#4: Insane Tools: 7 Steps to 10x Your Life and Achieve Your Goals
Today, Dr. Steve Orma introduces a new series called 'Insane Tools' and provides a powerful and practical 7-step method for eliminating unimportant activities from your life. By tracking your daily activities over a week and categorizing them, you can identify and prioritize your top values and goals. Dr. Orma emphasizes the critical importance of removing, delegating or reducing tasks that are not in your top 4 priorities/values, so you have more time and energy for what truly matters to you, helping you to achieve massive goals and a fulfilling life.
In this episode you’ll learn:
A 7-step process for cutting 90% of the clutter from your life
How to track where your time goes each day to identify what to cut
How to create categories or "buckets" for different activities to understand how much time is spent on each type of task over a week
How to determine your top three to four priorities and rank them in order of importance to focus your time and energy on what truly matters
How to eliminate, delegate, or reduce time spent on activities that do not align with your top priorities
How to regularly cut out unimportant activities to maintain a focus on what’s most important to you
Remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want!
Steve Orma
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00:00 Introduction to Insane Goals Podcast
00:17 Introducing the 'Insane Tools' Series
00:23 The Importance of Cutting 90% of Your Activities
00:43 New Podcast Format for Practical Application
02:14 Seven-Step Process to Eliminate Non-Essential Activities
02:17 Step 1: Track Your Time for Seven Days
03:56 Step 2: Categorize Your Activities
05:36 Step 3: Identify Your Top Priorities
06:23 Step 4: Rank Your Priorities
08:22 Step 5: Compare Time Spent on Priorities vs. Other Activities
08:45 Step 6: Eliminate, Delegate, or Reduce Non-Essential Activities
16:00 Step 7: Continuously Prune Non-Essential Activities
17:30 Conclusion and Action Steps
The 7-Step Tool for Cutting 90% of the Clutter From Your Life
1. Track where your time goes each day for 7 days and record this in a document
Use Google sheet or Excel
2. Create categories/buckets (entertainment, socialize, partner/immediate family/kids/pets, work, email, social media, eating/food prep, chores, etc).
Put everything you tracked into the appropriate bucket
Add up the total time spent each day and for the week for each bucket
3. Ask yourself: What are the top 3-4 priorities/most important values in my life right now and for the next year or two?
4. Write them down and rate them first to fourth (has to be in a hierarchy).
5. Go back to your doc where you tracked your time and look at how much time you’re spending on the top 4 things versus other things.
6. Start eliminating, delegating or reducing the time you’re spending on anything not in your top 4. Start with low-hanging fruit
7. Keep eliminating, delegating, and reducing until 90% of your time is spent only on your top 4 things.
RESOURCES
IG Episode 3: Why Eliminating 90% of What You’re Doing Will 10x Your Life
Need help achieving your goals? Work with me
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast. I'm Dr. Steve Orma, clinical psychologist and goal achieving specialist. Each week I discuss how to achieve massive goals, smash conventional thinking, and give you a radically different vision of what's possible for your life right now.
Introducing the 'Insane Tools' Series
In today's episode, I want to introduce a new series that I'm adding to the podcast, which is called Insane Tools. In episode three, the previous episode, I talked about why cutting 90 percent of what you're doing in your life will actually 10x your life, will make your life way, way better.
I gave you the rationale for why that's true and how that will benefit you in your life in several different ways. I gave you some ideas for how you can actually go about doing this.
New Podcast Format for Practical Application
But what I decided was I really want to make this podcast practical and for you to be able to actually apply these ideas and principles in your own life. So I'm going to change the format up a little bit moving forward, which is I'm going to do an episode where I present a principle or an [00:01:00] idea that I think is extremely important to apply in your life if you want to achieve insane goals and create an incredible life that you love and kind of provide why it's important and how it will benefit you.
And then I want to provide you a tool or a skill or a method for how you can actually start applying that principle in your own life. It's one thing to understand something logically, but to be able to apply it to your life, to your daily life, to actually make changes in your life is another thing.
And it's important to know how to do it. So either in the same episode, I'll present the tool, or if the episode requires more explanation and rationale, then what I'll do is I'll create a separate follow up episode that will go just over the tool that will help you apply the principle from that episode.
So in today's episode, I want to give you a tool and a way to go about how to start cutting things out of your life that are not moving the needle that are not honoring your values so you can get [00:02:00] to that 90 percent or more of where all you're doing in your life every day is the top things that you love and you're doing none or the minimal amount of things that are not things you love or that are not moving the needle.
