Over the past seven weeks I have explored each of the 7 keys to living a productive life from my book, The Productive Life. As I wrap up this series of messages, let me suggest a few things that could sabotage your efforts at living a Productive Life and remind you of what we covered:

* Struggling with Guilt. Many people feel guilty when they are not working a hundred-hour week. For many years I was a recovering workaholic. I was the worst possible taskmaster and I kept driving myself to work non-stop – even when I was supposed to be off. Thankfully, maturity and a desire to live a truly Productive Life have helped me leave that way of thinking and living behind. Maybe you are in a different place in your career and don’t yet feel the need to balance your life. Hopefully you will learn from others who have gone before you and learn to pace yourself and pay attention to all areas of your life. When you work, work hard and smart, but when you rest, rest well!!! Make sure you implemented the strategies you learnt in Key #1: Live Your Mission.

* Dealing with Overwhelm. My wife and I have a blackboard in our kitchen where we write motivational quotes for each week. Last week we chose to use a quote from the Productivity Paradox Podcast by Tonya Dalton: “Overwhelm is not having too much to do – it is not knowing where to start.” This book should have given you practical tools and strategies to know what action to take in any moment as we explored in Key #2: Manage Your Actions.

* Battling with Habits. My daughter, Ashley, often speaks of how our bodies have muscle memory and the negative effects that can have on our efforts to get or keep fit. Our minds have something similar going on and we will need to work consistently at the new ideas and habits that we are developing to overcome old ways of thinking and living. Don’t forget we referenced research that suggested that we need to repeat an action for at least 66 days before it become a habit. You may need to revisit Key #3: Build Your Habits to refine your best practices around mastering good habits.

* Neglecting Key Areas. Maybe you are doing well in some areas of your life but you are really struggling in other areas. Remember we have been talking about the Productive Life and not just the Productive Employee. It may be helpful to revisit Key #4: Plan Your Time where you learnt to include a wide variety of life areas in your planning to set and achieve your goals.

* Getting Easily Distracted. The world is not going to suddenly stop shouting for your attention. You won’t wake up tomorrow with no messages or demands for you to respond. You will need to continually revisit Key #5: Focus Your Mind and keep working on avoiding distractions.

* Fighting Your Nature. If you don’t appreciate how you have been wired and spend too much time trying to overcome your natural strengths and tendencies you will end up being frustrated because you have spent too much time trying to change who you have been uniquely created to be. If this become an issue then Key #6: Know Your Self could be the game changer you have been looking for as you embrace who you are and work with yourself rather than against yourself.

* Running on Empty. If one day you remember your good intentions to live a Productive Life but you find yourself thinking: “I just don’t have the energy to show up and deliver anything today” then it would be time to revisit Key #7: Renew Your Energy and do things that will generate the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy you need to live a Productive Life.

I trust that you have benefited from this series and have either invested in a copy of my book or have an intention to do so! As I mentioned in a previous message, if you honestly can’t afford to purchase a copy, then send me a direct message and I will send you a digital copy for free!

Here are some places where you can purchase a copy if you are able to:

Amazon (http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK) – eBook and Paperback for global shipping.

Takealot (http://bit.ly/TPL_Takealot) – Paperback for South Africa shipping.

I trust you have been enjoying this series exploring the 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life from my book: The Productive Life. In this message I am going to give you an extract from my book where I explored explored Key #7: Renew Your Energy.

In this Key I wrote about four kinds of energy that we need to renew: Physical; Mental; Emotional and Spiritual. Here is what I wrote about the first two kinds of energy:

1. Generate Physical Energy
The first step to renew your energy is to generate physical energy. I have learnt that how we live our lives will determine whether we show up with energy or drag ourselves through each day hoping for a weekend or public holiday where we can recharge before the next stretch.

