee says, okay, no problem. Just give me 15 minutes with each one of your executives and I guarantee that I can improve their productivity. Okay, so Mr. Schwab, being the shrewd businessman that he was, says, okay, well, how much are you going to charge me for this 15 minutes of time per person? Ivy Lee said, nothing. You don't have to pay me anything. Unless it actually works. Unless it's valuable to you. And then you can pay me whatever you want. Okay, let that sink in for me. I don't know where you guys are all at, but if there's any freelancers out there, sales guys, has anyone ever said, yeah, I'll do this project for you? Just pay me whatever you want at the end. How great would that be, right? Yeah, so obviously Ivy Lee had a lot of faith that his technique was going to work. So what was this breakthrough secret strategy? It's actually pretty simple. You start just by writing down six things. So you make this list. The specifics of this list is just an example. So you don't need to spend too much time on that. But this is an example of some of the things that have been on my list in the past. So you just write down six things at the end of your workday. You think about the things that are important that you need to do tomorrow. You add them to your list. You then prioritize the list. You put them in the order of greatest importance or greatest time sensitivity. You know, if you have a particular deadline that you need to do things by. You prioritize your list so that you really focus on the first thing. So as you go throughout your day, the next day you come into work, you look at your list, you look at number one, and you concentrate on it. You focus on it. You do nothing but the first one until it's done or until you have to move on to the next thing. Now, I realize that this can be really difficult. We tend to want to do multiple things at the same time. We want to spend time on, you know, I'm going to check my email here and there or I'm going to, you know, have this show running in the background or I'm going to listen to this TED talk or this previous Drupal event talk or whatever. But you know, science has proven at this point that we are really, really bad at multitasking, even if we feel like we are. Even if we think that we're the best person at multitasking, we're really bad at it. So the third part here is just concentrating. You know, if you can mute your Slack for an hour or however long it needs to be. If you can put your email away, turn off notifications, just focus on the one task. Once you've completed this task, you move on to the next one and you do the same and you go throughout your day that way. Once you've reached the end of your day, you might have some things that are left over. That's okay. You take those things and you move it to the next day's list. And you know, that thing, if it's not important, my desk is probably not super important to my daily job. So it might end up at the bottom of the list again and maybe it doesn't get done again and that's okay. But the point is we're focusing on the things that are most important to us. We're prioritizing them. We're focusing on them. And at the end of the day, even if you only get the first thing done, you still got the most important thing that you could do with your day, which is still pretty awesome. So personally, I tried this out. I felt like it was extremely effective for me. Here are some reasons why. First of all, it's very simple. I don't have to go through some complicated process. All that I need to do is spend 5, 10, 15 minutes at the end of my day coming up with the list. And then it's usually pretty easy at that point to prioritize that list. The hardest part is really focusing on just that one thing throughout the day. The next thing is that it really forces you to think critically about each thing that you're doing when you're coming up with that list, when you're prioritizing. You need to think about your day. How often do you think about the things you're doing tomorrow and actually give them some sort of rank or some sort of priority? I don't do it very often if I'm not doing it in a technique like this. So it really forces you to think and plan for what you're doing tomorrow. And so there's also been a lot of research on removing friction and how that can improve our likelihood to actually follow through and do something. Some people would even say, like in some of the studies, if my goal is to go work out every morning at 7 a.m. then I should remove as much friction as possible to make that happen. For some people, that might be instead of setting out their clothes and kind of setting out what they're going to wear the next day, set out your gym clothes. Put those on your bed or at the end or on your dresser or whatever. Or some people might even take that to a little bit of an extreme and actually go to bed in your gym clothes that when you wake up, okay, I'm ready to go. But it never works for you. The IWILE method here removes the friction to start with your day because you've already thought about the things that are important for today. You've already prepared them, you already have a list and all you have to do is look at the first one and go. You can hit the ground running and do the thing that's most important. And lastly, and this is really the most important and the thing that's the hardest for me is actually focusing. It requires you to focus on that one task as much as possible. A few things that you should be aware of is, well, first of all, this allows you or it enables you to really be proactive with your day instead of reactive. It allows you to think about what's happening tomorrow, prepare for it and have a plan in place instead of just having to react to, oh, I have a meeting in five minutes, crap, I forgot the slides, or I forgot to look up who I'm talking to or whatever it is. It gives you a chance to really be proactive. So