 My name is Sean Anthony, I have a seven figure consulting and education company, a real estate investment company with multiple properties and growing, and I publish content regularly on seven different channels. Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and of course where you're watching this video, YouTube. I'm also able to take weekends off and spend that going traveling or hanging out with my wife and my friends and my family, so I do have free time as well. Now my life is pretty busy and it's forced me to create a strategy that allows me to stay productive every day that I am work. And if I didn't have this strategy in place, I probably wouldn't get half of the things that I mentioned done. And so in this video, I'm going to share with you what this productivity strategy and framework is so that you can be more productive with your time as well. This will be especially useful for you if you are always finding yourself procrastinating or you're finding it hard to be motivated and actually get your work done. So with this productivity strategy, there are five pillars that I'm going to go over. The first is health. These are things like your diet and your sleep and your movement. The second pillar is your purpose and values. This is your reason why you're doing what you're doing. The third pillar is your environment and working in a place that inspires you and removes any distractions. The fourth pillar is your routine. The decisions you make on a daily and weekly basis. And the fifth pillar are tools that will make implementing this productivity strategy a lot easier. And let's jump into these five pillars right now. I'm going to share you what they are and how to implement it into your business and into your life immediately. So the first pillar is health and I'm going to break health down into four different components. There's your sleep. There's your diet. There's movement and then there's not being stupid. So the first thing is sleep. And without sleep, you're going to be pretty much useless. So you're like Lamborghini without gas. So what I'd recommend you do is fill up your tank with six to eight hours of sleep every night. If you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep, make sure that you're going to bed a little earlier. If you're getting four or five hours of sleep, it typically means you're not getting to bed early enough. So move your bedtime up and you'll get those six to eight hours of sleep. The reason this is so important is try sleeping for two hours and then waking up and working on a project. You're going to have a hard time, right? You're not going to have the energy. You're going to get distracted. You're going to feel tired and lethargic. And so get those six to eight hours of sleep. Very, very important. Second thing is your diet. So what you put into your body is going to affect the way that you feel and perform. So a simple way that I think about this is I try to eat as many whole foods as possible. I try to stay away from the fast foods and the packaged foods as much as I can. I'm not perfect, but anything where I look at the ingredients list and I can't pronounce half the things on there because it sounds like a science experiment, I'm not going to eat that or I'm going to try to get rid of it. And so things that I commonly eat are things like white and brown rice, potatoes, proteins like chicken, beef, pork and fish. And I just try to eat fruit as well. I try to eat as many whole foods as often as possible with my meals. Eating clean and healthy is going to help you perform better and have more energy and have more motivation to do your work. The third thing is movement. I strongly believe that everyone in the world has at least 30 minutes a day to move their body. Go up, take a walk, jump in the treadmill, do a quick 30 minute jog or run or if you have a hobby, an active hobby, go and do that regularly. So I'm working out pretty much every day in some capacity. Four days a week I'm doing some kind of body weight workout or I'm walking and I'm jogging on the treadmill. In the other three to four days I am going and doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu or boxing or training in some kind of martial art and that helps me to stay active and those classes are typically about an hour and a half to two hours. So every day I am moving my body and I'm getting active and it helps me so much with my energy and staying focused when I am working. So 30 minutes a day, you can do it. Everybody has 30 minutes a day where they can take a walk and move their body. You don't have to go out and join a mixed martial arts gym. That's just what I do because it's fun but you should be moving your body at least 30 minutes a day. It's gonna help a huge amount with your productivity. The fourth thing is just don't be stupid. If you are getting drunk every day and you're slamming beers and slamming shots and you're eating terrible food, you're eating Big Macs every day or you're going out, you're doing drugs, you're getting high and you're wondering why you don't have the energy and you're not productive, it's obvious, right? Don't be stupid, get those things out of your life, it's okay in moderation but don't go out and do stupid things on a daily basis. So that's pillar one all about your health. The second pillar in this productivity strategy is your purpose. If you're struggling with procrastination and not feeling motivated, it's likely because whatever you're working towards, whatever goal it is you're working towards isn't meaningful enough to you. If you wanna cure that, you need a strong purpose and a reason why you're doing what you're doing. So for example, when I ask my clients what they want, a lot of them, they'll start off by saying very broad and generic things, like they want more time, they want more money, they want more freedom. But why do they want that? What's important