5 tried and true productivity tips

274. i'm giving you 5 tried-and-true productivity tips.

these tips come from current and past members of my accountability club, as well as from my own experience and over 15 years of coaching. 

these tips will help you feel accomplished and have more fun while getting things done. 

if you loved what i talked about in this episode, you're going to love working with me.

i can help you feel better and get more done when you work with me 1:1. i'll help you figure out a meaningful goal, we'll create an action plan and i'll help you get unstuck all along the way. you don't have to go it alone, and you don't have to burn yourself out!

 
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Transcript

Why Tasks Stall And What Works

Inside The Accountability Club

Tip 1: Create External Deadlines

Tip 2: Use Short Timers Well

Advanced Timer Strategies

Tip 3: Make Steps Microscopically Small

Tip 4: Community And Body Doubling

Tip 5: Reduce Friction To Start

Recap And Key Takeaways

Coaching Invitation

Secret Mission & Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Show Up Society podcast, where I help you get super clear on what you really want so you can focus on doing the things that really matter to you instead of getting overwhelmed with all the extra. I also hope you learn how to be kinder to yourself so you can overcome perfectionism, people pleasing, and your inner critic. I'm Life and Business Coach Tammy Bennett, and I'm about to help you show up for the life you want to live. Hey friend, I am happy to be back. I spent 30 days doing this podcast every day, and then I needed a break last week, and here I am, back ready to go. Today I thought that I would share five or six top tips for accomplishing tasks on your list, for doing the things that you want to do, but sort of have maybe had a hard time getting yourself to do. So these are proven, they are tested, these work. So I am right in the middle, I guess nearer to the end of a current round of the Accountability Club. So this is a group coaching program that I put on. I think this is the third time I have done it. It's about six or seven weeks long, and I have participants join onto an online community portal. Each participant chooses activities that they would like to accomplish by the end of February, and then we sort of gamify it. We assign points, we assign teams, and everybody has to check in every week with what they've accomplished and what they haven't. They also have to tell me what tips or tricks they are using, what mindset, what physical things they are doing to help themselves accomplish the tasks so we know what's working. And then they also have to tell me what isn't working, what are the obstacles getting in the way, what are some things that they are having trouble overcoming, what are some struggles they're having with getting themselves to do the things. And then each week I compile all of these things that they have answered on their weekly check-in, and I uh we talk about them in our on our Zoom call. So we first I share all the things that have been working for people, and then we talk about the things that are still struggles, and I help give tips and we share tips, other people chime in, and it's just a great discussion. And through this, and through three years of doing this, and for over 15 years of coaching, I know that there are some tips that are tried and true, and they just work for most people. I don't think there are any tips that are gonna work for all the people, but I'm gonna share with you some of the top five or six that consistently come up as um as things that people share with me that have really, really helped them do the thing. So that's what we're gonna do today. So the first one is external deadlines. So external deadlines help a lot of people show up and get the thing done. Um a lot of times we are in situations where there are no external deadlines. So in that case, I think it's really helpful for you to find a way to create some external deadlines for yourself. So uh I was just thinking about this today because I got bangs maybe, I don't know, months ago. I got bangs months ago, and I've trimmed them once or twice by myself, which is totally scary and not a good idea. Um, but I'm in that really awkward stage where my bangs are really long, and now I have to come to a decision. Do I continue to have bangs? Or because they're more, they're like a lot of trouble, a lot of upkeep, and I don't enjoy going to the salon frequently to get them trimmed. Um, so then do I grow out the bangs? So I'm in this very awkward holding pattern. I can't make up my mind. I'm just kind of like putting them in a berrette off to the side while I decide. So this has been going on for weeks and weeks and weeks where I can't decide. And so finally I gave myself an external deadline. I made a hair appointment. So I think it's next week. So before next week or during the appointment next week, I'm going to decide if I want bangs or not. The decision will be made. There is now an external deadline. We have to make a decision. Either she's gonna cut my hair and trim the bangs, or we're gonna let them grow out, right? So because I didn't have any kind of, I just was like treading water in this decision and not making up my mind, not doing the task of deciding about my hair, I had to create an external deadline for myself. So I made the appointment. So oftentimes some of my one-on-one clients will say to me, Um, you know, every session we talk about a win that they have created, something good they have put into their lives, and I always make them say how they created it. And often the answer is, well, I knew I was gonna have this session with you, Tammy, and I didn't want to show up having not done anything. I this is like this great external accountability. Somebody's checking in on me to see if I did a thing. Um, and so that is a way that they created external accountability for themselves. Uh, there are so many ways that you can do this for yourself. Sometimes it's