488. Expert Interview: How to Design Your Perfect Day for Maximum Productivity

“People don’t really know how to be proactive about how best to spend their time because they’ve never been taught. In school, we are taught skills, but not a single course focuses on how to be proactive about our time. In fact, I would argue the opposite is taught. We are taught how to be employees, to bend to other people’s agendas, to spend our time according to how other people wants us to spend it. That’s really the default setting of education. I want to flip that upside down. I want everybody to be proactive with their time and do the things they truly want to do every single day. My goal is to empower people to be more proactive about how they spend their time. It is completely possible with just a few tweaks of mindset and strategy.”

“The place to start with is your mindset. We are often in a mindset of running around, putting out fires, responding to emails, all that stuff. That is our default setting. The first crucial mindset switch to make is to go from “I have to do everything, it’s all urgent!” to asking yourself, “What do I REALLY have to do during my day, and what do I want to do?

“Start that mindset shift by tracking your time. Just by becoming aware of where your time goes, you will start to direct what you are doing to be more in line with how you feel you should be spending your time. You’ll begin doing this almost subconsciously.”