In 2007, I was a full-time fitness hustler – working 70-80 hours a week in the gym, training, managing, teaching classes, whatever. And while I’ve always felt so grateful to
get to do what I love for a living, the hours and the constant head-down grinding was taking its toll – both physically and mentally.
I’d often run on 4 hours of sleep because I’d have to be a gym at 5am every day, and then I’d train clients late into the evening. In between clients, I’d either get my own workouts in (yes, I was doing multiple workouts a day chasing the elusive ‘perfect body’) or scarf a disgustingly dry chicken breast and broccoli while trying to zone
out on Facebook for 15 minutes.
I had no time to create a plan for where I wanted my life to go. Because I was always just doing what was in front of me – my next client, next class – “How many more until I get Sunday off and can watch TV all day because it’s the only thing I have the mental capacity for???”
I had zero mental capacity for anything. Write a blog? Are you insane? It was all I could do to take a shower and get into bed
every night.
In other words, I was the busiest person I knew, but not productive at all.
I had several aha! moments along the way, and for those I am grateful because I can see now that if I didn’t choose to begin to do things differently, I could have easily maintained the above scenario for the next 20 years.
The nature of head-down-grind-mode is that you
don’t have the time, mental space or inkling to look up and ask if you even could do things differently. Because it’s just survival mode.
So, I slowly started making small changes to my schedule and started owning my self-worth and started putting boundaries in place. It took me 5 years but in 2012, I left my full-time job and since then have worked exclusively in the online space – more time, less stress, more creative potential, more autonomy, less scarcity
mode, more trust.
But it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t without risk.
But for me, I’d gotten to the point that the risks of staying in a burning-the-candle-at-both-ends scenario became way, waaaaay worse.
The hardest part was making the transition from time-for-money trainer to spending precious time on things that weren’t guaranteed to make me money, like writing a blog.
It was a hard mindset shift to make, but realize -- and this seems impossible when you are operating in a lack mindset -- that when you choose time OVER money, you open up opportunities to create things that can have a bigger impact for more people (like the blog) and make you more money later (like online products or services) that you don’t have to physically be there to earn.
So I want to share with you my #1
productivity tool – the thing that helps me get more big stuff done by the end of each week.
Forced Ranking
This is a tool I learned from one of my mentors, Alwyn Cosgrove. It requires you only do 2-3 things a day. Yes, you read that correctly. You actually prioritize less stuff every day so that you a) actually get them done and b) create some logical prioritization around your
tasks.
I don’t know about you but a to-do list with 20 things on it is actually a to-don’t list, because none of it ends up getting done! Too many things on our mental plate overwhelms us to the point of paralysis.
In Forced Ranking, you create a chart like the one below. You fill in the “impact on your business” and “implementation time” based on the tasks you need to complete. Then you do the one with the highest score
first.