nice and easy. Sometimes you're applying for something and there's a deadline or a cutoff date by which you have to apply. So, in those cases, that's great. Use those already built-in external deadlines. But if they're not there, I encourage you to try to create one for yourself and see if that helps you get the thing done. My number two tip is to use a timer. I like to use uh it's called a cube timer, it's in the shape of a cube. And on four of the sides, it has different time increments. And so you just flip it onto its side, it counts down, and it beeps when it goes off. Now, here's the trick Pomodoro technique has been around for a long time where people set a timer and they work really focusedly for that time, but Pomodoro timing uses a 25-minute um uh time chunk. I think that is way too long for many, many people's brains, especially in this day and age where we have so many distractions. So I tend to use uh three, five, seven, or eleven minutes on my timer. And yes, for some reason I'm attracted to odd numbers. You don't have to do an odd number, but I would uh recommend that you try something less than 10 minutes, shorter than you think that you should. A lot of times people are like, well, what can I do in three minutes or five minutes? Believe me, on these calls that I have inside of the accountability group, I will set a timer for three or five or seven minutes, and I will have the people in the group do a task for that time. And it's always amazing how much you can get done when you're actually focused for three, five, or seven minutes, whatever that number is. So using a cube timer has helped so many people over the years of my coaching to just be focused. So the here are a couple tricks about using a timer because it's not as simple as just setting a timer and getting to work. It's one the one tip about the timer is a tiny amount of time, so something under 10 minutes. Another kind of important piece of this is to be super focused for that amount of time. So for that amount of time, until that timer has gone off, until it has beeped or made its noise, there's no checking the phone, there's no answering emails, there's no opening the door to people in your office to come in and chat, there's no answering the door if you're at home, there are no distractions. So for this, let's just say seven minutes, for this seven minutes, you are solely focused on the task at hand. And then the really important piece that a lot of people miss is when those seven minutes are up, when that timer has gone off, you celebrate what you have just accomplished. Even if you did not complete the task, even if you didn't get close to completing the task, you celebrate that you just spent an uninterrupted time on that task and you did make some progress. You did get started. That's a really important piece because what happens sometimes is people will spend five minutes on something and then they'll not celebrate it, they'll diminish it and they'll be like, yeah, it was only five minutes. I didn't finish it, I'm not done yet. Yeah, I didn't make enough progress. What's the point of working if you're not gonna give yourself credit for it? So use a timer for a tiny amount of time, be super focused during that time, and then celebrate what you accomplished after that part. I wanted to give you one or two other ways to use timers that have uh people in the groups have been using. So somebody else has a task of decluttering a giant closet and they are spending 15 minutes a day, period. They're set the timer for 15 minutes, they work really focusedly for 15 minutes, and then that's it. And they're just doing it every day to see how much they can accomplish. There have been a lot of people that have done similar kind of tasks to that, like just a timer every day. Maybe it's for exercise, um, maybe it's for business building and sending emails, whatever it is. And then another way that was really interesting that somebody used this time is they have a lot of things on their plate, and sometimes they get way bogged down into one project and they don't move on to the next thing, and they can kind of, you know, I don't know, if it's me, if it's me I'm talking about, then I can kind of drown and overthinking sometimes. So what this person did was they set their timer, and after the timer goes off, then they move on. They are done with that project for the day. So that just helps them not get bogged down and get too into the weeds. They work on it really focusedly, and then they move on to another thing. So um that might be helpful for you too, because I tend to use timers in short increments, like let's say seven minutes, and then I kind of celebrate, I take a break, and then I go back in for another round, and I will do many, many rounds. When I was in my master's program, when I was writing papers, I would have uh I had an 11-minute timer, and I would literally, I mean, it would go off probably. I probably did 10, 15 rounds of it sometimes writing a paper. So, but it just helped me so much to just focus for that short amount of time, then get up, move around, and take a break. But anyway, you might want to do it the way this person said, where they're not going back in for another round, they are they use it, the timer goes off, and then they move on to the next thing. Okay, the third tip I have for you is to break things down into tiny pieces. Now, I am not kidding you when I say tiny. I want them to be microscopically tiny because if you can make a task tiny enough, your brain is not going to resist it as much. So, what happens a lot of times for people with brains like me and a lot of people in my groups, they uh look at the whole big task or the whole big list of things to do and they get completely overwhelmed and they kind of can't decide which one to do. It feels way too big. They shut down and they avoid it and they scroll on the internet. Does that sound familiar? Um, it does to me. So instead of looking at the whole big overwhelming project with all the pieces, you're just going to like I just kind of