Zack Arnold

Let's create things that matter. Together.

Task Management and Establishing Rituals

About Episode

“There just aren’t enough hours in the day” is no longer an excuse once you become “Asian Efficient.” In this episode I speak with returning guest Zack Sexton of Asian Efficiency about AE’s new ‘Rituals’ program, and we also do a deep dive into task management with my new favorite program on the planet – OmniFocus – and their product OmniFocus Premium Posts.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I am very excited today to be back on the show with my productivity brother from another mother, mr. Zack Sexton from Asian Efficiency. So, how are you today, sir? I

Zack Sexton: Am doing very well, Zack. Happy to be related to you in the productivity field.

Zack Arnold: Exactly. Yes. So on this show, especially recently, I’ve done a lot of talks about nutrition and micronutrients, and had a conversation with Joe Desenna about building grit and determination. But my other love is productivity and efficiency, and trying to find ways to automate certain things and be able to get more done. Because with the amount of things that I’m in the middle of, all of which are my fault and my doing, so I can’t complain. I have very little room for error, and if I’m going to keep all of these plates spinning simultaneously, I have to be organized and I have to build habits and rituals. So, in the last show, and I’ll put a link to the show notes. I believe it was episode 23. So, fitnessimpost.com/23. You and I just kind of did a cursory overview of productivity. We talked a good bit about managing your email, a little bit about morning rituals. But today, I want to do what is basically stealing your term. I want to do a deep dive into the world of how to establish rituals and better ways to manage tasks. So we’re going to go into those two topics, and I want to start with this new program that you guys are developing about rituals because it’s something that I’m really, really interested in. So, kind of tell me where you guys are in the phase of that process because I know that you’re very close to a wide release, and let’s just jump right in and talk about how do we build habits and rituals when it’s so hard to become unstuck of the way that we do things.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, well, I I think you put it well when you’re talking about how many different projects you have. Your editor on high profile TVs. You’ve got your fitness and post podcast as well as your coaching groups. You’ve got your documentary go far going. So you you’re pushing a lot of different balls forward at a lot of different times, and doing all that can be difficult to say the least. And what we found is that if you set up certain habits, certain rituals that you have in your life, that taking action can actually be easier. So one example from I think it was a Duke study a couple years back said that 40-5% of the things that we do every day are unconscious. We just do them. So you, whatever you do when you wake up in the morning, you’ve probably done a number of times before. When you put on your shoes, you probably put on a certain shoe first, either the left or the right, and you just don’t think about these things. The reason you don’t think about these things is it would be completely overwhelming if you had to consciously make these decisions from day to day to day. So we figured one way to increase your productivity is to intentionally set these unconscious behaviors in things that you want to get out of your life. So we talked about a little bit about a morning routine on the last time I was on, but there’s other routines you can have. You can have evening routines. You can have a meditation practice. You can have a journaling practice, and all these things will, at least the ones that I just described, will give you a little bit more self awareness and also allow you to to do things that benefit yourself to to keep you healthy, exercise is another ritual that we talk about, and not be having to make conscious decisions about it every time. You did a really good job in your group, so I was able to test out your your coaching group really early on. And one thing you do is you start small, so you started with these really small little habits that you wanted your group members to begin to do. One of them was just putting on their workout clothes and going to their gym. And once that became habituated, once that became unconscious and unthinking, you’re like, “Oh, all right. Well, now go into the gym and do a little bit of cardio. And now you talk about your stool of health, which is mental and physical as well as nutritional, and so you started small, and then you’re basically trying to build up these these different areas of your life, these three areas of your life that will help you live a healthier life and a less stressful life and a and a more energetic life where you’re kind of doing what you want to do, so you built them up small, so you basically automate them, and that’s what our course rituals, which we’ve had a a beta launch recently. So there’s a few 100 people in the course now. We’re working with them one on one. There’s 100 people where Tan, Aaron, and myself will actually be personally coaching. That was the benefit of getting in early, and then we’re going to be re-releasing the course sometime, sometime later this year, maybe in April or May, to the wider public, and so we could talk about that. I think Tan agreed to give you one of the courses for free, but we want to make people work for it. So, what do you want your listeners who want this type of course for free to? My thought was write you some dang reviews because this podcast is awesome. I listen to it every week and get a lot out of it, and you don’t have nearly enough ratings and reviews.

Zack Arnold: Well, I I certainly am not going to argue with you there, and I think my my audience, anybody that’s been a long time listener, knows how long I’ve been on my knees begging and pleading because I am every single review that I get and every rating I get is always five stars, and people seem to really love the show. But iTunes hasn’t found me yet, and the only way that iTunes can find me with their fancy algorithms is if they know that people are listening and downloading, subscribing, and writing reviews. So yes, if I think that sounds like a great idea, and I swear to God, I didn’t put them up to this. I just heard about it now for the first time. So, but yeah, if there’s anything on the planet that I want for Christmas this year, Santa, I want people to find this podcast because I know it’s helping a lot of people, and I want to make sure it finds more of them.