Here are some things you can do to generate physical energy:

• Health: It all starts with eating well and even if you don’t go overboard but eat healthy foods and avoid harmful foods you will have more energy.
• Exercise: You don’t have to be a fitness fanatic who works out two times a day, although that may be your thing, but even if you just keep moving and walk a few kilometres every day, like my wife and I do every day, you will generate energy to release.
• Sleep: I have had seasons in my life when I worked late into the night and had to drag myself out of bed in the morning not ready to face the day. Make it a regular habit to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night and you will have more energy!
• Rest: I have numerous practices around rest that help me to generate energy, including: (1) Guarding my work rhythms by only working two thirds of the day and very rarely three thirds; (2) Taking a day off each week; (3) Taking a weekend off every two months; (4) Taking three weeks of continuous leave over my annual holiday period, and (5) Taking a three-month Sabbatical every seven years.

Be Productive Right Now!

1. What one thing can you do to generate physical energy?
2. Set one goal for each of the following areas:

• Health:
• Exercise:
• Sleep:
• Rest:

2. Generate Emotional Energy
The second step to renew your energy is to generate emotional energy. In recent years, as I have begun to understand how my brain works, I have realised that managing my feelings is a truly critical part of living with energy. I think positively and when I find myself tempted to have a pity-party or complain or give in to negative thoughts, I make a conscious effort to return to a place of positivity and without fail my mood starts to move from negative to positive.

I am not pretending that it is not a huge challenge at times, like when I received news about eye conditions that could have resulted in eye loss, but here is what I do know: (1) I can’t control everything that happens to me; (2) I can control how I react to what life throws at me; and (3) I can become better because of what I go through.

Here are some things you can do to generate emotional energy:

• Embrace Positive Thinking: I explored this concept in some details in the Focus key so I won’t repeat myself here apart from reminding you that thoughts matter and that they build mindsets – so think positively and build mindsets that will lead you to productivity and success.
• Avoid Negative Thinking: When you catch yourself thinking negatively, stop and reject the negative thought and replace it with a positive thought.
• Embrace Positive People: Go out of your way to spend time with positive people so their positive energy can rub off on you. Energy is infectious!
• Avoid Negative People: This may sound a little harsh, and obviously you can’t totally avoid people, but move away from people who have the potential to steal your positivity.

Be Productive Right Now!

1. What one thing can you do to generate emotional energy?
2. What can you do to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts?

Challenge:
Make it your intention to show up with energy, take time to prepare for every opportunity you get to engage with people, prepare as if you were a gladiator preparing to enter an arena, and just maybe it will end up being your finest hour – as reflected in the words of Sir Winston Churchill during the second world war: “To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a very special thing, unique to him and fitted to his talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for the work which would be his finest hour.” (The Transparent Leader II by Dwight L. Johnson).

In my next message I will pull things together as I wrap up this series exploring each of the 7 Keys to Living a Productive Life.

Don’t forget you can buy a copy of the book in various formats and places:
Amazon (http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK) – eBook and Paperback for global shipping.
Takealot (bit.ly/TPL_Takealot) – the paperback for shipping in South Africa.

I trust you have been enjoying this series exploring the 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life from my book: The Productive Life. In this post I am going to explore Key #6: Know Your Self.

In this chapter of my book I explore five steps you can take to know your self to help you increase your productivity. The steps are:
(1) Discover Your Uniqueness from Tests.
(2) Learn How to Do a Self-Assessment.
(3) Develop a Personal Profile Document.
(4) Apply Your Findings to Productivity.
(5) Keep Learning About Yourself.

If you know me fairly well, you will know that not only have I taken just about every possible personality or productivity test that has been created, but that I keep a very detailed document that contains the results of every test and other personal insights that I have gathered over the years. When you work through this Key in my book, I will point you in the right direction so that you can start something similar and also give you a template which will have all the links that you need to get started.

