#254 Why Your To Do List Is Quietly Killing Your Firm

But before I do that, I think it would be good to talk about a couple of the productivity hacks and habits that I've built up over the years that have enabled me to get more done in the same amount of time.

And one of those is, I mean, this, for example, this podcast.

This podcast fell by the wayside because I was taken out of my routine.

I came to the UK.

In Doha, I would have my, I had my headset in the car.

And therefore, if you've read Atomic Habits, you'll know that there are four key criteria that James Clear talks about in that book that you need to, that need to exist in order to make a habit.

to cultivate a good habit.

And they are to make something easy, to make it satisfying, to make it attractive and to make it obvious.

And this is just the way that, you know, a habit is made up.

So for me, the headset being in the car is an obvious visual cue.

It's there.

It's in the car.

I know when I drop my son and I've got that dead time waiting for him to play his tennis coaching that I get the headset on.

I go for a walk and I record my podcast.

It's a routine for me.

So in that sense, environment design, if you can design your environment in a way that makes the things that you want to do that you know are good habits, cultivate your environment, design your environment in a way that makes it obvious and easy for you to do the thing that you know you want to do.

So another example of this is, for example, Let's say you know you need to be more active.

You know you should be going for a walk every morning or going for a run or whatever it is that you would do, go for a walk, listen to a podcast like this one, to kill two birds in one stone, but you don't do it.

Why? You haven't made it easy, you haven't made it attractive, you haven't made it rewarding, you haven't made it obvious.

So one way to cultivate this good habit would be, well, how about, and this is something I used to do as well, my mornings used to be like how they are now.

My mornings used to be very, when the kids were a lot younger, I would get out of bed, slowly go downstairs in my pajamas, put on the kettle, make a cup of tea, You know, read the newspaper, sit down with the gazette.

And I would just waste at least an hour in the morning just having a very slow ritual process of just waking up without doing any activity.

And that's all changed.

That changed when I read the book and I started to implement some new habits and the way that, you know, I did it was as recommended in the book is that, okay, make it more obvious, make it more obvious that you're going to do the thing that you want to do.

So for example, going for a walk first thing in the morning before anything else, before even having your cup of tea.