Achieve Your Goals Podcast #111 - 
              Productivity Hacks: Achieve More With Less 
          
         Nick:   Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast with Hal Elrod. I'm your 
                 host Nick Palkowski and you're the listening to the show that is 
                 guaranteed to help you take your life to the next level faster than you 
                 ever thought possible. In each episode, you will learn from someone 
                 who has achieved extraordinary goals that most haven't. He's the 
                 author of the number 1, best-selling book, The Miracle Morning, a 
                 Hall of Fame business achiever, an international keynote speaker, 
                 ultra-marathon runner, and the founder of vipsuccesscoaching.com, 
                 Mr. Hal Elrod. 
         Hal:    All right, Achieve Your Goal Podcast listeners this is Hal Elrod. This 
                 is a solo episode. We haven't done a solo episode in a while, meaning 
                 nobody's here, it's just me. Not even Nick, not even our buddy Nick 
                 Palkowski's on the line, it just me today. We've been interviewing a 
                 lot of fascinating people lately and I decided to do a solo episode, it 
                 was actually inspired by this new tool that I got called the productivity 
                 planner. No this is not a sponsored- It sounds like an ad, a sponsorship 
                 plug. "Check out the productivity planner." No, actually it's a tool that 
                 was created by our friends UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn that created 
                 The Five Minute journal, they're the owners of the company 
                 Intelligent Change. 
                 This productivity planner, I got it in the mail, they did a Kickstarter a 
                 few months back. I got in the mail, I don't know, a week ago and I've 
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              started using it and I'm loving it. I'm loving it. In fact my only gripe is 
              that it doesn't have a spot necessarily for a pen so that I can have it 
              with me at all times. Well, I can have it with me at all times but I've 
              got to have a pen somewhere attached to it. Anyway, the point is I'm 
              not going to talk about the productivity planner as much as I'm going 
              to talk about what this reminded of you will. I had to be more 
              productive, right? 
              We're going to talk about some productivity hacks today and how to 
              achieve more with less. The one thing in the opening pages of the 
              productivity planner, and I guess I'm holding it my hand so I am going 
              to reference this as we go through the episode today, I was reminding 
              of the very old story, a real life story of Charles Schwab. Charles 
              Schwab, if you're not familiar with Charles, he was the owner of  
              Bethlehem Steel Company, which became the single biggest 
              independent steel producer back in, I believe, early 1900s. Schwab 
              became on of the wealthiest people in the world. 
              There's this story of how Schwab was frustrated with his employees, 
              at the lack of their productivity at one point. He made a deal with 
              them that he would reward the person who increased productivity for 
              their company. In that process he came across Ivy Lee, and Ivy Lee 
              gave him a singular life changing piece of advice. The advice that Ivy 
              gave to him was very simple. He said the process that Ivy was using 
              was using for productivity is that every evening before finishing work, 
              you might want to jot these down, this is not rocket science but are 
              you doing it, right? That's always the question, it's not what you it's 
              what you do that matters. Every evening before finishing work Ivy 
              would do 5 things, or 4 things really. 
              Number 1, he would write down 3 to 5 things that he planned to get 
              done the next day. That's the first, write down 3 to 5 things that you 
              plan to get done the next day. Second thing, rank them from highest to 
              lowest priority. Of those 3 or 5 things what's the most important? 
              Then in the morning start working on the task of the highest priority, 
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              and then last but not least only move on to the next task when you've 
              completed the current task. Only move on to task number 2 when 
              you're completed task number 3, onto 3 once you've completed 2 and 
              so on and so forth, and then repeat that process. 
              While this may sound simple and you may go, "Yeah, that's nothing 
              new," most of the ideas that we need to implement in our lives are 
              typically fundamentals that have worked for successful people for 
              decades or for centuries. Miracle Morning is a great example of that, 
              the 6 practices known as the life savers, none of those were new bust 
              most people were having trouble implementing any one of those. 
              Meditation was something that they had always thought of 
              implementing or wanted to implement but they weren't implementing 
              it. Maybe journaling was that for them or maybe it's morning exercise 
              or whatever. None of these were new, it was just putting them into a 
              system and actually making it doable so that every day you could 
              check off your list that you meditated, you did your affirmations, 
              visualization, reading, exercise, journaling, et cetera. 
              Ivy stressed to Charles Schwab the importance of completing the tasks 
              in order of priority and resisting the urge to go to the next task before 
              completing the previous one. If you don't complete the list of 5 tasks, 
              you don't sweat it. If you get 3 or 4 of the tasks done that's fine, the 
              important thing is to maintain focus on getting the highest priority 
              task done. Now if you're heard the story before, the part that makes it 
              pretty amazing is that at the end of 3 weeks, Charles Schwab sent Ivy 
              Lee a check for $25,000. Today that would be roughly $300,000 in 
              2015, give or take. He included a note to Ivy mentioning that it was 
              the most valuable pieces of business advice he had ever received. It 
              was within 5 years that their company, Bethlehem Steel, became the 
              single biggest independent steel producer, making Schwab one of the 
              wealthiest man in the world. 
              I share that with you, like I said it's nothing that you probably haven't 
              heard before but are you doing that every day? I know that I'm not, 
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              that's where the productivity planner, getting this and having a tool to 
              do it, it's like I've known this for years and sometime I do it, 
              sometimes I don't, sometimes I've been better than others. But what 
              ends up happening, and this is human nature, think if you can relate to 
              this. What ends up happening is you've got your to do list and you 
              often look at it and human nature is to take the path of least resistance, 
              that's human nature. We grab our to do list and we look at it and we 
              go, "Hey what's something I could check off?" To kind of almost trick 
              myself into feeling like I'm making progress. 
              But there's the different between being busy, which is just doing stuff 
              for the sake of doing stuff, and then making progress which is actually 
              completing activities or tasks or projects that are moving you in a 
              meaningful direction and achieving the goals that matter the most in 
              your life. That, as simple as it is, are you doing it? If not, like me, if 
              this is an area of improvement for you, that's all I want you to get out 
              of this call. I don't know how long it's going to be, it's not a call, it's a 
              podcast, but I don't think it will be a real long one, although I always 
              say that. 
              The point is, from now on, starting today at the end of each day, you 
              prioritize what are the top 3 to 5 most important tasks that you will 
              complete tomorrow, that you prioritize once you've written those 
              down from 1 to 3, or 1 to 5, which is the most important, which is the 
              most significant, and then the next day you execute in order and you 
              don't move on to task number 2 until you've completed task number 3, 
              or task number 1, you get what I'm saying with that. I'm going to flip 
              through the productivity planner here. One of the things that the 
              productivity planner uses, which I never knew the name of this but 
              back in my sales days when I was in direct sales, this is actually the 
              single most valuable technique that helped me rise to the top of my 
              field, of all the sales people in my company. 
              It's known as the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique it is 
              named after, Pomodoro is Italian for tomato and it gets its name from 
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