Transcription
In this video, I'm going to show you how you can be so productive and get so much done in a single day that it feels illegal. I'll do this by sharing three powerful productivity principles that helped me unlock this illegal level of productivity during my time in medical school, as well as helping me rank first in my postgrad studies.
These principles have worked not only for me but for thousands of learners that I've taught this to from around the world, so they will work for you too.
These three principles are:
Number one, the Pareto Principle.
Number two, the Zeigarnik Effect.
And number three, the Championship Mentality.
As a bonus, I'll also teach you a way to supercharge each of these three principles and use them in a way that I have never heard anyone else on YouTube talk about.
So let's start with number one, the Pareto Principle. In my first year of university, when I was trying to enter medical school, I was studying 15 to 20 hours every single day. A lot of that time was spent on doing my flashcards. By the end of the year, I had over 4,000 flashcards for my papers, and I would spend five to six hours every single day either preparing my flashcards or doing my flashcards.
I had this Google Sheet that had all the questions on it, and I would track how difficult I found it, how many times I got it wrong, and what priority it was. I had this elaborate system that I created for managing my flashcards. But at the end of the day, I found that my results were still not that consistent. I was still having to study a lot of hours just to get the grades that I got.
When I actually entered medical school, that system was completely unsustainable because the workload was two, three, four times what it was before. The moral of the story here is that, at the end of the day, it still wasn't enough. The reason is that what I was focusing on and spending my time on—optimizing my flashcards—wasn't the thing that was going to make the biggest difference.
This is really what the Pareto Principle is about. Sometimes it's called the 80/20 Rule, and the idea is that 80% of the benefit or the impact of something can come from 20% of the time, effort, or work. When you focus your time and attention on the other side—the 80% of things that produce 20% of the impact—it leads to a lot of wasted time, a lot of frustration. It's very annoying, and it's very stressful. That's really how I felt during those first couple of years.
A great example to illustrate the Pareto Principle is if you think about your health. There are so many things that you can do to optimize your health, like the amount that you sleep, what you're drinking, how often you're drinking, what foods you're eating, the specific micronutrient and macronutrient balance you have, the type of exercise, the frequency of your exercise, and the way that you support yourself in recovery after exercise.
You can take additional supplements, and you can do meditation. This list is so exhaustive; that's the entire industry, right? But really, if you just get 20% of those things right—like if you have good sleep, you're drinking, and you're eating reasonably well, and maybe you're doing some kind of light exercise—it doesn't matter the frequency or exactly what you're doing. Just do something, and you're 80% of the way to being pretty healthy and feeling really good about yourself.
When you focus on the other 80% of the things, you can take every supplement there is off the shelf, but if you're not getting that 20% right—if your sleep is not good and you're not drinking regularly—then you're going to suffer. It doesn't matter what the other 80% is.
This is really important when it comes to productivity because productivity is all about how you manage limited resources, the number one resource being your time. You have the same number of hours in a day as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo did. Figuring out what's worth doing and what's not worth doing is really the key.
A powerful way of thinking about the Pareto Principle is not that 20% of the things you do contribute to 80% of the results, but it's an understanding that if you have a list of 10 things that you need to get done, eight of those 10 things are essentially going to be a waste of time compared to figuring out what the two are that really make the most impact. Then, spend your time absolutely crushing those.
I think of the Pareto Principle as the fundamental pillar of all productivity because the impact that the Pareto Principle has is that it allows you to stack your gains. I want you to imagine that this circle represents you, and this cross represents the goal that you want to achieve.
When we just do everything and we don't strictly prioritize exactly where we want to spend our time and what's going to help us get 80% of the way to our goal, we end up doing this: we spend a lot of time doing lots of things, moving in many different directions, and at the end of the day, despite being very busy, we're still not very close to our goal.
Once we use the Pareto Principle, what happens is that we figure out what the things are that take us towards the goal. It means that in the same amount of time or effort, or even less, we're able to achieve our goal.
When you look at someone who's using the Pareto Principle day in and day out in their life, you see someone living like this. This is the type of person you look at and think, "Man, this person is focused. This person has clarity. This person knows the direction they're going." Everything for them feels like it's all laid out. You can see that they're moving purposefully towards their goal, and you wonder how it is that they make it look so easy to get so much done and be so productive while you are just squandering.