7-Step Process to Eliminate Non-Essential Activities
So I'm going to go through a seven step process for how you do this.
Step 1: Track Your Time for Seven Days
Number one, you need to track where your time goes each day for seven days and record this in a document. The reason why it's important to do it for seven days is the things that we do each day over the course of a week will vary.
Usually Monday through Friday it's pretty similar, but then on the weekend, when many people are not working their schedule changes and the things that they're doing during the day changes so it's really helpful to do this exercise for seven days What you want to do is just open a Google Sheet or an Excel document, some way to record this data, which is going to be very simple, but you need some way to record it. You could do it on paper as well and some kind of journal or notebook.
And the best way to do this is each day, as you complete a [00:03:00] task, you record what that task was, like what you did, let's say, oh, I answered emails, or I was on social media, or I went to a work meeting, and you record how much time you spent doing that thing, and you do that throughout the day. So that means, either you keep a notebook with you so you could track this, or you use an app, or you could just open up the document where you're going to actually record this.
That's the best way to do it. The other way you could do it is you could record it all at the end of the day, and you could think back, Okay, where did I put my time in today? Now, that will work, but it's not as accurate because you'll forget certain things that you did or you'll forget about how much time you actually spent on something. It's very easy with things like social media to lose track of time. It's very easy to get sucked into something like that where you just have no idea that an hour of your time just disappeared. So it's really helpful to record how long you're spending on each thing right after you finish it.
And then you're going to do this each day for seven days.
Step 2: Categorize Your Activities
You're going to create categories [00:04:00] or buckets. And these would be the main categories where most of your time goes. Where most of people's time goes each day, each week.
So this would be things like entertainment. That would include TV, social media, any kind of entertainment, going out to a movie. Socializing is another bucket. Time you spent with your family, that could include your partner, your kids, even pets. Your work, your job. Email, social media, eating and food prep, chores in general. These are categories that you want to create. Most people are going to have these kind of similar categories. But if you have certain special things that you do in your life, then you could create a separate category for that. And then what you want to do is put everything that you track into the appropriate bucket. TV, social media, watching YouTube, going out to movies, that would all be entertainment.
That would go into the entertainment bucket. All the emails, all the time you spent on email, whether it's work or personal, that would go into the email bucket. All the time that you spent with your partner, or [00:05:00] with your kids, or walking your dog, or whatever it is in terms of your family home life, that would go into the family bucket.
And so what you're going to do is put everything that you did that you cataloged over seven days and you're going to put them into buckets or these different categories. Then what you want to do is add up the total time that you spent each day for the entire week, for the entire seven days, for each bucket.
So how much on average were you spending each day on entertainment? Or how much time were you spending with your family and your kids each day? And then add that up for the full week. How much time did I spend in the last week on these different categories?
Step 3: Identify Your Top Priorities
Then step three, put that aside and ask yourself this question: what are the top three to four priorities in your life right now, your most important values right now in your life and for the next one or two years, let's say.
And this has to be just your top three to four because that is where you want most of your time and energy and resources going. Think of your top [00:06:00] three to four things that are most important to you. And this is maybe the hardest part of the exercise because you really have to think what are your priorities in your life right now.
And a lot of times people don't think about this and you know they kind of have an idea but it's very implicit and they're not really focused and very conscious of what these things are. So I want you to ask that question, write down the top three or four things, no more than four.
Step 4: Rank Your Priorities
And then step four, I want you to write those down, and then I want you to rate them in a hierarchy. That means first, second, third, fourth, in terms of importance. Now, this is also difficult for people to do A lot of times they'll say, these are all even, these are all important to me. And they are. If they're your top three or four things, they're going to be your top values in your life. The things that are your priorities, but you still have to know the hierarchy because that's the only way you know how to allot your time and your energy each day in each week to these different things.
So you want to rate them. Number one, number two, number three, number [00:07:00] four. So I'll share with myself, and I shared this in the previous episode, my top four things are number one would be my work and my work is top important because I need to put the most time into that to be able to achieve the goals that I have in that area.
Number two would be my wife and my relationship.
Number three would be my health.
And number four for me would be where I live, because that's really important to me because I think it has a huge impact on your life and your lifestyle where you live.
Those are my top four values and that's in order of the hierarchy. And when I say hierarchy, I mean in terms of importance of where I put my time and energy each day. That doesn't mean my work is more important than my wife or I value it more than my wife or I value those two things over my health. Really those top three for me are all even in terms of how important and vital they are, like those are like non negotiable values that I have to have the all three of those in my life.
