Setting the Stage for Top-Notch Productivity

Christine Li  0:00  
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 148. 

In this episode, I share a lot of reflections. The first part of the episode are my reflections on what are some of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to trying to be productive. I see people doing the overs, I mean, overworking, and I mean overthinking, and I mean, over stressing. And I spent a little bit of time talking about those common mistakes. But the good news is I also talk about the core four. And the core four are just a set of four things that I think you should learn to focus on. So that you can really steer clear of all the overthinking and the overdoing and the overwhelm. And you can have this clear, smooth, joyful productivity, and who doesn't want that. So let's go listen to this whole picture of reflections. And I hope you get a lot out of this episode. And I hope you take these pieces of advice and apply them as soon as you can. Let's go listen to this episode together now.

Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm, so they can begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn about powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together. So that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. 

Hello, there. It's Christine Li. And I hope you have been well. I am going to talk in today's episode about how we can help you set the stage for top notch productivity without the strain and without the stress. You know, that's my jam. And the reason why I'm choosing to talk about this topic today is that for the past couple of months, I've been very actively involved in coaching different clients, different followers, different people, both in small group formats inside what I call productivity power hour sessions. But I've also been very active on social media, teaching these different strategies and talking about different thoughts that I have about what makes for good productivity, good, solid productivity. If you're not following me on social media, I invite you to join me there, it's a lot of fun. I'm on Instagram and Tiktok as procrastination coach, so we can just get that out of the way. And I would love to have you with me on social media. It's a bunch of fun. Okay, so what I've noticed inside these recent trainings that I've done is that I know that no one really wants to make things super complicated. Nobody wakes up thinking, Oh, let me just make myself stressed out. Let me just make this day extra dreadful. Oh, nobody does that. But I also see people oftentimes making bunches of mistakes so that their day actually does get much more complicated. I see things like people overthinking what they need to do, I see people stressing out and worrying about the future and what they have to do. I see people, overworking. So it's almost the opposite of procrastination. But it ends up being just like procrastination. Because when we do too much, and we work ourselves to the bone, we're not really making ourselves happy. And oftentimes, we're not really progressing in our work in a meaningful way. I also see people getting overwhelmed claiming they're overwhelmed. And the reason why they're using the word overwhelmed is because they are looking at all the different things that they have to do. And we all have so many different things that we want and need to do. They're looking at all of those things all at the same time. So that overwhelm also makes the day very complicated for people. And then I think perhaps the biggest, deepest, most significant reason why people are suffering through their days sometimes is because there is a very core lack of self belief that people do not believe in themselves, believe in their potential believe that they can get through the day. I successfully feeling like they're on top of the world. And I'm here to help you change that lack of self belief and really start to dig in and say, You know what, I do have enough, I am enough. And for the rest of the episode, I'm going to describe what I think are the core for the core four things that you could start to focus on identify in your own behavior and your day, so that you can eliminate the overthinking the overworking the overwhelm, and the lack of self belief and just get to it. All right, so let me get to it right now. The number