Transcript & Summary: How To Be So Productive That It Feels ILLEGAL

[00:00] in this video I'm going to show you how you can be so productive and get so much done in a single day that it feels illegal I'll do this by sharing three powerful productivity principles that helped me to unlock this illegal level of productivity in my time in mid school as well as helping me rank first for my postgrad studies now these principles have worked not only for me but for thousands of Learners that I've taught this to from around the world so they will work for you too these three principles are number one the parto [00:34] principal number two the Zar niik effect and number three the championship mentality and as a bonus I'll also teach you a way to supercharge each of these three principles and use them in a way that I have never heard anyone else on YouTube talk about so let's start with number one the Paro principle in my first year of University when I was trying to enter into mid school I was studying 15 to 20 hours every single day and a lot of that time was spent on doing my flash cards I had by the end of the year over 4,000 flash [01:11] cards for my papers and I would be spending five six hours every single day either preparing my flashcards or doing my flash cards I had this Google sheet that had all the questions on it and I would track how difficult I found it and then how many times I got it wrong and what priority it was and I had this sort of a elaborate system that I'd created for managing my flash cards but at the end of the day I found that my results were still not that consistent I was still having to study a lot of hours [01:39] just to get the grades that I got and when I actually entered into medical school that system was just completely unsustainable because the workload was 2 three four times what it was before and the moral of the story here is that at the end of the day it still wasn't enough and the reason is because what I was focusing in spending my time on which was just optimizing my flash cards wasn't the thing that was going to make the biggest difference and this is really what the PTO principle is about sometimes it's called the 8020 [02:13] Rule and the idea is that 80% of the benefit or the impact of something can come from 20% of the time or effort or work and when you focus your time and attention on the other side the 80% of things that produce 20% of the impact it leads to a lot of waste of time a lot of frustration it's very annoying and it's very stressful and that's really how I felt during those first couple of years and I think a great example to illustrate the par principle is if you think about your health there are so many things that you [02:49] can do to optimize your health like the amount that you sleep uh what you're drinking how often you're drinking what foods you're eating the specific micro macronutrients balance you have the type of exercise the frequency of your exercise you know the way that you support yourself in recovery after the exercise uh you know you can take additional like supplements and you can do meditation this list is so exhaustive like that's the entire industry right but really if you just get 20% of those things right like if you have good sleep [03:22] you're drinking and you're eating reasonably well and maybe you're doing some kind of light exercise it doesn't matter the frequency exactly what you're doing just do something sometimes you're 80% going to be there to being pretty healthy and and feeling really good about yourself and when you focus on the other 80% of the things like you can take every supplement there is off the shelf but if you're not getting that 20% right and your sleep is not good and you're not you're not you're not drinking regularly then you're going to [03:53] suffer like it doesn't matter what the other 80% is and so this is really important when it comes to productivity because productivity is all about how you manage limited resources the number one resource that's limited being your time you have the same number of hours in a day as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo did and so figuring out what's worth doing and what's not worth doing is really the key and I think a powerful way of thinking about the spro principle is not that 20% of the things you do contribute to 80% of the results [04:25] but it's an understanding if you have a list of 10 things that you need to get done what it means is that eight of those 10 things are essentially going to be a waste of time compared to figuring out what the two that really make the most impact are and then spending your time absolutely crushing those and I think of the Paro Principle as the fundamental pillar of all productivity because the impact that the Paro principle has is it allows you to stack your gains so I want you to imagine that this circle represents you and then this [05:03] uh cross represents the goal that you want to achieve when we just do everything and we don't strictly prioritize exactly where we want to spend our time and what's going to help us get 80% of the way to our goal we end up doing this we spend a lot of time doing lots of things moving in many different directions and at the end of the day despite being very busy we're still not very close to our goal once we use the pral principle what happens is that we figure out what the things are that take us towards the goal [05:41] and it means in the same amount of time or effort or even less we're able to achieve our goal now when you look at someone that's using the Paro principle day in day out in their life and you see someone living like this this is the type of person you look at and you think man this person is focused this person has Clarity this person knows the direction they're going everything for them feels like it's all laid out you can see that they're moving purposefully towards your goal and you wonder how it is that they make it look [06:11] so easy to get so much done and be so productive while you are just squandering and when you look