ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

Gamify Your Focus, Say No, Win Big, and 4x Your Life - Ep 28

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 1 • Episode 28

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In this conversation, David Wood discusses the importance of intentionality and focus in achieving personal and professional goals. He emphasizes that many people lack a clear sense of what they want, leading to distractions and unproductive habits. Wood introduces the concept of gamification as a method to make goal-setting more engaging and manageable. He outlines various levels of gamification, the significance of setting artificial constraints, and the necessity of saying no to distractions. The discussion also touches on common productivity mistakes and the importance of measuring success. Throughout, Wood encourages listeners to appreciate their current achievements while striving for more.

Takeaways

  • Lack of intentionality is a common barrier to success.
  • Focus is essential for productivity and should be prioritized.
  • Setting clear goals helps in making decisions about what to say no to.
  • Gamification can make achieving goals more engaging and fun.
  • Artificial constraints can enhance productivity by creating a sense of urgency.
  • Conflicting goals can be navigated by identifying core values and desires.
  • Regularly assessing goals and progress is crucial for success.
  • Distractions, both internal and external, hinder productivity.
  • Taking time to reflect on what truly matters can lead to better decision-making.
  • You are already enough; self-acceptance is key to growth.

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David Wood, welcome to Productivity. Gracias, danke, thank you. Happy to be meeting you and to be on the show. David, you've coached everyone from tech CEOs to prison inmates. What is the common mental bug that keeps people from achieving their goals? Wow, love this question. I'd say lack of intentionality. I was just talking to a client this morning about a promotion and I said, well, I'm kind of curious how strong is your desire? And we realized it wasn't that strong. He was happy with how things are going and that's great. And I said, if your desire gets stronger, I think you're going to achieve it. So I believe that most animals on the planet don't have intentionality. Humans have it. I don't think dolphins get together and say, let's create an underwater garden in six months. I don't think they do that. They're more intuitive. But as humans, we have the ability to say, I want this and I'm going to work each day on making that happen. It's not the only way to enjoy life, but we have that ability. And so the common thing I find with people is, Some of them have that at a high level and often working with a coach or a mastermind group or some other structure can help with that. And they say, this matters to me. I care about it and I'm gonna show up every week, every day and every 25 minutes working towards that because it's fun. And people who are not doing that, they are just busy. They're like, I'm kind of clear, I'm a little bit clear on what I want, but it's a bit vague. And ah I'm just busy every day and I'm not necessarily working on the things that are gonna move the needle in what I want. And that's where I come in usually. People come to me because they're like, I wanna switch from that other category to this category where I'm very intentional with my day. And at the end of the year, I wanna be really proud of what I've achieved. So intentionality. I'd say is the common thing that is missing. You say that focus is a weapon. Why do most entrepreneurs and people in general treat it like an optional feature instead of the core of everything? My guess is because being distracted and pretending to multitask, even though we can't, is fun. It generates dopamine, some oxytocin, we get adrenaline in the body. So, you know, if I'm talking to you and then maybe my phone lights up and I look over and there's a text message, I'm like, that's cool. And at the end of the day, I get to feel really busy. And it can be... a lot of fun to work like that. It's just at the end of the day, we haven't moved significantly towards what we really want, which for most business owners, they want to double revenue. A lot of them want to double their time off. And so we're just kind of floating around because it's kind of fun. But it can also be fun to say, this is what I'm going to do this week. And I'm going to say no to everything else. That can be fun too. My job is largely to introduce people to that kind of fun. And how do they do that? Because, you know, when we speak about productivity, a lot of people tend to say yes to a lot of things ah for different reasons. So how do you convince people to say, no, I'm not doing this this week. No, I'm not talking to you this week. Well, I'm fortunate in that a lot of people who come to me have already worked out that what they're doing is not the optimal way and they, they want to invest in something else. It's going to pay off for the next 30 years, 40 years. So they're already kind of motivated and it doesn't usually require a lot of convincing. Plus I do podcasts like this to talk about it. And some people will hear this and go, Oh, that's me. Okay. I want to apply this in my life. But where I start, I usually start with a one year period because focus doesn't mean anything unless you talk about a timeframe. Because focus, are we talking about over a year? Are we talking about the next 10 minutes? We need to know. So I talk about intentionality and gamification on four different levels and I'll usually start with a year and You know, I want to offer actually Santiago. I have a business