How to productively plan a productive day

We’ll go over four steps for planning our day for long term meaningful success. 

Create a vision for your life

Step number one is what’s your vision? What do you really want? How do you really want it? And I would personally advise every single one of you to answer this question in at least three major areas, your health, your fitness, your body or your relationship with your physical self regarding your career, your job, your purpose, your finances. And the third area is your relationships with your intimate relationships, relationships with your kids, family members, friends at least three areas. If you want to take it to the next level, you can divide those areas into more detailed areas.

For example, your physical well-being and your emotional well-being and now it’ll be two areas. Maybe in your business, you have few areas, like maybe how do you want your marketing to be or how do you want your money to be? And how do you want your craft or art to be? In relationships maybe you want to separate it. What do you want your intimate relationship to be like? How do you want your parenting to be like? What is the relationship with your friends to be like? But at least in those three categories, at least. And think to yourself, how do you really want it? What would be a perfect future?

Something you actually want to have for yourself. That was dramatic. It’s not like the normal ringtone for an iPhone, it’s like drama. But it is dramatic. Creating a vision for your life. Creating a vision for the main areas of your life. So that’s step number one. 

How long a specific goal will take to achieve?

These steps should only be done once or once every very extended period of time. Maybe once a year, you want to revisit it. Maybe once every couple of months, you should revisit it maybe to refine it. But it’s something that usually doesn’t change too much over the course of your life. Maybe in specific key points of your life. But usually, generally speaking, it doesn’t change too much.

So [Inaudible 02:52] see how long a specific goal will take me to achieve is very limited and I usually make mistakes. And it doesn’t really matter. Because what’s actually matter is to be in progress, is to do something, is to be productive, is to be creative. As long as you’re productive. As long as you’re creative. As long as you are heading towards your goals. You’ll be happy. You’ll feel great. So it doesn’t really matter. Those things you should revisit at least once every couple of weeks, least once every couple of months. 

Short term goals

Step number three, those are, in my opinion, the most important set of goals, are some short term goals. When I say short term, I mean 90 days. Most of my management, most of my planning, most of my strategic thinking is made in a 90-day period. I’m teaching to work in 90-day windows for a few years now. Because I realized that 90 days, of course, it’s not like rocket science, it can totally be 100 days or 80 days or something in this range. Because I found that around 90 days is a long enough period to achieve something meaningful.

It’s not like a day or a week that usually can only take the several pieces of action, several specific actions. You can actually build a project in three months. But it’s also short term enough to not wear out, to not like to decide on something and you can totally like commit and follow through even if it’s hard if it’s only for 90 days. Many things are made every 90 days in the real world or around 90 days if you think about it. Public companies put financial reports every 90 days.

[Inaudible 05:00] Exactly. In the military basic training for the elite courses or for like infantry or for many, many, many people are around 90 days. So it can be 120 days, four months, three months because it’s very hard but they can see the end of it, then maybe they have like an advanced course which is usually, again, something like three, four or five months. That’s it.

So things are usually planned in those time periods because if it’s longer, it’s harder to push yourself through difficulty in order to get to the goal. The farther away you are from your goal, the less it can motivate you. It’s something very important to understand. The farther away your goal is from where you are, the harder it is for you to motivate yourself. 

If you will think about this research that is showing that I won’t go through the research only will show you the basic idea is that motivation comes from three elements. 

The first one is effective. If you can get 10 times as much money for the same job, most people will be more motivated to take the job that makes 10 times more. This is the size of the effect. If you want, for example, to lose weight then losing 10 pounds will be better then losing two pounds if you want to lose weight. So this the bigger the effect, the more motivated you’ll be. 

But it’s also about how probable (probability) if you actually believe you’ll get the result because this is why, if you see marketing from like commercials or marketing from 10 years ago, you’ll see people promising do this course, join this program, buy this kit, join our company and you’ll be able to make $360,000 every hour. And if you’ll see today’s marketing they’ll tell you, you can do $2,000 a month extra. Why? Because people start to feel that the big promises have low probability of actually becoming true so it’s less motivating. So this is why in today’s world people tend to promise less because people will actually settle for less if they actually believe it can actually happen. So that’s second is probability. 

But the third one, this is what we’re discussing right now, is I don’t have the word for it, but is that like how instant. How instant is the result? If I can lose 10 pounds in a week it’s very motivating, way more motivated if I can lose 10 pounds over 10 years. There’s a very famous experiment that people offered students to take one out of two options. They either could get $100 right now or they can come next week and get $120 and most students took the $100 right now. The economistic decision behind it is very logical. Because they don’t need the money to drink or eat. They are not starving. And they have no investment that will make 20% in a week. So the wiser, your decision is to keep the money and give it later. The rational decision.

But the thing is that people tend to value speed, they tend to value the idea that they’ll get the results right now. This is why building 90-day goals is relatively close so it will help us stay motivated even through difficult times. If we only go to very long term goals, it’s very hard to stay motivated when you’re facing hard times. So 90 day goals are really, in my opinion important. This is why I actually do it in the company. Every 90 days we sit all the team and everyone sets goals for themselves and personal lives and professional life and it’s actually really fun.

what are strategic actions you can do?

Step number four is what are some strategic actions you can do this week. So every single week, what I’m doing on Sundays (you can do it on whatever day you want to do it) is I’m sitting with my 90 day goals. If I look at them and I’m not motivated then I’ll look at my vision and revisit the 90 day goals. But usually, I simply look at the 90-day goals, I am motivated and I find some strategic actions I can take this week. Again, because I have 90-day goals for different areas of my life. I find strategic action for the different areas of my life and then I schedule everything. So in my schedule, I have things like to go to some special afternoon activity with my son, I have some time to plan something for the business and I also have my workouts or last week, I took a rock climbing course, for example.

So I have everything in my schedule. Because everything has goals (every long term goals) every set of long term goals has a set of short term 90-day goals. And every one of these have specific actions I can take this week. And you remember that we talked about being proactive in every single area of our life. This is the way I do it. I simply make sure that in every single area of my life, I take action every single week. And if one week, I find myself that I don’t take action in one specific area, I make sure that the next week I will because for example last week or two weeks ago, Leah was traveling with a friend.

So she was in the country for only two days that week and in those two days I was incredibly busy. So that week, I did nothing with Leah, I wanted to send flowers to the place she was visiting, but it was…, in the end of the day it didn’t happen for various reasons but still I made sure that the next week I will take action that will improve our relationship every single week.