Ramit Sethi is an entrepreneur and mega-successful author of the blog, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and a best-selling book of the same name. He also teaches people to increase their income with hist Earn 1K on the Side product.
Show Notes:
- Being brutally honest with yourself is important. The morning is most productive for him for cerebral tasks and he recognizes that, which he learned over time.
- Having self-awareness of what works for you is common among successful people. Work with what you’ve got. if you like working in the evening, do that. don’t need to be a morning person, do what works for you.
- Build systems so that everything is in one place. Figure out what needs to be written, by what date, etc. then you can just do your work. What works for Ramit for productivity is to be super detailed, put everything in one place, so he doesn’t have to think about it.
- Take time to organize all your information and tasks into one place, even if it takes a while, so it’ll all be there.
- Keeping a Google calendar can help to guide what you have to do.
- Give yourself flexibility to move tasks to the next day if you don’t have the energy to do it that day, but still get it done even if it’s moved to the next day.
- Working around barriers: you’re not lazy, but all the barriers get in the way.
- Make it as easy as possible to do what you want to do. Have everything prepared and right there. Set up your entire environment so everything is there, from having your gym clothes in a convenient place to laying out the digital environment you want. Set and follow a real deadline.
- Putting up barriers between you and bad eating habits: if you don’t wanna eat unhealthy food, don’t buy it.
- Put up small barriers around contacting people when you need to work. To focus: turn off internet and phone, keep all notes in front of you to stay in the zone.
- Get rid of barriers preventing you from working out: put gym clothes and socks right by the bed so you have no reason not to go.
- Take an experimental approach to figuring out why you don’t do the things you want to do (have a better relationship your family/partner, go to the gym, etc.). Go deep and ask yourself: what’s the real reason I’m not doing the things I need to do and how can I experiment to find the right approach for me?
- Just go to the gym for 10 minutes, then slowly increase the number, and learn to trust yourself again.
- Be brutally honest with yourself about doing what you want to do. Instead of dreaming about running 3 times a week, run once. Most people want results right away, but you have to build the habit first.
- Lessons Ramit learned from having a fitness trainer, which changed his life:
- Be committed and long-term about what you want to do.
- It’s critical to take advice and learn from people who know more than you. Don’t feel like you have to do things alone to avoid embarrassment about not being good at it.
- Taking small steps is important.
- Ways to manage debt problems:
- Realize how much debt you have (even though it’s scary and intimidating).
- Have 5-10 wins — instead of going cold turkey on giving up lattes, for example, tell yourself throughout the day that you won’t have a latte. If you make the decision not to give into the urge of buying something a few times, after awhile you won’t feel like you need to buy it anyway.
- Automate your payments so you don’t even give yourself the decision not to pay. That way, what needs to get paid for will get paid, and you don’t have to look at it.
- You can spend guilt-free when the payments are automated.
- In order to get to the results you want, it’s going to be messy — be comfortable with that. productivity isn’t about over-optimizing your system or being neat, it’s about getting things done.
- Write down ideas that you think are great throughout the day, then get back to them later so you get into the habit of looking for inspiration.
- Tools don’t matter much, just as long as they can help you do what you want to do. tools aren’t going to change your life or do anything for you but make things you’re already doing easier for you.
- Being in an uncomfortable situation: acknowledge what makes you uncomfortable and figure out how to get around it.