Zack Sexton: Sounds good. So that’s that’s a brief meandering introduction to rituals. It’s a it’s something we’re really excited about. This is something that the Asian Efficiency Team we’ve been doing for a long time, and we realize how big of impact it can make in your life. Also, the thing about rituals too is they’re sometimes they’re small; they don’t have to be really big. So my journaling habit takes me about five minutes a day, but over the long term, I’m able to record basically the history of my life and intentionally ask myself questions to move myself in a different direction. And over time, these really compound to move your life in a in a positive direction. So rituals aren’t necessarily things like exercise that are are quick wins. You don’t go to the gym once and you’re buff. You need to keep going to the gym, but if you’re having a hard time doing that, there is a process which you know actually a good deal about to incrementally growing and then sustaining habits for a long time.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s something that I just personally have looked into for years. Not even just for my groups; it’s just been a kind of a passion of mine is figuring out how do I just automate my brain because I learned about this term a few years ago called decision fatigue. I’d never heard of anything like that. I was just kind of blindly going through life and doing my job and being really busy and having kids and juggling everything. And then this concept of decision fatigue hit me, and I was like, “Oh my god, that makes so much sense. I’m spending so much time during the day thinking, “What am I supposed to be doing right now? and then sitting and figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing. And all right, well, if I want to exercise, I really need to use my willpower. What am I going to do tonight, right? And then once I started to learn how to automate a lot of my decisions, and I don’t want people to think that this means living life as a zombie. It’s actually totally the opposite because as you start to automate certain behaviors, you have so much more room to be yourself and have more energy and get more things done that you want to do. So it’s the opposite of just all right, time to make the donuts. And I just dated myself because you probably don’t even know that reference. Most people that are you know five years younger than me and less, I do the time to make the donuts joke, and they just stare at me, and I’m like, “Come on, seriously! It was a famous Dunkin’ Donuts commercial from the ’80s. I’ll even link to it in the show notes to prove that I’m not crazy. But anyway, I

Zack Sexton: Got your caveman reference. Yes, you knew the cave.

Zack Arnold: I’m happy about the caveman reference. That makes me feel better because I did that at the office, and again, I got the blank stares, and I’m like, “I hate all of you. But anyway, what what I’ve really learned is that if I take certain things that I just don’t need to be spending time on, and I automate them, and it’s like you said, it’s really small, simple things. Then I have so much more room to get things done that I want to do. And like a perfect example would be that I’m I’m now integrating this app called Coach Me, which I’ve talked about in the past, it was formerly named Lyft. It’s now something I’ve integrated into the groups, and a really small, simple thing that I do every morning is called tracking my heart rate variability. And I also have a podcast about this. Basically, I just wake up in the morning, I put a heart rate strap on, and for three minutes, I measure my heart rate variability just to make sure that my nervous system is in good shape, and to try and do that every single morning for like the first month, I really had to think about it. I had to stop myself and say, “Oh shoot, I forgot to measure my heart rate variability. But with the Coach Me app, I was setting reminders so I get a little ding, and then as time went on, I would have to think about it less and less, and now I don’t think about it. Now what happens is if I haven’t done it, then I feel weird. Then something clicks in my brain. I’m like, wait a second, what am I missing? What? Oh crap! I didn’t do the heart rate variability. So talk to me about what’s actually happening with my brain, where all of a sudden I’m switching from I have to use willpower to do something to now literally feeling off like I’m missing something if I don’t do it because I’m I’m sure that you guys have integrated some of the science behind habit forming and rituals. So how do I make that switch? Because that’s the big thing that everybody always asks me is how do I make it a habit? I don’t. I’m just spending so much time trying to push myself to do something and I don’t want to have to think about it. And I know that’s the heart of what you guys. Are trying to do

