Hi guys! This is Max, the author of this Productivity newsletter.
Every week I research and share some of the best insights on how to be productive and achieve more. This issue is going to be special since I plan on starting it with an offer.
🎉 A limited offer: Start a new habit this week!
Do you want to start a new habit in 2023? Now is the best time for it. More than that, I’m going to help you.
Suggestion:
- Think about the one positive habit you’d like to start
- Share it with me by replying to this email
- I’ll reach you back in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now, asking how it’s going.
Explanation:
- It’s a proven fact that accountability boosts your chances to stick to the habit and make it work. So, why not use this opportunity?
- I’ll start first: I promise to keep writing these emails every week for the rest of 2023.
- That’s my commitment, so feel free to reach me in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now – to see if I keep my word. 🙂
P.S. The offer is limited to the first 50 subscribers only, so don’t miss your chance.
⚡Framework: Time blocking as a way to beat procrastination
Problem:
- People used to procrastinate a lot
- It may have different shapes: we check our social media, go have some coffee, read recent news, etc.
- What’s common between these forms of procrastination is a lack of progress with tasks we work on
Suggestion:
- What might help to avoid it is time blocking in a calendar
- I tried doing this and it works for me
How to do it:
- Go over your to-do list for the day and allocate time blocks for each task right in your Google Calendar
- Visually having your schedule on the timeline helps you understand: you have a limited amount of time for each task
Here is an example of how it looks like:
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Explanation:
- The calendar view is visual and helps you estimate the approximate “progress” toward your goal
- Time blocks create a sense of urgency
- When you see the next time block coming, you are going to speed up – to avoid collapsing into the other one
- This exercise of time blocking helps plan your day more efficiently, by making a line of tasks to work on
🧪 Experiment: Starting with a ‘simpler’ thing helps in the study
Idea:
- This experiment was designed to study the effectiveness of foreign languages study among children
- Prof. Helmar Frank worked with 2 groups of students who participated in this experiment.
- Their native language was German, and their goal was to study English.
- Group A started learning Esperanto for the first 2 years. After that, they switched to English for another several years.
- Group B was learning English for the same total amount of time
- Results of the experiment demonstrated that students from group A got higher results on average, compared to their peers from group B
- Moreover, they were able to speak two languages: English and Esperanto (not just English)
Hypothesis:
- The explanation behind this experiment suggests that Esperanto is considered to be easier to learn compared to English
- Hence, starting to learn easier subjects allows us to develop the needed skills quicker
- Once we obtain these skills, it makes the further learning process easier as well
Suggestion:
- You can apply this approach in other areas
- For example, if you study programming, find the easier coding language to pick first
- This will give you a better idea about the general concept and help progress further with harder concepts
⚒️ Tool: The best way to improve your thinking
Idea:
- Journaling helps us share our thoughts and self-reflect, improving the way we think
- A daily journaling habit allows us to structure our thoughts, extract lessons and collect takeaways for the day
Suggestion:
- If you are struggling to establish a journaling habit (just like I did), I wanted to show you a tool that might work for you
- I do journaling with Google Forms. It’s a free tool that’s easily customizable that supports a questionnaire form
- If you got curious, here you can find a 5-minute setup guide
Extra tip:
- Besides that, I use a URL shortener (bit.ly) to customize my Forms link – to have a quick way to find it.
- For example, you can have your journal available at bit.ly / MyJournal1 – to memorize the address
- This works for both mobile and desktop
✍️ End note
That’s all for today! Thank you!
If you have any questions – please, let me know by replying to this email
Have a great and productive day! ☀️
I started this blog as an attempt to improve my writing skills and to establish a proper writing routine. I share notes and tips about productivity, products and routines. I believe that this blog will keep me accountable and (hopefully) will help someone else too.