When you look at the person who is doing this, they're not using the Pareto Principle. They're spending their time across the entire 100%. They're very, very busy; they are floundering. They're just treading water. You can see they are flustered. They're potentially falling behind, and despite being so busy, they are wondering why they don't seem to be getting any closer to the goal.
So here's the key takeaway for using the Pareto Principle: the first thing is to actually spend time planning and prioritizing upfront. If you're really busy and you feel like you don't have enough time to plan and prioritize or use the Pareto Principle and figure out what is that 20% that produces the impact, then let me tell you this: if planning is costly, not planning is more costly. Nothing is going to kill your productivity more than spending time on things that are a waste of time.
But you have to spend the time upfront to figure out what is or is not a waste of time. The second takeaway is that good prioritization feels bad. Here's a part that most people overlook: if you've got a list of things to do, the items that make it onto your to-do list are already fairly important.
If someone says, "Hey, have you ever thought about learning how you can juggle flaming swords while riding a unicycle and making an origami crane using your tongue?" then you might say, "No, I've never thought about doing that, and I'm probably never going to think about doing that." Unless your future career path is that of a very niche circus performer, that item is never going to be important enough to be on your to-do list.
Everything that's on our to-do list has already been filtered and shortlisted out, and we have made the decision that this is important enough for me to do. So what that means is that when you go through and figure out the 80% of the things that are not really getting you towards your goal, it’s going to feel bad to take them off your list because you are acutely aware of what you are losing by not doing this.
"I am losing out on this," and that feels bad. I want to normalize and let you know that when you're prioritizing well, it should feel bad because that means you're making the difficult decisions about what you're willing to lose strategically. That helps you spend the time in a way that gets you to your goal.
My final point is to think holistically. Productivity is not just about doing work or studying or planning. Prioritization is about everything you spend your time on, and that means taking a break, spending time with loved ones, engaging in your hobbies, and getting good sleep. These are all things that help sustain and rejuvenate you.
Productivity is anything that helps you get towards your goal. If you're three weeks into a sprint of not having had any breaks and you've just been studying and working the entire time, and you're feeling like you're burning out, then the thing that is going to get in the way of you achieving your goal is the fact that you're burning out or that you're too tired.
Choosing to ignore self-care and recovery is an incredibly unproductive decision. Again, making that decision can feel bad because it's not clearing my backlog of work and study that I need to do. I'm just sitting there resting, wasting time. But you have to recognize it's not a waste of time; it's actually very productive.
If you just use this principle, just the Pareto Principle as I've told you and nothing else, already for a lot of you, this is going to 2x to 3x your productivity pretty much immediately.
Now I'll tell you how you can supercharge this in a way that no one really talks about. Just to be clear, it's the supercharging of this that makes this feel illegal. We can turn the Pareto Principle into the Pareto Squared Principle.
What this means is that you can actually apply the Pareto Principle to itself. Let's say that of this list of 10 items here, we figured out the two that get us towards our goal in the highest possible impact. If we were to take those two and break them up, we would find that these two tasks have components to them.
Let's just say that each of these tasks has five components. Of these five components or subtasks that make up the two major tasks, 20% of these will contribute 80% of the impact. For example, writing an essay is the major task. If we break up this process of writing an essay, we might find that first we need to think of a plan, be clear on the objectives of the essay, write the main points, draft them, and then refine it.
Let's say that that's your process for writing an essay. Of this, your initial first step—the planning—is the thing that's going to make your essay the best. Whatever you plan affects what you write and how you draft it. If there are areas in your planning that are weak, those areas get carried forward.
A common one is if there's a big decision that you need to make. One of the things that helps you make a really good decision is just having more information to make a good decision. So just the first step of collecting more information or even writing down the things you need more information about that would help you make a better decision—that is the 20% that helps you with the remaining 80%.
By using not just the Pareto Principle but the Pareto Squared Principle, the additional benefits this gives is that, first of all, this actually reduces your procrastination because the task that you're focusing on is no longer this huge, overwhelming task. You're focusing on this tiny first initial step.
Number two, because you're prioritizing it so strictly, it also increases your success rate. By focusing on the most important part of a task, it ensures that you're doing the most important part to a high quality. Once you do this part, the rest of it becomes much easier, which again reduces procrastination even more.