in order to really make this work, there's a few things I've discovered that I went through and actually tried to do this. And first of all, you need to be mindful of deadlines. The first time I went through the Ivy Lee method, I created my list, I defined something that was relatively unimportant, like it wasn't at the top of my list, but it had a deadline. And I reached the end of my work day or I reached the time when that meeting was or when that thing was coming up and I realized I hadn't actually gotten to that thing. And so even though that task, that particular thing was not all that important, it needed to be higher on my list so that I was able to actually get to that in my day. So being mindful of deadlines will help you think about those things. It's also important to try to break down large tasks. So you might be thinking of, okay, I have this project, Ivy Lee isn't going to possibly work for me because I have this big, chunky thing that I need to do. I can't come up with six things. Or a problem that I had, again, one of the first times that I did it, was that I had a big, chunky task is my number one most important thing and I didn't even finish that in my day, which means I got to the end of my list at the end of my work day and I really didn't, I got some stuff done, the progress, but I didn't get anything on my list checked off, which didn't feel super good. So some strategies here to break down large tasks is you might, let's say for example you have a blog post that you need to write. So you can break that down into a list. I'm going to write the outline. I'm going to actually draft the post. Maybe I will meet with a co-worker to get them to review it. Then I'll spend time publishing marketing all that stuff. Or if it's something that truly can't be broken down into any more granular parts, then you can say, okay, I'm going to put the number one thing on my list. I'm going to spend one hour on this task. So for example, again, if that blog post is coming up or something, a big project, and it's coming up in six, I could say, okay, I'm going to spend one hour on it today and then focus on other things that are important today. Tomorrow, maybe I spend two hours on it and then focus on other things that are important. And then by the time that deadline comes up, you will have worked on it a number of times and it will accumulate. And then you can maybe break down some more granular things. But it's really important here that we take this seriously. For any productivity technique this is true. In order for it to be really effective, we need to actually take it seriously, follow it. If it is important to us, then it's something that we need to follow through on. One of the things that I have problems with on this is that I travel a lot. I travel about once a month to go to conferences or meetings or things like that. And so I return from a trip and I have this big queue of work that I need to do. We'll probably have this when we return from DrupalCon this week. When I fall into a trap of, okay, I have too much work that I need to work on to actually go through the Ivy League method today. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow. I really need to focus on this project or check my email. I need to do this thing. I don't have time to make my list of six things for tomorrow. It's an easy trap to get into. Like I said, I still struggle with it quite a bit, but it's not true. It's false. You can spend 15 minutes doing your productivity thing, whatever that is, and it will save you lots and lots of time throughout the week. It's worth taking seriously. So then at the end of the day, some things that I do to help Ivy League method and a little bit of housekeeping is checking to see if I actually did do the six things that I set out to do. I'll check my list and see where I'm at. I also take time to actually make my list for tomorrow. What are the most important things for me to do tomorrow? And then I ask myself, did I actually add these into my task list? So there's a number of different task lists you might use. Maybe you have a team that has a project management software, Gira or Asana, or who knows, it could be anything. Or maybe you have your own personal task list that you keep on your computer. Or maybe you prefer a notebook with paper. Whatever works for you. It's important to kind of use a method that works. So one of the pieces of software that I've talked about, I haven't had a chance to use it effectively, but it seems like it's really good for something like Ivy League. It's called Toodoo, and it's a little small, a little hard to see, but it's spelled T-E-U-D- T-E-U-X-D-E-U-X. And the thing that's really cool about to do is it gives you this short list where you can pick things, you can create your list of six things if you're doing Ivy League. And then you can cross them off as you go throughout the day. And then at the bottom, you actually have a list of categories. And so you could have your backlog of things you need to do or the things that are important to you that maybe don't make it onto the list. Or I have a list of blog post ideas. And then as you're creating your list each day, it's not up to you to remember like, oh, what was that thing I needed to do yesterday? You can just grab something from your list on the bottom, pull it up to the next day, or you can grab something at a due date, pull it up to the next day, and then you're ready to go. It's creating the list for you. Some other things that you can add to this list is some personal improvement tasks. Things that are maybe not work related but are still important to you, or that help you to feel more productive or efficient. So one of them for me is inbox zero. Who here gets zero emails in their inbox or gets down to zero emails in their inbox every day? Wow. That's impressive. I have a really hard time with this. I have learned that makes this