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Here on the Stand Out Be You podcast, we’re all about increasing productivity and making more time for the things that truly matter in life—especially with this new podcast series! You’ve found the page for the second episode of the series, so if you’re just tuning in, go listen to the intro first to hear more about what we’re talking about and learning so far.
When you’re ready to increase your focus and productivity, come sit down with Tequila on this episode to learn more about a strategy called productivity mapping, as well as “how to eat an elephant” by tackling those huge tasks one bite at a time.
A lot of the time, we don’t even realize what we’re doing, or we don’t even know what’s taking up our time until we stop, unplug, and write it down.
Often, the reason we have a hard time moving forward with a big task or goal is because we’re too overwhelmed to know how to progress. Sometimes, we don’t know how to plan our way forward, or how to organize the tasks we need to do.
Fortunately, all you need is a strategy to help you understand how to solve your own problem! On today’s episode, Tequila will walk you through the productivity mapping process step by step, taking you from the process of idea dumping all the way to task prioritization and categorization. She’ll also cover how to break down big “elephant tasks” into mini tasks you need to accomplish first, ensuring that everything gets completed. If you want to grow and improve in life or business, these productivity tips and tricks may just help you finally achieve those hard-to-reach goals!
Creating focused goals and to-do lists is definitely a learned skill. Just like with everything else, it takes time to rework your strategies and learn to organize your tasks and be more productive. But all of us in the Faces of Collaboration community on Facebook are here to help! Join our support system of solopreneurs, past guests, and Tequila to hear helpful tips and tricks, and to benefit from our ongoing webinars.
Plus, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about maximizing your productivity, don’t forget to subscribe to hear our upcoming podcasts in the series!
Ready to get started? Check out all of the productivity tools mentioned on this episode below!
Hello and welcome back to Episode #2 of the productivity series. . This is what we call the Productivity Mind Map. And what I'm going to do is walk you through step-by-step.
So, before we actually jump right in and show you different productivity tools and all that good stuff, we’re going to focus on first and foremost what we call Idea Dumping.
What I want you to do is whether that is to pull out a piece of paper or pen and pencil; or if you want to utilize your iPhone or smartphone, that’s fine too.
But what you want to do is you want to list down all of the tasks or To-Dos. So, your list most likely may seem like a lot and can be overwhelming and that’s why the next steps are important.
So, what I recommend that you do is pause this video, jot down all of your tasks and your To-Do’s. You might be thinking, well, should this be my personal stuff if I’m focused on productivity of my business or my career?
Yes, you definitely want to list down all of your tasks – your personal, your career, and your business and even your fun time. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to get an overarching view of all of your tasks so that way, we can begin to prioritize, which I’ll show you in just a minute.
And then once you have that list of tasks and hopefully, you've paused this video, and you've done that – you're going to itemize those tasks. And you want to itemize your list based on categories. So, we’re not just trying to prioritize the whole list.
We are trying to look at the list of things that we have to do and the day-to-day things included. And then what we want to do is categorize them so make sure you create categories. Categories for example – personal, fun time, work, play time, entertainment, key tasks that you have to do on a repetitive basis and even key tasks and even key projects that might be unique.
So, they can be consistent, and they can also be unique. What you're trying to do is you're trying to categorize them, so you know – okay, I'm spending this amount of the day on personal stuff. And a lot of times, we don’t realize that until we really write it down.
We don’t realize that all of our time is being spent maybe on the phone or maybe being interrupted or maybe being distracted. And then once we realize that, we say – Aha, okay, now I can put stuff in place to prevent that from actually happening.
So, once you've created those general categories, what you want to do is you want to create sub-categories. The reason why is that if you think about the saying – when you actually complete a task, generally speaking, the task can be split up into baby steps. And by doing that, the actual task gets completed, right?
So, in a similar case, in this case, we are splitting up the categories and breaking them down so that we can see – okay, in our personal life, how much time are we spending towards these different tasks but at the same time, which are these tasks belonging to especially sub-category wise.
So, these are mini tasks that you need to accomplish to get the bigger task complete, and this is what is going to help you break things down and then it’s going to be applicable. Your brain looks at a task like, say, for example, a project, it becomes very overwhelming and very frustrating because the work looks so big.
But when you break things down into sub-categories and then categories and then you're able to see a roadmap of what's happening in your life.
That’s when we can begin to define the priorities, which we’ll talk about in Episode #3.
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