How to Be So Productive That It Makes You Dangerous

In this video I'm going to share with you three powerful productivity principles that allow you to get so much work done compared to everyone else that it makes you dangerous. These are principles that I use to finish medical school and work as a doctor while running a business full-time and the same principles that I coach to my thousands of students and professionals. The three principles are number one the performance paradox, number two the obvious target trap and number three the marginal gains fallacy. Mastering these three principles makes you dangerously productive. We're talking about those people that you meet and you just feel like you cannot compete with them. Every time you see them they are effortlessly making progress in their life. They are not doing two steps forward one step back like the rest of us. Somehow every step is taking them forward and they're also not stressed and frazzled. They are calm and focused and somehow just getting everything done like a machine and actually the reason that they're able to be like that is because of the first principle which is the performance paradox. Here's what I've learned. If you want to be productive you need to have a product. Productivity is basically how efficiently the stuff you do leads to your intended product. Now this product it could be passing an exam, it could be getting a job, getting a promotion or it could be bigger than that. Maybe it's a series of exams or maybe it's your not just a job it's your entire career path or maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe the desired goal your product is just to live an intentional life, doing the things you want to do, being the person you want to be, feeling fulfilled and free. But whatever it is the way we measure productivity has to be based on the things that allow us to achieve that goal and create that product. And the difference between someone who is highly productive, dangerously productive versus someone who is just busy is that the busy person is spending their time doing a lot of stuff but the productive person is spending their time doing stuff that's meaningful to them. So if you look at a really busy person they might be like this is the person they're just like vibrating they're constantly just doing something there's a lot of energy going in all sorts of different directions whereas someone that's really productive they may not need to do so much but everything they do is purposeful and so with much less effort they're actually able to make more consistent progress towards their goals. I remember when I was younger in my late teens and early 20s where I was really on top of that productivity train and I was trying to optimize absolutely everything and make myself more productive and I lost sight of why I wanted to be productive. I just got sucked into this trap of being busy but I started feeling that as long as I'm doing stuff and I'm being busy with things that on the surface seem productive therefore I must be productive but a lot of the times the things that on the surface seem productive are not actually the best things that you can be spending that time doing. A great example of that is just getting enough sleep or taking a break or just planning things these are things that I typically was a bit impatient with I didn't feel that I was very important it didn't feel like I was busy and moving and making progress so I deprioritized that I thought it's more productive for me to be spending my time taking action and doing stuff but that's a very narrow and I would even say naive way of thinking about achieving a goal or achieving a product because human beings are not machines and so when it comes to something like rest, rest is an integral part of not only what keeps you in the game long enough to achieve the goal but also helps you to do that more efficiently and more optimally which means the more fuel and effort you put in the better the result you get out of it is. If you are a professional race car driver you care a lot about maintaining your car and you can imagine some gung-ho young racer that's coming in and planning on driving their car until it catches fire that's a very short-sighted way of thinking about achieving a goal and here's the thing because and I had that mentality when I was trying to enter into medical school my primary goal at that time was entering into medical school and I was driving that car until it was on fire but after you achieve that goal there's another goal and that goal is probably harder and now you're on fire you're burnt out and so an interesting perspective is to extend your goals out see the bigger product so let's say that this circle is where you are right now and the star is where you want to get to eventually if you've got a short-term goal let's say that this is you know one year six months honestly there's actually a lot of ways that you can achieve that short-term goal you don't have to be perfectly optimized you can be doing all sorts of things and you'll still eventually get there but as you extend that goal out further and further longer duration of time increasing level of challenge there are fewer paths that get you to that goal and so even if there is a way that you can achieve a short-term goal does that put you in a position where it's harder for you now to achieve the long-term goal because remember there are a lot of ways to achieve the short-term goal and constantly thinking about productivity in terms of short-term bursts and only short-term goals will start developing habits and systems and processes that don't go the distance that will damage your sustainability increase your risk of burnout and eventually be extremely counterproductive and something that's become clearer and clearer to me the busier I've gotten and this is the reason why I call it the performance paradox is that in order to get more product you often need to do less the major difficulty especially over time is not whether you can keep yourself busy it's not about whether you can execute on things it's about whether you're executing on the things that really make a difference and if you're not executing on the things that make a difference sometimes it's better just to not execute at all save that energy rest recover spend time with your family and your friends just like have an enjoyable experience of life if you're in a race to get to the finish line you have to recognize that you are not just a driver in the vehicle you are the vehicle you are the driver you are the fuel you are everything that is going to take you to that goal which means you have to take care of yourself it's a lesson I've learned the hard way that