Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things

Results matter the most.
Practically, that means this: You might work for 50 hours a
week, but if you don’t experience any growth personally,
emotionally, financially, you’re not effective. People often
ask me, “where do I begin?” To answer that question, I want
to share one exercise that I teach in my productivity
course, 
Procrastinate Zero.
It’s an exercise that I picked up from Peter Drucker’s 
The
Effective Executive
. To me, Drucker is the first and best

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thinker when it comes to effectiveness for knowledge
workers.
Many of the books, articles, productivity tools, and
productivity apps you see these days are all in a way
influenced by Drucker, who essentially invented the term
personal effectiveness.
What you will find next is a simple exercise from The
Effective Executive (which I modified slightly to make it
easier) that you can apply to become more effective
yourself.
Step 1: Know Thy Time
I often hear people saying: “I don’t know what’s wrong with
me. I keep procrastinating.”
My question is: 
“Do you know thy time?”
If you don’t measure your time, it’s tough to stop
procrastination or improve your productivity. Because if you
want to manage your time better, you have to know where
it goes first. Your memory is not sufficient. If I asked you
what you were doing exactly one week ago at this time,
would you have an answer? There you go.
How do you know your time? Keep an activity log. Before I
even have a real session with clients, I often ask them to
keep an activity log for two weeks. An activity log is exactly
what you imagine — an hour by hour record of what you’re
doing throughout the day.
The specific method you use for your activity log doesn’t
matter. The only thing that matters is that you want to keep
a record for at least two weeks. Preferably, you want a
whole month of recorded activities.
I just keep a pen and a notepad on my desk and every hour
I write down the time and what I’ve done during the past

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hour. It’s important to keep the notebook visible, so you
don’t forget.