How To Finish More Work in 2 Hours than 98% of People Do In 2 Weeks
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 31th, 2023
In today’s episode of Amplified Impact, Anthony dives into the topic of maximizing productivity and getting more done in less time.
Anthony shares three tips for productivity:
The first tip is to control auditory distractions through using noise-cancelling headphones and listening to a curated playlist that will put you in a state of deep work.
The second tip is to create a focus ritual, similar to what athletes do, to eliminate distractions and stay on track.
Third, Anthony discusses the importance of having a clear and defined work environment to maximize productivity.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Getting a motivational playlist is one of the biggest drivers of productivity in my personal life. Your ears are always on, so creating an environment conducive to focus in terms of auditory stimulus is important.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony: [00:00:00] And welcome back to the pod. It’s fantastic to have you guys here. I don’t know what day it is when you’re listening to this, but here on my recording days, this is when I batch all my content for the podcast. It is a Tuesday. It is a Tuesday morning. It’s fantastic. It’s 12 degrees out here in Minnesota, so you know we’re bundled up and trying to stay warm.
Anthony: Hopefully you’re doing well. Today we’re going to talk about how to finish more work in two hours than 95% of people accomplish in two weeks. There’s a lot of different ways that we can optimize for productivity and try to get more things done, and I can, I, I find sometimes it feels a little bit overwhelming to just have too much thrown at you.
Anthony: And so today I’m just going to share three tips, three strategies that are pretty easy to implement. That, I think you’ll start noticing immediate results. And so this is not an exhaustive list whatsoever, but this is a good starting point. Number one [00:01:00] in this. This one is like mega. For me personally, this might be one of the biggest drivers of productivity in my own personal life.
Anthony: It is getting a motivational play track. Okay, now. Or playlist not play track. I don’t know what I was saying there. Play track, playlist. So what I’m, what I’m saying here is for me, when I’m trying to go into deep work, one of the things that I’m really prone to with my ADHD is getting distracted by noises in particular, you know, there there’s visual.
Anthony: Distractions. And there can be this, the, the, the tactile of like, what’s the temperature of the wor the room distractions. But for me, the thing that will pull me out of the zone the quickest is auditory distractions. So if I hear anything in the other room that will throw me off my game instantly, I’ll just be going down rabbit holes.
Anthony: And so anything that I can do to control the, the stimulus that’s coming into my ears is going to, is, is been really, really powerful for me [00:02:00] because your ears are a really interesting thing, right? You can’t turn them off from the day that you’re born unless you have some kind of hearing impairment. They’re on always running.
Anthony: And so, Creating an environment that’s conducive for focus in terms of our auditory stimulus is important. So what I do first is I have noise canceling headphones. If you guys are watching this on YouTube, you can see ’em holding them up right here. These are my Sony. I think they’re like the W W H something.
Anthony: Somethings. They’re over ear noise canceling headphones. I love them. Now when I put them on, it almost feels like I’m putting on like a, a helmet, like I’m a jet fighter pilot, and I’m like entering into the zone. The world just kind of like shuts off and it’s, it’s a fantastic feeling. For the longest time I would listen to white noise when I worked, in fact, this, I, I listened to white noise while writing, probably my first five.
Anthony: And white noise is great because there’s nothing to get looped into in terms of rhythm or melodies or lyrics or anything like that. [00:03:00] However, recently in the last year, I discovered something way better, something I enjoy that puts me so deep into the zone that it’s ridiculous when I come out of it. I, I, I feel like I’m resurfacing from like the, the depths of the ocean or something like that.
Anthony: It’s, it’s this app called Brain fm. And it is so cool. What it, it, it’s, it’s science backed music to help you, stimulate certain areas of your brain that are conducive for deep work flow states. And so they tend to be very, deep guttural, ephemeral, no melodies, no lyrics, nothing like that. Not even like a necessarily a tangible rhythm to, to get into it.
Anthony: it puts me right into the zone. Now, I would recommend trying out Brain fm. I think it’s a fantastic resource, but if you’re not into that, you know, you can try other things like finding really epic e ethereal soundtracks from like different movies like Interstellar [00:04:00] or, What’s that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio?
Anthony: Oh, inception, that’s a fantastic one too. The, the, the composer on that, Zach Kempsey, he wrote, an album called Mind, what is it? Mind Heist, which was actually totally tangential. I wrote my book, mind Breach while Listening to Mind Heist on Repeat. So if you ever read that book that, the sequel to Time Heist, you’ll, you’ll be, you’ll be able, Maybe feel the mood of that particular song or that soundtrack, rather.
