Productivity, Networking, Planning, Development and Evernote with Rob Catalano, Co-Founder of Worktango Inc

Listen Below and Here’s What We Recommended:

Business and Marketing – Learning – Books – Entrepreneurial

There’s this really great book that takes about 20 minutes to read. It’s called ‘What Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast’. It’s something that I read five or six years ago and thought it was something I wanted to add into my routine.

I’m reading a book called ‘The Organized Mind’ by Daniel Levitson. It’s all about the digital onslaught now with everything being 300 miles an hour and always on. What was really interesting was that he says that having unread email in your inbox can reduce your IQ by as much as 10 points. (comment from Jo)

Productivity

Planning the Day Before – I review my top five from the night before. What that means is that every day after work I write a top five things I’m going to focus on doing the next day to help me prioritise, especially when there are a lot of things going on. I do review that in the morning just to make sure it aligns with what I created after work the day before and nothing has changed from then.

Email Time – I do like to catch up on my emails before around 10:00 am but I don’t touch my emails for the next two hours afterwards and really focus on one or two of those important things from my top five.

Planning Travel – When I’m traveling, I’ll try to book flights at 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM so I can still get caught up at the airport on the day and just start the day right.

Daily Goal Setting – It’s something we started doing daily when I was working at Achievers. The way we always looked at it was there was a top three but you didn’t want to limit it to top three so there was a stretch goal of something you found you wanted to get done, that was the fourth one. The fifth one was always something from a personal development standpoint. It had nothing to do with work but it was something you personally needed to do. It’s still top three productivity at work cloaked with a fourth stretch goal and a fifth personal one.

Shut off Distractions – That is why literally between 10:00 and before lunch, I do try and shut off email, shut off the distractions. I don’t put the phone on airplane mode so to speak but if someone really needs to get hold of me they can call me but it’s focused from 10-12 to try to do that top one thing. Then when something urgent does come up, you can take care of it the rest of the day and feel a bit productive that you focused on the most important thing first.

WorkTango – our tool is built to help managers have more accountability on what they are doing for their organisation and for their team. I actually use WorkTango as a tool to prioritise the things I need to get done for my team to make sure that they are successful.

Personal Development

Learning

You meet new people and you learn about new approaches and ideas and thoughts and ways that they do things. It’s a great way to learn and respect what other people do. From a learning and improvement standpoint, the ability to chat with new people is just a good opportunity. I do it whenever I can.

Goal Setting – I always try to think do I have a goal on the wealth side of things, the self side of things, and the health side of things. That’s how I structure what are my future goals personally.

Personal Development – Motivation

Living More

What I mean by that is, have I engaged in some level of new experience that I learned something or something I can have as a memory moving forward. Yesterday actually was a great example, it was the first time I was actually on a sailboat and drove it and didn’t know what I was doing but it was a cool experience. When I do something like that, I feel I’ve kind of lived more, right?

Organisation – Evernote

I have one list in a tool called Evernote which I’m sure people have heard about. I have work tasks, personal tasks but outside of the top five there’s always a running list of other things that I have going on. Some might be things I want to get accomplished next week or if I have an idea and I want to do it, I write it in something I want to do someday. I kind of keep a list of personal and work stuff outside of the top five so that I don’t forget things.

Wellbeing – Meditation and Mindfulness

Headspace – They actually have this little thing in there called SOS. Literally, it’s this quick, three-minute kind of ‘just stop’. There have been times where I have been super stressed and not sure how to move forward on something and I have used the head space SOS tool. Just again, three minutes of just stopping, coming up for air goes a long way in terms of trying to fix some things that don’t go right.

Wellbeing – Stress

I think health is not only the physical part of it but just kind of this state of mind. What I try and do is I really try and be in my days. It’s really easy to get bogged down in a lot of different things and tasks and to lose a day or a week. Sometimes I really try and just focus. Thursdays would most exclusively be about our product or Mondays are on marketing or Fridays are more about writing because I do a lot of columns and blogs. I think healthy isn’t just your physical state but also mentally as well. How do you keep yourself on track?

To Contact Rob

People can reach out to me anytime. Rob Catalano is the Twitter handle that I have. Obviously, that’s my name on LinkedIn. [email protected] is my email address and you can reach me there. If you went to the worktango.io website, you can email the company and it’ll get routed to me at some point.

From my end, I love connecting with different people and learning how they do things and, if some other productivity hack has worked for you I’d love to hear about it. It’s just great to connect with people.

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The post Rob Catalano on Show #26: Productivity, Networking, Planning, Development and Evernote first appeared on POWER to Live More.