How To Be More Productive

Yes, proactively, so we figured we'd do this one just because health and fitness plays a lot into productivity and at the moment everybody's lives changing. You know, lockdowns, everybody starting to work from home a little bit more, or it's more. Come in, this is where I'm going for them. And also this is sort of rolled into. You know, when you do take breaks and things open up again when you go on holiday. You can take these into your holidays as well. Yeah, cool, but before that make sure you head over to our website so you can get a lot of free **** you like. Free stuff. I like free stuff. We all like free stuff, it is all there. It is all a lot of things. We're going to talk about in today's episode like Resources, Things that help you be more productive over there. So go over, check out the free. Free Resources tab button. This was going for and yeah it's all there. Kill. That's enough about that. Let's get into it. Cool, so continuing with the resources, I guess we'll touch on. We have a habit tracker in our free resources section on the website. It's very basic. It's pretty much just an overview of the month and getting that would be a perfect place to start to improve your productivity. So basically you just pick three habits that you want to achieve or create. For the week or the month, you can change them every week and then you have the opportunity to tick off each habit every day as the month goes on, so. Obviously, in having that just having that is already going to make you a lot more productive because you can pick your top three priorities. He'd encourage you to keep doing them, so I guess to say you'll seek sizing and Sunday afternoon, and you haven't read yet. But every other day has all of the ticks off. Then you're a lot more likely to just read, you know like you're just going to do it because you want that last tick, so I guess it's sort of encourages you to be more productive. And it's good motivation. Using yourself as motivation is always good. I believe, yeah, 100% and a lot of time when you know you're making that transition from working at an office to home or. You know your job just changing or going on holiday.

It's just very easy to let go of those good habits, and this is just a way to. Continue those habits no matter what you're doing. And making sure you taking him off, 'cause again your health doesn't take a rest. Your health should be constant. K just 'cause you go on holidays or you go into lockdown doesn't mean your health stop stops. You still have to live and move and eat. Yes, yes.

So the rest of the episode is just going to us going to be us talking through habits and strategies to be more productive. So if you listen to this and you're like, Oh yeah, sweet habit tracker, but what the hell do I put in there the rest of the episode is for you. Cool, yeah, do you want to start with Robert? Three habits that if you have chosen for September 3 habits are stretch. Read and. Post post post socials every day, so that's more a business one. I get quite lazy. I'll have a love-hate relationship with socials and sometimes I never want to see it again, and it's not good for business so that one there stretching, especially my legs. My legs get super tight for some reason, so I'm stretching my legs every day. And what they've read, read, and that's just to keep me up to date with everything can keep me motivated and find new information to help us be better coaches and give to you guys, yeah? I don't have many health and Wellness ones in there because I feel like a hydrate enough. I eat enough, which we should because yeah, we are essentially role models. Yeah, and that's what we do for a living, so it's sort of we already. I've been working on this for like we've got it down Pat almost seven years now, 10 years. Yeah so. I've got damn packed. What are you doing cool? Well, I am what am I doing? I'm one of them is either reading my textbook or a scientific paper every day because reading is just something I always like for uni. I always put off because it's. Slow-paced, you know. Like I struggle to do it because I need to be actively doing something I find, so I've been getting up at 6 and reading because it's like the hardest thing for me to do. So do it first, get it over and done with. The other one was moved my body twice a day, so we exercise with Huey in the morning over zoom at the minute 'cause we're in lockdown. And then we sit at the desk all day. So then, having that, moving my body twice sort of encourages me to either do yoga in the afternoon. Like a little bodybuilding session or going for a long walk and then the third one was to journal every day. I just really like I value journaling very highly. I like to do it morning and night. I know that's a lot for some people, but. We can. Getting into our minds will segue from that to the journaling point, I guess. Done so. Uhm, recently I guess. Pretty recently a couple of months ago I started journaling. At night, to everything that I have on my mind, essentially everything I need to get done the next day. So I feel like in the evening you start to think about all of the things you didn't achieve that day and how much you have to do tomorrow. And that can stress you out and cause you to have a ****** sleep or not be able to fall asleep. Or instead, you just procrastinate and watch Netflix for two hours. So if you can make a list of everything that you want to do the next day, then. One it off your mind and you can relax for the night. You can fall asleep easier and two, it's more productive for the following day because you get up in the morning and you know exactly what needs to be done. It's already written out for you, you just have to do the first thing on the list. So yeah, that's probably my favourite productivity tool them in it. And on top of that, it gives you a reason to wake up and do stuff in the morning. I find when people situations change no matter what it is, and you've got that spare time in the day. If you're certain to work from home you like sweet. I can just sleep in for a little bit longer, yeah, but your sleep in a day gets away from you and you've got nothing done. So if you've got that list or not four and you set something for 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM, you know you've got to get up for it. It gives you that reason to get up and get into the day. Yeah, 100% and I feel like starting your day strong literally sets you up for a good day. If you know those days how you get up and you're like, oh, sleep in and we'll have breakfast in bed and then all of a sudden it's like a love and o'clock and you're like, oh. Now, what am I going to do? Just wasted half the day. Yeah, that's bad, like I mean, feel free to do those things, but not every day. Especially if you're trying to be productive. You're watching this because you want to be productive so you do it. Just do it. Uhm, another thing that you could add to your habit tracker. Oh sorry, I thought you were gonna go into the next one. I was going to say keep up your morning routine. So again, when your situation changes, you've got a spare time in the morning. You sleep in and then you don't do the things you normally do when you're going to work, so you wake up, have a shower, or you know the first thing you should do is have a glass of water. The best thing you can do is start your day is having a glass of water, then shower brush your teeth breakfast and on with your day where a lot of people will just wake up. Go sit on the couch, scroll on their phone and then all of a sudden it's 10:00 and the day has. Just not started and it's going to get away from you. So as soon as your situation changes, keep up the routine. This even goes for the weekend, so you should be doing this on the weekends. I do get a bit slack of this and but I'm trying to change that a bit, but your weekend should be the same as your weekdays. OK, it is so beneficial for your circadian rhythms to do that. It's good for your bot like which is your body clock, so it's just good for that just to keep it going. So you're going to have the energy levels that your body is used to doing. Like yeah, used to have it during the day. I guess just think about how hard it is for you to get up on a Monday morning compared to like a Wednesday morning because you've slept in Saturday, Sunday and now your body is like what are we doing? I thought we were changing our sleep routine to getting up at 9:00. Now you're telling me I have to get up at 6:00. This is so hard it takes, you know, 24 hours, 48 hours for your body clock to change like that. So keep it up. Yeah, cool, another thing you could do or how it tracker would be to eat regular meals if you're working from home. In lockdown studying whatever.