The takeaway for the Pareto Squared Principle is to spend even more time figuring out the 20% of the 20% to identify your most important task. By the way, for those of you that are interested, if you do the math on the Pareto Squared Principle, what that works out to is 4% of your time being used to create 64% of the total impact towards your goal.
If you compare someone who's not using these principles with this person who's using all of their time doing all of their tasks, what this person is able to achieve in two to two and a half months, you can do by the end of the week. That is what the Pareto Squared Principle unlocks.
By the way, if your goal is to be more productive, then one of the highest priority tasks—one of the 4% of things that produce the major impact—is to create a learning system. Learning is the mega skill; it's the tide that lifts all boats. It's the wish for more wishes. When you become a better learner, every skill becomes easier to learn, and you become more productive.
To help you become a better learner, I've created a free learning system assessment for you. This quiz evaluates your current learning system and gives you a score out of 100 based on its effectiveness. More importantly, you also get a personalized report that tells you which parts of your learning system are holding you back. It basically tells you exactly what is the 20% in your learning that, if you were to improve, gives you 80% of the results. I highly recommend giving it a go, and it is free. I'll leave a link to it in the description below.
So the first thing was the Pareto Principle, and that helps you to prioritize your tasks. But once you've got your 20% or your 4%, the other issue we run into is procrastination. There's no point in prioritizing the 4% if you never actually do it. Fortunately, this is where the second pillar comes in, and this is called the Zeigarnik Effect.
I probably use the Zeigarnik Effect every single day. After my fifth year of medical school, I decided to take a year of doing honors research. This was my first time doing my own research, and the first part of doing research is what's called a literature review, which is where you're reading through all the research within a field and then writing this big report based on it.
I was starting this in the summer holidays. I started off really enthusiastic and really keen, but because I'd never really written such a lengthy literature review before and it was a topic that I honestly wasn't that interested in, I found myself putting it off and procrastinating on it for weeks. In fact, it got so bad that after the first month, where I hadn't done anything, my supervisor actually emailed me to say, "Hey Justin, are you still keen on this project? Because you seemed really enthusiastic, but you actually haven't shown me anything."
I was like, "Oh crap, I need to produce something to show my supervisor." For the next three days, I quickly got some stuff together that just made it look like I'd been working on things, and then I sent it to her. What I found was that even though I wasn't doing the literature review properly and I was just creating something to send to my supervisor, the very fact that I started on this process made me feel more motivated to keep going with it.
So the next day, I did more and more and more until eventually, I had actually done the entire literature review. It was just that first step, as we all know, that helps to break procrastination. This is what the Zeigarnik Effect is about. The Zeigarnik Effect says that a task is easier to complete when it is left incomplete.
The idea is that when there's this incomplete task, we want to finish it off. It stays in our head; it occupies that space. We know we've got the ball rolling, and we want to finish it. That completionist tendency of ours comes out. If we deliberately start a task not intending to complete it, but rather we want to start it and leave it in an incomplete state, then this actually improves our motivation.
It reduces the amount of friction we feel with starting the task because we know we don't have to finish it; we just need to get started. Getting started is frankly very easy if you don't care about finishing it, and therefore the reduced friction reduces our procrastination.
The takeaway for using the Zeigarnik Effect is to understand the win condition for curing procrastination. The win condition is not finishing the task; your win condition is getting the task to a state where it's incomplete. We should never think about a task as completing the task; we should think about tasks as leaving them unfinished.
If you're using the Pareto Principle or the Pareto Squared Principle, then we already took the time upfront to identify what that task or subtask is that, if we were to focus on, produces 80% of the result. That item becomes the thing that we just get started on and use the Zeigarnik Effect for.
Now, with the Pareto Squared Principle plus the Zeigarnik Effect, your productivity is already at this point through the roof, but the sky's the limit.
So here's how you can supercharge the Zeigarnik Effect to make it feel like it should be illegal. This is what I call the Zeigarnik Squared Effect. Just like we did with the Pareto Principle, you can use the Zeigarnik Effect on itself. This is by recognizing that the idea of getting started on a task actually has many substeps to it.
For example, if the task I want to get started on is sitting down to study or plan my essay, then before that, I need to be at my desk, have all my books and resources out, and have an organized space. I need to have "Do Not Disturb" activated on my phone.
