Stop Wasting Time – A Simple Productivity System That Works

I don't know about you, but I don't want to just do more stuff. I want the time I spend working to actually count. So, I've over time adapted a simple system that multiplies what I can get done every day in the same amount of time. And in this video, I'll show you exactly how it works. And here's the thing, it's not complicated. It's not about fancy mobile apps or working longer hours. It's about a few simple habits that make every work session more focused and effective. Let's dig in. This video is brought to you by Savala. More on them a little later. So Cal Newport said in his book Deep Work that there are two core abilities for thriving in the new economy. Number one is the ability to quickly master hard things. Hello LLMs. And number two is the ability to produce at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed. This video is about number two. And it begins with something so simple you might laugh when you see it. But for me it's been the single most powerful change to how I work. And it's this a physical timer. This little thing has been an absolute groundbreaking addition to my workflow this year. This little timer here. You simply spin the dial around and it counts down and it buzzes when it's up. Looks like a kids toy. In fact, I think it is. There's a bigger version and it's always shown in the context of some kids playing or doing school. But here's the thing. Often the best solutions come in an effective use of simple things as opposed to an ineffective use of complex things. I've tried all the phone apps. Many are complex, but the complexity really comes in the fact that it's not a timer app. It's not just a phone app. This computer here is a complex distraction machine that never sleeps. This thing, on the other hand, is simple, does the job well, and alerts only one time when it's over. Let me explain the power here. So, the key to being productive is focused, timebased, deep work. And the enemy to this, aside from distraction, is the cost that comes with context switching. If you're not aware of the term context switching is the process of rapidly changing focus between different tasks, projects or contexts which reduces cognitive capacity and productivity causing stress and mental exhaustion. For example, let's say I start writing a SQL query. I have the context behind the task, the plan of how I want this query to work. I begin to write the code. I get in the zone and then my phone buzzes. Now, if I decide to check my phone, I have to break out of an entire context and vibe that I've created around my SQL query task and load this new state of what's alerting me on my phone. I fumble there for a minute. And when I decide to switch back to my SQL query, I have to reload what I was doing, where I was at, and recreate that context again. And yes, there is loss every time you do this. Not only does this waste time, but it quickly leads to mental exhaustion. This is why we feel mentally drained so early in the day and the reason we have such little mental resources available for deep thinking. So here's how I effectively use this device. So I have a task I need to work on. I estimate it's going to take me say 45 minutes to do it. I spin the dial to 45. I set this in front of me right here on my desk. Put my phone on do not disturb which also sets my computer to the same. Put on my headphones with some sort of instrumental only focus music. And I don't stop from this task until the timer buzzes. I enter a zone and I don't leave it or break from it until I'm alerted by this timer. Now, a few things to note here. Number one, note that this timer doesn't have the capacity to go over an hour. Anything over an hour is too long to sustain this level of deep focus. And number two, I almost always feel energized coming out of this looking at the amount of work I achieved or seeing that I've completed some task. And this is a huge morale boost and keeps me energized about what I'm doing throughout the day. And this leads me to my next main point of action, which is number two. After each deep working session, take a walk. Sounds simple, but this allows you to decompress from that focus session. It gets your blood flowing again, and it's just good for you. Check out some of the voices from the past on the importance of walking. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. And then we have Charles Lamb, an English essaist. He says, "I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early and taking a long walk, which makes me infinitely more fit to work again." In fact, there was a repeated phrase in medieval philosophy that simply stated, "It is solved by walking." There is something about taking a brisk walk to clear your mind that can do wonders for resetting your thoughts, solving problems, and just helping take the mental load off. Think about it. If you're in construction or any kind of physical labor, you're using your hands. You're breaking a sweat. You're moving from room to room. But as a programmer or any desk job really, you're sitting still making these little minuscule movements of clicking your mouse or typing. And all the work, the processing is in your head. Your brain is firing on all cylinders, but you aren't