We do this often, not often, but we have been guilty of this in the past of just having so much work on that we don't have lunch like we'll end up having a piece of toast or an apple, you know, and then three o'clock and we like starving. Grumpy, tired, can't think. And really, it's just less productive. Whereas if you do, just even if you have to set an alarm, just set an alarm for midnight, get up, make lunch, sit down, go outside in the sun, but it just gives your mind and body a break from the desk. And from concentrating, and if you do that, the afternoon is going to be far more productive, like if you just skip lunch. You might be able to work until 2:00, whereas if you stop and slow down and have lunch then you might get an extra three or four hours in the afternoon, whereas usually, you would hit a wall by two or three. So yeah, and it's better to eat consistently throughout the day throughout the week, OK? But he's going to struggle if you're eating minimal on Monday. A lot on Tuesday medium on Wednesday, nothing on Thursday and then all over the place again. Your body can't get used to it. Yeah, we're not talking about athletes or anything like that. We're just talking about being productive at home. So you need to fuel your body to be productive. So if you eat **** all on Monday, you're going to have no energy on Tuesday because you didn't feel yourself. So it all plays into each other. So be consistent, Yep. And that could be something you could have on your habit tracker, or is make one meal. The night before, and then you've got the meal for the next day. Yeah, I feel like if you know the times that you're going to eat, then it's also a lot easier to not snack as much as you can see that time coming. Like you know you're like at 12. I'm going to stop and have lunch, so it might be 11:30 and you're like, oh man, I could go for some chips. Be like it's only 30 minutes. I can wait until lunch, you know? So also just having mealtimes in place will help you. Even plan your snacks as well, I guess, and that's a good point. I think it was our business coach that said it like that. Would you, if you were an employee? Would you work throughout the day and not stop and work yourself into the ground if you're an employee, you get those rest breaks. Yeah, you're entitled to two breaks every day, so it's funny, like when we go and work for ourselves. It's like we're not entitled to him anymore. Yeah, they're there for a reason, so have two breaks a day at the minimum. There's nothing that you've talked about before. Like different ways you can be productive like work-rest periods, and that sort of stuff. Yeah, so at the start of uni, they taught they teach us a lot about it. Uhm? The best ways to learn, obviously. 'cause starting to learn is like can be daunting because you're like haven't done it for years. I guess a lot of people. If you've been out of school for a while, so two of the more productive ways to learn or work is to do 30 minutes like 30-minute intense periods of work or learning followed by a five-minute break, and then that just gives you brain time to like process. Remember, think about all the things you've just done or learned or come up with new ideas or the other one, which I probably prefer. Is 90 minutes of work, work, minutes of rest because. I guess your brain is kind of like a muscle like you wouldn't do bicep curls for eight hours. You know, like? It needs rest. It needs time to process. Yeah, so that's that is beneficial ways and they help you with your stamina I guess to be productive for the whole day. Yeah yeah, it's funny. Like how the eight hours is the industry standard for working and having two breaks, but it's the least productive. Yeah, it's how to have them not read like there are so so many studies on how to be productive but like 4 hours on an hour off is not one of them know. Just a funny side note, yeah. Cool. Another thing that sort of goes back to what you said before about planning. If you've got a big day for the next day. So if you write your list the night before all the things you have to do tomorrow, and then you're like, Oh my goodness, I have a huge day tomorrow. How am I going to have time to do anything else for myself? Uhm, when you're cooking dinner or cleaning up or whatever, just do a little bit of food.