But in terms of the time, I don't nearly need to put in as much time on my health each day as I do my work. And the same thing with my relationship to [00:08:00] keep that connection with my wife and spend the time I want with her, I don't need to put in eight hours a day to do that.
So that's how I've put mine into a hierarchy. So you want to think about that for yourself, your top four values or priorities in your life, and then order them in terms of the number of hours that you need to put into that thing to really honor it and get what you want in those four areas.
Step 5: Compare Time Spent on Priorities vs. Other Activities
Okay, step five. Go back to your document where you track your time and look at how much time you're spending on your top four things versus other things.
And this is what should shock you, or maybe it won't shock you. Maybe you're aware of this. But what it should do is shock you about how much time is being put into things that are lower on the list, or not that important to you now, and how much time you're actually putting to certain things.
Step 6: Eliminate, Delegate, or Reduce Non-Essential Activities
Step six is to start eliminating, delegating, or reducing the time you're spending on anything not in your top four. The best thing you can do with reducing or cutting out things from your life is to eliminate things, just to [00:09:00] get rid of them. Anything that isn't important, that isn't moving the needle, that is not absolutely required. And you have to be, again, very honest with yourself. Do I need this thing in my life right now? Or is it just, it's a habit that I'm doing it or it's an emotional want but it's not really important to you when you come down to it. It's not in your top four and it's not moving the needle on your top four. you eliminate you cut it out completely and I'll give you some examples in a minute.
The second best option is to delegate. If it's something that you absolutely have to have in your life, it's required, then try to delegate as much as you can to someone else. This could be at work, if you work on a team or if you're a manager, if you have the ability, if you have people working below you, then delegate it. A lot of times people have a hard time doing this, but it's really important to learn how to do that as you move up in your career or you move up as your business gets bigger to be able to delegate it to people that you've hired instead of you trying to handle everything yourself.
But this could also be applied to chores, grocery shopping, doing yard work. These are [00:10:00] kinds of things that could be delegated. You could hire a gardener, you could hire people to do some of these things. And sure, I understand money might be limited for certain people, so you might not be able to delegate everything you want to, but you want to do it as much as you can because the time that you'll get back. For example, there's so much time spent on on food. Shopping for food, creating the food list, deciding what you're going to have for dinner, then preparing the meal, eating the meal, and then cleaning up. It takes so much time, and if you're doing three meals a day, over seven days, over a year, or your lifetime, that's a lot of time going just to food.
So the better you can reduce that, or delegate it, or eliminate certain things, the more time you're going to have for your top four important things.
And then the last thing is, if you can't delegate it, you can't eliminate it, reduce it. And the way you reduce the time you spend on something is to either create better systems for how you go about doing it. Like I prepare my own dinner each night. But I have a system for how I can do it really efficiently, so [00:11:00] I do it in the least amount of time. Or you can reduce the time by just setting a boundary on yourself about how much time you're going to put into something.
So you really want to go through your list and start eliminating, delegating, or reducing the time you're spending on anything not in your top four.
And the best place to start is with the low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit are the easiest, most obvious things that you're already aware of that you know you're putting a lot of time into, that you know that you shouldn't be putting a lot of time to, that maybe you even say, you know, I need to start spending less time doing this, but you're not doing it.
This is where, like, if you want to achieve incredible things and have an amazing life and fulfill all your dreams, and you're serious about it, then you have to be serious about cutting out things that aren't honoring or supporting or helping you achieve those things. So low hanging fruit, a couple of very common examples would be TV. TV, or this could be watching stuff on your computer, like you're streaming Netflix.
So anything like that where you're just sitting and passively watching entertainment. Now I'm not saying don't do this. It's wrong [00:12:00] to do it. What I'm saying is, ask yourself, how important is it for me to do this or spend a certain amount of time on watching TV or Netflix versus the things that are most important to me in my life?
And I want to give you some statistics. So on average, Americans spend three hours a day watching TV. So some people are actually spending more than that, but on average three hours a day, I think it's a little less in other countries around the world, but still a lot of people spend a lot of time watching TV.
So three hours a day, that's a thousand and ninety two hours a year spent sitting in front of the TV, watching TV. Now, if you have 16 hours a day to live. If you figure eight hours of our day is spent sleeping and the other 16 hours is we're awake, and that's when we're actually living, we're doing all these things that we're tracking here. So 16 hours a day. And you're watching a thousand plus hours of TV a year, that's 68 days of TV watching. That means you are sitting literally in front of the TV every [00:13:00] year more than two months watching tv. That's one sixth of your year. Is that how you want to be spending your life doing that?