the more you care about the goal the more of a responsibility you have to take care of yourself and there are very few ways that you can take care of yourself and do yourself a favor that is better than joining my free newsletter I mean imagine that I have over a decade of experience coaching thousands of people I've seen so many mistakes that other people make and I know how to solve those imagine if you could just get into my mind and then take those core principles like I'm giving you in this YouTube video but it's just sent to your inbox every single week for free perfectly distilled written with my fingers is that a dream no it's my newsletter but seriously I do go through things that I think are pretty insightful that will help a lot of you who are struggling with productivity and learning so if you want to sign up to that I'll leave a link to the newsletter in the description below so that was the performance paradox and the takeaway from that is sometimes less is more and that is exactly the theme of the second principle here which is the obvious target trap when I was going through uni and I had all my lecture schedules and then I had my work and business related activities and I had all of these different tasks strewn around like on a notebook and then on my phone and I was looking for a way to consolidate all of that into like a single app that would allow me to sort of get my head around all my productivity issues but there was no single app that I found that did that very well and so I had sort of three or four different apps that I'd connect together and I created my own little ecosystem and I honestly took a lot of pride in that ecosystem of apps that I developed because that system worked so well for me in managing all my different tasks in my schedules it felt efficient ironically what I realize now is that at that time I had fallen into the obvious target trap the obvious target trap is when you think that there is a problem usually a very obvious problem and you see an obvious way to fix that problem and so you dedicate time and invest resources and effort into fixing that problem but this can actually be an incredible waste of time potentially the biggest most problematic type of wasted time here's what happened with my apps one of the apps got updated it no longer connected with the other app I had with and then that made me not use those apps for like a few weeks and a few weeks later I kind of forgotten how it all comes together because it was so complicated then I just stopped using it and then because I'd stopped using it but my entire life was on there I had like hundreds of backlog tasks and schedules they were strewn around there that I had to manually then re-export out funnily enough back to just google calendar and now this is not a google calendar sponsor segment not that google calendar needs a sponsor but the idea here is that simplicity is really king if you ask me now what my productivity system is there's three things a calendar app the notes app on my phone and a literal like sticky notes literally sticky notes that I just write stuff on and you know with my hand and I just look at it with my eyes very you know ancient technology and the need anything more than that it's very easy in the productivity space to over optimize on obvious targets things that you see a small problem with and you can obviously make that better like a new app or a fancy notion template but the thing is I really doubt that you or me with the fanciest notion templates and the newest apps is unlocking this level of productivity that has just never been reached by any person in humankind before us there have been really impressive people doing really impressive productive things for hundreds of years and so the core issue with this obvious target trap is that it all just comes down to a lack of proper prioritization when you learn to prioritize really well 90 of your productivity problems will be solved it's not going to come from time blocking it's not going to come from a new app it's not going to come from the way you do your schedule it's not going to come from a pomodoro timer it's going to come from just not wasting your time on things you shouldn't be doing in the first place and this concept of prioritizing effectively ties in directly with the Pareto principle so if you're aware of the Pareto principle the idea is sometimes it's called the 80 20 rule the idea with the Pareto principle or the 80 20 rule is that 20 of the stuff you do is going to make 80 of the impact well the other way to think about this is that if you've got a list of let's say 10 things that you're trying to do then without prioritizing you've got an 80 chance of wasting your time on the stuff that does not move the needle so your job is not to look at this list of stuff and just smash them as quickly as possible your job is to look at this list and ask yourself what are the key levers what are the things that if i were to work on get me closer to the product my overall goal as effectively as possible ask yourself that question and figure out what the 20 percent of the tasks that are worth doing actually are and actively reject the rest these things that are not the key levers they are not worth your cognitive bandwidth they are not worth your mental attention and your time to optimize because the opportunity cost what you could be doing instead is working on this stuff and these are the things that are going to push you forward towards your goal and when you see that dangerously productive person chilling out looking relaxed coming to the parties and socializing and you're wondering how do you get so much done when you never seem to be busy it's because they're spending the 20 of their time doing the stuff that really matters it's not that they've got less stuff to do they are choosing to do less stuff which performance paradox gets them more result same principle with your productivity system or the apps that you use i decided that the only apps i need is something to track my schedule a calendar and something to track my thoughts a paper or the notes app and i built a solid mental framework around how i use those two things i doubled down on the key levers and i focused on creating simplicity now i teach prioritization a lot and prioritization frameworks and what i've personally seen is that the average person is not very skilled at prioritizing part of it is that some people don't have the frameworks but actually the bigger part is that even when people have the frameworks i found that they're usually not using them in the way that they need to be and so i want to give you a quick tutorial on how to do prioritization really effectively i'll give you a super