one thing that I think you should look at is how you can eliminate the feeling that you're in a battle. In psychology, we are trained i If you don't know I'm a psychologist, in psychology training, we are taught about the significance of conflict, because life is smooth, when you are not struggling in conflict when you don't have a conflict in your heart or in your life. And so I'm going to explain what a conflict is, and then how to clear yourself of this dreaded conflict. So what you want to do is, look at the problem that you're calling a problem in your life. For our purposes, I'm going to just use the simple problem of wanting to clear out your garage, but also dreading the very idea of getting near your garage, because it's such a mess, or because it's so dusty, or because there's so much old stuff in there that you don't really want to go through. That is a great example of a simple conflict, where basically, you want two things at the same time. On the one hand, you want a clean and clear garage where you can park your cars and not hit anything. And then the other part of you wants to avoid having to get your hands dirty, or having your time taken up by having to excavate stuff out of your garage. That's pretty much the definition of a conflict, you have two different ideas. And you're hoping in two different directions about the very same issue about one issue. That's a conflict. And the thing that I've noticed is that when we procrastinate around areas of conflict, and of course, you can insert your own particular conflict in here in this conversation right now, when we stay in conflict, guess what happens? We solve neither of our desires, we don't get the clean garage. And we don't successfully get to avoid the garage either. Because we are thinking about it non stop. Every time we pull up to the house, we think, Oh, I can't pull the garage open. And I can't park my car into the garage because I haven't dealt with this conflict. So procrastination keeps us in that middle zone, mid conflict feeling sad about ourselves sad about our space, sad about the fact that we can't resolve the conflict. So what do we do? I teach people that we have to learn to deal with a conflict. And you can do that in any number of ways. But a simple resolution is that you have to pick what you're going to be satisfied with. You may be just fine with a cluttered garage. But you have to decide, You know what, I'm making peace with this, I'm going to be fine with that. Or you can decide, You know what, I am not going to rest until this garage is just so just as I need it functioning in a perfect way. And so I'm going to decide to resolve this conflict by setting up a plan to actually clear out the garage, I'm going to go slow and steady. Every Wednesday I'm going to spend an hour every Friday, I'm going to do another hour. Whatever your plan is, It's fine as long as you untangle yourself, disentangle yourself from the conflict. So that's tip number one core for tip number one, you want to eliminate the battle after you've identified the conflict. That was a mouthful. Okay, now we go to core for item number two, you need to elevate your energy. I see people making this mistake all the time. They know what they want to do. They know they're needing to ramp up their productivity, but somehow they are not managing their energy. So well. They're not regulating how they're using their energy so that they can get more done. When we're facing a challenge like having to clean the garage. We oftentimes require a much greater amount physical energy, and also emotional energy, I would argue to tackle the big garage task. And then what happens, instead of getting ourselves psyched up and planning a great attack for the garage clean up, we end up depressing our energy, somehow, we start to dread it, we start to avoid it, we start to do anything except getting closer to the garage, we start to do anything, but handling the issue at hand. And then what happens to our energy, it kind of dribbles away, I don't know what the term is for that. But it just gets sucked away by our indecision. And by our maybe magical belief that cleaning the garage isn't going to require great positive energy from us. So the second of the core for for setting up top notch productivity, is figure out how to elevate your energy when you need to get things done.