assessment. It's actually a business and life assessment. So even if you don't own your own business, it would be great for uh you as well. It's a free assessment. takes five or 10 minutes and it will help you get clear on what game you're playing over the next 12 months. So some of the questions are oriented towards what do you really want over a 12 month period and The link for this assessment, we might give it out a few times on the show, is focus.ceo, which is on my hat if you're watching the video, focus.ceo slash quiz. Really easy to remember. So over a year, what do you want? And it's amazing, even the people listening to this podcast, I wish we could poll them and see how many people have written down goals that light them up over a year. And how many have written down what they will not do this year. So for example, I had to address this with my own coach, what do I want this year? And I realized, I wanna own a home in the US now. I have a property in Australia, but I wanna own my own home in the US. I wanna qualify for a second housing loan. so that means I have certain income goals and I wanna own a home where I can create my own pickleball court. and played pickleball with my friends because I'm crazy about pickleball. Now that lights me up. But I also had to write down what will I not do. An example is I've decided to give up travel this year so that I can focus on this goal. And I'm giving up working on the piano and the guitar. Also improv, which I really enjoy. So that's the first... game and this can be very confronting for people to really ask themselves what do they want? What if you work at, what if you write it down and you really try and you don't get it? What does that mean about you? So some people are, they find this easy and they can like, I know exactly what I want. Some people have goals, they know what they want, but it doesn't light them up. So I tweak. and I work with them on let's find something that would have you do the happy dance. They would have you call your friends and say, yes, I got this, I'm so excited. So they might need their goals upgraded. And some people it takes them some time. It might take a couple of weeks of reflecting and questioning to get clear on what they want. But I call that the first level of gamification. Let's know what game we're playing over this year. And if you don't have a clear game to play you're not going to know what to say no to When you get invitations, hey, would you come and speak at this event? Could you help me out with this? Do you want to come and do this on Saturday? You won't know whether to say yes or no because you don't have a clear game to play and you might start saying yes to things I Want you to have a reason to say no. So that's let's call that the first level of gamification one year How do you deal with conflicting goals? I hear people that says, um I want to leave corporate and then they're applying for corporate jobs in another company. How do you refine your goals list and find those or these that really makes you uh shine, as you said? So I heard you say I might want a corporate job, but what's an example of two goals that conflict? An example is people that don't want to continue working for corporates, for corporations, right? But they are continue applying for corporate jobs here and there. And at the same time, they want to be independent or create their own business or be a consultant or something like that. And there is this being between waters where you don't know what should I take? One of them give me safety. The other one is more exciting. Where do I go? How do you... How do you find your light? Yeah, uh being human seems to be a game of optimizing conflicting values. So I have a value for independence, but I have a value for peace of mind and a stable income. So, you know, I might like to start a business, but I might like to work for a corporation. I have those conflicting goals. I thought about getting a job this year. because the idea of benefits sounded really good and I've been working for myself for 25 years. So I have those conflicting goals, but I'll ask you this. How does your body and brain decide to go to the bathroom? because you may have a desire to get a snack. You may feel like you need to stretch. Your brain might be, I've got some pressure on the bladder and I wanna go to the bathroom, but I wanna call Bill because Bill's waiting for me. How does it happen? It happens seamlessly. I think it's called a dominant monad, someone told me, where you go to these things and they bubble up to something and you... you make a decision without even knowing it and you go to the bathroom, you get a snack, whatever, it's always happening. So I start with let's ask the right questions. What do you care about? What do you want? uh Some people wanna go right back to let's work out values. uh But often when they come to me, they already have a bit of a sense. I want a double revenue, I wanna double my time off, I want my relationship with my kids to be great. Then when we dig in a little bit, I want my health to be better, so let's look at nutrition, let's look at exercise. I'm a generalist, so I work with people on everything that they want. And we ask the questions and then if there's a, usually there isn't any major conflict, it's just more finding their desires. And if there is a conflict, something will bubble up to the top. We might have to look at what are the pros and cons of starting your own business. and what are the pros and cons of staying in a corporation? And often what I like is what's the hybrid result? So for example, say they're already in a job, maybe they don't quit and start a new business. Maybe they negotiate dropping down to four days a week. And then they'll spend a Saturday