fbpx

Mike Vardy of Productivityist

Mike Vardy

Productivity Strategist and Founder at Productivityist

<div class="bc-author-social"><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --><ul><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --> <li><a class="dashicons dashicons-admin-home" href="http://mikevardy.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span class="bc-social-name">Website</span></a></li><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --> <li class="bc-social-linkedin"><a class="dashicons dashicons-linkedin" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevardy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span class="bc-social-name">Linkedin</span></a></li><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --></ul><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --></div>

Mike Vardy served as the Managing Editor at Lifehack, and written for 99u, Lifehacker, SUCCESS Magazine, and more. He has also spoken all over North America at events like TEDx Victoria, South by Southwest Interactive, World Domination Summit, and creativeLIVE.

Article

A Themed Process To Stay On Task

Most people manage their time in either two ways. Using to-do lists or using calendars. By themselves these are great ways of managing time and I congratulate those who use these strategies and apply them to their routine. It is a great first step, but I think we can go even further….

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mike’s success

The use of a themed process.

Result if you follow the steps in Mike’s session

A framework to manage your time that uses themes to guide your year, month, week, and day.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

A lot of people have probably heard of the idea of time chunking where they take little blocks of time and they decide what they’re gonna schedule in that time. Maybe they’ll work on emails during that time or they’ll set it aside for creative work or what-have-you.

Time saving takes it a little bit broader.

When I talk about time saving, what a meaning is that you take a commonly known denomination of time. Whether it’s the hours which is called “Horizontal Saving”, which is a bit more trickier for people to use if their jobs are really dynamic.

The other elements of time are the day, the week, the month, they’re all commonly known. Everyone knows what a day is. Everyone knows what a week is.

We all have twenty-four hours of the day. All of us have between 28 and 31 days in a month and of course the year. Those are kind of the ones that I focus on.

When it comes to time theming, one of the best areas I do and more common with people is, I either start from the top and seam their year and then work from their years to their months to their days. Or I start from their days and work from their days to their months to their years.

Weekly theming comes into play for specific project sprint’s, that’s why I call them weekly Sprint’s.

You don’t want a theme every single week because if you theme 52 each of the year, that’s a recipe for burnout.

Theming your year, giving your year three words which is a practice that Chris Brogan. I learned it from him and I’ve integrated it into my into my workflow.

The months are another critical way especially if you want to have the most productive 2017-2019, whatever beyond months can be really helpful if you theme them.

The days are really great for the day-to-day stuff. When I’m working with somebody who are struggling with just getting through the day, I say, “Okay, let’s look at your week and let’s theme every day of the week”.

But if I’ve got somebody who’s a CEO or is the big planner of the visionary? We normally start with the year and then work our way down to the days.

It really depends. That’s what I love about when I develop the system is I wanted a system that would work either from “I just want to get through today” to “I want to get through my bigger goal”.

it works either from the top down or from the bottom up.

Hand-picked experts share their #1 tactic

One marketing tactic delivered to your inbox each morning, 5 days a week