While training young couples who are approaching marriage I developed a way in which you can self-score yourself on the DiSC personality test and I have even applied it to help you figure out which Tendency you are (that is the test that Gretchen Rubin uses – you can take her test online at: http://bit.ly/Test_Tendencies), however, if you want my tool you are going to have to sacrifice something this month and purchase a copy of my book!!!

Let me leave you with an extract from this chapter of my book: “As far as I can remember, the first quotation I ever memorised was: ‘Know Thyself’. It has a somewhat disputed origin with some suggesting that it be attributed to Socrates. The story goes that In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living and when asked how he would sum up all the philosophical commandments, he replied: “Know thyself.” No matter who said it, the idea of getting to know yourself is a critical part of living a Productive Life. Until we actually understand who we are, how we are wired and what makes us do the things that we do, we won’t actually be able to consistently live life in a way that is personally satisfying or meaningful to others.”

In the next message I will explore the final key to productive living: Renew Your Energy!

Your productivity coach

Mark

It has been a great journey so far as we have explored the first 4 of 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life from my book: The Productive Life. In this message I am going to explore Key #5: Focus Your Mind.

How is your eyesight? In my younger days, I never appreciated how critical clear vision is until I started struggling to read in low light and, over the last decade, started to struggle with seeing stuff in the distance clearly. As an avid birdwatcher, who is on a quest to photograph every single bird species in Southern Africa (I have snapped 717 and have under 300 to still find and photograph), I know that good eye sight and the ability to focus is critical. The last 9 months have been rather hectic – an eye disease caused bleeding in my eye balls which forced me to have a surgery (known as a vitrectomy where the fluid is extracted and replaced and the retina is lasered back into place) and then as a side-effect I developed cataracts. I think I am somewhat qualified to talk about the importance of Focus!

Everywhere you turn these days you hear stuff about neuroscience. My wife and I have just started a Udemy course called SuperLearner 2 and we are so excited about going deeper with memory insights and boosting our reading speeds and comprehension rates.

This Key is epic and, if I can say so myself as the author, it is a cracker of a chapter. I actually believe that Attention Management is as important as, if not more important than, Time Management! The ability to control our focus is critical. Paul J. Meyer said: “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort” and part of the opening quote for this chapter is from Tanya Dalton: “Productivity is focusing on what matters most.” This Key will help you take control of your mind and enable you to do your best work in every area of your life as you learn the 3 Secrets to Focusing Your Mind:

1. Live Your Passion: Focus starts with doing stuff that we are passionate about. When I am working on something that I am passionate about, just about nothing can distract me!!! I am really excited to share a tool with you that will help you discover your passion in life – I call it the Passion Indicator. It is based on a set of questions that help you discover your passion and write it out. One of the six questions in the Indicator is: “What activities leave you energised but not drained?” When you work in the area of your passion you will be refreshed and not depleted!!! If I were you, I would buy the book just to get access to the Passion Indicator.

2. Train Your Brain: Dr. Amber Selking, a performance coach from the US, gave me permission to include an overview of what will be a book launched within the next year on Building Championship Mindsets. She writes about 7 building blocks for building a championship mindset and her fifth building block is Attention Control. I have recommended her podcast for this Key and you should consider subscribing even if you are still to buy my book. It is called: Building Championship Mindsets. There are also insights from the field of neuroscience in this secret from writers like John Assaraf, Dr Caroline Leaf and you should definitely subscribe to the podcast by Jim Kwik entitled: Kwik Brain.

3. Limit Your Distractions: The third secret to focus your mind is to limit distractions. You can’t have your phone distracting you every time an email or social media message pops up because it takes from 7 to 20 minutes to refocus every time you are distracted!!! Scary, right? I have a reputation of always responding to people who message me, but honestly, I do it in a way that does not cause me to lose my focus when I am working!!!

How are you doing with focus? Do you need some help in this area? Grab a copy of my book and invest in your development using this link: http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK. You can also get a free chapter using this link: https://bit.ly/TPLSampleChapter

In the next message I will explore Key #6: Know Your Self which will help you learn how to work with who you are to become productive! After all, stress-free productivity is what we are after!