and a Friday working on a new business. So you've got the safety. you got the income and you get to try this out for 6, 12 months, 24 months and if the business is starting to do well. So sometimes it's not an either or, sometimes it's like maybe you can have it all. Let's talk gamification, which is one of your uh unique um ways of thinking. How do you turn business or life goals into a game? So I think this comes down to artificial constraints. many people have heard of, I believe it's Parkinson's law that says work will expand to fill any container you set for it. So if you set a six hour container to work on you to build your website, that's how long it'll take. If you set a four hour container, that's how long it will take. So A really powerful principle that I'm getting more more excited about is setting artificial constraints. If you have a boss, well your boss might do that for you. Okay, you've got this much budget, you've got this much time, your boss should be setting constraints. But some bosses don't do that and we still need to do it for ourselves and if you're your own boss, you have to do it. You can't just... Well, you can, you can just go along and play and be busy. That's fine. I don't want to say that's wrong. But if you have goals that matter to you, then you probably want to be more focused. So we have to set constraints. That's why we start with a year and say, this is what matters. And this is what I will not do. Now you've got a game because you've set a constraint and you've got a reason to say no to things that don't align with your goals. ah The next level of gamification might make it even clearer. What's the game I'm playing next week? What matters most? Let's take uh pickleball. I love pickleball. uh To have a game, you've got to have limitations. You cannot hit the ball outside these lines. You cannot hit the ball below the net. You cannot hit the ball if you're standing in the kitchen. You have to have limitations or you don't have a game. And you've got to have a goal. I want to uh make you make an error, make you hit the ball out, then I get a point, and once I get to 11, I win. That's what I want to do with work. So we create a game over a year, create a game for next week. These are the things that I will do. Have a list. I commit, and this is scary, lot of people don't want to commit, but I commit that I will do these four things next week. I will try and do these three things. And then I'm gonna be honest with myself, these three things I wish I could do, but I'm probably, if I'm honest, I'm not gonna get around to it. That's a wish list. So you could say we divided up into three lists. This is what I commit to do, this is what I hope to do, and then this is my wish list. really dreaming. I'm probably not gonna get to that. Now you've got a game to play. And I highly recommend, I generally recommend my clients go and put that into your calendar. Work out how much time you're going to allocate to each. Box it. This is the limit. That's another artificial constraint. I need to finish this report. I'm going to give myself two hours. All right, that's a game. If you just say it takes as long as it takes, that's not a game. So two hours, this is three hours, this is one hour. Can you fit it into your calendar? Maybe you can't. So you've got to cut something. Once you've set this game for the week, and I recommend you do this in what I call a CEO date with yourself. Once a week, Friday, five o'clock, or Sunday, nine a.m. With your cup of coffee and breakfast, you're gonna create your plan for the week, create your game. Once you've got that, you now have a reason to say no to things that will come up. And of course things will come up Santiago. Life is gonna happen. People are gonna ask you for stuff that's gonna throw your plan out. And if you don't create a game and you don't commit to anything, you won't have a reason to push back. You won't have a reason to say no to yourself when your brain is, oh, I wanna do this thing on Amazon or maybe I wanna go and play Fortnite. uh you know, or I just want to goof off during the day or at night I'm gonna watch four hours of TV. You won't a reason to say no to that if you haven't committed to a game. So I get excited about this. This is intentionality. If you don't have a game to play, you're just gonna waffle through the week. But once you got a clear game with clear rules, you can win at that game and you're gonna have to say no or you're gonna fail at the game. You seem to have covered two levels of gamification. are the other two? You said there's four. I like that you're tracking that. Yeah. The next level. And by the way, guys, I don't expect you to listen to this in 30 minutes and then go and implement it all in your life. I haven't met anyone who's done that yet. Usually for my clients, it takes uh a good month or more of bringing these things in one at a time uh as a habit. And then after say 30 days or 60 days, it's yours for life. you try something out and then you might fail at it. And we look at, what happened? Maybe it was your notifications were turned on or maybe there's so many different ways that this can fail. I just want to give you some of the information. If you take anything from this, I hope it's the quiz, which will help you assess what you really want, what your challenges are. and you may find that productivity is the main thing you're gonna work on. But for many people, some people it's not, for some people it's leads, for some people it's mindset. But the quiz will help you do it. And again, the link for that is focus.ceo.com quiz. And I hope you take it, I hope you take it on. uh The third level is tomorrow. because the weak plan might fall apart at some point and things change. So I encourage my