about more time, money and freedom to them? So one of my clients, he keeps it really simple. He wants to have the time, money and freedom because he's married, he has three kids, he wants his wife to be at stay-at-home mom, he wants to take his family in two to four vacations a year and he wants to buy his dream home in the Midwest and so he has all these specific reasons of why he is working and building his business and making more money. It's to fund these things that mean something to him and so it doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be meaningful enough to you and a way that you could probably screw this up is if you take somebody else's purpose and someone else's goal and think that this has to be your purpose and your goal too, you need your own purpose, your own reason why otherwise it's not gonna mean anything to you and you're not gonna actually work towards whatever you're working on. Now personally, I'm more motivated by having fear and pain versus just having a goal and I call this the bare method and so the bare method, the way that it works is think about the worst case scenario or the thing that you don't want happening. That becomes your bare, right? If you're sitting in a campfire with a friend and you see a bear, a huge grizzly bear in the distance running towards you, what are you gonna do? You're gonna get up and run, right? You're gonna get up and move and so for me, I operate that same way. If I don't have a bear chasing me, if I don't have any fear or pain of being in a current situation, I'm likely not gonna be motivated to go out and do something about it. So an example bare for me was back when I had my nine to five, I hated that job. Every day I could not stop thinking about how much I didn't wanna be there and so that was my bear, was getting away from the nine to five. The fear and pain of being stuck in there was enough to get me to go out, build my online business and go out and make moves. My current bears are what if I lost everything? I had to go back to a nine to five or I'm not able to provide for my family or I had to cheap out on everything like I did growing up. Those are my bears, my fears and my pains and those things keep me moving every day. So if you don't have a bear or you're still finding it hard to get yourself motivated on just a goal alone, think about what is the worst case scenario? Create a bear if you have to. What is the worst thing that could happen if I don't do this? And that becomes a motivating factor for you. The third pillar in this productivity strategy is your environment. Environment is where you do your work. So there's obviously gonna be a lot of personal preference with this. You might not like the way that I work or my environment but I'm gonna break it down into two different buckets so you can figure out what is the right environment for you. So the first bucket is distraction. I try to remove all distractions from wherever I'm working. So right now I'm sitting in my dedicated office. In my office whenever I'm in here I lock the door. I don't have any distractions. I don't have a phone or iPad or TV or video games or whatever. It's just my computer here. I have my lighting set up. I have anything that I need to do my work in here and nothing else. I have found if I have my phone even if it's across the room here or I can't reach it, if it's even in the same room as me, I'm going to be distracted. I'll get up and I've monitored this myself. I'll get up from my chair and grab it sometimes and look at it and lose 20, 30 minutes or an hour. And so I have to remove all distractions so that I'm not touching it or not thinking about it. I read a study that it takes 23 minutes to refocus after you get distracted. So just imagine you're working for 30 minutes or so and you hear your phone go off with a text message. You pick up your phone, you look at it. You start scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, whatever it is and you've lost 23 minutes and now it takes you another 23 minutes on top of that to get refocused again on whatever it is you're doing. And sure enough, you've lost an hour at that point. And so you can see how this adds up over time after constantly getting distracted. So anything that's going to distract you, remove it from your environment, lock the door if you have a dedicated office and make sure it's not even close for you to even touch or think about. The second bucket is flow. And what I mean by this is making it easy where you can step into your workplace or your environment and make it easy for you to do your best work. So for example, I have my office here. I can walk in in the morning, I can sit in my chair here, I just turn on my computer and everything is set up here. If I want to shoot a YouTube video or if I want to shoot any type of content, I have my light here, I have my light here, I have my camera right here, I have my microphone. All I do is turn it on and boom, I can create content. I can create anything that I want. Now when I was just starting out, nothing was set up like this before. I had to take 30 minutes just to get ready for working and setting everything up. But now I can just walk in, it takes me seconds to get ready to work and turn everything on. So make sure that your working environment is set up for you to flow where you can sit down, you're not wasting any time, you can turn things on and you can get straight to work. Now a third bonus bucket is to work in a place that feels inspiring to you. So sometimes I'm here in my office working, but I also, I live in a luxury apartment building in a high rise in Seattle. And so a few times a week I'll go upstairs and it has panoramic views of Seattle and I can sit down there next to the window and look out and feel inspired. And I do a lot better work there with my writing and creative tasks because I'm feeling inspired in that work environment. So