Your productivity coach

Mark

I trust you have been enjoying this series exploring the 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life from my book: The Productive Life. In this message I am going to cover Key #4: Plan Your Time.

Let me give you a detailed overview of what I have included in this chapter of my book as I unpack some best practices around planning your time. There are 4 tools that will help you become productive as you plan your time:

1. Use a Planner: A productivity planner is a game changer when it comes to planning your year, month, week and day and to prove just how serious I am about using a planner I have actually spent the last six month working on one that is aligned with the 7 keys and that will help you get on top of your life. It is currently available as a free printable download for anyone who buys my book. Here are images of the main pages:

2. Plan in Advance: There are countless benefits to sitting down and planning what you are going to do (whether it is in the next hour, day, week, month, year or decade) and a good productivity planner will help you do the kind of advanced planning that will jumpstart your productivity. One of the things that I do every day, using my planner, is setting aside fifteen minutes every night to plan my major priorities, projects and tasks for the next day so that by the time my day starts I know exactly where I am going and I am less distracted and spin my wheels a whole lot less as I gain traction with my day! If you look at the first image under the last point you will see that the shaded part of the page (the T-shape) is what you complete the night before so you are ready for the day before it arrives!

3. Create Your Goals: I am going to introduce you to a fantastic tool that was created by the guys who released The ONE Thing book called the GPS Goal Planning Template. I have a Word version that is available as a download with the book which helps you create a Goal for each Life Area, then you set 3 Priorities for each goal; then design 5 Strategies for each priority and finally you choose a Deadline for each of the 5 Strategies. Here is what the GPS Planner looks like:

4. Schedule Your Goals: Who says that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Earlier this year I learnt how to use my calendar as a secret weapon to ensure that I move towards reaching my goals. Not only did it fast track my efforts at creating a leadership pipeline for the organization I am working in, and help me create a brand new daily morning routine, but it also got my book written and released. Clearly it is a game changer!!!

Okay, so I am a little excited about this Key and believe that it will change your life. I don’t quite know what to give you to get you going, other than to seriously urge you to consider making the investment in yourself by buying a copy of my book and working through it. You won’t be sorry for stretched yourself financially because of the return you will get for your investment. What price would you put on creating a life that is firing on all cylinders? Whatever value you come up with, do the math and if my book on Amazon – at around $10 – is less than 10% of that figure – then you would be crazy not to make the investment!!! Get it with this link: http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK

In the next message I will explore Key #5: Focus Your Mind. If you think I am excited about Key #4 – just wait until next time!!!

Your productivity coach

Mark

I trust you have been enjoying this series exploring the 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life. I thrive on being able to share what I know with others and am loving being able to share with you what I have unpacked in my book, The Productive Life. In this message, I am going to cover Key #3: Build Your Habits.

If you are like me, you have as many, if not more, negative than positive thoughts that come to mind when you hear the word “habits”. Yet, when it comes to productivity I believe that habits are a massive game changer because they turn goals into reality.

For years I had a Mission statement that was lived through my Roles which had Goals and related Activities (this was the subject of my last message) but until I started building Habits around my goals, the effects were nowhere near where they could have been. As I created habits for each one of my goals the effect on my life was exponential.

For example, I have a Priority in my life to engage with God and a Goal of spending quality time in devotions every day. What helped this goal become a consistent reality in my life was creating the Habit of getting up at 5am every day and spending the next hour in devotions where I mediate, read Scripture, pray and record the spontaneous flow of thoughts that come to mind. No longer am I hoping to do this – it has become a habit and it happens! In fact, adding it to my Morning Habit Stack, that includes a number of other habits that happen one after each other, has ensured that I don’t miss a day! Of course, I can choose to delay the start of the habit but because there is a sequence of events that take place – it happens. This is what I will teach you to do in this chapter of my book!

