Name: How To Be 10x More Productive | The Ultimate Guide to Productivity
Uploaded: 2020-11-23T19:35:07.000Z
Duration: 16 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's running in the right direction for the longest distance.

It's about making the greatest progress towards your goals in the shortest amount

And the key to productivity can be boiled down to a simple equation: distance equals

velocity multiplied by time, which equals another set of variables.

In this video, I'll explain all of the variables, giving you the ultimate guide to productivity.

You're an organism with a limited amount of energy that you can spend each day.

As you go about your day—moving, thinking, acting—this energy bar is slowly draining.

And if you're mindless of how you spend this energy, you'll end each day with nothing

So learning to use your own internal energy is critical to being productive, and the best

way to leverage your energy is by performing what I call Sprints.

Sprints are time-bounded work sessions that require intense focus, active participation

in an activity, and pushing yourself beyond your current limits.

Working sprints, the ones I'm talking about in this video, are just like real sprints:

a strenuous and intentional use of your energy.

If you're a student, sprints are when you study at your desk with no distractions, and

you're actively working on homework problems, recalling flashcards, deconstructing a text,

writing an essay, or doing practice exams—not reading over your notes or highlighting.

If you're a hockey player, it's intentional and strenuous practice on your conditioning,

puck handling, passing, or shooting, not idly skating around and shooting on the net for

If you're a writer, it's hammering out your words and performing surgical revisions.

The purpose of a sprint is to make effective progress towards your goals by focusing your

energy on a singular task that challenges you, and this brings us back to the key formula:

Every sprint has 3 key components: distance, velocity, and time, and I'm going to break

Distance is the measure of your productive output.

If we're running, it's the literal miles or kilometres we've travelled.

If we're writing, it's the number of words or pages we've written.

If we're studying fluid dynamics, it's the number of practice problems we've solved.

Distance is the measurable fruits of our labour, and it shows us if what we're doing is effective.

Our goal is to increase the distance we run with each Sprint, and there are two ways to

do this: increase our velocity or increase the time we work for.

Time, with a big T, can be broken down into two smaller components: time (with a little

t) and N. N is the number of sprints we decide to do in a day, and t is the length of each

For example, when I write, N is four and t is thirty minutes.

That means I do four Sprints a day that last thirty minutes each.

Thirty minutes is how long I can successfully stay intensely focused in a single Sprint,

and after four sprints a day, I'm pretty mentally exhausted.

You can experiment with the number of sprints you do in a day and how long you do them for

The goal is to get both variables, N and t, as high as possible but in a way where you

Going back to my writing example, I can consistently do four sprints a day for thirty minutes each

Consistency depends on discipline, not motivation.

Here's what happens if you work off motivation.

You'll get excited and do four sprints for one hour each on the first day and exhaust

You'll probably do one sprint for one hour the next day, fifteen the next, and then you'll

But here's what it looks like if you work off discipline.

On the first day you work for fifteen minutes, and you still feel like you have energy in

The next day you do two sprints, and you still have more energy in the tank, but you wait

On the third day you do three fifteen minute sprints, and on the fourth you do four, slowly

But on the fifth day, you try working twenty minutes each sprint instead of fifteen, and

So on the sixth day, you try working for thirty minutes, and you realize that you're a little

And in fact, that tiredness spills over into the next day, so you only do ten minute sprints

Now you've successfully found your limit, and on the eight day, you revert back to twenty

minute sprints—which you consistently maintain going forward.

Discipline, not motivation, leads to consistent results, and discipline depends on thoughtful

experimentation, self-awareness, and self-respect.

We have to discover how much we can push ourselves, finding a healthy balance between being too

When it comes to productively managing your time and energy, one of my favourite pieces

of advice comes from Hemingway: You write until you come to a place where you still

have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through

until the next day when you hit it again.

Hemingway didn't work until his tank was empty, like many overly-motivated, eager beginners

He kept a consistent regimen, and he always ended his work day with some energy left in

his tank, when he knew how he would continue his story the next day.

By ending in a place where you know what step to take next, you'll build anticipation

that will let you hit the ground running on the next day.

Productivity, when it comes to the things that matter, is always a long-term marathon,

and to run the marathon, you have to learn to manage your time in a way where you can

make consistent daily progress, and managing your time comes back to two factors: the number

of sprints you do (n) and how long they are (t).

But time is not the most critical factor for being productive for 3 reasons.

Once you're working around 60-80 hours a week, you're reaching the maximum of what's

probably possible for the average person.

The rest of your gains in productivity will come from your velocity, not your time.

Once you're working 80 hours a week, you'll probably burnout and become tired, reducing

(3) And the final reason, time is an imprecise metric.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How To Be 10x More Productive | The Ultimate Guide to Productivity

discipline

rhythm

critical

deliberate