And there's so many different ways of doing that you can meditate, you can call someone for inspiration, you can YouTube, or tick tock tutorial to get yourself motivated, you could put on some music, there's so many different ways to elevate your energy. So my request for you is to just make sure you don't stay stuck. Alright, number three of the core four ways to develop top notch productivity is to get structured with your plan. Basically, the idea is make a plan how many of us have wasted days, weeks, even months or years, just thinking about what we want to do where are we want to go to the goals that we want to achieve, when really would take far less time to actually start putting one foot in front of the other and getting to that goal, we waste a lot of time when we don't have structure to our plan. And I'm in there with you. We've all done this before. So there's no judgment. But my aim here today is to get you to become more of a planner to structure your time so that it doesn't dribble away. And the big example that I use for this item of needing to be more structured with your planning is the dissertation years, if you've ever been a dissertation student, my heart is with you. Because you've been in a zone where you've needed to get something really substantial, accomplished, with no timeframe with relatively no support with no financial backing, and with a lot of anxiety that surrounds the whole task of being a PhD success. So those of you who have not been dissertation students, but you are feeling stuck right now, in the situation of needing to get something very large and unstructured done. My tip for you here is to break it down into very small steps. And start a path of knocking those small steps down or getting those small steps accomplished. And learning how to feel accomplished. Every time you knock one of those things down every time you finish a cycle of productivity. And don't suffer in silence and don't suffer without a plan. Get yourself a plan. Get yourself some support if you need it. But definitely get yourself this small step type of plan where you know, you can make progress if you stay with it. And I'm here right beside you supporting you with this podcast on social media. And however else I can help you I'm happy to try. The fourth element of the core four ways to develop top notch productivity is probably my favorite of all of these. You want to make things very fun, and very social. And for me, being social is inherently fun. I'm a true extrovert. I really get my energy from being with people, helping people having fun with people doing novel things. And I would love for you to use this tip for yourself. In case you're in the doldrums in case you're feeling totally stuck. In case you just want to ramp up your productivity you might be doing very well already but you want to accelerate your progress because why not when we get to our goals faster, we just have much more free time to enjoy. So if you remember step number two was to elevate your energy and I believe that when we're having fun, our energy automatically very naturally is elevated. We start to feel more awake. We start to feel more alive. We start To feel more energized, and that's always good, I think for productivity. I do believe that when we're feeling fearful, overwhelmed, overworked, overtired that our productivity tends to go down the drain, or it slows down. And I just want you to think you know what, I'm smarter than this, I can save myself all the drama and all the dread and I can turn on the mic record the podcast, I can open my book, put pen to paper, I can call up the person I want to ask out for a date, I can get this stuff done, I can put my energy out so that I can get some energy feedback from the universe and from other people in my environment, you can do this, you can decide, I'm going to transform my productivity so that it's way more fun, so that I don't run in the other direction anymore, so that I avoid having to rely on procrastination to get through the day. And so that I can see success right away. So there you have it a great map for how to develop much stronger productivity, all you need to do is I'm going to recap here using my notes, you're gonna one eliminate the battle, you're going to make everything smooth and simple, you're going to eliminate the conflicts as you address them one by one to you're going to elevate your energy so that you have enough energy to actually tackle the thing that is on your plate. Three, you're going to get a little bit more structured, with your game plan, no more just relying on Netflix and the refrigerator food. To get your through, you're actually going to make a reasonable, doable, manageable plan to get your work done. So that again, you have more time to play in the end. And of course, number four, my favorite is to make everything much more fun. Involve your friends, your colleagues, your supervisors, your staff, whoever is around you get other people to have a role in your success. It is okay, you do not have to shoulder everything by yourself. Gone are those days where we're just isolated. Because those days are no fun, we're no longer going to be procrastinating in silence, we're gonna be successful, surrounded by loved ones and surrounded by people who are also pursuing their paths of success. So there you have it. I've laid it all out for you. I hope you use it for success. Starting today. If you are looking for more support with your own path towards success, I want to let you know that I do have a program called The Success Lab. And that is a program where I gather people who are inside the lab as active members in weekly coaching and weekly work sprints, where people who are inside the program are talking through their conflicts, they're getting coaching from me, they're listening to each other's process of undoing the procrastination and getting on the road to success. And then the work sprints involve people taking their chosen item of work, and getting it done during our Success Lab calls. It's a bunch of fun, it's high energy, it's a little bit of structure, and it eliminates the conflict for people. We don't have to live in solitary confinement with our procrastination anymore. And if you're interested in learning more about the Success Lab, feel free to direct message me on Instagram. Again, I'm procrastination coach there. You can also hear more about it periodically by asking to get onto my mailing list. And I'm gonna give you a way to do that. Now, you can request a download of my free habits worksheet by going to procrastinationcoach.com/habitsworksheet, procrastinationcoach.com/habitsworksheet when you ask for that download, which will be a free tool to help you with your habits. You will also get on my mailing list and then you'll eventually hear about the Success Lab. Again, I'm kind of talking about it periodically on my list. So let's do this. Let's get our self esteem up. Let's get our path towards success laid out. And let's go for it. We have this beautiful life. We have this beautiful brain. Let's use it all in alignment with great success with great purpose with great joy. I wish that for you and I am so grateful for you and your attention as I talk on this podcast that make time for so Success Show. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next week. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. We'll talk to you soon!

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