



you often see people who appear to bebusy all day long but seem to accomplish

very little as I travel the countryspeaking to students all over the world

one of the questions that I always getasked is this why am I not able to be as

productive as I would like to be and themore and more this question is asked it

tends to lead me to believe that this isobviously a huge concern for many

students around the world I get it I getit you have a lot to do you have a lot

going on so many things that you'reworking on so you tend to spend your

days doing a lot of things but you seethe answer that I replied to them with

is actually another question are youfollowing the / productivity rule

and so what I'm saying to you is thisthey asked me Torian how can I be more

productive or why am I not being asproductive as I would like and my

response is are you following the /productivity rule are you familiar with

the rule we'll listenonly % of what you do each day

produces % of the results

think about what I'm telling you only% of what you do each and every dayproduces the % of your results so if

you can learn to eliminate the thingsfrom your day that aren't as important

then you become more productive byfocusing on the things that are

important let me give it to you again ifyou can just learn listen to me if you

could just learn to eliminate the thingsfrom your daily life that aren't asimportant then you can become more

productive by focusing on the thingsthat are important so here's how it

works

if you have a list of ten things thatyou need to accomplish today only two of

those things will turn out to be worthmore than the other eight things puttogether but see the problem is this

we're too busy as students we're toobusy focusing on the other eight things

that tend to not contribute as muchtoward your productivity now I'm not

saying that these eight things are notimportant what I'm saying is that the

other two are more important in thesetwo need your complete attention

I want you to start a list today of allthe things that you have to do all ofthe tasks all of the projects all of the

assignments that you must complete nowonce that list is done ask yourself thisquestion if you can only accomplish one

of the goals on that list today whichone of those goals would have the

greatest positive impact on your life

only one of your list of ten if you canaccomplish only one of them today which

one of those ten things would have thegreatest impact on your life now watch

this once you have figured out what thatthing is that one thing out of ten that

one item that means the most out of allof them the one item that is much more

impactful than the other nine once youhave figured out what that thing is then

continue on with the second mostimportant and critical goal you'll beginto get a sense of the couple of things

that are most detrimental to yoursuccess

this becomes your twenty percent don'tmiss this this becomes your twenty

percent now the other percent shouldrepresent the things that are importantbut things that can certainly be put off

until the first twenty percent iscomplete we're talking about the /

rule but you see here's the problem ifyou choose to start your day working on

the low value task or in other words ifyou choose to begin your day working on

the percent of the things on yourlist

then you will soon develop the habit ofalways starting out working on those low

priority items those low value tasksthose things that are on your list that

don't have as much value so here'shere's how I like to look at it watch

this if you complete the top % of yourtask first then if you happen to run out

of time and don't get to the bottom %then that is still my friends a good

work day because you chose consciouslyto focus on the % of your day that is

the most importance and so if the % isnot able to be accomplished because of a

lack of time that is okay because the% that you did do account for the

other % stay with me so in other wordsyou can get a lot done just by focusing

on your top % of things to do yeah youknow what we can even take it a step

further what I typically tell mystudents is to aim for getting your %

done before lunch know don't miss thisthis is the time when your brain is most

productive this is the time when you areawake this is the time when you are most

alert so if you're putting in a long dayof studying or putting in a long day of

homework try to get as much as youpossibly can done before you break for

lunch now come on now we all know whathappens after we eat we tend to get

sleepy we're ready for a nap we want towind down our day and that nap typically

means a loss of productivity now here'sa fact you like statistics you likenumbers you like facts here's one for

you the hours between p.m. and p.m.are the most wasted hours of the entire

day why because these three hours arethe hours we transition home from school

or from work and that time in transitionis easily lost

we have a tendency to become foggy ifyou will as we begin to unwind from the

day and before we know it three hourshave vanished in the blink of an eye

there was a study done a while ago watch

this a study that was conducted someyears ago on the habits of wealthypeople and what was discovered was that

% of wealthy people have one big goalthat they work on all the time don't

miss what I'm telling you they didn'twork on different things at one timethey simply focus all of their effort

all of their attention to one goal andas a result they were able to become

wealthy because of their attention spenton one thing not multiple things what

are you saying to me Torian well listenif you want to be wealthy then you haveto do what wealthy people do you have to

have the same habits you have tosacrifice the same things stop fooling

yourself into thinking multitaskingworks there is no such thing as a

multitasker why because the moment youtry to juggle more than one task is the

moment that you lose focus on one ofthose tasks and if you lose focus

there's no way you're being productive

changing tasks more than times a daydrops your IQ and average of points

so this is what I want you to do pickone goal pick two goals that you can

work on over and over and over again andif you do I promise you your life willchange for the better the most valuable

task that you can do each day are oftenthe hardest and most complex question

but the payoff and the rewards forcompleting them can be tremendous many

successful students become successfulbecause they follow this thing called

the rule now before you do anythingon your list today listen to what I'm

telling you before you do anything onyour list to date ask yourself is this

in the top % or the bottom % whatwe're talking about here is the

rule of productivity