a lot easier. I'd be happy to talk to you guys about that at the end if we have time for it. But this is something I set out to do. It makes me feel good to know that I'm being organized with my inbox. Have I tweeted a helpful resource today? So this is one where I go through periods of time where I'm not using social media very well, and I, in order to like be a contributor to creating content and kind of promote my personal brand, I think it's important to tweet something or encouraging. And so I just have a personal improvement to remind myself of this. Another thing that I like to add to my personal improvements list is, have I actually looked at my schedule for tomorrow? Because even if I'm creating my Ivy Lea list, sometimes I forget to look at the actual meetings that I'm doing, or the things that I'm doing after work, or the things that my daughter or son might be doing with school or other projects. Another thing that's important to me that I put on my list is reading my Bible praying. I'm a Christian, so it's important to me, and I feel like it's something that helps me to prepare for my day, and to really mentally be in the place I need to be, to be an effective employee, and husband, and father, and all that stuff. Maybe for you if this isn't your thing, maybe it's reading some book, or maybe it's meditation, or yoga, or something else. But the point is really focusing on things that are important to you. Another thing that's important to me is a little bit of physical fitness, so I'm not the sort of person that really goes to the gym, but I work from home, and it's pretty easy, low friction to do push-ups, so I set out to do some number of push-ups every day. Another thing is journaling, so I like to blog also like personal journaling and stuff like that, so have I actually taken the time to write today. So, again, the thing that's really important here is thinking about the things that are most important to you, having some way to track them, also personal items. So, I use the Ivy Lea method actually over the weekend as well, so I use it for my family time, for weekend things, you know, the honey-do list, the things that I need to do over the weekend that are important as well. But, like I said, the important thing here is really tracking your progress, keeping track of how you're doing, because if you aren't tracking it, you can't measure it, you can't see your progress over time, and it's much harder to actually keep that going. So, one of the best ways to track your progress over time is a great segue into the next technique. It's the Seinfeld strategy. So, for the Seinfeld strategy, the story goes that Seinfeld was approached by a young comedian who was trying to figure out how to become a better comedian, I suppose. And so, we said, you know, Mr. Seinfeld, you're such a great comedian, how did you get to be so good at telling jokes? And so, Seinfeld said, okay, yeah, you know, all that you have to do, it's pretty simple, you just set out to do something every day. You commit yourself to doing something every day. In his case, he said write a joke every day. It doesn't matter if it's a good joke or a bad joke or whatever, just write a single joke every day. Next, you should get a calendar, like one of those big wall calendars. Put it up on your wall, well, you'll see it every single day, maybe frequently throughout the day, and you'll put it up there, and then get a big marker, maybe a big, like, red marker for everybody to stand out and feel good about, and put a mark on the day on the calendar for every single time that you do this task. Once you do this, you'll start to go, and you'll get, like, oh, you'll do a day or two, maybe you'll miss a day, and then you'll get into a streak. You'll get going for like five days, and you'll come up on that sixth day, and you're like, man, I have five days, I don't want to break this chain, and then you'll get up to a week, and you'll get up to a week, and then you'll get up to a week. So one of the things that's good about this is just don't break the chain. Just keep it going. It'll become a gamification at that point. It becomes exciting, and you can see how far you can go. Now, in all honesty, Seinfeld has admitted that this actually didn't happen. This isn't a true story. However, the technique is still real. Keeping track of your progress using a technique like this works. I was actually looking through his calendar, we were scheduling something, and I noticed he had some time at the end of his workday dedicated to sort of the end of workday catch-up or thing, and I asked him about that, and he said, yeah, he takes time out of every day to kind of review the things that he did that day and see how he was doing and if he accomplished those things, and this was happening at the same time that I was learning about Ivy Lee, and so it was like, oh, this is perfect, this is like very similar complementary techniques, and so I, he had this survey that he filled out and I said, great, can I copy that? Can I make it my own? And he said, sure, so it's just a simple little Google form, you can go and create it totally free, you can ask yourself the questions of the things that are important to you, put them on the list, and then every day go through and fill it out, and there's some cool things you can do here with Google Forms, one of them is, it will actually give you stats over time, you can see graphs to see how you're doing every day. Another thing you can do is you can gamify this a little bit too, Google Forms lets you turn any questionnaire that you have into a quiz, so that means you can choose a right or wrong answer and give point values to the various things that you're doing. So the answer, the correct answer to are you at inbox zero is yes, I should be at inbox zero at the end of the day, and if I do that, if I check that yes box, I get 10 points, and that feels pretty good. And