My wife and I listened to an episode of the Kwik Brain podcast on our bird watching outing on Monday. This is our favourite podcast at the moment and not one that I mentioned in my book. It is by Jim Kwik and is all about understanding your brain and training your memory. It is more of a masterclass than a podcast and you should consider subscribing to it. Anyway, Jim interviewed the author of a new book entitled Wild Habits. In her book, Tara Mackey says that for habits to be successful they need four features (based on the word WILD): (1) Willingness: we must accept that something is not working and be willing to change; (2) Intuition: we must figure out what the next step is, take it and see where it leads us; (3) Love: we need to have the self-love to take the necessary step; and (4) Discipline: we need the discipline to take the step every day until it becomes a new habit.

Be Productive Now:
Here is an exercise you can do right now to help you with habit building:

1. What is one goal that you are struggling to achieve at the moment?
2. Think of a habit that you can start to help that goal become more attainable – it could be a really small action that take each day (James Clear speaks about Atomic Habits and Dr BJ Fogg speaks about Tiny Habits.)
3. Start practicing the habit and use your calendar to help you remember to actually do it.

If you have not downloaded the sample chapter from my book on Building Habits – then you can use this link to get the Free Chapter.

If you have not done so already, grab a copy of my book on Amazon today (http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK) and get printable versions of the Workbook and the Productive Life Planner for free using the link to the Resource Folder available in the book!

In my next message I will explore Key #4: Plan Your Time. I trust you are starting to see how the keys build on each other.

Your productivity coach

Mark Tittley

Welcome to another stage in The Productive Life journey. Today I am going to explore Key #2: Manage Your Actions.

About a decade ago I got a print copy of David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I could not put it down. I thought I was being productive before this stage of my productivity adventure started but I knew there was still the occasional thing that I was letting slip through the cracks and it drove me crazy! I really do not like disappointing people (after all, I am an Upholder on Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies model – you can take the test for free here: bit.ly/Test_Tendencies).

The biggest win for me in reading and implementing David Allen’s book and creating an action management system was developing the habit of capturing EVERYTHING that I commit to do, or need to do. I am sure you often have people asking you to do things for them and you promise to do it but then it slips your mind because you bump into someone else who has their own requests and then other stuff comes your way and before you realise it, you have forgotten what you promised to do!

The value of Getting Things Done (GTD for short) is that you commit to doing something right away if it will take you less than 2 minutes to do (this is The 2 Minute Rule) or you capture it in your action management system that is out of your head and you don’t forget to do it. You can use paper or an app, I know what I would do without the app that I use as a Capture Device which is called Nirvana. In fact, I am never more than a few second away from a capture device. This is actually just the first of five steps of the GTD Workflow Model that I introduce in this chapter of my book.

When you buy my book, you will be given access to a folder of resources and one of the documents contains all the GTD Templates that I have created that has earned me the reputation of being a machine when it comes to getting things done. Honestly, I am no rocket scientist but I have a system that makes me productive! Discovering a system like this will literally change your whole life. No one needs to remind me of things I promise to do because my system reminds me and honestly, I sleep so much better at night because my mind does not have to keep waking me up to remind me of stuff I need to do. I use my mind to help me be creative and create systems for people or things that need to be improved – not to remember stuff.

How are you doing in this area? Do you get into trouble for not getting things done? Maybe you feel a little like this sometimes…

It may cost you a little to invest in my book, but I can guarantee that you will reap the reward as you become known as the person who gets things done and you will no longer get into trouble with your family, friends or colleagues for stuff you don’t get done! You will learn how to manage your actions as you work through this chapter of my book!

In my next message we will explore Key #3: Build Your Habits and I will help you learn how to keep good habits and break bad habits!

Your Productivity Coach

Mark Tittley

Welcome to the first of 7 messages in which I will be unpacking the 7 Keys to Living a Productive Life that form the basis of my book: The Productive Life. Whether you have read my book or not, these messages will inspire you and give you lots to think about. We start with Key #1: Live Your Mission.

