Do you often find your workday just out of control? Today I’m sharing important tips that I’ve been following to make sure that I stay productive and always be at my best for the people around me.
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Transcription:
Hey there, Pete Moriarty here. Today, I want to share with you a tip that has been really meaningful for me in my life in making sure that I am productive and I show up best for everyone that is inside my life. Both myself, my family, my staff, anyone I want to do work with. This is going to hopefully give you some real insight into how you could be more conscious, more present, for those that you need to show up with. And I look forward to your comments on it right down below.
This is the jelly bean video. And from now on, will be known as the jelly bean video, and it’s about productivity. I have had a really keen interest in productivity, in living a life of purpose, living a life by design, and being able to perform well at home. That sounds funny. At work, live life that’s important to me, and achieve my dreams and my goals and everything else. And so along that way, I’ve learnt about performance, productivity, and making sure that I can perform my best in all situations. That joke’s not going to go away. It’s in my head now.
So I want to share a concept of jelly beans and the jelly beans concept is something that’s been really useful for me because this has helped me to make sure that when I’m focusing on a task, I’ve got less chance of being distracted. And when I’m looking to really show up in the different areas of my life, I’m doing it in a conscious and a present way, in a way that really works for me.
I want you to imagine your attention span and your ability to manage more than one task at a time as a big jar of jelly beans, and that big jar of jelly beans is basically your ability to concentrate on different tasks, your ability to manage everything that’s on your mind. And I know that for a business owner, you always have a million things on your mind. “The BAS is due. I’ve got to look after the kids,” if you’ve got kids. “I’ve got to look after my children at work,” your staff. And so there’s all these pressures and things that we’ve got to worry about as well as wearing the finance hat, the marketing hat, the sales hat, and everything else that we have to do to actually run a business. And it’s no surprise that those that run businesses are probably more likely to be more like the ADD-scatterbrain-type mindset or potentially have lurking mental health issues that they’re pushing to the side by keeping busy with business. That’s just my opinion. I don’t know if that’s a fact or not.
But the jelly bean concept can really help you to solve this, this feeling of scatteredness in your mind and your thinking. So if you imagine your mind is like a big jar of jelly beans, and every time you have an open loop, one of the jelly beans comes out of the jar, right? So you have an open loop, jelly bean comes out of the jar. And until you close that loop, the jelly bean doesn’t go back in the jar. Only when you close that loop, does the jelly bean go back in the jar. And eventually you’ll run out of jelly beans because you end up having jelly beans sitting all over the floor.
So if you imagine you’re driving down the street, you’re sitting in traffic, and you’ve got your phone sitting in your phone holster in the car. You’ve got an email that pops up on your phone and it’s from that client. You know that client? That client, right.
And maybe the subject is in all capitals or maybe it’s like, “Oh yeah, that project’s overdue.” Or it’s something that you’ve forgotten to do. And it pops up on your phone and you’re sitting there in your car and there is nothing that you can do to stop thinking about that until you actually close that loop. That’s a jelly bean out of your jar.
Now, unfortunately, when we’ve got notifications on our phone, when we’ve got emails dinging and binging, when we’ve got staff that can interrupt us with instant messages, what that does is it means that a lot of jelly beans end up coming out of your jar on any normal day because you have these open loops being created all the time.
So the magic trick to be more productive and to be more conscious and present and show up in a much better way is to keep the jelly beans in your jar by doing things like disabling notifications on your phone. That’s a really big one. Next one is making sure that if you’ve got present time with family or you’ve got quality time with staff that you put your phone down. Mine actually stays on do not disturb 24 hours a day. So phone calls don’t even come through. I only receive phone calls if I’m literally sitting at the computer or I’ve actually got a handset that I use at home as well.
Now, what I’ve done is taken it to a more radical step, and I’ve actually switched off all of the notifications for all of the apps on my phone, including Messenger. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I blocked the Facebook newsfeed on my computer, and I’ll drop a link to a video below so you can learn how to do that. But my phone doesn’t actually buzz for anything apart from one app. And that one app allows close friends and family to get in touch with me when they need me, because that’s all I want this to be. I want to be in control of when I use this device, for maps when I’m driving, or for looking up something when I’m on the go, or for paying at a shop.
But in all of those actions, I’m in control. So jelly beans are not out of my jar, but if I’m doing a task and something dings or bings on my phone and it diverts my attention, that’s a jelly bean out of the jar, right? Because I’ve got an open task and then, “Oh, look, this person’s added me on LinkedIn,” and all of a sudden, “Oh yeah, I’ve meant to catch up with them. I haven’t seen them in five years and blah, blah, blah.” And you can see automatically you’re distracted and your mind goes to somewhere else. So keep the jelly beans in your jar by reducing things or interruptions or even ways of working that allow jelly beans to come out of your jar.
So, to do that, I want you to take a very, very disciplined approach to working in a bit of a linear fashion. And by that, I mean, don’t try and multitask. Multitasking doesn’t exist. The actual definition of multitasking means switching between two tasks quickly. It doesn’t actually mean doing two things at the same time. So if that helps illustrate that point, multitasking does not exist. So don’t try doing it. And if you’re the kind of person that is easily distracted, or you find yourself switching between multiple tasks, if right now you’ve got two monitors on your desk, get rid of them and go to one big monitor instead. There’s a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work, and that’s also got some really cool strategies around getting into the flow of doing one task at a time. But also if you look at videos on YouTube about minimalism and those kinds of concepts, they’ll really bring you in the right direction about simplifying things and allowing you to therefore be more effective.
And what does this all result in? You show up better for your staff. You show up better for yourself. You show up better for your family. You’ll perform better in all the ways that you want to perform better, but it’s about getting rid of those open loops that get created by jelly beans.
So for you today, keep the jelly beans in your jar, and I’m interested to know what strategies do you have for keeping jelly beans in your jar and removing open loops from your life? Drop them down below.
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