imagine it as like you have a tweezers and you go into that task list and you're just gonna tweeze one of them out and to put it on the plate in front of you. That's kind of gross. Like if you think about a hair on a plate in front of you, but I think you know what I mean. You just take one little task, put it in front of you, and just focus on that one instead of looking at the whole big giant picture that can feel overwhelming and shut you down. So um, again, here the keys are to make it a really, really tiny step and then to celebrate it, even though it may feel too tiny to celebrate from what you're typically used to, right? So tiny step, celebrate it, and then you can go back for another one. I'll give you an example of something that came up for me. So I um a few months ago got asked to do a workshop in a for a running organization. I also during that same week got asked to do a workshop for a craft and creative organization. So that was a couple months ago, and each of the people, each of those organizations wanted me to put together a package with like my photo, my bio, um, worksheets that they're gonna do in these workshops, the title of the workshop, the description of the workshop, um, you know, my slides that we're gonna use or PDF handouts, all these things. So it when I looked at those emails, I was like, oh my gosh, that is way too much for me to do. I'm not gonna do this now. And I put it off for months and months and months. Well, now it is February, and these workshops are in the next couple weeks, right? Actually, I already had one, but the other one is in a couple weeks. So the the time crunch was on and I had to do these things, but they still felt so overwhelming and I dreaded it with all my heart. And I didn't want to open the email and see the bulleted list of things that I had to do. So I took my own advice of breaking it down into something tiny. And so on one task session, I just found the photo and I uploaded the photo to the email, saved it to draft, walked away, celebrated. Okay, got one part done. Then I did the next tiny step. I did the bio, right? So I wrote my bio for each of these organizations because I kind of tweaked my bio a little bit depending on who I am presenting to. And then I put that into the email, saved it as a draft, walked away, celebrated it, and came back. So one tiny step at a time, I put together all of these assets to send. And overall, it didn't take me very long at all. It was like 20 to 30 minutes, and I had been putting it off for months, right? And it didn't take that long, but it's because I broke it down into tiny, tiny little pieces that felt more doable instead of looking at that whole bullet list of things that I needed to do. Okay, the fourth thing, this one has come up a lot, especially in this current 2026 round of the accountability club, and that is people are saying that community or uh buddy system is really working well for them to get things done. So we have co-working calls in the group. So I did one, and then one of our members is kind enough to host one a week. And a co-working call is just everybody comes on to Zoom at the same time, everybody has their own project that they're working on, and at the beginning of the call, we share with each other what are we going to be working on during this time that is usually about 90 minutes, and then we meet up at the end. We all stay on Zoom together at the same time. Some people leave their cameras on, some people leave them off, but we have this like we all know that we're all working away. Um, and then at the end, on the last few minutes of the call, we come back on, you know, put our cameras back on and we share what we accomplished. And it's just so fun to have people like know what you're working on and to know that you either completed it or made progress on it. It just feels really good. Um, this is actually a really good technique for people that have neurodivergent brains or ADHD brains. It's also called body doubling, where you have somebody just working alongside you, even though you're not working on exactly the same thing. So, anyway, we have those co-working calls inside of my accountability group, and those have been incredibly helpful for people to get tasks done during those calls. There have been some people in my groups that aren't able to make those calls, so they have been setting up co-working time with in real life with friends. So, a couple people are meeting friends at coffee shops and then they're just working together at the coffee shop. A couple other people are doing really well on their exercise habits by meeting with other people. So for a Pilates class or for a run, and some of these people don't even run together, they run at different paces, but they're meeting each other for the run and then they separate for the actual run and they talk before it and they talk after it, but it's just some kind of like accountability person to meet, and it's just helping them get things done. Um, so if you are not in a place where you have a co-working call or buddies or uh friends that want to meet up with you, look online. There are a lot of groups that are specifically for this purpose. I have three clients right now that are all writers, different kinds of writers, and they all attend shut up and write groups. I think, I think it's shutupwrite.com. Um, but you can search for shut up and write. There are groups all over the place where they um you can meet online or in person. I think they have both available. And uh you can write together and share your writing, and you know, some some of the groups will say, Okay, by next week we're gonna have five pages of writing, bring your five pages. So it just, you know, that's one kind of this accountability community group. If you don't have any kind of group like that, then you can create it. It you it can start by you just reaching out to one other person and saying, Hey, do you want to be accountability buddies together? Do you want to co-work and help each other get things done? Um, when I moved from