Let’s pretend that we are having coffee and I learn forward and ask you: “What is your mission in life?” How would you answer me? Take a moment to think through your response…

I have a distant memory of the first time that I was asked that question and remember struggling to answer it. I recall saying things like: “I am a youth leader”, “I am a guitarist”, “I am an IT specialist”, etc. I sadly can’t pin-point the exact moment when I crafted my first mission statement but it set me on a journey to not only know my mission but also to take every step possible to live it out through every area of my life.

Once I had consumed every book that Stephen Covey had written I get to a place where the pieces came together. Some year later I discovered a tool that gave me a simple framework to write a short but comprehensive mission statement that supplemented the process that Stephen Covey suggest in his book: First Things First. He speak about identifying your mission and then identifying the roles you play in life, then creating goals for each of the role and finally using a Weekly Planner where you schedule activities into your week so that you get the Important things done and you don’t spend you whole week chasing after Urgent things that demand your attention.

In Key #1: Live Your Mission, I guide you step-by-step through a process which will not only get you to refine your own life’s mission but it will give you a tool to use with people around you who would benefit from knowing and living their mission. I honestly believe that this one tool alone will make your investment in buying my book worthwhile.
I also explore the value of using a weekly planner and you will be able to download my version of this tool from the folder of downloadable resources you get with the book.

One other highlight of this Key is that I share my top 13 Personal Management Secrets that help me to stay on top of every area of my life whether it is my work or home life. These secrets have helped to earn me the reputation of being highly organised and efficient – the person you go to if you want something to get done and who does not let you down when he says he will do something for you. Here are a few of my secrets that I included: Take time to give time; Handle paper once; Confirm appointments and Work two thirds of the day.

There is a valuable tool to evaluate priorities in your life that I did not include in my book. I refer to it as Covey’s Quadrants Model (it is also known as the Eisenhower Matrix). It is a way of evaluating activities based on two ingredients: IMPORTANCE and IMPORTANCE. (1) Important Activities are your most important things, your first things, any activities that contribute to your mission and your goals. (2) Urgent Activities are pressing things, in-your-face-things, activities that demand immediate attention. We spend our time in one of four different quadrants and each quadrant contains different kinds of activities and is represented by a type of person:

We must figure out where we are spending the most of our time and make sure we are spending more time in Q2 by doing these 3 things: (1) Say No to Q3 activities; (2) Shrink Q1 by avoiding procrastination; and (3) Reduce Q4 time wasting activities.

Here are some more images to understand the model:

One practical application of this model is to use it, you sort your tasks into four categories depending on their importance and urgency:

1. Important and urgent – Tasks you will do immediately.
2. Important but not urgent – Tasks you will schedule for later.
3. Not important but urgent – Tasks you will delegate.
4. Not important nor urgent – Tasks you will eliminate.

Be Productive Now:
Reflect on these two questions to become more productive:
(1) What are some of the activities that you engage in that waste your time?
(2) What one thing can you do on a regular basis that will make a great difference in your life?

If you have not done so already, grab a copy of my book on Amazon today (http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK) and get a free Workbook and the Productive Life pPlanner thrown in for free!

In the coming weeks I am going to unpack my approach to Productivity and share with you 7 keys to Living a Productive Life. My goal is to introduce you to my book (The Productive Life), give you some insights if you have not had a chance to read it yet, and also give those who have read it a chance to review what they have learnt and add some fresh insights.

You may be wondering what I mean by a Productive Life. Let me start by saying what I DON’T mean and then describe what I DO mean:

I am NOT talking about becoming a Work-a-holic. I have been there and it made me nearly lose my marriage and lose touch with my kids. Unless we put boundaries around our lives and make sure that one area, like work, does not become the most important area to the detriment of other areas, we will find ourselves in deep, deep trouble. I also nearly allowed a passion for birdwatching to become an obsession and found that I needed to put boundaries around that area of my life so it did not negatively affect other areas. I am also NOT talking about becoming a Slacker who does not care about getting things done in the workplace – or any other area of their life. Neither being a Work-a-holic nor a Slacker are healthy ways of living.