Second low hanging fruit example is social media. On average, people spend, and this is all over the world now. On average, people spend two and a half hours a day on social media. Again, for some it's more, even a lot more. For some it's less, but on average two and a half hours a day, which is 913 hours a year. If you have 16 hours a day to live, that's 57 days of being on social media a year, again, almost two months.
So when you combine the TV and the social media alone, that's four months on average that people are spending every year of their life doing those two things. That's a third of your year. Do you want to spend a third of your year or get to the end of your life and look back and say, I spent a third of my life watching TV and scrolling on social media.
Now, if you're okay with that, then you're probably not someone who wants to, who is [00:14:00] going to achieve incredible things in your life or build a the life that you want because to do that it requires the commitment, the time, the energy to put into that and not on these other things that may give you some entertainment or give you some value but that are sucking away from being able to create the life that you want and not really creating a lot of fulfillment for you.
So those would be two easy areas or low hanging fruit where you could just eliminate that stuff either completely or cut it way down..
A few other examples here would be social life. I'm not saying don't have a social life, but how big of a social life do you want beyond your immediate family, your wife, your kids, your pets, things like that. So this is to like your friends, to extended family, to going to parties and weddings and all this stuff.
Ask yourself, go through your list of friends and really be honest with yourself and say, which one of my friends is actually creating value? The ones that I spend the most time with, the ones that I'm closest to. Because even there, you should have a [00:15:00] hierarchy. If you want to have friends and have a social life, that's fine. But ask yourself, Where am I getting the most value? Who are the friends or family members who I value the most, that I enjoy being around the most that I click with the most? And start reducing and eliminating in that area as well, because a lot of time is sucked there on spending time with people that you don't really enjoy being around or way more than maybe spending time with people who are of higher value to you or more important to you.
You could do the same thing with chores. A lot of time is wasted with chores and email is another one. And there's other areas, but you get the idea. You want to just start going through starting with the low hanging fruit and just cutting stuff out of your life.
And this will open up a lot of time. Just if you cut out TV and social media, that would be like five hours a day. That's like a third of your day right there almost. And that would be another five hours that you have to do something that's way more fulfilling or rejuvenating or supporting your top [00:16:00] values.
Step 7: Continuously Prune Non-Essential Activities
Okay, and then step seven is just to keep doing this. You don't just sit down and do this for a week and, you know, eliminate a couple of things and then just go back to your life because what will happen is it'll just build up again. It's like clutter in your house. Every once in a while, you throw out a bunch of stuff or you have a garage sale, but that clutter just somehow comes back. You have to keep pruning, you have to keep weeding the garden and getting rid of anything that isn't in your top four and anything below your top four, it's the minimal amount of time and energy that you need to put into it to maintain those things. So you just keep doing this over time.
My wife and I started doing this, to a great extent back in 2015. And we just kept eliminating and reducing month after month, year after year, up to today where 90, 95% of our time is spent on our top four things, and the rest of the time is spent on things, basically like just chores, things that we need to do. And what we found is that when we started actually eliminating things that we thought we [00:17:00] needed, that we thought we couldn't live without, we didn't miss it. Because we were then spending more time on things that were more enjoyable and more fulfilling and more important to us. And that made it very easy. We didn't miss those other things.
So it gets easier and easier over time to reduce and eliminate or delegate these things, because you find that it really benefits your life. You're able to achieve more. You have more energy. You have lower stress. You have less on your plate. And it just makes your life way better and allows you to achieve everything that you want to achieve in your life without settling or compromising.
Conclusion and Action Steps
So I hope you found this episode of Insane Tools helpful and the action step would be to go and do this. Go track your time over the next seven days, create that document, start recording it, and then go through this exercise. And I'll include this entire exercise, all seven steps, in the show notes, which you could find on my website at drorma.com/podcast. This is episode number four. If you didn't listen to episode number three, that's where I go over the rationale or why this is so important to do and how it will [00:18:00] benefit you in your life. So I'll have a link to that as well.
And if you found the episode helpful, please leave a review in Apple Podcasts and let me know what you think about the show and subscribe. I put out episodes every Tuesday. And now with this new series of Insane Tools, sometimes there'll be two episodes a week, but definitely every Tuesday, and then occasionally there'll be a bonus episode where there's a tool that I introduce.
Thanks for listening to the Insane Goals podcast. You can find all the resources and links for this episode in the show notes at https://www.drorma.com/podcast. And remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want in life. No limits, no BS, and no excuses. I’ll see you next time.