at the person that is doing this they're not using the Proto principle they're spending their time across the entire 100% then they're very very busy they are floundering their person just treading water you can see they are flustered they're not you know potentially they're falling behind and despite being so busy they are wondering why they don't seem to be getting any closer to the goal so here's the key [06:41] takeaway for using the parto principle the first thing is to actually spend time planning and prioritizing upfront if you're really busy and you feel like you don't have enough time to plan and prioritize or use the Paro principle and figure out what is that 20% that produces the impact then let me tell you this if planning is costly not planning is more costly nothing is going to kill your productivity more than spending time on things that are a waste of time but you have to spend the time upfront to figure [07:16] out what is or is not a waste of time and this is the second takeaway is that good prioritization feels bad here's a part that most people Overlook if you've got a list of things to do the items that make it onto your Todo list are already fairly important if someone says hey have you ever thought about learning how you can juggle flaming swords riding a unicycle while making an origami crane using your tongue then you might say no I've never thought about doing that and I'm probably never going to think about doing that [08:00] and unless your future career path is that of a very Niche circus performer that item is never going to be important enough to be on your to-do list everything that's on our to-do list has already been filtered and shortlisted out and we have made the decision this is important enough for me to do so what that means is that when you go through and figure out the 80% of the things that are not really getting you towards your goal that are making the biggest impact out of all the other things that you could be doing it's going to feel [08:31] bad to take them off your list because you are acutely aware of what you are losing by not doing this I am losing out on this and that feels bad and so I want to normalize and let you know that when you're prioritizing well it should feel bad because that means you're making the difficult decisions about what you're willing to lose strategically that helps you spend the time in the way that gets you you to your goal and my final point is to think holistically productivity is not just about doing work or studying or planning [09:10] prioritization is about everything you spend your time on and that means taking a break spending time with loved ones engaging in your hobbies getting good sleep these are all things that help sustain and rejuvenate you productivity is anything that helps you get towards your goal and if you're 3 weeks into to a Sprint of not having had any breaks and you've just been studying and working the entire time and you're feeling like you're burning out then the thing that is going to get in the way of you achieving your goal is the fact that [09:46] you're burning out or that you're too tired and so choosing to ignore self-care and Recovery is an incredibly unproductive decision and again making that decision can feel bad because it's not clearing my backlog of work and study that I need to do I'm just sitting there resting wasting time but you have to recognize it's not a waste of time it's actually very productive and so if you just use this principle just the parto Principle as I've told you and nothing else already for a lot of you this is going to two to 3x your [10:21] productivity pretty much immediately but now I'll tell you how you can supercharge this in a way that no one really talks about and just to be clear it's the supercharging of this that makes this feel illegal we can turn the Paro principle into the parto squared principle what this means is that you can actually apply the Paro principle to itself so let's say that of this list of 10 items here we figured out the two that get us towards our goal in the in the highest possible impact well if we were to take those two and we were to [11:02] break them up we' find that these two tasks have components to it so let's just say that each of these tasks have five components well of these five components or subtasks that make up the two major tasks 20% of these will contribute 80% of the impact so let me say for example writing an essay is the major task well if we break up this process of writing an essay we might find that first we need to think of a plan uh we need to be clear on the objectives of the essay we need to write the main points we need to [11:41] then draft them and then we need to refine it let's say that that's your process for writing an essay well of this your initial first step the planning is the thing that's going to make your essay the best whatever you plan affects what you write and how you draft it and so if there's areas in your planning those areas get carried forward or a common one is if there's a big decision that you need to make well one of the things that helps you make a really good decision is just having more information to make a good decision so [12:12] just the first step of collecting more information or even writing down the things you need more information about that would help you make a better decision that is the 20% that helps you with the remaining 80% and so by using not just the Paro principle but the protos squared principle the additional benefits this gives is that first of all this actually reduces your procrastination because the task that you're focusing on is no longer this huge big overwhelming task you're focusing on this tiny first initial step [12:46] and number two because you're prioritizing it so strictly it also increases your success rate by focusing on the most important part of a task it ures that you're doing the most important part to a high quality and once you do this part the rest of it becomes much easier which again reduces procrastination even more