You can actually get started on getting started with organizing your space, getting your books and everything ready, laying them out on your desk so that the only thing left to properly get started is to just sit down and start.
Here's a bonus tip: if you really struggle with procrastination, you can actually use a reverse Zeigarnik Squared Effect. You can make it really hard to get started on something that you would normally procrastinate with.
I used to be a big gamer, and one of the things that I changed is I went from having this big gaming PC to a MacBook. I only had one monitor at the time, so I would plug my monitor into my MacBook, which didn't have any games on it. I just used it for work.
My computer would end up being unplugged from my monitor. I went from gaming for hours and hours a day to gaming for a couple of hours a week because I just couldn't be bothered unplugging my monitor from my MacBook, crawling under my desk, opening up the panel in the back of my PC, and fiddling around to connect my HDMI cable and turning my PC on. I was so lazy, and I couldn't be bothered. It was so hard to get started with the distraction that I just didn't.
The awesome thing is now, with AI and other types of automation and technology, we can make the Zeigarnik Effect even easier by automating some of these things. For example, let's say that when we're trying to plan an essay, we want to get some initial first points down. We want to think about some possible structures and check some of the resources.
We can use something like ChatGPT to generate some points and some structures for us to start with. It's like being given a running start on the task for free. You can also set up calendar reminders to remind you to set up your books and desk, or you can set up automatic "Do Not Disturb" focus periods on your phone so that automatically, when you know you're meant to be studying, your phone flicks into "Do Not Disturb" mode.
What we're doing now is we're not just getting started with getting started, but we are enabling our environment and our technology to get us started for us. The key takeaway for using the Zeigarnik Squared Effect is to just keep breaking it down and make it easy.
The third productivity pillar amplifies the impact of the first two. The third one is the Championship Mentality, and this can be summarized with a statement: lose the game to win the championship. A great example of this is Toyota, the car company.
In the modern day, Toyota is known for having really reliable cars, but this was not always the case. In the 50s and 60s, Toyota used to produce very shoddy vehicles. To fix this, they actually slowed down their production process. They deliberately sacrificed their revenue and profit. They lost market share and sacrificed their volume in order to learn more about their production process.
They went into meticulous detail to figure out how they could improve and optimize their process before ramping up the volume again. The way Toyota improved their processes is actually a business case that's taught in a lot of schools now.
The idea here is that if we are this circle and we're trying to reach this goal, a lot of the time we don't actually know how to achieve it. It's difficult sometimes to figure out what is that 20% that produces the 80% impact because we don't know what our goal really truly requires of us.
What a lot of people will do is either just do a lot of stuff and hope that it gets them towards their goal, which would be like just being really busy but not really being very productive, or they just do what's common and what other people say that they should do. But this can be risky because what if they're wrong?
The Championship Mentality tells us that in order to achieve our ultimate goal, we don't necessarily have to achieve every goal along the way. In fact, it can be a better idea to not worry about beating and winning the next game in order for us to have a great chance at winning the championship.
So how does losing a game help us win a championship? The answer is that by losing the game, we are able to get valuable data and information that turns these unknowns into knowns. By doing that, we're able to create a much better plan and prioritize and use the Pareto Principle more effectively.
I see this a lot when it comes to studying. People might want to enter into a certain university degree or have this kind of long-term goal in place, and they've got an exam coming up in one or two months. They want to nail this exam so that they can achieve this ultimate goal, but their study skills are a mess. They have no idea what they're doing with their studying. They have no real self-awareness or insight. They're not in a position where they can really succeed.
The best thing for this person to do would be to spend the next one or two months really learning about learning—understanding how to learn and how to study, what their habits are, what their tendencies are, experimenting with things, and then building a learning system that really works. That's going to be enough for them to win the championship.
But that might mean that you spend so much time on just improving your skills and learning about yourself that you actually fall behind on your actual studying in that short period of time. You might not do very well for that immediate exam.
Now you'll end up crushing it in the next exam and the one after that and the one after that, but if you're so focused on just winning every individual game, and what it's costing you is valuable learning and understanding and figuring out these uncertainties that help you to win the championship, then you're actually setting yourself up for failure.
At some point, you're not going to be able to win that short-term game, and now you're left with two problems: number one, you don't have the skills to win the championship, and number two, because you've left it for so long, you don't have enough time left to figure it out either.
