Go From Reactive To Proactive With These Tips (TPS603)

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome back to the productivity show, a podcast where we believe that people like you can get the important things done without sacrificing your health, family, and things that matter to you. If it's your first time listening, welcome. I'm T.N. founder of Asian Efficiency, calling him from Austin, Texas. And I do this podcast together with my co-host, Brooks Duncan, all the way from Vancouver, Canada. How are you today, Brooks? I am great, what's going on in Austin these days? You know, it's happening, A.I.s booming. People are still moving here. The food scene is good. So it's hard to complain here. It was actually riding a WAMO yesterday. And for those who don't know, WAMO is a self-driving car service here in Austin. You can call it through the Uber app, and then a white car will show up, and it will just drive itself and take you to places, which is really cool. And two people who are riding a bicycle were stopping at the stoplight. And they were just two random strangers talking to each other at the stoplight, just having a good time laughing and joking. And I like, I snapped a photo. I was like, oh, this is like peak Austin, Texas, where people just love to be outdoors, cycle, have conversations with strangers. And it's one of the reasons I love living here. So can't complain. Oh, that's what's up. I went on my very first WAMO this last weekend. It was totally unintentional. I was just getting at Uber and the app asked me, hey, do you want an autonomous WAMO car? I'm like, heck yeah. So I tried it out. And yeah, it's amazing. It's no offense to our Uber and Lyft driving listeners. I love you. However, it kind of feels like that is the feature. It is very cool. Yeah, we have swarms of them driving every single day. So regardless whether it's a holiday or not, they're always around, which is very convenient. So I'm a big fan. And we could do a whole episode on autonomous vehicles and how one can be very productive in them, which is something I've been trying to master for the last six, eight months since we've had this service. But today, we're going to be talking about pro-activity versus reactivity. Now, if you've been listening to the pro-activity show for a while, you know that being proactive is a state of mind and a place you want to be, but most people are reactive. And so how do you make that transition or that transformation to go from being reactive to proactive? And it's conceptually easy to understand, but tactically, I think, very difficult to do. And this is also one of those things where AI can not just like solve it in one afternoon. This is more of a habitual thing and a thing that you have to develop is it's almost like a skill. And so we're going to be talking about that today, how you can do this, where you can become more proactive, because once you are more proactive, you are not just more productive, but life is a lot easier, work is a lot easier, and you don't feel like you're behind all the times. In fact, you're going to be ahead most of the time. And I think all of us would like to be there. So before we start diving into today's episode, we always like to start off with our top three favorite resources. So at books, what do we have today? All right, I actually have three books. Usually we have a combination, but there is this three books that kind of came to mind when I was thinking about this episode or just that I've been enjoying recently. So the first is a book that we've covered on the pro-activity show before. It's called The 12 Week Year. And I think this is, if you're looking for frameworks and ways to be proactive, I think it's a very structured way to structure your week, your quarters, and it makes sure to add in times to do the things that you want to do, as well as adding in what we love to call buffer time. So it's a very good framework for that. So if you're looking for something tactical, this is the 12 week year. Number two is another book, Flight Plan by Brian Tracy. It's a book that uses a pilot metaphor to help you define a destination, set strategic goals, and make decisions proactively, instead of just drifting reactively, which is not what you would want a pilot to do. And then number three is another book, a bit different than these two, less tactical, but it's called Benjamin Franklin, an American Life by Walter Isaacson. So it's an eye-listen to the audiobook, but the paper book would be great too. And I think it's great because, first of all, what an amazing guy would an amazing life, and no surprise there, even though I'm not American. I still look up to him quite a bit. But number two, in a lot of ways, he was like the grand daddy of Western proactivity. He, you've probably seen his daily schedule that he had in his own autobiography, and he always did things very intentionally. And I think you can learn a lot of proactivity from Benjamin Franklin, and that is a great biography of him. So to see all of these, just go to asianeficiency.com, swipe in your podcast player, all the links to everything we talk about will be right there. Awesome. So let's start diving into today's topic here. So let's talk about first what proactivity or being proactive means versus being reactive. So Brooks in your mind, when you think about a person that is reactive, how would you describe that person? What does their day look like? How are they working? And how do you think that is different from somebody who is proactive? Yeah, if you were talking about like what does a day look like, I think a good example could be you, you know, you just have your weekends, Monday morning you go into the office or if you work from home, you log onto your computer or whatever it is you do in your job. Don't really necessarily have a plan. You fire up your email, you log into Slack or Teams, and all of a sudden you're bombarded with things that are popping up, and the things that pop up throughout the day and