Zack Sexton: Yeah, so you’re right, and you did a few things correctly, which is backed by science. You might not have known it, or maybe you did, but there’s this great book out there called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and he talks about really the three parts of habit formation. And the first part, which is what you did with the coach me is the trigger. So the trigger is a reminder or a cue or the you know the first falling domino you can think of it for your routine, and the routine is the thing that you want to do. So part of your morning routine is to check your heart rate variability. So you’ve got the trigger, which is your coach.me, and then you have your routine, and the last part of the step to reinforce everything is a reward. So for you, maybe a reward, and and actually, weirdly enough, this is a very big reward for me, is checking your habit off the tracker. You seeing how many days you got in a row. You you feel completed when you check that off, and so that craving that that reward reinforces the habit, and eventually you get to the point where that action is deeply ingrained in your brain at a place called the basal ganglia, and these are the areas where it’s very low energy. You don’t have to think about it, but you can do it. What it does is it hits the the trigger or the the cue or the reminder in rituals. We call it the marker, and then you go through the process, and then all of a sudden you’re at the other end, and you’re like, “Did I get the reward? So a common example that you can that people might be able to relate to is driving to work? Sometimes you pull out of the driveway and all of a sudden you’re at work. You don’t even remember one turn that you made. You just knew how to get there. So the trigger was pulling out of your driveway. The routine was all the turns and stops and goes that you it takes to get to work, and then the reward is oh I’m at work now and you don’t even don’t even have to think about it, so the idea is to get it into that part of the brain a little bit more quickly, or just a little bit more effectively. So one one way to make it a habit or something that you don’t have to think about is just repetition, and the idea you you said you you possibly hinted at something people might have heard before, which is about after a month I didn’t have to think about it anymore. So it’s just something that I did, and there was a very popular myth out there that it takes 21 days before a habit’s formed, and you know maybe that’s not a bad rule of thumb, but there was a little bit more research done on it recently. In 2009 Oxford University did a study on it, and they found that that’s not the case. In fact, depending on the person and the difficulty of the task and the circumstances that they’re in, it could be anywhere from 18 to 226 days. The average being 66 days. So people people think that oh you know if I can just get it done for a month it’ll be locked and loaded. That’s not necessarily the case. And the thing that we teach in our rituals course is that you really probably shouldn’t be thinking about number of days before it’s automated. You should be thinking about number of repetitions. So you did your heart rate variability reps 20 times, 30 times. It maybe because you have are a little bit more prone to picking up good habits because you’ve picked up so many recently. Maybe you’ve set yourself up in a situation. You set your environment up to be really easy to check your HRV. All of these things that you did made it so it was automatic, and we teach all those all those different parts in the course.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s a really good point that you just brought up about setting up your environment, because like you said, I created triggers around me, so I almost had to go out of my way to not do it. Because, for example, I used to always keep my heart rate strap in the room where I would exercise because that’s the place that I would use it. And I thought to myself, the reason that I’m not checking my heart rate variability in the morning is because my daughter is waking up at 6 a.m. screaming, “Mommy, mommy, mommy! And the last thing I want to do is go upstairs to my exercise room and find my heart rate monitor and strap it on. So I said, “I need to automate this and make it easier, so I put it right next to my bed. So as soon as I either wake up or I’m woken up in the morning, and I will admit that having to wake up with a three-year-old at six in the morning sometimes precludes me from hitting my goal every single day. But I get to it for the most part. But having the heart rate monitor on my nightstand right there when I wake up made all the difference in the world and made it that much easier. And another example, actually, that’s like another one of these very real world practical things where I use the strategy. And this is a really weird one, but I think there’s I’m sure that there are people that will be able to relate to this in some way. But to get into my building where I work on Empire, you need a security path. Like a little magnetic key card, and they have it on a little string with a little clip that you put on your belt. And what was happening to me is, I was getting home at night. I was forgetting to take my badge off, and I would have it still clipped my belt. I would wake up in the morning, change my clothes, go to work, and say, “Oh crap, my security badge is still on my belt at home. And I would forget it all the time, and I was driving the security guards at this place crazy because I was always getting temporary badges or having them help me get on the elevator so I could get up to my office. And I said, I need to stop saying to myself, I have to remember, I have to remember, I have to remember. And it was after the initial conversation that you and I had, where you had mentioned, well, hey, if you if you want to try and watch TV less, don’t use willpower. Just make the remote harder to find. And I’m like, that’s genius. So what I said is, I need a trigger to remind me. And there’s this like little thing next to my visor on my car that when you flip it down, there’s this little compartment, and you can’t really drive with a compartment open because it kind of blocks your field of vision. So I said, what if I leave that open when I take my badge out in the morning, and then when I get in the car at night, I can’t close that door until I put my badge in it, and that completely changed everything. And from that day on, I never forgot to take my badge off and leave it on the the bathroom counter in the morning again because I said I’m not going to close this door and I’m going to create a trigger. So when I’m a zombie at 11:30 p.m. at night after a 14-hour day, I get in my car, I see the door still open, I take my badge off, I put the badge in the little compartment, and I’m done. And I didn’t forget my badge anymore because I set triggers and I automated the system.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, so you’re completely not relying on your willpower or your memory or anything like that. I really like that. I actually just set up a one of the rituals I have is reviewing my goals every day, and I’ve been pretty spotty with this. I’d gotten better, but you know, still at least once a week I miss the review of the goals. So there’s a site called If Then Then Then That. So I F T T T I don’t know if I said enough Ts. Three ts.com

Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, I’ll put a link to it. I I know the site. I haven’t used it, but I know the site, so we can put a link

