It’s very easy to fall off the wagon and suddenly become overwhelmed with everything that you have to do. If you’re constantly getting into a battle with procrastination and ambient anxiety, you need to listen to this highlight from our episode with David Allen. Find out more about our investment opportunities here 👉 www.vonfinch.com/invest 👈 In this week’s episode, we have another special clip for our ‘Best Of’ series. Join us as we look back at our amazing interview with David Allen, expert productivity consultant and founder of the time management method “Getting Things Done”. On this highlight, we talk about how to beat procrastination by trusting your system, figuring out the most important thing to do, and reserving your psychic space for the most crucial stuff. Anyone who’s juggling work and personal life can find themselves with a mess of thoughts in their head, unable to focus and even more unable to be productive. If you belong to this crowd, this episode highlight can definitely help you find your center and take back control over your life.
It’s very easy to fall off the wagon and suddenly become overwhelmed with everything that you have to do. If you’re constantly getting into a battle with procrastination and ambient anxiety, you need to listen to this highlight from our episode with David Allen. Find out more about our investment opportunities here 👉 www.vonfinch.com/invest 👈
In this week’s episode, we have another special clip for our ‘Best Of’ series. Join us as we look back at our amazing interview with David Allen, expert productivity consultant and founder of the time management method “Getting Things Done”. On this highlight, we talk about how to beat procrastination by trusting your system, figuring out the most important thing to do, and reserving your psychic space for the most crucial stuff.
Anyone who’s juggling work and personal life can find themselves with a mess of thoughts in their head, unable to focus and even more unable to be productive. If you belong to this crowd, this episode highlight can definitely help you find your center and take back control over your life.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Be accountable for anything that pops up in your head.
2. Focus on the most important stuff.
3. Write things down, both for your personal and business life.
4. Take the time to sit down, organize your thoughts, and get yourself in the right state of mind before doing anything.
5. When you fall off the wagon, get back in there and figure out the most important things you need to prioritize.
LINKS
https://gettingthingsdone.com/
Matt [00:00:01]: Hi, everyone. This is Matt, the producer of The Investor Mindset Podcast, and I'm here to tell you that we've got another great episode for you in the best off series. And this week, we're taking a look back at the episode that we did with David Allen, where he teaches us how to clear our minds and optimize our workflow. This is one that you don't want to miss. Let's get to it.
INTRO [00:00:30] : This is the investor mindset podcasts and I'm Steven Pesavento. For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with understanding how we can think better, how we can be better, and how we can do better. And each episode we explore lessons on motivation and mindset for the most successful real estate investors and entrepreneurs in the nation. If you're an accredited investor, and you're interested in learning more about our investment opportunities, the exact types of investments that I personally invest in, then head over to theinvestormindset.com/invest, or send me an email at Steven@vonfinch.com.
Steven [00:01:20]: Well, it's a natural process that we tend to go through but a lot of times what I've noticed, with myself and with clients and other folks that I've worked with in the past is that sometimes we'll skip a step and then things really get off, right? If we capture but we don't clarify that I've got a list, and I've got something on that list, and I'm ready to go work on it, but I actually have no idea what I need to do, and then we end up going into procrastination mode, we, you know, avoid it, whatever, and we don't actually start getting those things done. Huge problem.
David [00:01:53]: People fall off the wagon at any phase of those five phases. First of all, most people haven't really captured everything that has their attention. They're still walking around with a bunch of stuff banging around in their head that tends to distract them when they're trying to focus on anything. So that's the first thing that people miss is they don't capture everything. They don't get it out of their head. Second thing is to your point, even if they get it out of their head, they've got a list of things that are still unclear about what to do about it. And then even if they've done that, they don't have a trusted system depart reminder of the calls they need to make, and the websites that need to surf and the stuff they need to do at their computer and stuff that they need to talk to people about. If they haven't got that in some trusted place they know they're going to see at the right time, when in the right context, they'll be off the wagon again. And even if they did all that, but they don't review what the contents of this are regularly and also, as you know, the weekly review is a huge habit to build in, which is to keep your system complete and current, because the world's gonna come at everybody a lot faster than people can keep this pristinely clarified and organized. But you need to make sure you've got placeholder for stuff. And every seven days or so you need to make sure you bring up the rear guard and get current with all that stuff. Otherwise you don't trust your system. As soon as you don't trust your system, you think it's too much work and so stuff sucks back up into your head, and you're back where you started. So it's very easy to fall off this wagon at any point in the game.
Steven [00:03:22]: Yes. And so for the listeners, I know you guys have all been through it where you started getting organized, you started to take action, started a follow up process like David's talking about and then you have missed a week and your list or your end-tray, your list of all the things that you've got to do kind of gets way out of whack. You've got to get back in there and reflect at what the most important thing to do? What's going to get me closer to my goals? How should I go about getting these things done. It's so important. And once you skip that review for a week or two weeks, all of a sudden, now it feels overwhelming, and it's difficult to get back on track.