and so the takeaway for the predo squared principle is to spend even more time by figuring out the 20% of the 20% to identify your most most important task and by the way for those of you [13:24] that are interested if you do the maths on the PTO squid principle what that works out to is 4% of your time being used to create 64% of the total impact towards your goal and if you compare someone that's not using these principles which is this this guy here and you compare yourself to this person who's using all of their time doing all of their tasks what this person is able to achieve in two 2 and 1 half months you can do by the end of the week that is what the PTO squ principle unlocks by the way if your goal is to be [14:00] more productive then one of the highest priority tasks one of the 4% of things that produce the Major Impact is to create a learning system learning is the Mega skill it's the tide that lifts all boats it's the it's the wish for more wishes when you become a better learner every skill becomes easier to learn and you become more productive and to help you become a better learner I've created a free learning system assessment for you this quiz evaluates your current learning system and it gives you a score [14:31] out of 100 based on its Effectiveness more importantly you also get a personalized report that tells you which parts of your learning system are holding you back it basically tells you exactly what is the 20% in your learning that if you were to improve gives you 80% of the results I highly recommend giving it a go and it is free I'll leave a link to it in the description below so the first thing was the Paro principle and that helps you to prioritize your task s but once you've got your 20% or your 4% the other issue we run into is [15:05] procrastination there's no point prioritizing the 4% if you never actually do it fortunately this is where the second pillar comes in and this is called the zaric effect and I probably use the zaric effect every single day after my fifth year of medical school I decided to take a year of doing honors research and so this was my first time doing my own research and the first part of doing research is what's called a literature review which is where you're reading through all the research within a field and then you're writing this big [15:37] report based on it and I was starting this in the summer holidays I started off really enthusiastic and really really Keen but because I'd never really written such a lengthy literature review before and it was a topic that I honestly wasn't that interested in I found myself putting it off and procrastinating on it for weeks in fact it got so bad that after the first month where I hadn't done anything my supervisor actually emailed me to say like hey Justin are you still keen on this project because you seemed really [16:12] enthusiastic but you actually haven't shown me anything and so I was like oh crap I need to produce something to show my supervisor and so for the next 3 days I really quickly got some stuff together that just makes it look like I've been working on things and then I sent it to her and what I found was that even though I wasn't doing the literature review properly and I was just creating something to send to my supervisor the very fact that I started on this process made me feel more motivated to keep [16:51] going with it and so the next day I did more and more and more and more and more until eventually I'd actually just done the entire literature review and so it was just that first step as we all know that helps to break procrastination and this is what the zga neck effect is about the zga neck effect says that a task is easier to complete when it is left incomplete the idea is that when there's this incomplete task we want to finish it off it stays in our head it occupies that space we know we've got [17:23] the ball rolling we want to finish it that completionist tendency of us comes out and so if we deliberate start a task not intending to complete it and rather we want to start it and leave it in an incomplete State then this actually improves our motivation it reduces the amount of friction that we feel with starting the task because we know we don't have to finish it we just need to get started and you know getting started is frankly very easy if you don't care about finishing it and therefore the reduced [17:57] friction reduces our procrastination and so the takeaway to using the zga Nick effect is to understand the wi condition for curing procrastination the win condition is not finishing the task your win condition is getting the task to a state where it's incomplete we should never think about a task as completing the task we should think about tasks as leaving them unfinished and if you're using the PTO principle or the PTO squar principle then we already took the time upfront to identify what is that task or subtask [18:35] that if we were to focus on produces 80% of the result and that item becomes a thing that we just get started on and use the zga Nick effect for now pero Square principle plus zga Nick effect your productivity is already at this point through the roof but sky's the limit hey so here's how you can supercharge the zga effect to make it feel like it should be illegal and this is what I call the zonic squared [19:09] effect just like we did with the Paro principle you can use the zonic effect on itself and this is by recognizing that the idea of getting started on a task actually has many substeps to it for example if the task I want to get started on is sitting down to study or plan my essay then before that I need to be at my desk and I need to have all my books and my resources out available to me and I need to have uh let's say an organized space and I need to have do not disturb activated on my phone and so [19:48] you can actually get started on getting started with organizing your space getting your books and everything ready laying them out on your desk so that the only thing left to properly get started is to just sit down