Zack Sexton: To it. Yeah, and so I set up at 1o’clock Send this. Send me this text, and I use text rather than email because I’m a little bit more prone to check a text than I am to see an email. Sometimes I go a couple days without checking my email. So then all I have to do is click on it, and it’s a link to my Evernote where I have all my goals and and I can review them automatically. So I just started it a couple days ago, but I haven’t missed one since. So I I think the more that you can automate or really just put things in front of the door. One example could just be putting your your gym bag right in front of your door at the evening, which would be both your marker and then also a change to your environment because it’s it’s not as difficult. You’re not like waking up in a haze in the morning looking for your socks and your shoes. It’s just it’s all set up and and all ready for you.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s actually something that I use with my wife because we rarely see each other awake during the week because our schedules are kind of the opposite. Where she leaves for work at 530 or six in the morning, and then she gets home at three in the afternoon, and I wake up with the kids because she’s gone. And so we we really don’t see each other. But if I have to take something to my daughter’s school with her, it used to be she would send me an email. I would have to remember it, I would have to, you know, again use willpower and be like, “Oh, what am I supposed to remember to do today? What am I supposed to remember? Right? And I told her, I said, “You know what? From now on, whatever it is that you need, just put it in front of the front door, so I cannot leave unless I’ve taken care of that thing. And I never remember what she asked me, which drives her crazy. But she’ll ask me to do something or take something, and I won’t remember that I have to do it. But I literally can’t get out the front door to my car until I’ve done that thing because I have that trigger in front of me.

Zack Sexton: Oh, absolutely.

Zack Arnold: So, how do I do a specific ritual in the morning every single day? What are the general steps that you can take me through? And I’m what What would a good morning ritual be to use as an example that people say this is what I want to do more of.

Zack Sexton: Yeah. Well, I can give a really general one. So one thing that’s always great to do in the morning, and I hope and I think you would agree, is to hydrate. You’ve spent the last seven to eight hours unconscious. If you’re like me, you breathe out of your mouth and probably lose a lot to evaporation. So you’re dehydrated. So the first thing you can do to start to wake your body up is to hydrate yourself. One way to make that easier is to actually set a water bottle or a glass of water next to your bed stand. I specifically use lemon water. I used to actually squeeze it myself the night before. Then I found this great product, which I will link to you because I can’t remember the name, which is some natural lemon juice that I just add to a water bottle. Then I then I set it next to my bed. The reason for the lemon is because it vitamin C helps helps your immune system a little bit, and there’s also some anti-inflammatory properties for it, and it also manages to scrub your gut out. As well, so that’s perfect to do in the morning because you haven’t had anything to eat yet. So, drinking water, maybe lemon water, might be a good first step. The second step that Tan at Asian Efficiency actually does, and started to get me in the habit of it as well, is going to the bathroom and doing your thing. If you need to do that, I usually do. I think a lot of people usually do, and then washing your face. So just splashing cold water on your face to again to get that process going, to get you waking up, to get you from, man, I’m a zombie. To hey, you know I’m feeling all right. Another one that is also a newer ritual for myself, but one that other people on the team, Tan as well, has done for quite a while is stretching, and so doing a little bit of a stretching routine. I usually just do a sun salutation. I usually do something also a stretch that I learned from the sitting solution as one that gets my my groin as well as my. There’s no way I could describe it, but it’s a really good one. Is it is it the womb

Zack Arnold: Squat?

Zack Sexton: No, so maybe so. I sit down all the way, and I take my right hand and grab my left ankle, and then put my left hand in the air. Oh yeah, yeah. Sky

Zack Arnold: Reaches. Yep.

Zack Sexton: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really good. I really like because it gets your groin. I mean, it just gets so many different areas. So I’ve gotten in the habit of doing that. If I had done a hard workout the day before. Maybe do a little foam rolling or lacrosse ball rolling to to get some get some things loosened, loosen up there. So we’ve got water. You know, just waking yourself up, splashing water on your face, and doing a little bit of stretching. Another one that a lot of people find useful to do in the morning, and I would actually encourage you if this is something you’re interested in doing, that the morning is one of the best times to do it is meditation practice. So there’s a lot of things that you can do. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It could be three minutes. It could be one minute. You don’t need any special apps. You don’t need all you need to do is you can count your breath. You can find a mantra that works for you, and just repeat that in your head. But clearing your mind and noticing the things, all the distractions that might be coming in and coming out. Other types of meditation are out there are called loving kindness meditations. One that’s currently out, and I think might be wrapping up as the as this podcast goes live, is a Deepak and Oprah meditation. My girlfriend and I are listening to that right now. We’re a few days into that. That’s nice. It’ll set the tone. It’s really easy if you are new to meditation. It’ll be very guided. There’ll be music that goes along with it. There’s also an app called Headspace that will also give you a little bit more guided meditation to that. So that could be something that you you do towards the end to to round things off. Another one could be journaling. That’s kind of it. I would I would limit it at first too. Yeah. We talked about in your group in your group coaching you have a really small incremental step. So I would definitely start with just drinking some water and then maybe move to drinking water, splashing some water on your face, and then maybe add some some of the stretching. So those are some examples of a a morning routine that you can get into. Right.

Zack Arnold: Okay. So before we move forwards, I just have to to throw this in. If for any reason on the planet that either Deepak Chopra or Oprah Winfrey are listening, if you’re looking for a name for your meditation program, you should really call it Chopra and Oprah. I think that would be awesome. Really horrible joke, but it just popped in my head. I just I love it when I come up with awful, awful jokes. So yeah, Chopra and Oprah. But anyway, hold

Zack Sexton: Back.