quick practical framework that you can use and then the common pitfalls that i've noticed stop people from using those frameworks and if you've ever struggled with prioritization yourself and you've tried it in your own life then you'll probably resonate with these pitfalls so the first thing that i want to give you is the framework the simplest one i think is the or not and framework you've got a lot of stuff to do someone asks you hey you want to get a coffee get some pizza you have to think cool i could do that and then i can fit time do my other tasks afterwards and then i can go for my jog after this no no the way you think about it is i can do that or i can do this other thing in my priority list everything that you decide to commit to has an opportunity cost sometimes the opportunity cost is purely your own freedom peace of mind relaxation and that could be extremely important that could be the key lever for you that day and so the or not and framework simply says when you're confronted with a new possible task or commitment to do instead of accepting it ask yourself what will you sacrifice in order to fit that in figure out what you're willing to lose and by doing this one of two things is going to happen either you are correct you genuinely did not have time to do both of those things it's a good idea for you to have thought or not and and picked your loss very intentionally or you finish things faster than expected and you do get time to do more than that and then you can just do it you can just add that on and still get it done there's genuinely no downside to thinking about it as or not and and connecting yourself with what you are intending to lose but when you don't do this that's when you end up with this overwhelming amount of stuff that you're constantly juggling and you never feel like you have time to do everything because you don't have time to do everything the issue is that you're not connecting to the fact that you don't have time and you have to pick something to get rid of which brings me to the first major pitfall which is that correct prioritization should feel bad if you are even remotely new-ish to prioritizing and it doesn't feel bad you are probably okay there's only three situations here number one it feels bad because there are important things that you want to do that you're actively saying no to feels bad or it feels good because you don't have many things going on in your life so you can basically say yes to anything and it's all easy that's not the case for most people especially most people watching a video about how to be more productive or number three it doesn't feel bad because you suck at prioritizing and you're not connecting with the pain of what you're losing in which case it's going to feel bad for you eventually when you're not able to keep on top of all of your commitments and you realize you're falling behind so either way not prioritizing feels bad prioritizing feels bad the difference is that when you prioritize even though it feels bad you are in control of your priorities and your life you are deciding where to put your time and your attention and your mental and over time what will happen is that even though it initially feels bad you will realize that hey even though it feels bad because you're saying no to something you are at the same time saying yes to something else that was actually more important for you and when you feel the benefit of having said yes to that that's going to make you feel good and eventually this feedback loop is going to over time make it so that when you say no to something you don't feel bad about it anymore because you connect that with what you're truly saying yes to and that deep sense of fulfillment and satisfaction that you are really deliberately and intentionally taking control of your life that is a feeling that goes beyond just feeling good or feeling bad so that's the that's the first common pitfall is that people don't feel bad enough or they avoid feeling bad the second thing is that when you're prioritizing correctly your task priorities should not be the same as your values if every time you come to prioritize your tasks you're doing it based on the priority of your values that means that every single day there are certain tasks that are always going to be prioritized higher and in certain tasks that are always going to be prioritized lower so that is going to create an imbalance of your priorities that makes it very binary it means that the one or two most important things in your values receive all of the attention and everything else is constantly put off and that is going to create a lot of value dissonance in you because you are constantly saying no to things that are genuinely important to you and so the way that priorities and values balance out is that on a daily basis your priorities should reflect the context and situation and what is important for you in that short-term period like for those few days balance out your values across weeks so let's say you really value spending time with a certain friend that's fine spend time with that friend but you don't have to spend time with that friend every single day you say no to the friend on monday you say no to the friend on tuesday you make up for it on the wednesday or the thursday or the friday or the next week and saying no to one of your values on any given day is not likely to lead to a meaningful consequence in a short amount of time your values are more like a compass whereas your task priorities is more like the road you're going to take and so i would recommend spending active time at least at the beginning maybe 15 to 30 minutes a day depending on how much stuff you have to prioritize to actively sit down through all of your tasks and use this or not and framework to be very clear about where your key levers are what you're saying no to and just re-evaluate your values and your priorities ask yourself have i fallen into the obvious target trap where i'm spending time on things that i think are obvious things for me to work on when actually when you take a step back that's not the thing that's going to make the biggest difference fyi for me personally i usually review my task priorities and re-prioritize every day and if i'm really really busy and there's lots of stuff on my plate i might re-prioritize it even twice a day so that's on a daily or weekly basis i also recommend that you do this prioritization and you take a step back you think about whether you have fallen into the obvious target trap on a longer term scale as well maybe once every three to six months and this is because it's very easy to get tunnel vision relating to your priorities so years ago i was involved in the medical