moving. It's quite fascinating if you think about it. But you have to rest your brain and move your body at some point. Also, if you work from home, this is an essential practice because being surrounded by the same things, the same surrounding, the desk, monitor, chair, shelf, day after day can limit your creativity, your ability to formulate new ideas and solutions for your workplace. So, I work from home and have a few acres of land, so I can walk freely. And some days, I work from the local coffee shop for a change of pace. If you're in the office, just walk around the block, go down to the coffee shop and back, or at least head to the break room and have a short conversation with another person. The key is that you get up and out from your work area, get into a new atmosphere, and clear your head before your next focused work session. So, I have this onetwo punch throughout the day of focused work followed by decompression by walking, followed by focused work, followed by movement. But that begs the question, who actually has 8 hours free to do this every day? What about meetings and lunch and Slack messages and distractions and all of that? Well, before I show you how to actually structure your entire day around these focus sessions, I want to tell you briefly about the sponsor of today's video, Savala. Savala offers modern platform as a service features that makes it unbelievably simple to host web projects and static sites. And for devs like us that also want a bit more. It has all the developer centric tools that we love like easy git deploy instant previews deploy templates docker file support managed databases and object storage. It runs on Google kubernetes engine in 25 regions and savala integrates cloudflare's 260 plus edge network for static sites. I actually just deployed my astrobased static website here just now in less than 2 minutes. Just connect your GitHub, give Savala access to a repository where your code lives, and hit deploy. That's it. They have transparent usage-based pricing, which has become a problem with many of the similar solutions out there. With Savala, you only pay for what you use with free internal traffic between components. You also get $50 in credits to start off with, so it's completely risk-f free. Savala is a Kinsta product and thus has built-in enterprisegrade security, giving you a peace of mind that your apps are secure. You get everything you need under one roof, including fully managed databases and object storage, and they have real human support, which is very rare these days. Again, you can get started for free with a $50 credit. Link will be below in the description. Now, back to the video. Now, let's zoom out for a second because having a timer and taking walks is great, but the real magic comes when you actually structure your entire day around these focus sessions. And that starts with step three, which is scheduling your day. And here we have to back up a bit. So number three is to spend the first 15 minutes of your day scheduling your day. This morning routine determines your focus sessions for that day. For example, 8:45 to 9:00 a.m. is my scheduling time every workday. Go ahead and mark this as a daily recurring slot on your calendar. And here's how this works. So let's say you have three main tasks for the day. Number one, write a SQL query for some app you manage. Number two, write documentation on a new feature that you implemented last week. And number three, write a Terraform configuration for that feature you implemented last week. So you check your schedule. Well, you have your standup at 9:00 and then you're actually free from 9:30 to 12. Well, let's plan to knock out that documentation task during that time. Now, based on our hourlong focus segments, we'll schedule that from 9:45 to 10:45. And then at 10:45, we go for a walk. Then you schedule your next focus time, say from 11 to 11:45 to build that SQL query. Then 12:00 to 1 is your lunch. You have a meeting at 1 to 1:30 and another meeting from 4:00 to 5:00. That leaves you free again from 1:30 to 4 for more focused work. And you realize that the final task, the Terraform config work, will take you probably 2 hours. And remember, you don't want to go over 1 hour continuously without a break. So you're going to break it up. So you schedule 1:45 to 245 to work on the Terraform config. At 2:45, your buzzer goes off and you go for a walk. Then you schedule 3 to 3:45 for your second session to finish out that task. At 3:45, you take a break and then you're back at your meeting by 4. So, do you get what I'm saying here? You can look at your schedule every morning and find available focus times. Compare them with what tasks you need to accomplish throughout the day and see where you can fit them in around schedules, lunch and all, giving some time for short breaks afterward. And look, there may only be room for one a day, but let that be the minimum. Rest assured that there is a lot you can do in a short amount of time when you put continuous focus on a matter. Next, this leads to the question of where do I write all this out? Like how do I recall what I'm doing throughout the day? Well, for me, I started adding these slots directly to my work Google calendar. I first just added focus time slots and had