then the cool thing is once you've done this day after day after day, you can see in the graph how many points you're getting, how you're doing, how you're doing it actually completing your goals. So I did this for a while in the Google Form and it worked pretty well, I liked it quite a bit. However I found another app that I have started using that I like even more, it's called Todoist. Todoist is a local sort of task management app, I guess they have a web app too, but you're able to create groups of different tasks that you're doing, so I have a number of here on the side. You're able to set priorities and you're set due dates and kind of all the things that you'd expect from a task list. And so I created my six things today list, I also created the six things backlog for all of the things that I wasn't going to do today, but maybe I want to do tomorrow. And I went through my day this way, and one of the things that makes to do is really work for me is again the gamification, the feeling of like I'm accomplishing something, and they do that by giving you points again, again, giving you points. So as you go throughout your day, you set out to do a certain number of tasks from your list every day, and they score you, they give you points on did you meet your goal, so this little gold star that I have here, I love gold stars. If you meet your goal for the day, you get a gold star and you get points. For completing tasks, for scheduling new tasks, for doing things like that, you accumulate other points throughout the day. Here's actually negative points, and I think that was because I had something that I had scheduled that I didn't do on a day or I postponed it for a couple more days or something like that. So I actually had some points taken off. And then this stacks, so this actually plays really nicely into the Seinfeld method because you start accumulating more points for the longer chain that you have going on. So if you start getting, you know, one day, two day, three day, seven days, you start earning bonus points for keeping that chain going, which is huge. It helps to really visualize that. And then, of course, since there are points, there need to be levels. So there's different levels that you can actually progress through. So as you accumulate points, you go from one to the other. And then overall, you can see stats about how you're doing. So a graph over time, you can see over the last seven days and kind of compare, which is really helpful for actually seeing how you're doing. So really, all of this is trying to do is help you establish a habit of productivity, of creating this lifestyle, of being more productive with your time. So one of my favorite quotes that I've had since, I think, high school is actually from Aristotle. Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. Now, the reason why I love this quote is because, honestly, I find it a little humbling. It's important for me to remember that in order to get really good at something, in order to be something that's excellent, it's not going to happen overnight. I'm not going to decide to be a great guitar player just by going out and buying a guitar and saying, yeah, I'm a guitar player. No, it takes habit. It takes practice. It takes a lot of time. So one way that I can help visualize this is actually removing the word excellence and replacing it with other things that are important to you. So we are repeatedly do being a leader, therefore, is not a single act, but a habit. Maybe for some people, it's getting fit. Maybe it's not, again, the diet pill. Maybe it's working out, eating healthy. And then another thing that really resonates with me is good parenting. Being a good father for my son and daughter is not a single thing that I can do. It's a long lasting relationship of caring and love and being there for them. And that's, that's really important. It's good to be reminded about that. So what do you think in order to establish a good habit towards good parenting, for example? What's a habit that would actually encourage us towards that direction, towards being or trying to be? Well, before we can actually ask ourselves what that habit is, I think it's important to actually try to define the things that are actually important to us. I've been surprised how it's really difficult. It is surprisingly difficult to think very critically about the things that are important to you. Most people don't even do that, don't take the time to consider they just kind of live their life. And so stopping, taking the moment to think about that is important. And as you go through your list, you can ask yourself some questions like, you know, why is this important to me? You know, maybe it's more than a single sentence, maybe you write a blog post, maybe you write a few paragraphs about why this thing is important to you. It's also important to think about how the thing that's important to you will actually change. You know, will this have positive or negative effects? How will this thing affect other people in your life? And then ultimately, what will you actually do when you meet your goal? What will that look like? Try to visualize what that would be when you reach your goal, when you do this thing that's important to you. So again, Steve Perch is one of my colleagues and as I was talking to him through this section, he reminded me something that I hadn't considered. And that is, you know, I was coming into this thinking originally about this sort of like peak productivity, making myself the best I can be, sort of putting myself as you know, trying to find harmony and happiness and all that stuff. And he reminded me that for some people, that may not be what they're going for. For example, if you are a PhD student, you might like the idea of being up all night working on your thesis, you might be eating junk food or fast food, because that is, you know, getting your PhD, you