What is GSD?
It is a productivity acronym which stands for “Get Stuff Done.” I’m not sure where I read about it, but it has stuck with me for a while. Since the passing of my Grandfather I’ve been taking a serious look at time management, time is the single most valuable asset we have and we never know when we’ll run out of it and we can never get it back. Someday we’re all going to end up in a box, till Jesus returns. With that said, I’m looking at time management with a new found purpose. The purpose is to get stuff done in order to have a maximum impact on those around you. If we don’t manage our time effectively, we end up procrastinating. Procrastination has the following impact:

• Negative effects of procrastination when working with a team:
  When you do this, you’re wasting everyone’s time that you’re working with.
• Negative effects of procrastination when working by yourself:
  You’re not able to have the same positive impact on those people around you because you have to frantically get things done, as a leader this can cause a tremendous amount of stress and tension in a team.

Getting stuff done is as important as eating and drinking. You have to do things to get anywhere, accomplish anything, and in order to have a lasting impact on the people around you to maximize your time with those people. This goes for family, coworkers and friends, customers and business acquaintances. Let’s take a look on how we can get things done.

You need a system that works for you. My system might not work for you, but you need to start creating a system with the goal to be organized, effective and ahead of the game. To do what, you ask? Maximize your time and impact on those around you.

I’m still working on my system but let me layout some things which have been working very well for me:

First, having defined goals and core values that you want to lead your life with, so you know where to maximize you time. My goals are this:
– Best husband, father, friend, coach and business owner I can be. All these are things I get to work on everyday.
– My core values: Faith, humility, integrity, perseverance, and excellence. These guide my decisions on everything I do. I’m not perfect and I mess up, but these are my foundations to live my life. You need a foundation. Do you have one?

Second, you need systems. With the world in a constant state of media input we are getting hit with emails, texts, phone calls, Instagrams, Facebook posts, and so much more that is right in our pocket all day long. Getting sucked into this can be the biggest productivity killer and time waster there is. Would you flush $100 bill down the toilet? Why would you flush your time down the toilet? Remember time is valuable, you will run out of it. Let’s start to systemize your time:

My 8-8-8 rule.
8 hours a day of work, 8 hours a day of sleep, 8 hours a day of free time to enjoy with your goals and core values.

How many have this perfect balance? I bet not many, I know I don’t. Right now I work 10-14 hours a day, sleep about 6, and spend about an hour each evening with my wife and child. Makes me a little sad, when I look at this. Now I truly love my job and business and I am grateful I get to bring my daughter to work, but there still needs to be some work on balance. Out of an 8 hour work day, I know most people get about 4 hours of actual work done in that time. This is because we are not effective with the time and have so many distractions we can’t stay focused on a single task for more than 15 minutes if you’re lucky. I challenge you to try it. Start a task, and set a timer. See how long you can stay focused before your mind wanders, you check the Gram, Facebook, answer a text, or scroll the fake news, and start thinking about the 50 million things you need to get done versus focusing on what is right in front of you. If you get 15 minutes that’s pretty good, I don’t think many of us will. This is an area we need to work on and because of this, that is why procrastination has and can be so effective to accomplish a task. The urgency forces focus, when focused you can get stuff done very quickly and effectively. But you create chaos doing so for yourself and the people around you or the task doesn’t get done and you become the person no one picks for their team, end up a Millennial who feels everything should be given to you because you tried. I won’t go too far down that road at this time, let’s stay focused on the task at hand.

Systems for time management and productivity:

Step 1: Define why you want to be organized. You need purpose in your life in order to be effective with your time.

Step 2: Get a digital calendar. Paper is good, but to work with others and in the digital age. Get a digital calendar. I prefer Google, but iCloud, Office 365 all work well.

1. On the calendar, lay out your week. Give each day a theme. No one needs to have their calendar open and available everyday for everything.

Here is a snapshot of my week. I have flexible time built in everyday at 10AM. If you have booked a time to meet with me, it has most likely been at 10AM. Not saying this is the only time I am open, but I try to control my time. It is my most valuable asset, so I try to protect it.