and start and here's a bonus tip if you really struggle with procrastination with something you can actually use a reverse zonic squared effect you can make it really hard to get started on something that you would normally get procrastinated with so I used to be a big gamer and one of the [20:24] things that I changed is I went from having this big gaming PC uh to a Macbook and I only had one monitor at the time and so I would plug my monitor into my MacBook which didn't have any games on it I just used it for work and so my computer would end up being unplugged for my monitor I went from gaming like hours and hours and hours like a day to gaming like couple hours a week because I just couldn't be bothered unplugging my monitor from my MacBook crawling under my desk opening up the panel in the back of my PC and like [21:05] fiddling around to connect my HDMI cable and turning my PC on like I just I was so lazy and I couldn't be bothered it was so hard to get started with the distraction that I just didn't and the awesome thing is now with AI and other types of like automations and Technology we can make the aonic effect even easier by automating some of these things so for example let's say that when we're trying to plan an essay we want to get some initial first points down we want to think about some possible structures [21:36] we want to check some of the resources well we can use something like chbt to just generate some points and some structures for us to start with it's like being given a running start on the task for free you can also set up calendar reminders to remind you to set up your books and set up your desk or uh you can set up automatic do not disturb Focus periods on your phone so that automatically when you know you're meant to be studying you have your phone flick into a do not disturb mode and so what [22:04] we're doing now is we're not just getting started with getting started but we are enabling our environment and our technology to get us started for us so the key takeaway for using the zga neck squared effect is to just keep breaking it down and make it easy now the third productivity pillar amplifies the impact of the first two the third one is the championship mentality and this can be summarized with a statement lose the game to win the championship and a great example of this is Toyota yeah like the [22:40] car company now in the modern day Toyota is known for having really reliable cars but this was not always the case in the 50s and 60s Toyota used to produce very shy vehicles and so to fix this they actually slowed down their production proc they deliberately sacrificed their revenue and their profit they lost market share they sacrificed their volume in order to learn more about their production process they went into meticulous detail to figure out how they can improve and optimize their process [23:15] before ramping Up the Volume again and the way Toyota improved their processes is actually like a business case that's taught in a lot of schools now and so the idea here is that again if if we are this circle and we're trying to reach this goal a lot of the time we don't actually know how to exactly achieve it it's difficult sometimes to figure out what is that 20% that produces the 80% impact because we don't know what our goal really truly requires of us and so what a lot of people will do is either [23:47] just do a lot of stuff and just hope that it gets them towards their goal and that would be like just you know being really busy but not really being very productive again or they just do what's common and what other people say that they should do but this can be risky because what if they're wrong and so what the championship mindset tells us is that in order to achieve our ultimate goal we don't necessarily have to achieve every goal along the way and in fact it can be a better idea to not worry about beating and winning the next [24:25] game in order for us to have a great chance at winning the championship so how does losing a game help us win a championship the answer is that by losing the game we are able to get valuable data and information that turns these unknowns into knowns and by doing that we're able to create a much better plan and prioritize and use the Paro principle more effectively I see this a lot when it comes to studying people might want to enter into a certain University degree or have this kind of long-term goal in place and they've got [25:01] an exam coming up in one or two months they want to nail this exam so that they can achieve this ultimate goal but their study skills are a mess they have no idea what they're doing with their studying they have no real self-awareness or Insight they're not in a position where they can really succeed and so the best thing for this person to do would be to spend the next one or two months on really learning about learning understanding how to learn and how to study what their habits are what their [25:31] Tendencies are experimenting with things and then building a learning system that really works that's going to be enough for them to win the championship but that might mean that you spend so much time on just improving your skills and learning about yourself that you actually fall behind on your actual studying in that short period of time so you might not do very well for that immediate exam now you'll end up crushing it in the next exam and the one after that and one after that and one after that but if you're so focused on [26:04] just winning every individual game and what it's costing you is valuable learning and understanding and figuring out these uncertainties that help you to win the championship then you're actually setting yourself up for failure because at some point you're not going to be able to win that short-term game and now you're left with two problems number one you don't have the skills to win the champ chionship and number two because you've left it for so long you don't have enough time left to figure it [26:34] out either now I'm not saying go and lose every