know, focusing on that one thing is the most important thing to them at that moment. So it may not be harmony and balance, it really might be getting stuff done, like doing the thing that you think is actually most important. And for some people that have a lot of anxiety, they're feeling really stressed, they have too much on their plate, it may not be balancing all these different things, it might be removing things, reducing things from your life, simplifying things. So for me, I sat down, I thought about the things that are important. And some of this is kind of over kind of inherited from that list I showed you before. But I realized it's important to me to get up at 5am. Who here loves to get up at 5am? Yeah, there's a few people here that are into that. Personally, I don't like getting up at 5am. I'm going to be honest, I am not a morning person. But I found when I get up at 5am, when I can wake up before my kids wake up, I am so much happier throughout the day. When I can wake myself up and maybe even get a few things done around the house, I am so much happier than when the kids run in at six, seven, whatever time it is, and are waking me up like I that's that's not good. I'm not a happy person at that point. So getting up at 5am is important to me because it makes me better and more prepared. Also, again, reading and praying is important to me because it puts me in that head space that I need to be at. Also, I have a list of daily affirmations that I read out loud. This is again some more productivity research that kind of being put into practice that I'm trying. Basically, you know, reminding yourself every day why these things are important to you, you know why your job is important, why your family is important, what you can do to be better at those things. Saying those aloud every day does help you to keep those at the top of your mind. And then actually picking tomorrow's tasks. So taking a step back, full disclosure, I started doing Ivy Lee about a year, year and a half ago, and it worked pretty well for a while. But it stopped working for me. Part of the reason was because I was traveling a lot. Anytime that I traveled, it would kind of throw me off my game. And as I said, I would fall into that excuse of I don't have time to come up with a list of things. I'm just going to focus on my email and get caught up and focus on this and get caught up. And I fell into this trap. And so when I was coming through this process about a couple months ago, coming up with this list and preparing for this presentation and thinking about what it would take to actually make myself more productive, I realized Ivy Lee is still a good process. But I can't rely on it as the only process. I can't say Ivy Lee is the thing that I'm doing and that's all that I'm doing because my life is a little complicated when I travel. I can't always do that. So I'm still doing picking tomorrow's tasks, but I'm using the sort of modified version of Ivy Lee that works a little bit better for me. So I looked at this. I originally thought the habit that I want to establish is getting up at 5am. I think it made sense. When I get up at 5am, all those other things gets to be a lot easier and I'm much happier. But I found, ultimately, if that's my habit, if that's what I'm trying to do, I can't reliably do that every day. I'll wake up at 5am and realize I don't want to get up at 5am and I'll go back to sleep. So I thought about, okay, what habit can I establish that will actually support these things? What will my priority be that will make these things even more possible? And I realized it's going to bed at 9pm. Before this point, I was going to bed at 1, 2, 3 in the morning sometimes. And it wasn't always like, oh, I'm watching Netflix or anything. It was often like, yeah, I'm hacking on this project and things are going pretty well and I'm doing pretty good. I feel good about this. I'm like, oh man, it's 3 in the morning. I need to go to bed. My kids will be awake in three hours. Yeah, that's no good. So forcing myself, establishing a habit to go to bed at 9pm is way easier than forcing myself to get up at 5am and it reinforces all these other things that I'm doing. So I thought about this and I thought about what can I do to help remind myself and track. None of those other techniques really are those apps really do this super well. So I created a spreadsheet. I created this habit forming checklist. Here at the top, we have a section where you can type in your, or I printed this out and kind of handwritten it. I put in my habit. I can put in notes about why this thing is important to me to remind myself. And then I have a checklist so I can go throughout the days, check off the days that I actually do the habit, the thing that I want to do. And then I actually have a section here for notes. And the point of the notes is that as I go throughout the week, I might have little tweaks that I need to make to it. So for example, I helped organize mid-camp, the Chicago Drupal camp, and those meetings started at 8 o'clock. Now I don't know if any of you have ever helped organize camps before, but those meetings don't often end on time. They often go much later. So my wife and one of my best friends is my accountability buddies. And so any time there's sort of a exception to the rule that I need to make, I personally need the accountability. And so I'll say, hey, I'm going to be late. I'm not going to get to bed on time this day. Does this make sense or am I kind of cheating the system or whatever? And so they'll say, okay, so then I'll write in a note kind of explaining why, to myself, to remind myself why this happened. And then the bottom here, I have a section called daily incidentals. And now I named that intentionally. These are all the things that I said are important to me that happen sort of incidentally as a result of doing my habit. So, you know, that's where I put all those