that might not be the same for you. You might not like the city views and you might not like a luxury building or anything like that, but I find somewhere that feels inspiring to you and that has helped me do better work and better creative work at least. So if that means setting up your office in a certain way where you are excited and looking forward to sit down and work every day, then do that. If it means working in a certain place where you feel inspired, then do that as well. But again, when it comes to your environment, make sure you are removing all distractions, make sure you're setting it up so that you can get into a flow state fairly quickly. And a bonus bucket is to work in someplace that inspires you or set up your workspace to be inspiring. The fourth pillar is your routine. And when you have a routine, you rely more on your habits versus your willpower. You only have a certain amount of willpower and motivation every day. And if you're wasting it on things like, what am I gonna wear today? What am I gonna work on? Then by the time you do get working, you're getting half, if not less than that of your work done. So let's break down routine by morning, day, night, and week. So I will share how my routine works and then you can take what you want and apply it to yours and create a routine that works for you. So let's start with morning routines. And I've literally tried every hack out there. I've tried the journaling for 30 minutes and meditating for 30 minutes and going to the gym for two hours and waking up at 430 to 5 a.m. And I've tried it all. I've done all the things. I've added a lot to my plate and I found that most of it is just procrastination. By the time I used to actually start working, it was like 10, 10, 30 a.m. And I'd use a good amount of my energy up on my morning routine. So now my morning routine is super simple. I wake up at 630 a.m. I don't even need an alarm clock because I'm so used to it. I do a five to 10 minute stretch. I make my coffee. I make a big jug of water. I walk here into my office. I sit down in my seat and I get to work. There it is. Reducing the amount of time from waking up to getting to work has been a miracle for my productivity. I found that by padding my morning routines with two, three, four hours of stuff, I just procrastinated and I didn't even get to my main things once I did get to work. So my recommendation to you would be to skip all the stuff that adds more things to your morning routine and just shorten the time of you waking up and getting to work if your goal is to be more productive and get more stuff done. Now let's talk about the day by day routine. There are a lot of things that I do on a daily basis. A few examples are I write a daily email to my list and I'm posting content on multiple platforms every day. And so those are things that I'm doing pretty much Monday through Friday, sometimes on the weekends as well if I'm feeling creative. There are things I don't do every day though like client calls and sales calls. So outside of client calls which are like group consulting or coaching or one-on-one calls, I try to make sure that anything else, right? Sales calls or prospecting calls, nothing is done until 1 p.m. or later. It's in the afternoon. The reason I do this is I found that I'm most productive in my mornings. So from 6.30 to 1 p.m. or so or I usually eat lunch around 12. So from 6.30 a.m. to 12 p.m. until I eat lunch, I'm focused solely on my stuff, my most important tasks and anything else like sales calls are done in the afternoon. By structuring my days like this where I push off the other stuff to later in the day, I can 100% ensure that I'm gonna get my main important tasks done in those morning hours from 6.30 to 12 p.m. Now as far as my night routines go, I do all of my training, so mixed martial arts and body weight workouts or whatever I'm doing, those are usually around 4.30 to 5 p.m. So I'm done with work by that time. From 4.30 to 6.30, I'm training and when I get back, I'm usually planning out my next day so I'm writing down the one to three things that I need to do the following day and then I'm usually eating dinner with Jackie and my wife around 7.30 p.m. or so. Now the reason why planning out the next day is important is if you're waking up at 6.30 a.m. like I do and you don't have a plan for the following day, you're gonna spend that first hour, two hours just trying to figure out what you're gonna work on. So I like to plan my day the day before and I write out the one to three main things that I need to get done the following day. Your bedtime, you should set it at the same time every night. So I'm usually in bed by 10.30 p.m. It doesn't take me very long to fall asleep and that allows me to wake up at 6.30 a.m. which gives me eight hours of full sleep throughout the night. Now your night dictates your next day so if you're going to sleep late, if you're going to sleep at one or two in the morning and you're trying to wake up at 6.30, now you only have a few hours of sleep and you're not gonna have that energy and productivity for the next day. So it's important to set your sleep time and make sure that it's consistent across every day. Now as far as your weekly routine, remember when I said it takes 23 minutes to refocus if you get distracted. And so because of that, I try not to make it so that my days are I'm switching between 10 different tasks because every time I switch, I'm gonna lose 23 minutes trying to get refocused. So what I do is I try to theme my days out as much as possible, which means that on certain days I'm working on certain things. So if it's a Friday, for example, I'm usually shooting content for YouTube and my short form videos. If it's a Wednesday or a Thursday, I'm usually spending the day doing creative work, like maybe creating a product or working on a certain strategy for a sales funnel or working on a