Zack Arnold: So looking back on those habits, I agree with all of them. I practice most of them actually. To if people really want to take the drinking water habit in the morning to another level, which I have done, is I have this this product called Nutrients, which is this two a day powdered multivitamin, and I take that right in the way in the morning with 12 ounces of water, one packet of that, and a slice of lemon as well, for the same reasons that you said, and that just literally, it’s just one of those force multipliers that changes the entire course of my day as far as whether or not I’m level-headed, whether or not I’m anxious, because I know I’m hitting all my micronutrient levels. And I’ll link to the show notes because I did a full two-part super deep dive into what micronutrients are and how they work. So I’ll put links to both of those shows. So that’s something that I do in the morning as well, but I also agree and will say to people, if you’re like, “Oh, I love all these morning rituals. I’m going to start all of them tomorrow. It’s kind of a house of cards, and it crumbles if you haven’t built the foundation first. So now that we’ve established all these great morning rituals, let’s pick one because it’s one thing to say, “Oh, well, yeah, waking up in the morning and doing this, that, or the other thing-that’s great. But if I want to use your steps, what do I actually do to now automate this process so I don’t even have to think about it anymore? So let’s pick just the the simple one. I don’t want to pick the water one because that one might almost be too simple. Let’s say the 1010 minute morning stretching routine because that’s another routine I’ve set up where as soon as I get to my office before I jump. And start editing for the day. I do a 10-minute stretching routine, and that was not as easy to set up or do. So, what are the steps that I need if I want to automate a behavior like that?

Zack Sexton: All right. Well, the first step would be to have some sort of trigger. It can be just waking up, or it could be a little alarm on your phone, or you know, we just talked about if, then, then that. You can set a trigger to remind you, say, “Hey, do your morning ritual. You know, just something to set the things in motion that you are wanting to get up to. The second is to actually take the time to write the routine down, and it may seem, you know, overly like you know I know what I want to do. I don’t need to write this down, but it actually is really important. And I’ve been doing my morning ritual, which does include taking supplements for a number of months now, and I still have a written documentation of all of the routines and actually the why behind them. Because sometimes if you don’t know why you’re doing something, there’s no real motivation there. You forget the lemon example. I actually did forget why I I found lemons important, and then I went back to my written routine, which I just had in Evernote. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s why there was all these reasons why it’s really important for me personally to have lemons in the morning. Same with you with stretching. Maybe you wanna you wanna be more limber, but then maybe you could go on a deeper why and be like, “Well, why do I want to be more limber? Well, I want to be able to pick up my kids and and go go there. So write down the list of of things you want to do in the morning. Just write it out. Write the whys, and then give yourself some sort of reward at the end. So whether it be you know a great cup of coffee, a bulletproof coffee that you you get to enjoy, or just the satisfaction of checking it off a habit tracker, like Habit RPG is the one I use. Use Coach Me. There’s there’s a lot of good ones. If you just go to the App Store, the Google Store, or the iTunes Store, you can find tons of tracker apps out there that will allow you to do that. And then also take the time to write down all of the necessary tools, and so tools that you might need are your strap, you know, your HRV strap, supplements you might need. You might need your phone if you’re going to listen to a guided meditation. So take the time to write down and list all of the tools that you need, so you don’t end up missing those. Because a lot of times, you’ll you’ll be trying to do your morning ritual, and either you won’t remember them because you haven’t written them all down and you’re groggy, or you won’t have all the tools necessary. So that’s our our suggestion for starting any sort of ritual. And the difference between rituals and habits is that rituals we you can start with a longer list of routines. Like I said, it was it’s kind of three to four parts, depending if you include tools in your in your parts. So you can start with a longer list than just building one habit at a time. So you don’t need to just say, okay, water, okay, splash face, okay, you know I’m gonna add these. And like I said, you know if it’s 21 days, then it’s 21 days. If maybe it’s 66 days, who knows what the number is before it becomes automated? But it’ll take a really long time to get a a large a morning routine of 6789, things that you’d like to do every morning. Like a lot of people want to exercise every morning. A lot of people want to meditate. A lot of people want to journal. A lot of people want to get hydrated and take their supplements. But if you waited for all those to become habits individually, it would take years to getting these things done. And that’s why the the process of writing them all down and actually going through them step by step the same way you can habitualize a whole group of actions at one time, and eventually that whole group will be automated, and that’ll be something that you don’t have to think about.