things. And I crossed them off throughout the week as I go and do that. And I created another section. So let me actually jump ahead and show you what this looks like for my first five weeks. Oh, I should say it takes about 10 weeks to actually establish a habit and make it automatic so that you don't have to think about doing it anymore. So if you print off two of these sheets, you'll have 10 weeks. And if you do it for 10 weeks, you should probably be pretty close to that. So I have this here. I filled it out. You can see I had a week where I traveled to San Francisco. And I wasn't intending to keep to the 9 p.m. for that week because we're at a team retreat. We're going to be hanging out, playing board games up late at night. And so I wasn't expecting that. And that was fine. But down at the bottom here, so I have my list going across, and I have a section here. And this is meant, I made it to be really flexible. So I have this section here where I have push-ups. I mentioned earlier push-ups are important to me, 10 or so a day. And so I created push-ups. And I tally off the days that I do push-ups and how many sets that I do. I also have a section here, it's a little hard to see because of the little ruffle. But how am I feeling mentally and physically? And kind of go through and number that on a scale of one to five. And then I have this empty space in the bottom where I can like write in notes. So I can say, oh, I wasn't feeling well that day. I was kind of sick or whatever. And then kind of go through. So this has been working pretty well for me. And if you guys want this, I wasn't able to get them printed out and kind of bring them to you. But if you check out my blog, DavidNiedem.me, my latest blog post, I just published it today, has this in it. And you can download the PDF and print it for yourself if you want to check it out. So based on all of these things, based on all these techniques we've talked about so far, how many of you here feel like this would make you at least 1% more productive with your day? All right, pretty much everyone, great. So let me now introduce you with that in mind, kind of hold that in the back of your head. With that in mind, let me introduce you to Vilfredo Pareto, the Pareto principle. Now, this might be also kind of more widely known as the 80-20 rule. So with the 80-20 rule, he was like a scientist at the time and noticed as he was gardening, going through his garden, he noticed that about 20% of the like little pea pods in his garden created 80% of the yield. So 20% of his peas, the plants actually did 80% of all the peas that were generated. He thought that was kind of curious. And actually, I think he was an economist, but he started looking and looking at other things around the world and realized this habit happened over and over again. It wasn't just in his garden. He started noticing other places. So he noticed that in Italy, 80% of the land was owned by about 20% of the people. Okay. Well, let's keep going. He also noticed in Great Britain that 30% of the population earned about 70% of the income. So very similar. And he realized as he goes through and looks at all these different things, this can be applied time and time again to all sorts of things in your life. For many companies, it's done uncommon for about 20% of the clients to represent 80% of the income that they earn. So maybe you have that one awesome client that has all of your projects that keeps you going week after week, month after month and all that stuff. That could be one idea. And so we start thinking about why? Why did that happen? Why does the 80-20 principle work? And it ultimately comes down to this theory of sort of this winner-take-all mentality where in this case, you have this business where you're fighting for some new project. You're pitching it. You're putting yourself out there. You don't have to be significantly better than your competition. You just have to be enough better than your competition so that you win. And then once you win, you can put that logo on your website and make it a little bit better for your next pitch, for your next proposal. You'll have that work in your portfolio to show off, which makes you a little bit more likely to win that next project. And it kind of builds upon itself. Another 1% thing is winner-take-all of you're applying for this new job. You don't have to be just amazingly better than everyone else. You just have to be slightly better. You just have to be 1% better. And it adds up over time. You can add that. You get that job. It kind of goes on your resume. You have this experience. Then the next job, it's a little bit better and easier. And this can be applied to all sorts of things too. And this explains why the 80-20 rule works the way it does. In his garden, those plants compete for the same resources. One pea plant might get a little bit more sunlight than the rest of the plants. So it grows 1% bigger, which means it has more leaves, which means it gets even more sunlight. Also, its roots grow just slightly longer than the rest of them, which means it's getting more water and that starts building up. Those plants end up getting much, much bigger. And 1% day after day adds up to be quite a bit. Also, politicians compete for the same votes. Once a politician is famous, everyone has heard of this politician that won the election. So at that point, even if they do a really poor job, they're significantly more likely to be elected the next year over someone that you've never heard of before. Authors compete for the same New York Times bestseller list. Once you get on the bestseller list, you can put that on your book and you're much more likely to, or your next book, and then you're much more likely to get on the list again. Athletes compete for the same gold medal, same thing. It's all about getting just slightly better, getting there first, crossing the finish line before anyone else. Companies compete for the same client and then TV shows. Once you get in that sort of primetime spot, you're much more likely to stay in that primetime spot than if your show got into some off hours where nobody's watching. Now, in this day and age, that probably isn't actually as much of a factor, but it's still something that worked back then. So ultimately, the margin between good and great is much, much more narrow than you expect. It really just does come down to 1%. 