Episode Details

Whenever you run into tips on productivity it's always this earth shaking advice

You're advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks. Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You'll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here's a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well!

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How to work with a timer Part 2: The power of sleepPart 3: Why you need to focus on the road, not the destination.

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I've always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut.

Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily.

To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut.

She's just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don't need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter.

We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They're gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the biggest productivity tools is to do nothing.

Intrigued? Well, follow along.

The three points of gentle productivity are: 1) Working with a timer 2) Sleep 3) Focus on the road, not the destination.

Part 1: Working with a timer

The Psychotactics Article Writing Course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world. And rightly so. In fewer than 12 weeks a participant has to go from a "frozen state" to being able to write an article exceedingly well. When you look at all the components involved in article writing, you run into a mountain of elements to master.

A single course covers "topics, sub-topics, outlines, how to start an article, different types of formulas of writing, subheads, objections, examples, summary, sandwiching and yes, the incredibly important task of starting an article." And in the process of juggling all these components, the participants do something that jeopardises the entire learning process.

They will try to write an article that seems to meet their own standard

Participants complain about the quality of their article. After they write their articles, they somehow feel something's missing. So they go back to write and rewrite until they reach some sort of "quality standard.

No one starts off wanting to spend three or four hours on an article, but invariably that's how we go about trying to get our work to a higher "quality".

In reality, all that's happening is the build up of exhaustion

If you spend four hours writing an article today, and four hours writing an article tomorrow, will you be awake on the day after? The chances are you're just going through the motions as the tiredness seeps into your bones. When you're tired, you're not only robotic, but you miss out on very important learning cues.

It seems very much like a Catch 22 situation. You can't create a "great" article unless you work hard at it. And yet, working hard leads to so much exhaustion that the rest of your work suffers. Is there really a way out of this mess?

The answer lies in a timer

The Article Writing Course runs to a timer. You have a fixed time to do the outlines; a fixed time