therefore throughout the week and therefore throughout the month, therefore throughout the quarter, you're just kind of led around by what is coming at you and you're responding and reacting to that. And that kind of informs how you spend your time and what you focus on. And that can have knock on effects to different areas of your life, right? It could be your money, right? That it could be you just spend your money on whatever happens to be going on, you're not being intentional with saving and stuff like that or putting your money in certain areas and it can go in also as a different areas of your life, but that's what I think of when I think of a reactive person. It's not bad necessarily. We're not saying this isn't a value thing, it's not like proactive is good, reactive is bad necessarily, but we are saying that you know, you're listening to a productivity podcast. As a chance is are you want to be airing on the side of productivity, and I think we can all agree generally proactive people are going to be more on the productive side. I think in another way, I think about this is most people who've listened to us for a while or have maybe read a productivity book are familiar with this whole idea of like a two by two matrix of urgency and when we think about long-term focus and short-term focus, like what is a distraction, what is a long-term focus for us. And so we think about, for example, the Eisenhower matrix, right? We talk about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And it's so easy for us to always cater to the urgent stuff, like the phone rings, the email comes in, we get a text message, we get a WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, and it's instantly respond to it and then throw everything to the side and go, hey, I'm going to do this right away. And somebody who is typically more on the spectrum of being proactive tends to kind of stick to what they do and what they're focused on right now. And oftentimes it's also the long-term vision of something. And so for example, if I think about a proactive person, I think about, okay, when they're show up to work, they have a goal or they have an intention or some sort of idea or vision of what they're doing that day. And that's going to be a major priority and that's something that they're really trying to focus on versus somebody who just comes into your point and just kind of waits and sticks around and sees whatever comes to their inbox or whatever pops up on a notification and then gets to work. Like that's to me in behavior, the main difference is in someone who's reactive versus proactive. The person who's reactive is waiting for them to be fed what needs to be done. The proactive person is saying, hey, I have a list of things that I need to do to get to a specific outcome. Let me go ahead and start working on them. And that doesn't mean that they're immune from pings on Slack or teams or emails or anything like that, they still have to handle them obviously. But they know how to prioritize them now. Say you do have a plan for your day. Let's say you're like, oh my main goal for the day is to do X. I'm planning on working on it in the morning and that type of thing. And then you come into work and your teammate hits you up on Slack saying, hey, can you fix this thing in our CRM or whatever? Maybe doing that as part of your job or something like that. So the way I think of proactive and reactive is it's kind of like a mindset as well. A proactive person will probably say, sure, I will do my best to get to that today. And then what they'll do is they'll put it in their task manager or however they park it. Go back to working on what their main priority and focus is for the day. And then maybe like after lunch come back to that request and fix it. That would be to my mind, you're still reacting to things that happen in your organization, but you're doing it in a more proactive way. The more reactive person is gonna sit down, start working on their thing that they had already determined is their priority for the day. Somebody ping zones be like, hey, can you take a look at this? Can you help me with this or whatever? and then they just drop what they're doing and go help. Now, sometimes you have to do that, right? Sometimes it's an emergency. Sometimes there's a big client situation. I mean, we all have to do what we have to do, but a lot of times, I think of it anyway, like a mindset thing is, like you said, you're prioritizing, you're putting things in their bucket. You're still being responsive, but you can be responsive without being reactive, at least in my mind. Yeah, I think another symptom, if you may will, is we tend to be very reactive when we're lacking time. And so when we think about the T framework, right? What we're known for, time, energy and attention, most people who are reactive have the time piece, not really figured out yet. And when I say time piece, not the watches that you wear, I'm thinking about the currency of time and how you manage it and how you are dealing with it, because anybody who is proactive can be very busy and are typically managing their time pretty well. But I think there's a strong correlation also between people who are reactive and also are time poor or don't manage their time very well. So that's the first thing I would always pay attention to. And one person that comes to my mind is, I was working with a client on this, maybe a few years ago. So, and she's like an operations person, a real big company. And she was a classic example of my schedule is super busy. I have back to back meetings. Tan, if we're trying to plan something right now during the scotching session, it has to be done 10 days from now, because everything else has already pre-scuggled for me. And I go, okay, right now we're playing catch up, where, hey, in order for us to work on something that is importance, but not urgency, we actually have to plan it like 10 days ahead now, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just tells me