entry space like helping people enter into medical school and so these students are very motivated entering into medical school they're going through medical school they're studying even from the very first time i meet them and i asked them hey why do you want to be a doctor they give some generic answer but they're not really sure and i can tell they're kind of just convincing themselves they go through medical school this question still lingers in the they become a doctor it's still lingering and then 15 years later they're messaging me saying hey justin how did you manage to leave being a doctor because i hate my job now and it's the exact same concerns that they had 10 plus years ago that they just never addressed that's an example maybe an extreme example but honestly really common of an obvious target trap just dominating for like a whole era of your life you know i said that nothing wastes more time than just doing the wrong thing well this is an example where someone has entered an entire career path spent 10 plus years of their life on something and then realized that it was the wrong thing to be doing because 10 years ago they didn't ask themselves this question is this entire pathway the road that i'm on is that the right road that i want to be on or is that road just the obvious target that i latched on two years ago and the only reason i'm still on this obvious target road is because to challenge that feels too insecure there's too much of my identity tied up in it and it's too destabilizing well it doesn't get any easier the longer you leave it if you're driving on a road trip and you feel like you're getting lost you don't keep driving until you just see where you end up before you check the map so that's the obvious target trap and by the way if this is a concept that resonated with you i talk about a little bit more in one of my news as well so just a reminder the link to that is in the description the third principle here is the did you know if you get one percent better every single day for 365 days one year you would be 37 times better than you are today that is the crux of the marginal gains concept it was made famous i think probably by james clare in his book atomic habits that's where a lot of people are exposed to this concept and you know the idea is that these one percent gains are compounding so even though you know you're not really making much progress in these early days over time it stacks up and stacks up until you are multiple times better than you are now and there's a lot of power and a lot of truth to this concept most of the time for whatever goal you're trying to reach this is not going to be done in like one single line one single shot as you progress and every step you take you are constantly going to have to make micro optimizations to your processes and to your systems to keep you focused and on track and productive and every time you make that micro adjustment that's a one percent change but this is the part about this marginal gains framework that i don't see a lot of other people talking about which is interesting to me because this is actually the thing that i see more commonly which is that you can make a one percent gain every single day to slowly get better but you can also make a one percent change that makes you continually worse and so every day you're just getting one percent worse or what's more common is that every single day you make one percent change but you're not really moving at all you're just kind of changing back and forth up and down and fluctuating and the difference between the person that is marginally gaining versus the person that is marginally getting worse or the person that's marginally static and fluctuating the difference is data it's metrics it's the feedback you get from the optimization that you're making when you make an optimization and you get feedback on whether that was a good or a bad optimization that tells you how to adjust your optimization next time or whether that is even a worthwhile optimization to continue with the marginal gains fallacy is making one percent changes every single day believing that just because you make a one percent change it is going to result in cumulative gain in reality you only get the gain when you measure what matters i think an obvious example from learning let's say that someone's spending a lot of time learning like lots and lots of hours a day so their primary metric they're going to use is hours of studying per day so hours of studying per day very easy to track and get feedback on so they're going to make an optimization to try to reduce the amount of hours of studying per day so let's say that they were originally writing lots and lots of notes and so to reduce the amount of time that they're spending they're going to use an ai to summarize the notes for them so they're able to now cut their hours of study down from let's say 10 hours a day to five hours a day so based on this metric this is a great success and so further optimizations should continue to build this marginal gain except this would be probably a terrible idea because the reason that they're learning in the first place is not to fill the hours in their day the reason that they're learning is to pass an exam or to have expertise have knowledge in their memory so their true outcomes that actually matter for them are knowledge retention in their memory and knowledge depth or expertise slash the ability to apply what they've learned these are the things that actually matter that they should be testing on so probably what would end up happening is that by using ai to summarize these notes and therefore bypassing some maybe more helpful cognitive processes of learning that they were doing when they were writing their notes their actual retention and their depth may go down so yes they've saved time but they could also save time by just not studying and that would have the exact same effect of reducing the metrics that actually matter and so i think this is a good example because the easy thing to measure in this case hours a day is not always the metric that actually matters measuring your retention and measuring your depth and expertise this this is much harder it takes a lot more conscious effort these are not metrics that are like readily available for you but by not having these metrics that actually matter you run the risk of being this person or this person if you pick a metric that is actually wrong where tracking that metric is going to make you change things in a way that's worse you're going to become like this bottom person marginally getting worse whereas if you're tracking metrics that are essentially meaningless then you're going to be making futile