Exercise happens at 11AM, this is the goal everyday, but I average 3 days a week. But you can see on this Thursday I have a hair cut. Instead of screwing over my team and missing a meeting, or affecting family time. I booked it in my flexible and workout time. More on this later. Health is a key factor to maximizing your time. So health and fitness needs to and must be a priority. On my calendar, Thursday is also is a makeup day for working out or a rest day. Like I said more this in a later post.

12-3:30 Monday through Wednesday. This is where I have been making magic happen. This is focused work. These three days of the week are the 9 hours I try to GET SHIT DONE. This is the time I work on the work of running Double Edge. My favorite hobby. All the tasks I am working are prioritized and set for each day to get things accomplished. Friday, I try to plan what I am going to accomplish M-W of the next week. I pick them, usually things we talked about in the manager’s meeting and team meeting on Thursday the day before. Then come Monday I start hammering on these tasks. Door closes. I open my list and start cranking through. Now the funny thing. When I truly focus, a ton gets done in about an hour and my computer/admin work planned for that day is done. You can think maybe I don’t have a lot to do. Anyone wants to job shadow, I would be more then happy to set up a day for you to live with me for a 24 hour period.

I can keep going into tremendous detail on the calendar and if anyone ever wants coaching on it. I am very happy to help. I coach fitness, but I will also coach some time managment haha. Because of better time management, and reevaluating my purpose in life, you might have seen me out coaching a little more fitness these days. My mission in 2018 is to automate everything at Double Edge into systems so I can be free to be coaching anytime I am at either gym.

Step 3: Have a note taking system. Our brains are constantly bombarded with data all around us. I recently read something in a post, that said you need to get your thoughts and tasks out of your head and onto an external hard drive to free your brain to do creative thinking. This external hard drive is notes. This can be paper, an application, whiteboard. I use them all. For meetings I used paper or notes app on my ipad, whiteboard in my office, post-it notes on my computer and desk. If it pops into my head I try to get it to the external hard drive. Then everyday at the end of my focused work period, I transfer all the actionable data that has been written down into a task management software. Which brings me to step 4.

Step 4: Get a task management/project management software. This absolutely is NOT EMAIL. With today’s advances in technology there are many options. I have tried almost all of them. Todoist is the one that has stuck with me and we use at Double Edge as a team.

Task management software when used effectively can be life changing. How I use Todoist is a separate post because it can be an animal with a huge impact on your productivity. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. Here is screenshot of mine.

On the left of this picture are all my projects. And current task for the day on the right. There is so much in the backend with prioritizing, labeling and organizing I will not go into detail in this post. If you think Todoist is for you, I am more then happy to help you set it up. But I use them all and effectively now. Ask my staff how you get Derek to do something? Assign it to me in Todoist. If my external hard drive notes don’t make it into Todoist, it doesn’t get done and I purposely forget about it. You have to clear the cache and cookies out of your brain. Every Friday, I audit my Todoist and prioritize things based on the previous weeks accomplishments and the future weeks goals. Sometimes, unexpected things come up, simple and complex. Death of a family member to a flat tire, or an engaging conversation with a friend that ate up 2 hours of unplanned time. When this happens things can get pushed behind. So on Friday, I take an honest look at my tasks. First, decide if this task is something I personally have to do. If not, I delegate to the right person to handle it. Is this something that actually needs done? Sometimes tasks end up in there that seem life changes and brilliant but after a week of putting it off you might realize it is a waste of time or not needed. I usually ask someone near to me to confirm if that task or progect needs done or if I should trash it. Based on what I decide, the projects get listed in order of priority and my tasks get assigned due dates of Monday, Tuesday

or Wednesday with a Level 1 or 2 priority. Level 1 means work doesn’t stop till it is done. Level 2 means great to get done that day but it can be pushed. Level 3 task don’t have due dates yet.