that we just have a 10 day gap to overcome, where she can get to a point where, hey, when she's showing up to work, there's like stuff on her calendar or stuff on her to do list that is important to do, but it's not necessarily urgent. And that's a great place to be, right? So we think about the eyes and how I may trick this is like the Q2, where it's like important but not urgent. This is like the long term stuff that we wanna work on. And in reality, if we can work on that sort of thing maybe 30 minutes a day, I think that's a great target to aim for, because that's two hours a week or so, give and take. That's a great place to be. And I think it's very realistic for most of us to spend two hours a week on something that isn't really due much later on. And then I know you and I, Brooks, we're big fans of the 3030 rule, which is this idea that if we can spend 30 minutes on something that isn't due in the next 30 days, you're gonna be in a great spot. Because there's a lot of things that we wanna do in the future, but we don't have the time for right now. And so if you're like this person that I was coaching and you have the book 10 days ahead to put something on your calendar to work on something that is important but not urgent, that's maybe the baby sceptical we have to do now. And so the challenge for me was when I was working with her was, hey, how do we do this consistently on a weekly basis where you maybe you have to book 10 days ahead, but maybe like 10 days in, you're now having a calendar full of action items and priorities and things you're working on. They're actually meaningful to you now. And now on a rolling basis, your calendar is actually proactive as well because you know, working on the things that are meaningful to you. (keyboard clicking) I'm pretty good about drinking water, but sometimes I need more than that. That's where drip drop comes in. It's hydration designed to keep up when water alone isn't enough. Thanks to drip drop for supporting our show. Go to drip drop.com and use promo code TPS for 20% off your first order. Drip drop is doctor developed, proven fast hydration that helps your body and mind work better. Drip drop uses science-based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports strengths. Drip drop is trusted by firefighters, medical professionals and over 90% of top college and pro teams because it's engineered to hydrate you faster and more effectively than water alone. 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So instead of living paycheck to paycheck, you're like slowly, at least at first, you're slowly building up your money so that you're spending last month's money at the start of the month and you're not burning through your current money. That's the general idea. And so this is kind of like the opposite. At the beginning, you're still going to be churning through those things that are like cluttering up your day, but you're getting to overtime. And I think actually, no, I think about it. I think this is one thing where people really struggle with productivity is we kind of forget that it takes time to get the place that you want to be. You read about this strategy or this trick or whatever and you're like, I'm going to implement this thing and I'm going to put it into practice. But we forget that it takes time to get to the place where the flywheel is spinning, so to speak. And if you know that upfront, I think you're fine, but it can be easy to get discouraged at first when you're still running out of time at the beginning of the day, even though you bought and read that amazing book, this stuff takes time to kind of catch up. - Oh, absolutely, yeah, this lady that I was coaching, I would say it probably took about six to eight weeks before we got to a place where she felt confident that every week was filled with priorities on her schedule that she actually wanted to work on. And there were things that, you know, back to the Q2 idea of like important, but not urgent, was consistently on the calendar. That took about six to eight weeks or so. So it wasn't a slow process at all. We were checking in once a week and making sure that we're making progress, but that's what life is not perfect. There's always stuff happening, people get sick, stuff happens in real life, things get delayed, you know, coaching sessions get missed. We might have to delay session. And so, you know, it's not a linear progression. And I think that's a realistic thing that kind of put out there is that if you are under water right now, you wanna get above water, it's not as simple as flipping the switch in one week and then you're there. I think from my experience, this can take anywhere from four to eight weeks. And I think that's a realistic expectation to set for everybody. Going back to the T framework, you talked about how time is the first way that this manifests and I totally agree. I think another way that this can, being reactive can manifest when it comes to the T framework is tying in with energy and attention as well in the sense that But when you're reactive, I feel like it leads to things like decision fatigue and making kind of like snap emotional decisions because you're just feeling ground down and you just feel like you're just trying to get things off your plate. You're not really making the best decision that you can in the span of how you're going to spend your time because you're just always reacting. And I think that feeling of feeling behind which can take a while, like we just said, I think that can really drag down your energy and attention as well. So the more you can be proactive and avoid having to make these future snap decisions, I think the more on top of things you're going to feel. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think we can all relate to having a poor night of sleep and what do we do? We tend to eat poorly. We tend to go for the sugary foods or maybe it's just me. We tend to make poor decisions overall and that has a direct impact on your performance and what you do at work and the decisions you make and there's a rich task you're going to be working on and which one you're ignoring. And frankly, I tend to procrastinate a lot more if I'm not sleeping really well. And so it's kind of a misnomer in the sense that the better you sleep, the more energy you have, the better your performance is overall. And I think it's just like a force multiplier in that sense for overall productivity. So anything that we can do to increase our energy capacity is always a good thing and same thing with attention. I would even argue that being proactive means that you are redirecting your attention in the right ways. And if you think about the T-frame work, you know, you ever look at that diagram that we have, you'll see that most of the skills that we teach are actually under the attention bucket. It's because I think it's the most difficult to master, but it's also the most multi-dimensional because you have to figure out your North Star. What are some of the mindsets you have to adopt? Where does your attention go? How do you fire while how do you continuously build habits so that you are focusing on the right thing? And there's like a bunch of tactical things we can do, right? So putting stuff on your calendar, like we said, or the 3030 rule or using the ice and how our matrix like these are all super valuable tools and learning them and using them is super helpful because once you've done it a few times, you'll know how to take them out of your toolkit and go, Hey, I'm feeling overwhelmed. Maybe I didn't sleep that well. What are some tools that I can use to kind of get me back on track? And easy go to is just like the 3031. Which is, okay, if I have 30 minutes available on my calendar, what is something that I can do that is not do in the next 30 days? So think about something that might be due in the next month or two or so. Spending 30 minutes today feels like you're not making any progress because sometimes you're just like, you know, craving this immediate satisfaction of like, okay, I'm working on something and it's done and I can ship it. But the more we can get in that zone of, I'm working on something today, but it's not due until later, but it's time that due date actually comes. You're already ahead of the game. So the perfect example is if you've ever done your taxes before mid April, which, you know, April 15 is like the deadline here in the States. If you've ever done it before then, you know, everyone else around you is like stressing out when it's like April 11, 12, 13, 14, right? And if you've ever done it before then you go, ah, I did that last week. Last month, I'm good. Like, life is good. I can do other things now while everybody else is stressing out. Well, how do you get there? Well, you have to do stuff way in advance before the due date. And that means doing something on a Tuesday afternoon with nobody is watching and 30 minutes, you know, organizing your papers or organizing your, your receipts might not pay off until much later. But you got to have like almost like, I wouldn't call it discipline necessarily, but just have the vision and forecast to go, Hey, I know doing 30 minutes today will pay off down the line and being able to have that kind of like discipline about it. It's funny. You gave that tax example because just this morning I was, you know, reading an email or, I don't know, broker or whatever. I said, you know, your tax forms are ready and I was thinking to myself, okay, this is the year. This is the proactive year. This is the year I am not waiting till made it mid April to get everything organized. And for all my proactive nature, I am often the one scrambling near the end. So this is the year it's happening. I'm declaring it on the podcast right now. All right. We're going to check back with Brooks in a few weeks. So for those of us who want to hold Brooks accountable, emails that podcast at Asianefficiency.com and we'll check in with him. So Brooks, as far as like apps and tools, are there anything that comes to mind that you find helpful to use? Like for example, are you looking at your goals on your calendar? Do you have reminders in your to-do list app or do you have specific apps and tools to help you be proactive? Like what's your toolkit? I don't think you necessarily need special pro activity tools. I think the tools we all use as part of being quote unquote being productive, whatever that means to you. I think you can use them. Like, but just maybe using them in slightly different ways. So as an example, one thing I've started doing recently is I have this weekly task that can take quite a while, though a productivity show drinking game, AI has cut that down a lot. However, one thing is a lot of times it's kind of like getting to the end of the week that I'm able to do it. However, what I've started doing is just using my regular old task manager or you could use a calendar for this if that's what you do. And it's basically like on Tuesday, look ahead for what you're probably going to need to do Thursday and Friday. And so that doesn't sound like that productivity groundbreaking. Like wow, you made a reminder a couple days ahead of time, but I will tell you like that has made such a difference using the tax example. This feeling of not needing to like go up to the wall to do something. And a lot of times I can't actually do it until I get to Thursday and Friday. However, just like looking ahead, knowing what's coming, laying the groundwork that I can, it has just made this so much more peaceful like using your tax example. I feel like the February and March tax, tax bylers because it's so much more peaceful at the end of the week. Because then it's just execution. It's not decisions as much. So are you finding that maybe the calendar is like your best tool for being proactive them? Yeah, calendar, for me calendar slash the task manager, you know, putting in reminders to essentially, I guess the way I would put it is putting in reminders to look ahead