those allotted so people can see when I'm available and not available. But recently, I've gone a bit further and I've changed the normal focus time message to the exact work I'm doing. So instead of focus time, I have working on SQL script or writing documentation. This not only helps me feel more organized and committed to doing that task at that time, it not only keeps me on track as to what I'm exactly supposed to do at any given time, but it also allows me to look back at the end of each week and note what I've achieved. It's right there in my calendar. It's also there publicly for people to see what I'm working on. I'm not focusing. I'm writing some Terraform automation for the feature that I worked on last week. Look at that. Travis is focusing again. Well, no. Now you can see exactly what tasks I'm tackling at any given time of the day. So, schedule your focus times each morning first thing. Add them to your calendar around your other duties and use your timer to enforce these times for deep, meaningful, distraction-free, productive sessions with the right amount of decompression in between. Sounds great, right? But is this even doable in most jobs? Well, let me try and answer two more common questions that I think you probably will have at this point. Number one, when emails. When do you find time to check your emails in this system? Well, the same way you schedule it. So, where I work, we're pretty strict about how we contact other people. If it's not urgent, send an email. If you schedule a meeting with someone, you better have an agenda. Things like that. Well, none of us should be expected to reply to an email like we would a direct Slack message. To make the system work, you have to actually schedule time to look at and answer emails. Outside of that purpose time, let your emails sit and wait for you. Managers, tech leads, etc., they don't just drop things to respond to your email. You shouldn't do so either. Actually, schedule time to check emails and even direct messages, Slack updates, and things like that. Your higher-ups at work want results from you. And if you're producing great results and are delivering time and time again, that trumps how responsive you are to everyone's needs. even if they think you're hard to get in touch with throughout the day on a dime. Let your work speak for itself and let it be a testament to your focused offline bouts throughout the day. And then the second question, what if I can't focus for that long? Travis, what if I can't focus for an entire hour or more than one full session a day? My mind wonders. Well, this is a muscle you have to strengthen. And this can be an entire video, but now more than ever in history, you have to take back your mind. Constant social media is sucking it out of you. unchecked AI use sucking it out of you. Those meta glasses on your face and that handcuff that controls it. These things will not help you. And your phone is a necessity. Yes, I'm not saying go buy a dumb phone. But to get back at the skill of being able to focus for a longer amount of time than you're used to will take work. It's a muscle. You'll need to work on strengthening it. Again, this could be a whole separate video, but think about this if you have the problem and put together a game plan to get stronger in this area. So, that's my simple productivity system that is working very well for me these days. What tips do you have? How are you handling the amount of work you have on your plate daily? Let me know down below so we can discuss. If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, consider doing so. And I'll see you in the next video. [Music]

Try Sevalla (sponsor) and get $50 free credit: https://geni.us/hwF05 I want the time I spend working to actually count, so I've adapted a simple productivity system to multiply what I can get done every day. In this video, I’ll share the 4 simple habits I use every day to triple my output. No fancy apps, no gimmicks; just a practical routine you can start today to boost focus, reduce context switching, and get MUCH more done in less time. 🕒 Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:45 1 - A Physical Timer for Deep Work 03:40 2 - Decompress by walking 05:50 Sponsor 07:18 3 - Plan your day, before your day 09:31 4 - Keeping in step throughout the day 10:45 - When emails? 11:50 - I can't focus that long 12:37 - Outro 📢 Video mentions Timer - https://amzn.to/4gFFUa4 Bigger Timer - https://amzn.to/3KirkcI Deep work - https://amzn.to/4nK0GaX Thank you Sevalla for sponsoring this video. 🎥 Watch These Next 🎥 https://youtu.be/uDcb12CqoR4 https://youtu.be/EMWNZtCYg5s https://youtu.be/jUOysN-rcyQ FOLLOW ME ON Twitter - https://x.com/travisdotmedia LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/travisdotmedia FAVORITE TOOLS AND APPS: Udemy deals, updated regularly - https://travis.media/udemy ZeroToMastery - https://geni.us/AbMxjrX Camera - https://amzn.to/3LOUFZV Lens - https://amzn.to/4fyadP0 Microphone - https://amzn.to/3sAwyrH ** My Coding Blueprints ** Learn to Code Web Developer Blueprint - https://geni.us/HoswN2 AWS/Python Blueprint - https://geni.us/yGlFaRe - FREE Both FREE in the Travis Media Community - https://imposterdevs.com FREE EBOOKS 📘 https://travis.media/ebooks #productivity #getmoredone #focus