David [00:04:02]: And you know what's counterintuitive, Steven about this mode is that in order to really be present with the most important stuff, you need to be really present with that less than important stuff. Otherwise, it will start to take more room than it deserves. As soon as the thought, I need cat food pops into your head twice, that just means you're inappropriately engaged with your cat, right? If you got a cat, you want to keep your cat and you don't want the cat to jump on your face at three o'clock in the morning -- say John, I'm hungry. I got to eat food, then you need to handle that. If you don't, then cat food will take up more psychic space than it deserves. So you need to be equally accountable for anything that pops into your head so that you can be accountable to yourself to your point to focus on the most important stuff. But that's why a lot of the world and a lot of people are feeling stress. It's not so much that people are overwhelmed. I mean, one of the things I sort of re-understood in the last two or three years, overwhelm is not really the big issue. The overwhelm happens when your building catches on fire, right? You're feeling overwhelmed with the stuff you've got to do to survive to get out of the building and save the stuff you need to save, etc. but you handle that. The biggest problem is what I refer to now as ambient anxiety. The cat food that you haven't handled. The conversation with your life partner that you're avoiding that you know you need to have. It's all that other stuff that may not be if you sat down and said, what's my most strategic thing to do right now? That's also good to do in terms of your business and where you're going. One of the things that are going to give you the highest payoff is you to complete those projects. For sure. So you don't neglect that exercise but if you don't handle all the other stuff, then what it does is it sort of takes wind out of your sails, to be able to focus appropriately, with the appropriate present tense energy that you need to on the more important things.
Steven [00:06:03]: So what you're actually saying is that it might not even be the work that you have that stressing you out, it's all the other things that are in your head that are preventing you from actually moving forward on the thing that you know, you need to get done.
David [00:06:16]: Yeah, very much so. That's oftentimes the truth. And the reason I know that is because I spent 1000s of hours, with a lot of some of the smartest, busiest people you'd ever meet, getting them to empty their head and getting them to make the appropriate decisions about the stuff that has not been the emergencies. But all the other stuff, and then they suddenly wake up, they suddenly are conscious again, they're suddenly like, oh my god, they're suddenly inspired to focus on the inspirational stuff. I never tell people what they ought to be thinking about. I just asked them all the questions so they can get their head clear and then let them organically and naturally emerge with the things that they ought to be thinking about.
Steven [00:06:53]: So in summary here, the big step, we got to sit down, we've got to capture all of the things out of our head in totality, right? I highly recommend you go out and get the book, getting things done so you can get the full system. But just from a high level, we got to write everything down, we've got to capture it on paper, anything that's related to our personal life and our business life, all of these thoughts into one place. We've got to go through those thoughts, clarify them understand what is actionable? And then we've got to organize those into, what are things that we're going to do? What are the things that we're going to keep? What are the things that we've got to take action on right now? And we've got to do all of this just so that we can get in the right mind state before we do anything. So What else would you want to add on to that for people so that they make sure that even if they were just going to go take action right now that they can get these things out of their head so they can actually start making some progress from a place of calm centeredness, and not having to feel all that stress and that ambient anxiety that you're talking about?
David [00:08:02]: Well, people often ask, how long does it take to get value out of this process? I say, well, how long would it take you to get these dumb little tools called pen and paper and write down the top 10 things that are on your mind right now that have your attention? "I need to sit at my home office. I need to make sure that I'm set up with my family and my kids right now in terms of how we've been doing their schooling." I need to make sure all -- Just write down 10 things. The first top 10 things on your mind, and then go through each one of those and say, what's my next step on that? What do I need to do? And actually write those down? Oh, I need to email Joe about that. I need to talk to my son about whether he wants to do XYZ. I need to order this on the web so that we have -- Just make the next action decisions about all of them. Watch how that feels. How long would that take? About three minutes. So it's not going to take you long to experience the value and people automatically never had anybody. That's why I know this works is nobody's ever done that and not felt more control, more focused, whatever. And that's only 10 things. There's only three minutes. If you really, really, really wanted to do this, it'll take you a couple of days or at least a day where you just sit down and say okay, let me truly gather everything that's got my attention. That means walk around where you live and capture -- that light bulb needs to be changed. I need to fix that thing. I need to I need to put some WD 40 on that door because it's squeaking over there right? Oh yeah, we were going to talk about -- etc -- Get it all. So that for most people takes somewhere between one and six hours just to identify all the stuff that's got their attention. And then it's going to take usually, you know quite a number of more hours to go through all those and to your point to clarify next actions required on any of those things. And and also at the same time to build and to refine a trusted system that will hold the reminders. Here are all the errands I need to run. Here's all the stuff I need to talk to my life partner about. Here's all the stuff I need to do with my computer. So don't shoot the messenger. I'm just reporting. That's what it takes. If you really, really, really want to get a clear head. That's what it would take, but it's not going to take you long. As soon as you start to do any of this, you're going to feel better, you'll sleep better. Just keep a pen and paper by your bed, you'll sleep better. And you can capture some ideas that you wake up with.
Steven [00:10:28]: Thank you for listening to The Investor Mindset Podcast. If you like what you heard, make sure to rate reviews, subscribe and share with a friend. Head over to theinvestormindset.com to join the insider club, where we share tools and strategies from the top investors and entrepreneurs and how to take it to the next level.