Productivity & Time Management: Beat Procrastination

This lecture opens the course by asking why some people accomplish in a month what others cannot achieve in a year, and frames the rest of the training around identifying and removing the real causes of low productivity and procrastination.

This lecture identifies the five most common productivity killers that quietly undermine focus and output at work, and gives a concrete action for removing or reducing each one, forming the foundation the rest of the course builds on.

This exercise turns the five productivity killers covered in the previous lecture into a concrete action checklist the learner can apply immediately.

This lecture explains why working on several tasks at once is a myth of productivity, citing research showing people who multitask are up to 40 percent less efficient than when focusing on a single task at a time.

This lecture presents Sophie Leroy's research on attention residue, the phenomenon where part of your focus stays stuck on a previous task even after switching to a new one, and explains why batching similar tasks together protects concentration.

This lecture explores why people procrastinate, reassuring learners that everyone delays certain tasks at some point, and unpacks the underlying reasons so procrastination can be addressed directly instead of through willpower alone.

This lecture debunks the very idea of time management, pointing out, echoing Jim Rohn, that nobody can actually speed up or slow down time, we can only manage the activities we choose to do with the 24 hours we all have.

This lecture gives a framework for dramatically increasing results without sacrificing health or burning out, aimed at anyone who wants to reach ambitious goals faster by working smarter rather than simply harder.

This lecture explains why many people struggle with productivity simply because they lack clear goals, and teaches the SMART goal-setting framework as the starting point for knowing exactly what to work on.

This exercise has the learner apply the SMART framework to define their own concrete goals, addressing the common productivity problem of not knowing what to actually work on.

This lecture adds three additional criteria a goal must meet beyond the SMART framework, giving a fuller checklist for setting objectives that actually drive productive action.

This lecture teaches the daily habit of rewriting your goals by hand, a simple practice for keeping objectives clear and top of mind so that daily activity stays aligned with what actually matters.

This exercise asks the learner to write down their own goals daily for a set period, applying the habit covered in the previous lecture.

This lecture teaches the Eisenhower Matrix, a framework for sorting tasks by urgency and importance, to help learners stop confusing what feels urgent with what actually moves their goals forward and to focus their energy accordingly.

This resource clarifies the distinction between urgent and important tasks, a common productivity trap where reacting to what feels urgent crowds out time for what truly matters.

This lecture introduces the concept of MPTs, the Most Profitable Tasks, explaining that every moment spent on one task is automatically a moment not spent on another, and that identifying your highest-value tasks is one of the most overlooked productivity levers.

This exercise has the learner calculate their own effective hourly rate as a concrete tool for deciding which tasks are truly worth their time and which should be delegated, automated or dropped.

This lecture covers three key concepts for eliminating low-value tasks from your calendar, including the 80/20 Pareto principle, identifying the 20 percent of tasks that generate 80 percent of results.

This lecture explains Parkinson's law, the tendency for work to expand to fill the time available for its completion, using the common experience of a task taking a week when given a week and a single day when given a single day, and shows how to use shorter deadlines deliberately to boost output.

This lecture draws a productivity lesson from Warren Buffett, one of the world's most successful investors, on ruthlessly prioritizing what matters and deliberately avoiding what does not.

This lecture explains the concept of mental load, the ongoing background weight of unfinished tasks and open loops in your head, building on the earlier discussion of attention residue, and its effect on focus and creativity.

This lecture presents the Zeigarnik effect, the psychological tendency to keep thinking about unfinished tasks, and shows how getting tasks out of your head and onto paper frees up mental space for focus and creativity.

This lecture pulls together the goals, priorities and hourly-rate concepts covered earlier into a concrete method for structuring a workday and actually executing the task list.

This exercise walks the learner through the three concrete steps for structuring their day to accomplish the maximum amount of meaningful work.

This lecture teaches the 'net time' technique, using otherwise wasted moments such as commuting or waiting in line as productive transition time, a favorite time management approach popularized by Tony Robbins.

This exercise asks the learner to identify their own recurring pockets of net time, such as commuting or waiting, and plan how to use them productively.

This lecture gives concrete techniques for eliminating interruptions at work, addressing the finding that employees, especially managers, are interrupted on average every few minutes during the day.

This lecture opens the section on meetings, one of the biggest productivity black holes in most organizations, citing statistics on how much of a manager's time is spent in meetings and how many of them are considered unnecessary, and encourages surrounding yourself with colleagues who share the same productivity mindset.

This lecture gives concrete rules for running effective meetings: no agenda, no meeting, starting on time regardless of who is missing, banning laptops and phones unless necessary, challenging default meeting length, and always asking whether the meeting or your presence in it is truly necessary.

This lecture shares practical techniques for managing colleagues who dominate conversations and meetings, from redirecting questions back to the topic to explicitly naming the time remaining and the items still to cover.

This lecture presents stand-up meetings, a technique borrowed from Agile project management, and the research behind it showing that standing meetings keep participants more engaged, cut down on side distractions like phones, and run on average 34 percent shorter than seated meetings.

This lecture applies the single-tasking principle to email, explaining why constantly checking messages between other tasks destroys focus, and gives a concrete system: dedicated email time slots, reading direct-recipient messages first, organizing folders by project or client, and aiming for zero unread emails at the end of each session.

This exercise has the learner block two dedicated time slots in their calendar for handling email over the next five days and apply the zero-inbox method covered in the previous lecture.

This lecture gives two real-world strategies for getting back on top of an overflowing inbox: proactively walking over to frequent senders to resolve requests in person, and blocking specific email-free days with an out-of-office message that resets the inbox to zero.

This lecture teaches the '3 Qs' technique for writing emails that pre-answer likely follow-up questions, including proposing multiple options up front and setting a response deadline after which a decision is assumed, to eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth exchanges.

This lecture shares three additional email productivity techniques: saving templates for recurring responses, always reading the most recent message in a thread before replying, and flagging emails with color codes to organize follow-up.

This closing lecture makes a critical career distinction between simply executing tasks and actually delivering the results your role is paid for, and gives concrete questions to ask a manager to clarify exactly what results matter most, so that effort and time get focused on what genuinely advances the business and your career.