Zack Sexton: You’ll feel weird if you don’t do all of the different steps. So that’s how I’d suggest breaking it down and doing the the things in the morning. Is make sure you have the the trigger or the marker. Write down your routines and why. Go ahead and give yourself a little bit of reward, especially at the beginning. You may think things like exercise have intrinsic rewards of endorphins and feeling better and having more energy, and they do. But early on, you should give yourself an additional reward on top of that until it becomes automated, because the only way you’re going to keep going coming back for more is if you are if you have some sort of craving that makes you want to do that. Eventually, the endorphins will be the the only craving you need. However, at the beginning, maybe a healthy I don’t know Shakeology might be the motivation that you need to do.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I was just going to step in and say, “Don’t make your reward Girl Scout cookies, because that’s that’s not going to help with you reaching your goals and establishing good habits. But somebody could construe it as, “Oh, I need a reward, and you know, I need to you know do the Pavlov’s dog effect. So every time I exercise, I’m going to have half a pack of Girl Scout cookies. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. And

Zack Sexton: Reward is a very open. I use that term. Really loosely, like for me, my rewards are for many of the rituals that I have in my life are literally just checking checking things off my habit tracker, which is weird. But the habit tracker I use, Habit RPG, which I’m sure we can add to the show notes, has little missions and quests. And the more the better I am about my rituals, the better I do on the quests, and the more gold and gear and other weird stuff I get. So that’s my intrinsic reward. And I’m also teamed up with my girlfriend on this role-playing game, so I know if I don’t do it, I hurt her character as well. So there’s a little bit of a social element to it as well. So reward could be as simple as is a tracker, but it can be a little bit bigger. And yeah, you probably don’t want to make it half a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies, but something that you enjoy doing. Maybe it’s just going for a walk, or taking a little bit of time out to yourself, or watching a YouTube clip. Just whatever will motivate you. Whatever is something that you can look forward to personally, use that. And if it’s not working for you, just keep playing around with different healthy rewards that you can give yourself until you find one that really motivates you.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think the reward that I really want to hit on, and I’m glad that you said this, is the check mark and checking something off because there’s actual science that proves that when you complete a task or an item, that you get a dopamine hit to the brain, and completing that task can become addictive. And this is the perfect segue to the second part of the show, which is talking about how to get more things done. And part of that is developing rituals to automate many things that you don’t need to think about. But the other part of that is organizing your task management system. And I want to talk about OmniFocus. OmniFocus is a program that helps you manage your daily tasks and and organize your projects and uses the the GTD, the Getting Things Done methodology. And this is something that you had kind of introduced to me when we’d first started chatting, and you had said to me on our first podcast, “You’re like, yeah, you really need to get into OmniFocus” because at the time I was using an app called Things, which is a good app and it’s helpful in its own way for developing lists and having categories. But then I decided to make the jump, and I got OmniFocus, and I opened the program, and I said, “I have no idea what this thing does, and I have no idea how it’s organized. I don’t understand these words. It says perspectives. It says context. Like it’s. It was very robust. You look at things, and it’s like a glorified grocery list where you can make categories, and you have check boxes, and you can set reminders. All of which is great, but it was intuitive. I didn’t need a tutorial on how do I use things. But OmniFocus, like there are so many different directions you can go with it, but thankfully, you guys have this program called OmniFocus Premium Posts, and I cannot emphasize enough to people: this literally changed my life learning how to change the way that I manage tasks. And like you said at the beginning, I have dug such a ridiculous hole of so many things that I have going on, and I’m spinning so many plates, and I don’t like to fall through. I don’t like to say that I’m going to do something to somebody and then I can’t follow through on it, and I basically drop the ball, so to speak. And the reason that all of the plates are still spinning is because of OmniFocus, but not just because of the app. It’s because how you guys trained me to use the app, and the end result of that is the reward of hitting the check marks, and that’s how I get so many things done and so efficiently. So let’s talk a little bit about OmniFocus and the Asian Efficiency product, OmniFocus Premium Posts.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, so like you said, OmniFocus is a task manager. It’s Mac only, so if you don’t have any Mac products, you’re not able to use it. But if you do, it’s on the iPad, the iPhone, as well as your your laptop, and it all syncs up through this service they have called OmniSync. So if you check something off on your iPad, it’ll show up on your iPhone and your desktop computer instantaneously. The great thing about OmniFocus is also the terrible thing about OmniFocus is that it’s really customizable. You can you can set up different notifications, different projects, different groups, different folders in all kinds of different ways, and that’s what overwhelms a lot of people. So a few years ago, Tan and Aaron had been working with OmniFocus for for years, and they decided to come up with a an ebook that was called OmniFocus, and I think it was called actually OmniFocus Premium Post, and they wrote basically the definitive guide that became really popular. It was one of the most popular things on Asian efficiency site is this OmniFocus premium post. So they were selling those for years, and then eventually there was an upgrade just last year when I joined the team. So I was able to help them reboot their OmniFocus training. Although this time around we decided to take it up a notch, and instead of just having it be an ebook that you would. Download and you could, you know, look at Kindle. We made it a full-on course with, I think there’s 40 or so videos in there. It also comes with free support. So if you ever have any specific questions, you could just email us at support@asianeficiency.com and we we get right back to you with with any questions that you may have. But we systematize it. We basically say, hey, you know what? We’ve been using this app for for years, and we found the best way to organize it is X, Y, and Z. And so here’s how you organize it with X, Y, and Z. The best way to do things from day to day is to do this, this, and that. And here’s how you do this, this, and that. And people really seem to take to it, it’s just the fact that we one show them all the different functions of the tools and that that they might not have seen otherwise because a lot of them are kind of hidden, unfortunately. So we show them a lot of the tools that they might not know that OmniFocus offers, but also we just give them a system to where all right, I’ve got so many things to do. I need to get them off my brain, and the way you get them off the brain is by capturing them. And where I’m going to capture everything in my life is in OmniFocus, and then I’m going to go back through OmniFocus and organize that into different little departments. So your departments would be Fitness and Post, as well as Empire, as well as maybe the new job that you’re you’re about to be getting, as well as Spartan Race, so you can have you can organize it all in a different way, and then review all of the different things that you have in your life once a week. It’s got a really nice review function, and then from day to day you can go through all of those lists that you have in your life, prioritize which ones need to get done, put those on your list, and just like you said, just check them off one by one, only focusing in on one thing at a time because multitasking does not work. You actually the only thing your brain can do is switch task really quickly, and that has bigger willpower draining effects as well as you’re not as able to focus as intently on the project at hand.