clients to create a date with themself, maybe five o'clock every day. I prefer this to eight a.m. the next day. Like the day of, that's not a great time to plan. I don't like that. I prefer do it the day before, because you got some separation. You can make some CEO decisions for your day tomorrow and you can really look at it and say, all right, I've got my week goals. I've got my calendar already set. Let me see if that's right. No, this is now more important. So this, I'm gonna move back. This, I can't fit it in now. I'm gonna have to push that back to next week. I'm gonna have to call Bill and get myself out of this meeting, renegotiate. You make these executive decisions ahead of time so that you've got a good game to play for tomorrow. And again, you can have a list of this is what I commit to. I will do these two things no matter what. I'm promising myself. That's a little scary sometimes because what if you can't control it? But I will do these things. These are on my hope list. And these other things I'm going to have to just put back. taking them off tomorrow because I can't fit them. Let's take the loss up front. Instead of finding out at four o'clock tomorrow it can't be done, I want everyone to take the loss up front. Your CEO can handle that. So now you're gonna have a game to play when you wake up tomorrow morning, you know what matters, and you'll have a reason to say no when everyone's asking you, can you do this, can you do that? Oh, wait, let me squeeze this in. You'll have a reason to push back. That's the third level of gamification. And I think maybe we should, maybe you should not tell them the fourth one, because I want to tease people a little bit. Tease people a little bit, right? You don't want to give away the whole farm. Plus, I don't like overloading people. You know, it's exciting. I can give people like 50 different things to do. You can't implement them all. And we just overload the brain. And it's ironic because we talk about focus. And then I give people 20 things that they can't implement. oh It's a little bit hypocritical. How do you measure if a goal is gamified correctly? Well that is science that the system is working. I that. I would say it's working for me. if at the end of the day I nailed the things that I said were important. Now, I don't do this every day. Some days I just wanna be free flowing. Like tomorrow is Saturday. I'll probably do some work. I might work on an app, an AI app that I'm really interested in. And that's gonna be more free flowing. I just wanna do what feels good. I have a cup of tea, might walk the dog, might work for a couple of hours. So I'm not saying be focused 24 seven, that's insane. But on the days usually the weekdays, I want to be focused, did I set what mattered and did I nail those things? And that feels really good. I'd call that success. You know, you get to feel like a hero. And that's largely why I talk about this stuff, Santiago. I mean, you know, the stuff that really lights me up is intimacy and true connection and courage, going for stuff that's scary. Like that's the stuff I really love as a coach. uh Loving oneself. I just don't know how to really sell that. So what I do is I help people with the stuff that their brain is telling them they want, which is usually making more money and creating more time off. And uh one way to do that is to focus on productivity. uh I forget now how I got here to this. I just lost my train of thought. David, what is your no to yes ratio these days? Wow. I have no idea what my ratio is, because I don't know how often I'm saying yes. But what came up, what came up when you asked that was realizing there are some important no's that I'm saying to myself. Because no's aren't just for other people. For example, recently I made a commitment that I will not buy corn chips. or any other kind of chips or crackers or ice cream. I'm not buying and have those in the house. ah And also I've said no to having two alcoholic drinks in a day, except once a week. Once a week I could have two. So, you know, I'm fascinated by the idea of discipline. And when you create a game, If you wanna stick to the game, wanna win at the game, you're gonna have to say no to some things. So one of my games is health. also cannabis. I found during the pandemic that I really liked it and I was using it to relax my body. But if you smoke every night for five years, you run into some issues. It's not good for the body or the brain or the motivation. And so now I'm saying no to myself. for things like that. So I don't know what my ratio is, but I know I think I'm winning at the game because at the end of most days, I'm happy with what I achieved. I look back and I go, good job, good job, good job. And particularly there are some hard things, some hard things that I would want to put off. I'm proud of myself when I handle those. And part of this creating a game is if you create a CEO date with yourself for the week and for the day, you can put some hard things on your own plate. Because you won't have to do it until next week or until tomorrow. And things like handling taxes and you know, so. I'm happy with how I'm playing the game and I have no idea on my no to yes ratio. I'm gonna sit with that one. What is the number one productivity mistake even high performers make? well, a big obvious one, and the high performers should know this stuff, is allowing, I think, or let's go back to basics, not having their clear targets. If I don't know what I'm going to achieve today, then it's really hard to be productive. It can happen, but it's hard. So just starting the day or the week without clear targets would be the number one mistake. And then the number two that came up would be allowing notifications and distractions, allowing