when I lived in California, I was a part of a stitch and bitch group. It was a knitting group. We met at a cafe or a restaurant every week or every two weeks with our knitting projects, and we just knit together and we chatted together and we would look at what each other was working on, and it made you want to work on the knitting outside of those groups because then you'd have something to show for next time, and it was just really fun, and just that community, that connection, that shared humanity was so beautiful. When we moved away from California, though, we moved to North Carolina and I didn't really have any friends in the area, and I felt a little bit uh alone or lonely and missing that piece. So I think at the time I used meetup.com uh and I just said, like, hey, anybody want to start a stitching bitch group at this Barnes and Noble? And two people showed up and we met, and we that was over 20 years ago, and I'm still in touch with uh some of them today. So um, if you don't have a kind of community, accountability um buddy, co-working kind of group or people, go create it for yourself. Go find it. That might be really helpful. And it's also more fun when we can share experiences with other humans, okay? All right, my last one, number five, is to reduce the friction. So, what I mean by this is make it really easy to start the thing. So maybe this looks like having all of your supplies ready, having your space cleared off, ready to go. Maybe this looks like you having sort of a mindset mantra where you're getting your head in the right frame of mind to start on the project. This also might look like focusing ahead of time on what task you're gonna do during that work session, right? So you don't want to like start working, go, oh, I don't know, should I send that email or should I do that Instagram post? I'm not really sure. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, you use so much energy, so much decision juice making that decision. And then you're you're likely not going to get as much done during that work session. However, if you're like, okay, tomorrow during my first work session, I am going to send an Instagram post, then you've already decided it and now you don't have to use any decision juice when it's your work time. You just already know you're doing that Instagram post. So that reduces some of the friction to getting started. So just think about ways about what your goal is, what your task is, and what can you do ahead of time to make it easier. So if your goal is to work out in the mornings, then have your water bottle ready to go, have your watch or your headphones charged and ready, have your workout clothes and shoes ready to go so that all you have to do is get up and put them on. I know a lot of people who get up and the first thing they do is they put on their running bra and then they're like, okay, like my running bras on, I'm probably gonna, it's more likely that I'm gonna exercise than I would if I was just dressed in my regular clothes. So finding ways to just reduce the friction and make it a little easier to get started. Okay, so I'm just gonna recap really quickly these five tips that are coming straight from clients, my 15 years of coaching athletes and clients, and from uh the current members and past members of accountability clubs. So the first one is external deadlines. So either they're already there for you or you can create them for yourself. Have something that's kind of checking in to see if you did the thing by a certain date or time or not. Number two, use a timer, tiny amount of time, be super focused while the timer is clicking and then celebrate what you accomplished during that time. Or you may want to use this for like a daily habit, 15 minutes a day. Or you may use it as a stopping point. I'm gonna spend X amount of minutes on this and then I'm gonna walk away from it for the day. Okay, tip number three, break it into tiny pieces. What I recommend you do if the project feels too big is to break it down into tinier pieces on paper, take a quick break, then come back to the paper and break it down into even tinier pieces. So many times our brains don't make these pieces small enough, so make them really small. So that's tip number three, break it into tiny, tiny pieces and then celebrate every tiny step that you accomplish. Tip number four, community, buddies, co-working, meet up with friends, right? Have other people that you are meeting with or um sharing with. It helps so much. And tip number five, reduce the friction, make it as easy as possible to start. Decide things ahead of time, prep things ahead of time, really set yourself up for success. Okay, friend, I hope these tips help you. Let me know which one is your favorite. I am so glad you're here and have a great week. Thank you so much for showing up to this episode of the Show Up Society podcast. Now go out there and show up for yourself. Hey friend, if you liked this podcast episode and you want help applying it to your life so you can do more of what you want and feel good while doing it, you're gonna love working with me one-on-one for six months. I'll help you with strategy and mindset so you can figure out what you want, make an action plan, and I'll help you get unstuck all along the way. Go to showupsociety.com forward slash coaching to set up a consultation to see if we are a good fit for each other. Oh hey, loyal podcast listener. Thank you for being here all the way through to the end. Okay, friend, your secret mission today is not going to involve Instagram because I'm having a lot of mixed feelings about Instagram and how I want to show up there and if I want to show up there and how I want to use it. So instead, I'm going to ask you to please share this podcast episode with somebody that may need it, that may find it helpful or useful, but somebody that you've never shared the podcast with before. That's going to be my secret ask for you today. And I appreciate it so much. And even if you don't share it, I appreciate you being here. Love you, friend.