1% day after day, continuous improvement, focusing on making yourself more efficient, more productive, establishing these habits. That's what makes the biggest difference. And so, you all raised your hand a little bit ago and said some of these techniques that we've talked about would improve your productivity or improve your happiness or effectiveness by at least 1%. So if you do that every day, you'll be 1% better at each of those things, which will add up. And the thing is really, again, taking it seriously, being deliberate about doing it every day. And so what are the results? So when you're in this sort of success of being productive, when I was at sort of the top of my game of Ivy Lee and it was working and I was feeling really great, I felt amazing. I got through my list of six things. It took me about a week to actually get through my list of six things and really find a list of things that worked. I felt so amazing. And then every day, going after that, I could look back on my list, see the things that I did, feel good about it, and it worked really well. And then I started amending it and changing my plan and creating an even better one. And then again, ultimately, it's really cool to know that yesterday, I said these are the things that are most important for me to do and to do those things, to do the things that are most important, just feels really good. And ultimately, you also get more things done by focusing your time and looking and being deliberate about it, being proactive, you're able to get more things done with your day. And then you can prioritize urgent tasks. So let's say you're doing the Ivy Lee method or some other technique and your boss comes to you and says, Joe, we have this new project coming in. I need you to meet with the client in three hours to scope it out. Okay, it's not possible for me to say, oh, I'm sorry, but it's not on my Ivy Lee list for today, but I can add it to the list for tomorrow. That's just not gonna fly. So the cool thing is though, is that if you have your Ivy Lee list, if you have your six things that you're doing today, you can go to your boss or your boss comes to you, you can talk through it and say, okay, well, here are the things that I said was important today. Where does this fit in that priority? How does this compare? This thing that you're asking me to do, whatever this thing is, how does this actually compare to the other things that I think I should be working on today? And then you can talk about that and figure out where it needs to go. Also, you feel more prepared. If you are thinking about the meetings you have tomorrow today, if you're doing the things that you need to do for those in advance, it means that you are prepared for those things. So I mentioned at the beginning that Ivy Lee told Charles Schwab that he could pay him whatever he wants, right? Well, how much do you guys think he paid him? So at the end of the day, Charles Schwab wrote Ivy Lee a check for $25,000. So at first, $25,000 doesn't really seem like all that much. It probably seems like he maybe didn't think that was all that effective, but with inflation and all that stuff, this is actually $400,000 in today's money. Now, again, remember Charles Schwab, shrewd businessman, extremely wealthy, CEO of this big company, paid a productivity expert whatever he wanted. He could have paid him nothing and it would have been totally fine. He paid him $400,000 because he saw the techniques that he had suggested in practice. He saw that they worked. He was seeing the results of that and it was really good for him. So $400,000. So these slides are available. You can see the URL up at the top. Also, I have references where you can find more of the techniques that we've talked about today. So with that, I will open it up to questions. Yes, sir? Yes, absolutely. So inbox zero tips. So I personally feel much more productive and sane when I don't have hundreds or thousands of emails in my inbox. And so if you're using something like Ivy Lee, if you have this list of things that you know you need to do, an email that's in my inbox still means that I either need to reply to it or it has some sort of important information that I need to remember. If it's neither of those two, I can just archive it and search for it later if I need to. So the technique that I use is if this thing needs to be replied to, I will add it to my list in my Ivy Lee and I'll say reply to email, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And then I will archive that email. So I use Gmail and it's still in my inbox. I can search for it. I can find it. But I add it to my list, my task list. So it's not forgotten. I don't see it on my list, so it clears up my mind. But it is on my Ivy Lee list and I have that time dedicated to focus on this particular email that I need to do. There's other apps as well, like Boomerang is a really popular one. Yesware is one that we use at Pantheon. And it really makes it easier to sort of bounce these emails out and back so you don't have to keep them kind of preoccupied in your inbox. Yes, sir. Yeah, the question was, it can be really easy to get kind of lost in your work and would it be helpful to have like an alarm or something like the Pomodoro method to keep you focused on your time? Certainly. Yeah, setting an alarm and saying, I'm setting a time limit on these tasks. If all of these are equally important, if all of these need to