Step 4: Put Email in their place. You should never have more than zero emails at the end of a day. When I say ZERO I mean ZERO. This is the daily goal. Email management can be a whole discussion on its own. There are so many tools to help with email management. I know of people who, executives at fortune 500 companies who get thousands of emails a day, I get about 70-100 per day, not a crazy amount but can get out of hand if I don’t stay up with it. I recently met a person who had 19,000 unread emails on their phone. That truly blew my mind. Here are some things I have found to help. Break your email accounts up.

1. Email Account 1. Have a spam account. This is the account you use to sign up for things, online shopping etc. You expect nothing important to come to this account.
2. Email Account 2. Personal. This is a private personal account for all personnel related email.
3. Email Account 3. Work. This account is for work and work only.

The benefits of doing this is to stay focused.

Account 1. You never have to prioritize time to check. I have 2 spam accounts. One That doesn’t even exist, and an account I roughly check once a week. I scan over and delete everything.

Account 2. I use for all personal. Bills, family communication. Etc. Things I need to know and want to be in the loop. Like if my Gym Membership was declined or something cool is happening at the gym I want to know about. Haha. This email account I check everyday. If spam comes in here, unsubscribe immediately or create a rule to manage it into folders to check later. This account I respond and take action on once a day. Maybe during a poop, or something. If family needs me then they can call me or text me. I have alerts and priorities assigned to bills so I know immediately if something needs attention.

Account 3. Work. This is for work and work only. I check it and respond to it once a day, and clear it out to ZERO every single day. 97% of the time. This email is super important. It is how your team communicates, customers and vendors can reach you. Being prompt with your email is very courteous. Keeping it clean allows you to be effective. At work I follow the 24 hour rule, I strive to respond or delegate everything in this email account within 24 hours. To do this I have to be diligent and organized. Monday is my toughest day do catch up on Email. 3 days of emails can build up over the weekend. I have recently stopped checking work email on weekends. Needed to get my family time back in order, still working on this but making progress. Monday I will usually wake up around 3-4am to get my emails cleared and organize my day, before anyone can wake up an interrupt me. This is quite time. I have always been an early bird so this isn’t hard for me.

With your email you don’t have to respond or delete everything that day. You can set up folders to organize things. Like a M/T/W/Th/F folder. Meaning you will respond to everything you get on Monday on Tuesday. I don’t like this method because then you are always a day behind. I personally use Todoist. Todoist has a great feature where you can forward emails to your projects. Customer email, I forward to todoist with a Priority 1 and a today due date. That means I have to try to respond to that customer today. But remember my goal is 24 hours. If I am deep into focused work, that email gets a Priority 1 due tomorrow. All customers get priority 1 I just choose if it is today or tomorrow to get a response. If I don’t respond to you within 24 hours you need to email me or call me again. Usually it means I didn’t get it or it got lost in web somewhere. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does know I strive to live by the 24 hour rule.

When these emails pop up in Todoist, I handle them all. This is how I get things done and keep a ZERO Inbox.

We lose so much time and metal engagement with all digital applications that live on our phone. If you are addicted to them. You might want to clean it up, and prioritize your time to be the most effective and have the biggest impact on your goals and core values. If your goals are to be an Insta hero on social media, news consuming super star, you should still prioritize your time to be most effective at it. At the end of the day, the best way to have a positive and motivating impact on someone is by spending time engaging with them in person. Digital media isn’t the demise of our youth and society, it can be a great powerful tool. Not having the self discipline and purpose driven life to keep it in its place can and will be the demise of you. To do this you need to replace and create habits that facilitate purpose, metal engagement and clarity. Get the book “Power of Habit” this is a great starting point to creating good and healthy habits. Our daily function is a function of habits. Everything we do can be trained and structured based on habits. Creating a habit of productivity and effective time management can have a life changing impact on yourself, those around you who live with you, those you work with, and can greatly improve your quality of life and time you have on earth. Remember you can’t get time back. Use it wisely.