Mark Manson’s 5 Ways to Be More Productive
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 1st, 2023
So, I was just scrolling through Twitter, and I stumbled upon a gem of a tweet from my buddy Mark Manson.
He’s the genius behind “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” and other awesome books.
This guy’s been dropping knowledge on personal development and self-help for ages, and his YouTube channel is top-notch.
Anyway, Mark shared these Five Ways to be More Productive Each Day, and I thought, “Hey, this is too good not to share with you guys!”
So let’s dig into it and grab some golden nuggets to rock our day.
Basically his advice is to make sure you do the following:
- Get that quality sleep
- Find your rhythm
- Prioritize your top task
- Keep the phone away in the morning, and
- Get moving!
So, are you ready to take on the challenge?
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Do your most important task first thing.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
Yo, what’s up everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. So I was just cruising around on Twitter and I came across a post from Mark Manson, my buddy who wrote the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck plus a bunch of other books and he has a fantastic YouTube channel. Guy’s been blogging about personal development, self help stuff for the last couple decades. He’s a real OG, great thinker, love his stuff. And I came across this tweet and I thought, hey, this is a this is pretty good. Want to share it with you guys? Let’s unpack it a little bit and take some nuggets into our day. So the tweet is called Five Ways to be more productive each Day. First thing he says is get better sleep.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:37]:
In particular he says no caffeine, alcohol or sugar before bed. You guys know if you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time that I’m a firm believer that we only have three levers of energy that we get to pull. We have our sleep, we have our nutrition, we have our exercise. Sleep is one of those things that for a long time in the Hustle culture was demonized, was bastardized. People would say like you can sleep when you’re dead. Rise and grind. And it created this culture for me when I was just starting on my entrepreneurial journey that I thought it meant that I needed to sleep less and work more. And for many years that served me well in the sense that I was waking up every morning at 05:00 a.m., I was doing my morning routine and all these things.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:21]:
And what I came to discover was that waking up early wasn’t making me a better worker, it wasn’t making me a better thinker, it wasn’t actually adding to my productivity. All it was doing was helping me develop the muscle of discipline and that was very important. But as I’m now at the point in my life where I don’t need to develop more discipline now I need to figure out how to optimize and apply what I already know, I start to realize that sleeping less is not helpful. In fact it’s detrimental. It’s holding me back in a lot of cases from doing my best work. So I’ve prioritized over the last few years sleep to a higher degree than ever before and pretty much beyond exercise. It is the most important thing in my life in terms of what I make time for and my ability to prioritize it. And so Mark, he mentions here no caffeine, alcohol or sugar before bed.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:10]:
So a little bit of context here. Caffeine has like a half life of 8 hours or something like that. And so if you consume 100 milligrams of caffeine at 12:00 p.m. At noon, then you are going to have about 50 milligrams of caffeine still in your system. Come around 08:00 p.m. Or something like that. And I might be wrong on the details of this, but all that’s to say is that caffeine lingers in the system far longer than we think. And so if we’re drinking caffeine late into the afternoon, early evening, it’s going to have an effect on us even into bedtime.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:40]:
Now, I’m one of those people who believes caffeine doesn’t affect me in the same way that it probably does other people. And so I fall into the myth all the time that I can get away with drinking caffeine later into the afternoon because it’s not a big deal. But when I look at my sleep scores, when I track this data through my aura ring, my whoop, or through my eight sleep mattress, I see that my quality of sleep does, in fact, suffer. So don’t ignore this. It’s really obvious that alcohol before bed, any amount of alcohol, negatively affects sleep scores to an incredible amount. Like, if you have never seen the data on this, I would encourage you to go get one of those sleep tracking devices that I just mentioned, use it for a couple of months. Feel free to keep drinking during that period of time, but you’ll notice as you start to see your data over a long enough period of time, that the nights when you drink are just destroying the quality of your sleep. And so one of the easiest ways of improving your sleep is getting alcohol out of the system entirely.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:41]:
All right, number two on Mark’s ways to be more productive, he says, wake up earlier, see birds and worms. And so, again, I already kind of unpacked this one. In my own personal experience, waking up early was very beneficial for me to develop discipline. However, I’m going to disagree with Mark in the sense that I think you need to wake up when your body wants you to wake up. If you’re a morning person, great. Wake up early. If you’re not a morning person, don’t feel like you have to do this thing. Everybody always talks about how there’s this magical time period at like, 05:00 A.m., where the world is still asleep.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:10]:
You can do your best work, and I agree that there is something magical about that time period. But just understand your particular circadian rhythm and work within your limitations or your unique context. I think that’s just the most important thing here. Number three, do your most important task. First thing, I agree with this. I agree that your morning should be dedicated to working on the most important thing. The word priority has been bastardized. It used to mean one thing, right? What’s your priority? And now we say things like, what are your priorities? And that’s not possible.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:45]:
You can only have one priority. We can’t have multiple. And so we’ve talked a lot in previous episodes about prioritization techniques like the ice framework, which is impact confidence ease or the Eisenhower matrix. A lot of ways for us to really get to the root of what is the most important thing for me to be working on. And I agree that if you want to be more productive each day, the first thing that you should work on is that most important thing before the rest of life kind of gets in the way and starts slowing you down. Now number four I think is very interesting and theoretically if you could pull this one off, I think it would make you more productive. I find it very, very difficult to actually do this one. He says no email, texting or social media until after lunch.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:28]:
I find this one very difficult because you maybe can relate to this. It feels like if I’m not at least checking my text, like something might have happened in the night, somebody might need me like noon or lunch or whenever that is. That’s a long time to go before you’re checking in with the world. It feels like right now what I have discovered is when I’ve taken digital detoxes, I’ve gone on vacation. I’ve been intentional about putting my phone away and not using it as much. I’ve noticed that it’s all inside my head, this perception that I’m going to miss out on something important and that I need to be tied into it. So this is one that I would really love to be able to manifest. No email, texting, social media.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:08]:
If I could get to a world where I don’t pick up my phone until 01:00 p.m. Every day, that would be a really cool world and I might actually try to make that a goal for this upcoming quarter. See if I can do one month without touching my phone for the first 5 hours of the day or something like that. And then Mark’s fifth tip here is get up and go for a damn walk. And I agree, just like getting up and moving more frequently is always a good thing. Moving the blood flow. I’m at my standing desk right now. I spent a lot of time sitting, I think we all do.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:38]:
So anything that we can do to get up and get moving, get the blood going, it’s going to pay dividends. And there’s interesting psychological studies that have been now correlated the number of steps that we take in a day with our overall life satisfaction and happiness, like the mental health that we experience. And that number is like 4780 steps or something like that. And what they showed is that people who take fewer than that number of steps in a day, less than like 5000 let’s say, let’s just round up. If you take fewer than 5000 steps in a day, it is correlated with higher prevalences of depression and mood and psychological mental health disorders. Whereas people who are taking more than 5000 steps experience higher levels of happiness. And so it just seems like a really simple way to cheat the system. Just go get more steps in, I don’t know, like, 5000 isn’t that hard to do.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:28]:
So just make more time for it. Just got to prioritize it again. It’s all about prioritization. All right, so those are Mark’s five ways to be more productive each morning. Get better sleep, wake up earlier, do your most important thing first, no email, text, or social media until after lunch, and then get up and go for a damn walk. Couldn’t agree more. So oh, man. I stuttered pretty badly.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:50]:
Hope this brings you a ton of value. If it did, let me know. Shoot me a DM. I’d love to connect with you guys, but until tomorrow, as always, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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