be done today, because I have a deadline tomorrow or something, then certainly you'd want to set an alarm or something to kind of keep yourself on track with what you're trying to do. Yep. And Pomodoro is another productivity technique that mentions like a certain amount of time, highly focused, and then you have some break time and then highly focused time. So that's another technique that's worth looking up to. Yep. If your list for the day is not time sensitive and you feel like you're getting through it at a greater rate than you expected, do you try to get through the whole list first before you get to something else that wasn't on the list or are you willing to work things in? And second, do you try to keep your personal family life, what I want to do on the house, or whatever list separate from your professional, especially when it's come to your like pantheon versus maybe what you're doing on your own brand or something? Right. Great question. Let me repeat it. So the first one is what do I do? Like I have my list of six things and I feel like things are going well. I have something else I need to add to my list. Do I finish my six things first and then do the other stuff? Is that? Yep. So for that one, it depends. It's okay to reevaluate your list throughout the day. If something important comes up that you need to prioritize over the other stuff, then you can put that in your list. If you have something come up that's not important, that it doesn't need to be done today, then I would put it into my six things backlog and then consider it tomorrow. Get through my six things. And another common question that I've heard is, okay, so if I finish the six things I'm working on by noon, I can just stop working, right? Well, not exactly. Probably not. Depending on your workplace, that probably wouldn't be okay. If you finish your six things and you still have time to work, which is really common when you're first starting out with the Ivy League, because you're not super good at judging your time, that's when you pull from that backlog of things that you had said, this is something I think is important. It's not important today, so I'm not gonna put it on my list for today, but it's here. I can refer to it. And then if you get through everything on your list, you have that backlog to look at and think about, okay, well, now I'm gonna work on this thing that I wanted to do. And then the second question was, should I have any tips or suggestions for keeping work list separate or integrated with personal family list? I do keep them separate, but it depends on how you prioritize your time, I suppose. So I typically have a weekend like family time backlog and I have a work backlog. And then as I'm going through and creating my list, if it's Saturday or Sunday or a day that I have off, I'll be pulling tasks from my family backlog to build that list. And if it's the weekday and it's a regular workday, then I'll probably be pulling from my regular daily work stuff. But I still have the family backlog I can refer to if I have extra time in the evening to work on something. Yes. Right, right. So the question was, if you're in a support role, if you have some pretty regular things that are happening throughout the day that you need to give attention to that you can't necessarily prioritize or bake into a list, how do you sort of balance that? Is that sum it up pretty well? So ultimately remember the very first, not first slide, I guess the third slide where I say you need to make this list your own. Whatever technique that you feel like has pieces that will work well for you, it's important to schedule that it's actually gonna be effective. You know, anything where the Ivy League method just isn't a good fit, then make the Ivy League into a method into something that will be a good fit. So maybe it involves a list where maybe you have, I'm gonna work on the first thing and then I take an hour for focusing on this other stuff and then I have another thing and I have an hour for focusing on other stuff. Or maybe the Ivy League could allow you to give you the priority and then able to bump things in, unexpected things as they happen, as they come up. But ultimately maybe the Ivy League isn't a good method for that sort of a workflow. I'd be happy to talk more specifics about that after if you have time. All right, thank you all very much for coming to my talk today. All right, since you guys stuck around and we have like two and a half extra minutes, I have a couple bonus slides for you. So bonus technique number one, habit stacking. It is really difficult to establish a new habit so if you have something you already have as a habit, like for example, brushing your teeth every morning, taking a shower, making coffee, you can hijack that a little bit and kind of combine that with a different habit to make it a little bit easier to establish a new habit. So I use the digital echidna stuffed echidnas to basically, I say every day that I have a meeting, every time that I have a meeting, I put an echidna on my desk. In order to get that echidna off of my desk, I need to do a set of pushups. And so over the days, I might have multiple meetings in a row. I might accumulate a echidna debt that I have to work off by pumping out pushups. And the second one is a technique called kaizen. It's kind of popularized from like Toyota and the Japanese manufacturing. The technique says basically that it's basically easier to remove than to add new things. It's easier to, I guess, it's much harder to do more great work. It's much, much easier to do less bad work. Some practical examples of this is it's actually very difficult to earn more income throughout your day. New job, get a raise, whatever. It's much, much easier to spend less. Now that's not a fun, sexy technique, but it's something that can be applied to all sorts of things throughout your day as well. So thanks again.