What are the Most Successful Habits in My Daily Routine?

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In this episode, I answer a listener question which is:

What are the most successful habits that you will into your daily routine?

So there's a follow up question here from Ben, which is what are the most successful habits that you will into your daily routine? So what do I do daily that is successful?

Well, the first thing I will tell you is if you're interested in forming good habits, the absolute greatest book on this topic is called Atomic Habits by James Clear, that is a game changing book that I recommend to everybody. But in terms of my habits, they're not really that complex.

I spent many, many years experimenting. I did morning rituals, visualizations, meditations, writing down, you know, the different things that I was going to do today and honestly, Ben, most of it was too rigid and infringed on my sense of freedom. Freedom is one of my highest values.

The couple of things that I've found that make a huge difference. There is a process called morning pages, and that comes from a book called The artists way. I don't remember the author's name is Julia something you can check it out online. And in that book, what they do is they take You something really simple but very powerful. You sit in the morning with a blank sheet of paper, and you just write and you empty your mind.

So it couldn't be that I forgot to pick up something from the store, I need to do that project for a client. It can be just writing how you feel, but you completely empty your mind you drain the swamp, as I call it. And doing that before the day is just amazing. Because one thing that I learned from David Allen, the founder of getting things done when I interviewed him is the mind is not designed to store things. It's designed to process them.

But we leave all this stuff in the back of our minds. And that interferes with our ability to actually do the things we need to do in the day. We're using some of our mental power to remember that stuff. So the morning page is just gets everything out on paper, and then I eliminate the stuff that's not important. And I put the stuff that is important on to my daily to do list.

Now when it comes to my daily to do list, this really is the anchor of everything that I do. I have this list with me I, you know, populate it in the morning. And I keep coming back to it throughout the day to check in on how I'm doing. I've tried so many different lists and productivity processes. And actually, I've created my own, which is a hybrid of all of the best ones. And I call it the PACED system P,A,C,E,D.

And that stands for procrastinate, automate, concentrate, eliminate, and delegate. So I take every task and I run it through those filters. And I decide, you know, what, am I going to procrastinate on? What can I automate, so I never have to do it again. What am I going to concentrate on today? What is being eliminated? And what can i delegate, I do have a video recorded where I share that process.

So if there's some interest in that, I will publish that. I just haven't got around to that yet. But that process is really, really important for me. The next three habits that I would mention, one is checklists for my teams. I run a large digital team, and I kept finding that the teams would send me work back.

That wasn't the accurate, or they didn't do it in the way that I wanted. And I realized that the gap was I was thinking I was communicating clearly. And I was thinking they understood, but they didn't. And a lot of the times in some of the countries like the Philippines especially, they have a cultural thing where they will not ask a question if they're not sure.

So you think that you know, you've delegated it and they think that they've understood it, but there's a big gap and then what you get back isn't accurate. And I really couldn't understand why good people were doing, you know, below average work.

The book, The Checklist Manifesto really fixed that for me. That book tells you how a surgeon performs surgery based on a checklist, how a pilot flies a plane, based on a checklist, how even the most complex situations and scenarios can be made simple with a checklist because people can follow small instructions. If you give them the entire task at once. It can be overwhelming. If they know move this thing here, click that drag that over there. It's so lot easier.

So checklists for my teams made a huge difference. And I use process.st is the the software I use for that. Another process that makes a big difference, which is also related to managing teams, is something that I learned again from Rajesh. And it's that you don't get what you expect, you get what you inspect. And I think it originally came from Peter Drucker, the father of modern management. When you expect your team to do the work, they will find ways not to do it. And it's not because they're bad people, it's that we get distracted, we're busy.

And humans, I'm not going to call as lazy, I'm gonna call us efficient, we'll find the most efficient way to do something. So we'll deviate from the process a little bit here a little bit there. When they know that there's an inspection happening. It makes sure that people are aligned to your process, and they do things the right way.

So the way that I inspect is I asked for screenshots where I can see everything. And those screenshots provide evidence. So for example, I have a spreadsheet every day. that tracks the income. How much have we invoiced clients? And how much have we received in the bank account. So I get a screenshot of that every day. And in that screenshot that 32nd check, I can see whether it's been logged correctly because I have an idea of what's coming in.

So just that two minute check every day makes a big difference. It means that I'm checking on all of my teams with the recurring daily tasks so that any process that's not followed, it gets captured right up front. It gets captured immediately, rather than it growing and becoming this huge overwhelming problem. That means I have to stop what I'm doing to deal with it. The next thing I'll tell you that successful is the focus at will app. So when I have a most important task on my priority list, I need to focus on that and that's probably going to be a two or three hour chunk of time.

The focus that will app puts me into a mind state using by neural beats. That is one of focus, so it shuts out all the time. attractions, and there's just music that's not too aggressive. It doesn't have vocals, and it puts me in a tunnel vision state or I can focus it just does something to the brain chemistry so you can find that focus at will. And I think they have a few of their video and audio tracks on YouTube so you can check it out for free. I do have the lifetime premium is definitely worth it. And I would recommend finding some way of focusing when you do those most important tasks.