optimizations that actually don't get you any closer to your goal and so if you want to make those one percent changes compound into real gains a lot of the time you have to spend extra effort to find ways to measure the thing that actually matters because especially for big complex long-term goals the metrics are not readily available and easy to get your hands on so one of my students is a emergency doctor training to be a medicine specialist and a lot of the learning that she's doing in little optimizations is to try to make her better as an emergency medicine specialist but it's very hard for her to track whether her knowledge is developing in line with an expert we tried using chat gpt getting it to give feedback on her level of knowledge but we found that compared to a true expert it just wasn't nuanced enough that's a common current limitation with a lot of llm engines and so the extra effort she had to go to was to reach out to her seniors to create a mentorship network so that she could have meetings go through problems and questions talk about her understanding and get feedback to see and calibrate whether she was moving in the right direction or not this is a very manual process it takes time it takes effort takes other people's time and effort but it's necessary and incredibly valuable because it provides a rare data point about whether you're optimizing in the right direction or not and the person who is dangerously productive they've probably gone through this process already they have insights about their own processes and systems they've spent the time to ask themselves hey does this really matter does this really get me to my goal or not they spent the extra time and effort to evaluate that and critically dissect what they are measuring to make sure that they are optimizing in a way that gets them to their goal and so to help you with this i'm going to give you two different ways that you can start measuring what matters there are two different types of metrics that you should try to set up the first is an outcome metric and the second is a performance or sometimes i like to call it a proxy metric an outcome metric is when you get data on whether you're actually achieving your goal or not so for example if it's with learning your goal is to achieve a certain level of retention and depth so it would be about methods that give you data on your retention and your depth so this could be something like just testing yourself creating a test for yourself using ai to generate a test for yourself if the thing you're trying to optimize is your business revenue that will be the actual amount of money that you generated so you would track that by or just tracking your actual money if it's a fitness goal like running that you're tracking it's going to be your actual target running pace right so you're going to actually track the pace of your running so the outcome metrics give you the answer it tells you have you achieved it or not and if you haven't achieved it what is the actual number the level that you have achieved so the outcome metric is the most accurate it's the one that is most closely going to reflect your progress to the overall goal and if you can readily generate outcome metrics for yourself that's kind of the the best you should do that as much as possible but often outcome metrics are delayed or it's more subtle and ambiguous it's hard to actually directly measure it so let's say that you are trying to get a job and you need to pass a certain interview it's really hard to create an outcome metric for whether you're passing or failing an interview because there are no real quantifiable metrics that you can measure that on and you can't just wait until you do the interview and then fail to realize that it wasn't good enough so when the outcome metric is delayed or it's too hard to get visibility on it then you would try to use a performance or a proxy metric instead a performance metric or proxy metric tells you how you're doing on the way to your outcome metric it gives you a sort of checkpoint evaluation and these are usually things that are more easy to evaluate and track so for example if you are doing that interview you might set up some kind of external you know mentor or senior that you can talk to to get feedback if you're selling a product that hasn't launched yet then you might not be able to track the sales number which is what you care about as an outcome metric so instead maybe you track the number of people that are registering to be interested in purchasing this or maybe you track your website views and the good thing about a performance or proxy metric is that because they're just signals of progress you can really measure anything so let's say that the goal that you want to have is like more emotional stability so that's very hard to measure as an outcome metric but you can do a daily mood check-in so you can have a daily mood you could do emotional reflections and you can use this data to see whether you're heading in the right direction or not so you might find that for your goal there are one or two outcome metrics that you can measure and then there are four or five proxy metrics where no single one of them is going to be enough to give you a picture but by tracking all five of them it gives you a pretty good idea about whether you're in the right direction and the most important thing is that you are measuring the thing that actually matters instead of just measuring the thing that's easy to track when that may not really be correlated to the true outcome you're aiming for and so that's the third principle the marginal gains fallacy or rather how to avoid the marginal gains fallacy and so all of these three things come together and understanding that when it comes to productivity sometimes less is more and the way you decide what to spend your time doing is by avoiding this obvious target trap and doing really clear sometimes emotionally difficult prioritization and to make sure that the things that you're prioritizing are the things that get you to your goal you need to set up these metrics to measure what matters and so by following these three principles not only will your productivity improve but it will become easier and less stressful and you'll be able to make more consistent strides towards your goal when other people may just be busy that is what makes you dangerously productive now if you're interested in more productivity tips like this then you might be interested in watching this video here where i break down 22 of my top productivity strategies that you can fit in as part of your arsenal so if you're interested check that out but otherwise thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one