Zack Sexton: So it really allows people that have a lot, a lot on their plate to funnel all of that stuff, get it out of their brain and into a trusted system, and then it allows you to look through that trusted system and focus in on the three or four or five things that you you are able to get done that day, considering your your time, your attention, your energy, other meetings that you might have throughout the day, and not feel bad about all the rest, and not let things drop through the cracks, and review things, and realize that hey, you know, I don’t have time for this, so I’ve either got to drop it, or delegate it, or automate it, or push it back in the future. But allows you to basically be one of those guys or girls that people trust. They’re like, oh well, if I tell Zack to do something, he’ll follow through, and if he’s not able to follow through, he’ll he actually knows that he doesn’t have the time or the energy to do it, so he’ll let me know right then and there, or maybe in a in a day or two, or he’ll he’ll reschedule it so we can actually get something done, and that feeling is is huge, and so if you’re on the you know you you don’t have a lot to do, and you’ve only got one or two projects going on in your life. OmniFocus is likely overkill for you. You probably don’t need all the functions for it. But if you’re like somebody like yourself that has a lot of pans on the fire, then OmniFocus is an amazing solution, and it’s basically a lifesaver for a lot of really busy people out there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, I literally cannot emphasize enough, and I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but this has completely transformed the way that I do things, the amount that I’m able to get done. Because people ask me all the time, like, how in the world are you working on this giant TV show, working 6070, hours a week, and you record a podcast, and you’re you know putting together distribution for your documentary film and going to festivals and the really really simple answer is OmniFocus and I eat well and I try to stay active so I have the energy to get through all of my tasks but I literally would not be able to organize it without OmniFocus and I I’ll give you guys a free plug in addition to the free plug I’m already giving you for the product, but you have some really good podcasts. You have the the productivity show, and you have some good podcasts that kind of give a cursory overview of exactly what OmniFocus is, what contexts mean, what perspectives mean, what some good strategies are to use it. So I don’t want the rest of today’s show to be about well, how does OmniFocus work? Because that’s what your product does. That’s what your podcasts do. But what I want to talk about is kind of the end result and what OmniFocus did for me. Like some of the things that it changed for me. The first one, which is something that you alluded to, was when people ask me to do something, they just trust that it’s going to get done. But what that is, of course, first of all, very true because people know that they like working with me or asking me to do things because I will follow through. But what I’ve really learned how to do is tell them when I can follow through and how much they can count on me. Because one of my downfalls is that I have a very hard time with the word no. When somebody asks me for something, my inclination is well, always, yeah, of course, I’d love to help out, and then I. Myself in these holes where I’m like, oh my god, I don’t know how I’m going to get this done for them. I have this that I’m doing. I’m in the middle of that. I already promised this person that thing, and now I’m able to respond much more clearly and say, oh, you know what? I’d love to help you out with that, but you need to understand if you want my help, I’m not going to be able to give it to you until two weeks from now, and I’m only going to have this period of time where I’m going to be able to give you my full and complete focus. And if that’s if you need more than that, unfortunately, I’m going to have to decline and say no. And I was never able to do that before because I wasn’t organized enough to understand what was going on in my life. And that’s what OmniFocus did for me. And the other thing that it did is it really showed me the breakdown of everything that I’m involved with, which is, I’m, it’s terribly overwhelming. Like I’m looking right now at all of my projects, and I have 26 different projects in four different categories. So I’m definitely not somebody where OmniFocus is overkill. If anything, I’m killing OmniFocus. But I have a multitude of things, and first of all, what this tells me is I need to do something about the amount of things I’m involved with, but what I love about it more than anything else is the ability to focus on certain things. So there’s literally a focus button where I can have all of my tasks in front of me, all of my to-do list, all of my projects, and just say, “Holy crap! I’m never going to get any of this done the rest of my life, I give up. Right, that’s what most people do when they look at their to-do list and they just throw their hands up and say, “I’m just done. There’s just no way I can do this. But once you learn how to focus and say, “You know what?