and lay groundwork. So if you have these things that you know could be coming up, it can be tempting to just like leave it mentally until the time, you know, this is something I always say to my wife and my kids. Like, don't worry about problems you don't have yet, which I do think is true advice. However, maybe I think a better advice could be, don't worry about problems you don't have yet. But if you can lay some of the groundwork so there are less of a problem now, that can be a good thing as well. I mean, amen to that. And I think that's also very difficult to do. Yeah. It is good. But, you know, it's like dad advice 101, you know, I got to get it. But whether it's easy to execute is a different story, but you know, I got to be a dad and do it. I will say, as you were saying, there's a skill that is really helpful for this is breaking stuff down. And I know we continuously reference this skill, but it's something that doesn't come natural to a lot of people. And this is where honestly using not to get cliche here, but an AI tool to help you with this is actually really, really helpful. Like if you have a goal or an outcome or priority that is not due in the next 30 days and you have a hard time in general breaking stuff down because maybe that is just doesn't come natural to you, but you understand conceptually how it's really helpful. Literally, if you go to chatchubt.com or Claude or Gemini or whichever you use and say, Hey, here's my priority or my goal. Here's the due dates that I have. Like what can I do week by week to help me get to this outcome? Can you be surprised how good the breakdown is of this? Obviously, the more context you give, the better. And you can even tell it and say, Hey, help me set reminders for all these things or what should I put on my calendar for each of these weeks to make sure that I'm staying on track. And now this tool is helping you come up with reminders, went to schedule stuff for how long. And this is actually the heavy lifting that most of us struggle with, including myself, but now has become a lot easier. So for me, one of the main tools is continually using an LLM to help me break stuff down and just say, How do I in the constraints that I have? So for example, I might mention that I only have two hours available every week to do this. It can help you down with those constraints and say, Okay, if you only have two hours a week, here's how I would break it up, 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there. And the more you use the tools, the better advice it can give you because it's funny enough is start to learn how you work and how you think and how you operate. So for example, even though I love being proactive as much as possible, I have to admit, I work really well when there's a deadline. If there's a deadline, I will stay up a little longer. I will wake up a little earlier just to make sure things are getting done, even if it's 24 hours or 40 hours before. That's a level of self awareness and insight, but what's helpful with that is to say, "Hey, if that is true and I don't want to be so stressed out, if I can look on my calendar and just look 30 days ahead and say, "Hey, I have this wedding I have to go to during this weekend." So, if I have to go to this and I have to travel and book all this stuff, I know I'm not going to be able to work on certain things. So, what do I have to do today to make sure that I'm not going to be stressed out during this wedding? Because we've all met people at weddings that are really stressed out because they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is great, but I also am really stressed about this deadline. I have to meet as soon as I come back when honestly, that could have all been prevented if you're willing and able to look a few weeks ahead." I like that too because it's all well and good to say, "Oh yeah, you should be proactive, you should use these tools to set reminders or break things down and stuff like that exactly what you said." But the kind of like dirty secret of productivity, is that stuff going to be a pain in the ass so that they're create calendar entries, figure out milestones? You know, just the term that friend of the show, David Sparks uses for this stuff is donkey work, that he really believes in using AI for it. He calls it donkey work. And I think that's a great example of ways that AI tools can make this easier because you are still figuring out what needs to be done. However, you don't necessarily have to sit there like clicking all of the things to create the tasks and the calendar entries and giving it titles and tabbing through things like your AI tools can do that for you. I think that is that is a big win and it's something that makes it easier to be proactive even if on a high level, you're still the one in control that is getting rid of the donkey work as David says. Well, on that note, I love ending the episode with an action item. So if you made it this far, what I recommend that you do, if you want to be more proactive is open up your calendar and I want you to look 30 days ahead and see what is coming up in the next 30 days that is really important to you is meaningful to you. And what can you do in the next three days and spend 30 minutes on it just to make progress on it? So what is the 30 30 rule for you looking like in the next three days? And I think if you can do that, you'll start to realize like, hey, maybe those 30 minutes will fly by and nothing feels satisfying at all because you just did something that didn't really have the big payoff. But I promise you, if you make this a habit and you spend 30 minutes every single week on something that is not doing the next 30 days, I think you're going to see yourself in a position where you'll slowly become more proactive. You're going to be less stressed about deadlines. And I think that's a great place to be. So that's it for today's episode of The Procivity Show. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you again next week.