I'm not saying go and lose every single game and fail every single exam. What I am saying is that sometimes, to win the long game, you need to be ready to lose the short one.
Here's my takeaway for you to use the Championship Mentality: number one, figure out what a championship means to you. Is it really the next test or exam or promotion coming up, or is it something further than that?
Number two, figure out what the consequence of losing the game is. What does losing this game really mean to you? What's the consequence of it versus what are you giving up? What's the opportunity cost? What are you losing out on the opportunity for in order to just win this upcoming game?
Have these two things really clear in your mind and revisit them once every month or so.
Now here's the way that we can crack the Championship Mentality to make it feel illegal. Think about this: the reason we are willing to accept the loss in the game short term is because that provides valuable information to figure out how to win long term.
If we think about the amount of certainty we have at being able to win here on the Y-axis, this is our level of certainty. In the beginning, we start off with a very low level of certainty because we also have a very low level of information.
As time passes, we learn more about what it takes to achieve our goal. We learn more about our tendencies, our habits, and our processes, and we find a way to make it match. But that takes time.
As time goes on, our level of information starts going up, and so too does our level of certainty about how we can succeed and how we can win. Let's say that this blue line represents the point at which we have enough certainty to know how to win. This is the line of winning.
But let's say that this dotted white line here is when it matters. We don't want this period of learning and gaining certainty to take so long that we actually miss the boat. We already failed all of these goals, and we look back and think, "Ah, I regret not doing things differently back then." That's the thing we want to avoid.
The way we supercharge this Championship Mentality is realizing that this is wrong. There's this great saying: time changes nothing; it's what you do in the time that matters.
Sometimes I'll be talking to a student about the way that they're studying, and I'll say, "Okay, you need to make these changes and this improvement. That's what you really need to do to help you achieve this goal." They say, "Okay, that sounds interesting. I'm just going to think about that for a little bit. Give me like a week to just think about what you've said."
My question there is, what's going to happen in that week? Are you spending this week to go on a meditative retreat, light some incense over a fire, look at the stars, and tell you what you should be doing? There's this assumption that by sleeping on it and just time passing, somehow it changes the decision that you're going to make.
But it doesn't. At the end of the day, what's going to happen is that a week is going to pass, you're going to realize, "Oh crap, I need to meet up with Justin again tomorrow," and you're going to do all the thinking the night before. You could just do that thinking immediately on the spot.
When we realize that our ability to gain certainty and gain information doesn't depend on our time but depends on our actions, this is where we change the game and supercharge this. While everyone else is waiting to figure out how they can succeed and what they need to do, what the strategy is for them to win—just by letting time pass and sort of passively learning about what to do—you can realize that action is the thing that makes a difference.
In the same amount of time, you can take more actions, the same number of actions, the same amount of learning that someone would have originally gained across this period of time. You can do it in this period of time, which means that you're able to get to a winning strategy much earlier than everyone else.
Again, if I look at studying, people make this mistake constantly where they'll say, "Hey, I'm going to do my best for this exam. If it doesn't go well, okay, I'll learn from that." What are you actually learning from that? What was the experiment that you ran? What is the data that you're getting from that mistake that really helps you?
Did you really need to wait two months studying a certain way, sitting an exam, failing that exam to realize that mistake? Could you instead have tried an experiment today, tested yourself on that tomorrow to see the effect it has, and then iterated and experimented on a daily basis to get that same information or even more?
It's ironic because one of the most common pieces of feedback that I get from students in my program is they say, "If they're older, I wish I learned this back when I was in school. I wish I knew this 10 years ago; it would have changed my life."
Then the most common thing I hear from people that are 10 years ago, that are in school, in that place where they are currently actively making those mistakes, is, "I'll try it later. I don't really have time right now. I'm too busy struggling right now to figure out how to do well."
But let me tell you, if you don't make time to learn how to succeed, that time will be made for you later through failure.
So the takeaway is: don't be passive. Don't just assume that the problems you have now will solve themselves. If you're serious about gaining certainty and achieving your goals and giving yourself the best chance of success, take action. Do the things and make the time that other people are not making so that you can learn what other people are not learning.
These are the three pillars of productivity that are going to help you get much more done and help you achieve your goal. Here's another video that will help you refine your learning system so that you can level up your productivity even more.