Zack Arnold: Right now, I am just going to work on this one project, and you hit a button, and all of your other tasks literally disappear, and that’s it. So you look at your task management list. You look at what needs to be done this day, what needs to be done next week, what’s flagged, what’s on your calendar. Everything else disappears, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, well, I can manage this. This isn’t that hard. I just need to send this person an email, and I need to post this on my website, and I need to start writing this blog post. But that’s not so hard. I can do that in a couple hours, and then you do it, and then you hit the unfocus button, and then everything else is in front of you. But if you use the OmniFocus premium posts method to figure out how to organize and use the system properly and customize it, you never ever feel overwhelmed because it’s literally like having a personal assistant where I wake up in the morning and it’s like, “Good morning, mr. Arnold. Here are the things you need to do, and it doesn’t actually do that, but that’s kind of what it is. You just go on your phone. It’s like, all right, these are the things I need to care about right now. I don’t need to worry about the 700 other tasks that I’ve input into this program because I know they’re not important. And what I really found is so beneficial is, and this comes from the Getting Things Done method, which was introduced to me by you, so thank you again for that. But it’s the idea that the brain cannot hold and memorize information; it’s just not capable of keeping all that information inside. And you stress out, and I would be so stressed because it’s like I have to remember to do this. I have to remember to email this person. I have to remember that I need to output this, and I need to send it to the client. I have to remember that this person asked for that thing, and I have to deliver it to them, and the system just crumbles. But now I don’t remember anything. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do today. That is complete literal truth. That after I get off this podcast, I have no clue what I’m doing today. But I open OmniFocus. I hit the forecast button. It shows me what I have marked with due dates for today, and I say, “Oh, all right. Well, here’s what I need to do today. And if I run out of things to do, I look at the things that I have flagged, knowing that these are the priorities. If I have more time, then I go to my flag tasks and I do the flag tasks. And all of these are things that I wouldn’t know anything about if I didn’t go through that training program, which is really, really robust, but it’s not intimidating because you guys designed it for both the beginner and the expert, which is really really hard to do. But I had never used OmniFocus in my life. I didn’t know anything about the getting things done, the GTD methodology, and I was able to approach this and start from the very beginning and kind of get a cursory overview of what all this meant, but now that I’ve been doing it for several months and it’s making a huge difference, I can still go back because you break it down between beginners and power users, and you can just jump right in and be like, “Oh, there’s this cool feature, and there’s this little pull down, and you can use this six-stroke cocky, and you can do this. And I’m like, “the the training just kind of never ends, so it’s there’s just so many things that that it can open up for people. You just have to be willing to put in the investment of time for a few days to learn the method. But then when you look at it over the course of the long haul, the amount of time you save is just exponential. So I’m going to stop gushing now. But if if OmniFocus were a person, I might just marry

Zack Sexton: It. Well, thank you so much for all those kind words. Yeah, we put a lot of time into it and love, and it’s it’s really good to hear those types of results. And so, thanks thanks a lot, Zack.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. So, what we’re gonna do is this show releases on april 5, and any. Listening to this show between april 5 and april 13, and are interested in the program that Asian Efficiency is doing on rituals. And if you leave a review, rating, and subscribe in iTunes, then your name will be drawn, and you will be eligible to win a copy of the Asian Efficiency Rituals program when it comes out, which is a value of how much?

Zack Sexton: We are selling the course right now for 190-$7

Zack Arnold: 190-$7 and transforming your life literally, establishing new rituals and becoming more efficient. And all you have to do is take three minutes, go onto iTunes, find the Fitness and Post podcast, subscribe, which hopefully you are already. But if you aren’t, please subscribe, leave a rating and review, and you can be on your way to establishing better rituals in your life. So thank you. That is awesome that you’re doing that. I really appreciate

Zack Sexton: It. Yeah, you’re welcome. We’re really happy to support the show. It’s you guys are all techies out there listening. You can do this. It’s really easy. You can be eligible for it. Zack needs to be found in iTunes because what he’s producing for I don’t know the audience size or your download size but it’s just it needs to be heard by more people so we’re we’re excited to help in any way we can

Zack Arnold: Well I appreciate that and frankly one of the main reasons that the show even gets on the air or gets recorded ever is because I am more organized and efficient because of Asian efficiency so anything I can do to send things your way as well. I’m happy to do so. So thank you so much for being awesome and creating fantastic products that are helping to improve my life and improve the lives of others.

Zack Sexton: Thank you so much, Zack.

Recommended Next Episode

Hacking Your Productivity

Do Your Best Creative Work

This is a must-listen for anyone feeling overwhelmed by their to-do lists. Zack Sexton and I discuss hacking your productivity with better workflows.

Play Episode

Zack Arnold

Learn

Connect

Task Management and Establishing Rituals

About Episode

Episode Highlights

Useful Links

Transcript

Episode Credits

Recommended Next Episode

Hacking Your Productivity