Anthony: Okay. Number. First, we’re controlling for our auditory, stimuli. Number two is we’re going to create a focus ritual in the same way that like athletes and performers, they have a warmup ritual that they go through every single time. They repeat the steps. It’s getting into the zone, it’s getting their body primed for performance.
Anthony: Focus is not something that just happens at the drop of a hat. You cannot just [00:05:00] say, time to focus and sit down and go. You have to, you have to ease into it. It can take 15 minutes. Before you all the, the residual, what do they call it? thought residue from previous tasks, evaporates and now you can fully dedicate yourself to what you’re working on.
Anthony: And so the more run up that you can give yourself to going into deep work states, And more likely that you’re going to be able to stick with it through that 15, that first 15 to 20 minute window of frustration and kind of like discomfort so that you can actually make it through your whole, say, 90 minute block of, of deep work.
Anthony: A lot of people, they, they never make it through that first 15 minutes. They just keep getting distracted and each time they pick up their phone or look at the window or do this other thing, you’re resetting that clock on yourself for it’s going to take another 15 minutes. you know, that attention residue to, to evaporate.
Anthony: And so anything that we can do to create a focus ritual to start putting ourselves into the [00:06:00] zone is going to pay dividends. Because once you, once you start to unlock these, these tactics or like these, modalities, you can. You can accelerate the pace at which you go into focus. For instance, for me, one of my, my focus rituals is I come into my office and I get my, my, What’s the word?
Anthony: The, the scent really figured out. I, I light a couple candles. I have my boom boom sticks. This is a cinnamon one. This, you know, is just a nasal inhaler that smells like cinnamon. But I, I start to set a, a mood, for focus with scent Number two is then I clean off my desk. I make sure that only the things that need to be on my desk for the, the job that I’m about to perform are there.
Anthony: So I do a little mini cleaning task while I put my headphones. And I start to listen to brain.fm to like get into the, the mode, the rhythm. Once that’s clean and I sit down, now I turn off my phone, [00:07:00] I turn off my internet, or I turn off my, my browser or whatever it is, or lock out the, the sites that I don’t want to be using during that period of time.
Anthony: And then I bust out my Pomodoro. My little timer, I set it to go and then I’m off. It doesn’t have to be a crazy routine. It doesn’t have to be a crazy ritual. I think the easier it is just to replicate it over and over, the better. And so this is something that I can do anywhere, right? It’s not. It doesn’t have to be in this workspace.
Anthony: All I need is my, I need a, some kind of sense stick. I need some way to control my, my nasal input. I need, my noise canceling headphones. I need to have a clean workspace and I need to set my timer. And once those things are set, now I’m in the flow. And that, that’s, been a very powerful thing for me personally.
Anthony: All right. The third thing is remove all distractions. Focus is, At its core, the ability to resist distractions. Now you can make it so much easier on yourself by just instead of having to resist distractions, just make the distractions [00:08:00] obsolete and eliminate them before they ever even appear. And so this is where things like turning off your phone, turning off your internet or whatever, like having controls specifically for what I think are the three areas that typically get, cause the most distractions, number one, phone two is the computer.
Anthony: Number three are other. on your computer. I’m a big fan of closing out browsers. Going to a new virtual workspace on your desktop where only the tabs are open and the programs are open that you’re using for that particular task. That’s a, that’s kind of a high level thing. So, if you’re not sure what I’m talking about that, shoot me an email, Anthony Vicino.com and I’m going to send you guys, I’ll send you a resource that, that kind of walks through, what that looks like, how to use a virtual, desktop on your computer.
Anthony: Number two, you can put your phone into airplane mode. Super. . everybody knows this, but whether or not you actually do it is another conversation, but that’s going to be important. Number three is then controlling for other people, which means you need to have some mechanism [00:09:00] to let the people in your life know that you are not to be bothered right now.
Anthony: You’re not come knock on the door if you’re in an open workspace. If I’m wearing my headphones, that means I’m off limits, or you put a sign. Some, some sort of notification system so that the people around, you know, when this thing, when this, when the sock is on the door handle, don’t distract me. Don’t come talk to me until I’m out of this flow.
Anthony: And just by doing those three things and like preempting the distractions from even occurring, You’re going to, you’re going to vastly improve the amount of work that you can do. And so those are just three tips that are going to allow you to do more in two hours of work than most people do in two weeks. Guys, I hope this brought you some value.
Anthony: As always, I appreciate the heck out of you being here for tuning in, and I will as per usual, see you all tomorrow.
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