client campaign. So Wednesday and Thursday for my more hardcore creative tasks. Tuesday is my client call day. So I have three group consulting or coaching calls on Tuesday and I bundle them up on those days because I don't wanna have to spread those out throughout the week and have to do client calls throughout the week. And Monday is more of a planning and maintenance day. So I am planning out the content for the week and coming up with new ideas of things I wanna talk about and I'm responding to my virtual assistants on anything that they need help with. And so it's more of a planning and maintenance day for me and the other days are what I just mentioned. The fifth pillar in my productivity strategy are tools and the reason I left this last is because they're the least important. People get really addicted to these tools and softwares to make them more productive, but they end up becoming less productive because they're trying to use all these different tools. So what I'm gonna do is give you an extremely lean list of tools. Some of these are free, some of these are paid, but these are the main tools that I use to stay productive on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. So keep that in mind and only use the tools that are relevant to your situation. So the first tool that I use is a tool called Notion. This is 100% free. I use it for project management and capturing my different ideas and for planning out things like this YouTube video right now. So anything that I'm working on or consuming and ideas that I'm having or YouTube scripts, I will put it into Notion and I use this to stay organized. So what I used to do before was just put everything into my Apple Notes file, which is on my phone and on my computer, but it got pretty messy and it got hard to track things and search for things. So now I use Notion for everything, project management. It's an awesome tool, it's 100% free and I use it for everything, ideas and writing content and keeping track of that. The second type of tool that I use for productivity is social content scheduling. So these are not free tools, these are paid tools. I'm active on LinkedIn and Twitter and so I use two different tools for that. One is called Tapleo and that is for scheduling out my content and tracking the performance of my content on LinkedIn. I'll link to both of these below by the way. So with Tapleo, I'm able to schedule out a week or two weeks of content and once I schedule it out, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to manually upload it or remember to post. With Tweet Hunter, which is for Twitter, it's the same thing. They're owned by the same company or the same parent company. Tweet Hunter allows me to schedule out my tweets and threads so I don't have to think about it on a daily basis. I think it's well worth the price. It also tracks your analytics and which posts are doing the best so you know what types of content to create in the future and so I use this to save a lot of time in my content creation and scheduling. The third tool I use is a cheap one. It's a paid tool, but it's one that I use every day. It's just a normal notebook here and so I plan out my days in this, just get a pen and a notebook like this on Amazon and I plan out what I'm working on every day and I plan out anything that I'm thinking about creating like a product or mapping things out in here first and then I go and put into Notion later. So I like doing this because I just found that physical planners just hit differently for me. I usually stick to it a lot more and do it if it's written down in here versus just typing it on the computer. And the last tool that you can use, if you're finding that you have all these gaps in your time and you're trying to wonder where is all my time going? I feel like I don't have very many hours in the week. I recommend you download this tool called Toggle. It's T-O-G-G-L and track your time for a week or two. Hour by hour. Figure out where all your time is going and how you're spending your time. You will likely be a little horrified when you figure out how many hours you're wasting on a weekly basis but every time I do this it's usually every six months or so I'll do this and track my time. I find that I'm able to get hours back every week because I'm not doing things I don't need to be doing anymore. So again, the time tracking tool, it's called Toggle, T-O-G-G-L. Track your time for an hour or two every week and you will get hours back once you figure out where you're wasting your time throughout your days and weeks. That's really it for productivity tools. I try to keep it simple because I found the more tools that I add to my daily use, the less productive I am because I'm logging into all these different tools but those are the four main things that I'm using on a daily basis to be productive. So there you have it. Those are the five pillars in my productivity strategy on how I stay productive 97% of the time while also still having free time to hang out with my wife and friends and family. My wife and I are trying to have kids right now so I'm sure I'll have to refine this system even more once I do have kids but right now those five pillars are health, purpose, routine, environment and tools. Watch this video again if you need to. I know it's a bit of a long one and create a framework with those five pillars that works for you. Now once you go through this and you have more of your time back you can actually spend that on increasing your income through a side hustle or growing your online business. So if you want ideas for that, I'll link to a video on different online side hustles or businesses that you can start in 2023. But anyway, that's gonna wrap up this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give it a like, subscribe to my channel below for more content just like this and I'll see you in the next video. Take it easy.