single game and fail every single examp what I am saying is that sometimes to win the long game you need to be ready to lose the short one so here's my takeaway for you to use the championship mentality number one figure out what does a championship mean to you is it really the next test or exam or promotion coming up or is it something further than that and then number two figure out what is the consequence of losing the game what do losing this game really [27:08] mean to you what's the consequence of it versus what are you giving up what's the opportunity cost what are you losing out on the opportunity for in order to just win this upcoming game have these two things really clear in your mind and revisit them once every month or so now here's the way that we can crack the Championship mentality to make it feel illegal so think about this the reason we are willing to accept the loss in the game short term is because that provides valuable information to figure out how [27:41] to win longterm so if we think about the amount of certainty we have at being able to win here on the y- AIS this is our level of certainty in the beginning we start off with a very low level of certainty because we also have a very low level of information and then what happens is that as time passes we learn more about what it takes to achieve our goal we learn more about our Tendencies and our habits and our processes and we find a way to make it match but that takes time and so as time goes on our level of [28:18] information starts going up and so too does our level of certainty about how we can succeed and how we can win so let's say that this blue line represent presents the point at which we have enough certainty to know how to win this is the line of winning but let's say that this uh dotted white line here this is when it [28:43] matters what we don't want is we don't want this period of learning and gaining certainty to take so long that we actually missed the boat we already failed all of these goals and we look back and think ah I regret not doing things differently back then then that's the thing I should have done differently that's what we want to avoid and the way we supercharge this Championship mentality is realizing that this is wrong there's this great saying time changes nothing it's what you do in the time that matters sometimes I'll be [29:16] talking to a student about the way that they're studying and I'll say okay you need to make these changes and this this Improvement that's what you really need to do to help you achieve this goal and they say okay that sounds interesting I'm just going to think about that for a little bit give me like a week to just think about what you've said and my question there is what's going to happen in that week are you are you spending this week to go onto a meditative Retreat light some incense over a fire [29:41] look at the stars and tell you what you should be doing like there's this assumption that by sleeping on it and just time passing somehow it changes the decision that you're going to make but it doesn't at the end of the day what's going to happen is that a week is going to pass you're going to realize oh crap I need to meet up with Justin again tomorrow and you're going to do all the thinking the night before and you could just do that thinking immediately on the spot and when we realize that our [30:10] ability to gain certainty and gain information or something doesn't depend on our time but depends on our actions this is where we change the game and we supercharge this and so while everyone else is waiting to figure out how they can succeed and what they need to do what the stry is for them to win just by letting time pass and sort of passively learning about what to do you can realize action is the thing that makes a difference and in the same amount of time you can take more actions the same number of actions the [30:42] same amount of learning that someone would have originally gained across this period of time you can do it in this period of time which means that you able to get to a winning strategy much earlier than everyone else and again if I look at studying people make this mistake constantly where they'll say hey I'm going to do my best for this exam if it doesn't go well okay I'll learn from that what are you actually learning from that what was the experiment that you ran what is the data that you're getting [31:10] from that mistake that really helps you and did you really need to wait 2 months studying a certain way sitting an exam failing that exam to realize that mistake could you instead have tried an experiment today tested yourself on that tomorrow to see the effect effect that it has and then iterated and experimented on a daily basis to get that same information or even more it's ironic because one of the most common pieces of feedback that I get from students on my program is they say if they're older they say I wish I learned [31:45] this back when I was in school I wish I knew this 10 years ago it would have changed my life and then the most common thing I hear from people that are 10 years ago that are in school in that place where they are currently actively making those mistakes is I'll try it later I don't really have time right now I'm too busy struggling right now to figure out how to do well but let me tell you if you don't make time to learn how to succeed that time will be made for you later through failure so takeaway is don't be passive don't just [32:22] assume that the problems you have now will solve themselves if you're serious about gaining certain and achieving your goals and giving yourself the best chance of success take action do the things and make the time that other people are not making so that you can learn what other people are not learning so these are the three pillars of productivity that are going to help you get much more done and help you achieve your goal and here's another video that will help you to refine your learning system so that you can level up your [32:51] productivity even more