So, what do I mean by living a productive life? In the chapter entitled: Understanding Productivity, I refer to being on top of every area of your life by making sure that you put significant amounts of time, energy and attention into everything you do in every area of your life. This will mean different things for each area of your life, but until you have the mindset of excellence and invest effort in every area of your life you will not get the most out of life nor have the kind of impact that deep down you want to make on this world.

I wrote the book to provide a framework that will enable you to live your best life. Here is what you will be able to do once you have worked through the 7 Keys to Living a Productive Life and have applied the insights to your life using the workbook style of my writing:

(1) Live Your Mission – you will learn how to discover your mission in life, how to live it through each of the roles you play in life, how to set and achieve goals for each of your roles, how to use a weekly planner to track activities you schedule and how to adopt the personal time management secrets that I have learnt in life.

(2) Manage Your Actions – you will learn how to keep track of every commitment you make in life, how to keep everything out of your head, how to decide what needs to be done, how to actually get things done and how to do a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly review of your system.

(3) Build Your Habits – you will learn how habits are critical to achieving goals, how to build good habits and break bad habits, how to stack habits on top of each other to ensure they get done without a million alarms going off during your day, how to create goals for each habit, how to track your habits and how to work on new habits that you need to start.

(4) Plan Your Life – you will learn how to use a productivity planner each day, how to plan in advance, how to set your goals using the GPS goal planning system and how to schedule your goals in your calendar so you actually achieve them.

(5) Focus Your Mind – you will learn how to live your passion so you have the best chance of staying focused, how to train your brain to think and act like a Champion, and how to limit distractions so you can actually be productive.

(6) Know Your Self – you will learn how to discover your uniqueness from test you take, how to do a self-assessment so you can know your style without doing a test, how to create a personal profile document, how to apply all these insights to your productivity and how to keep learning about yourself.

(7) Renew Your Energy – you will learn how to generate physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energy so that you are able to show up in any life situation with more than enough energy to face whatever comes your way.

I am excited about this journey. I do need to say that I won’t be trying to pack the content of my book into these message – the book is available via Amazon.com in eBook or paperback formats using this link: http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK.

The book contains a link to a downloads folder where you can download the workbook and loads of resources that I have made available.

I can assure you that your purchase will be a worthwhile investment in your life and that your levels of productivity will skyrocket. How do I know this? I have passed these keys on to countless people over the years and have personally seen their lives change for the better.

I would like invite you on a journey to living the most productive life possible! In the coming weeks I am going to make regular posts that unpack the 7 Keys.

Watch out for the launch of a company that provides training, coaching and resources for being Productive @ Work and Productive @ Life. A domain has been registered (www.productivelife.co.za) and our website will soon be up and running. I am delighted to have a colleague, Stuart Fisher, partnering with me in this adventure.

If you have not gotten a copy of my book yet, then let me encourage you to act today – it will be a great step towards being uber-productive with your whole life. Payday should have arrived for you so consider making the investment in your future sooner rather than later.

You can get a copy on Amazon in either Paperback or eBook formats – and at the moment sales for each format are very close so clearly there is still a need for paper even though we live in a digital world. If you don’t want to wait for the shipping delay, or if you prefer reading digital books (like I do!!!) then grab the eBook and use the link at the end of the Introduction in the book to download the free Workbook which effectively means you have the best of both worlds – a digital version and a printed resource to do the exercises.

Be sure to check out all the extra templates and resources that we have uploaded and will keep adding to the online folder. You do need to buy a copy of the book to get access to that folder.

In the next post I will explore what I mean by living a productive life from the introduction to my book.