Prep doesn't have to be complicated. Make a salad that you can literally scoop out of a container and put into a rap with some pre-cooked chicken like and then your lunch is done. Takes way less pressure off you thinking about what you have to have for lunch. Chopping up stuff for lunch and then eating lunch so it takes a lot of time when you're at home because I feel like you tend to fluff. We fluff around a lot, so if you have everything ready you pretty much. The kitchen gets it, eat it, and then you can go back to work. Yeah, and yeah, you said it's just coming down the sort of planning. I think everything would go into that so haven't you had a tracker journaling and then those two things you're going to know what your next day is involved in so you can plan meals. If you need to, yeah, so. Do you know? They will let up take him off to come off heaps of ticks. Ticks everywhere. UM, do you have any more? I just feel like we should touch on the one thing we always talk about is sleep and they were very sort of talked about it. Sleep routine I feel like we did talk about it, but I just want to sort of re talk about it because it is so important. I feel like as soon as anybody situation changes it's like sweet. I'm going to sleep for hours. Don't help works and you're just going to end up in a hole. And this even goes for holidays and stuff like that like I said. If you're used to getting up at 7:00 every morning, get up at 7:00 every single day. As soon as you change that, you're just going to be less productive, and it does suck on holidays because you get nothing done or you don't see anything you don't enjoy yourself. And working from home and even sucks even more 'cause you don't earn the money to go on holidays. Yeah, so. Yeah, just again, probably just go back and watch one of our ones about sleep. Uh, one thing that I very lightly touched on that I wanted to talk about was. Doing your hardest, whatever you consider being your hardest task first, so I find for a lot of people that we know in a lot of clients the hardest thing for them to do is to exercise. So like it's. It takes the most amount of thought planning effort for them to get out into the gym or go for a walk or whatever it is. So if you do that first, then it's already done and you don't have 8 hours before it to think about how much you are. What's the word? Dreading how much you're dreading it so you don't have all that time to think about how much we're dreading it. You get up and you just do it and then it's done and then you feel good because you've exercised and then you're more. You're more likely to be productive for the rest of the day because you're like Oh well, I've started. Well, I might as well keep going like this. Yeah, yeah, there's that much research out there to show that exercising in the morning is super beneficial for productivity like you should be moving your body in some way in the morning. There are just no ifs. Or butts about it. It is beneficial now. There is a reverse where if you're doing. It's wrong, like if you're doing a workout in the morning and it's taking all your energy from you for the rest of the day. You're working out wrong in the morning. The morning workout should give you energy for the rest of the day. If it doesn't, you're doing it wrong. That's where you contact me and say, Jack, what am I doing wrong? And I'll say this this this and then you get going and have a better productive day. But move your body in the morning. I can't stress that enough. Yeah, start it if you haven't done it before, it will be hard to get used to, but once you get used to it, it will be extremely beneficial. Yep. Cool, we do talk about this a lot or we have the last couple of weeks, but I feel like it's important to productivity is to try and put your coffee off for 20 or 30 minutes. I feel like we've been doing that a lot lately and it helps it.

I think it helps a lot. So if you get up and have a coffee immediately then the coffee will spike your cortisol. Like not naturally, so it doesn't give you a body time to let your cortisol levels rise. So then the coffee spikes them quickly. Hard and fast, and then you drop hard and fast. So just 20-30 minutes. Not that long. Put your coffee off and then you like you'll be able to function a lot better for the rest of the day. And maybe you won't need to get 234 more coffees because you'll feel alert. Yeah, a super easy one to put in the upper track of that one so you can just say first coffee at 9 tick. Yeah, and you probably won't want to. 6 after that, yeah, yeah. Easy, put it in their products. What else? That's all, that's all I've got noted. Kill, I feel like that's about it. Anybody that does download the habit tracker sends us a message with your habits in there. If if we've missed anything that you think is important, put it in there, send it. Let us know what you put in there. That would be pretty cool. But Fridays is now our second day for podcasting. OK, we're going to be doing a second show on Friday the Friday wrap up where we're just going to talk **** for a little bit. I'm pretty good at it. Yeah, just topics that sort of interest us.

We figured you guys would probably be interested in as well being random things that we've learned. Maybe they aren't even health and fitness related. You never know and also will do a bit of Q&A on those shows because we do get questions during the week from you guys. So we're just going to do a weekly Q&A on that episode as well. So if you got any questions, any topics you want us to talk about, or any articles you go to, oh, this is interesting. Jack and Mac or like that send to us and we'll talk about it. On that show. Uhm, how long is it going to go for? Uhm, I just need to know so I can fit into my schedule, you know? Allow half an hour in your schedule. It won't be half now, it just takes us a little while in setting up and. Recording and lots of stuff, right size. It's just. Yeah yeah, I'm gonna say I'm gonna blame for like 10 to 20 minutes. OK, cool sounds good alright as always thank you all for joining in if you got something out of it share this with somebody else who needs to be productive. Help pass out help them out. And yeah that'll do. We'll see you all in the next episode. Thank you all for listening. Have a productive week.

@jack_insitubody

@mack.insituhealth