that. and that's both external, like your phone or email. And also internal, just your own thoughts will take you off track. You know, so you need to really be focused and set a game. uh We talked about the gamification over a day, but you've got to create a much shorter game as well. That's the one we didn't get to. And if you allow notifications or even allow your own thoughts to take you off track, then... you're not gonna win at the game. I like sometimes having a later list. I call it a later list. And if my brain comes up with something that it wants me to do when I'm actually committed to a task, write it down. Oh, call Bill. Or check my Amazon order so that I can get back to what I like to call a working meditation. Let's do some rapid fire questions, David. Five questions, 30 seconds to answer each one of them. Number one, what's the most powerful productivity tool you use every day? Pomodoro Technique. Number two, what's one belief about success that you disagree with? that you're not successful already. Number three, one boundary everyone should set immediately. No idea. Number four, favorite game you've used as an inspiration for life or business. Huh. Um... maybe improv, theatrical improv. You have to learn, uh you learn some, it's like Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. You start to see life parallels and one of the tools is you learn to say yes to everything. Yes, and I will build rather than no, that's wrong. Be like, yes, thank you, and. So I think improv. is a game that's influenced my life and business. And number five, if someone feels completely scattered and over committed, what is the first thing they need to do tomorrow morning? Take some things off your plate and take the loss upfront. Grieve for those things. Say, okay, it's not healthy for me to do all of this. So what matters most? So prioritize, I would say. Take some things off the plate. That's two things. And the third would be, take a breath. Breathing is a wonderful hack. Just a breath. Alright. I got this. David, what's your message to all ah listeners who feels like they are either drowning in justice, distractions, seeing the life pass in front of their eyes, but they're afraid to change? You're doing great already. I think we miss how good life is and how good our decisions are and how much we've achieved. We're very hard on ourselves generally. So you don't need to be fixed. You don't need to be changed. If you want more, if you recognize that you're capable of more and you want to play a game called, wanna crank it up a notch, then uh there are ways to do that. and that's great, but don't let anyone sell you on the idea that you're broken or you're not rocking it out already. Appreciate where you are, and if you wanna go to another couple of levels, I'd be honored to help you do that. Let's wrap this up. How can listeners connect with you, experience your coaching, or get you to speak at an event? How can people get in touch with you, David? I would say do the quiz. I put 20 years into that thing and it'll cost you five to 10 minutes of your time to look at what do you want and it'll help if you have a business too, it'll help you assess nine areas of your business so you know what to work on. Also that'll get you on my mailing list if you want to get, I send out a couple of things uh a week that are designed to help you with your business and your life because I care mainly about life. That's focus.ceo.com The second thing I would offer is if you want me to review the results of your quiz and assessment I'm happy to do 15 minutes I will give you 15 minutes of my time to help you create the beginnings of a plan The reason I do that for free is because it's how I find the right clients to work with And then the third thing I would offer your listeners is if you're interested in coaching with me and after our 15 minute discussion it looks like coaching would help you and you want a coaching structure, I would offer a sliding scale. I've been charging just a flat $2,000 a month for many years and recently I've been playing with the idea that not everyone should be paying that amount of money. If you're not earning over a quarter million. of dollars a year, I don't think you should be paying $2,000 a month to a coach. So if you mention in the notes in your assessment, Santiago and sliding scale, then I will, if we decide we want to work together, we'll pick a number between $300 and $2,000 a month that we both feel is right for where you're at in your life and your business. And that's my third offer. and all three of those things you can get plus my mailing list if you want it at focus.ceo.com quiz and I imagine that'll be in the show notes. It will be. David, thank you so much for this time. It was really interesting to hear that we can gamify our goals and break them down somehow that they are more digestible and em we can have fun with them. I'm also taking away that that phrase you said that you are already enough and you don't need to fix yourself. I think this is a message that these days is a bit overlooked. We live in the society of getting more, buying more, getting more done. And sometimes, many times indeed, less is more. David, thanks a lot for being with us today. And we wish you the best. That you get your American houses here. Of course, I'm sure you will. And we might need to bring you back to explain the number four gamification step. Yeah, we could do that or what's coming up for me is courage. We could, I'm so passionate about like what scares us and how do we ride that edge of the fear. I'm actually counter phobic, which means I lean into what I'm scared of. uh So that just came up. Yeah, I've really enjoyed your insightful questions and I'd be happy to come back. Thanks a David.