Building Success with the Power List
There are a lot of different methods out there for increasing your productivity and becoming successful. I've tried several of them, but the one that has helped the most is the power list.
There are a lot of different methods out there for increasing your productivity and becoming successful. A few common examples would be personal Kanban boards, setting SMART goals, the Pomodoro technique, and Getting Things Done. I've tried most of them and think that they can be quite useful, especially when combining them together.
Over the past few months; however, I've been using another method / program that I feel has worked even better for me - the Power List from Andy Frisella.
There's not much to it - it's essentially a daily planner with a list of tasks or goals that you either do or don't do. The basic premise is built on creating and maintaining discipline in order to achieve your goals and dominate your life.
Each day, you pick 5 actionable tasks that must be completed. If you complete all 5 tasks, then you "win the day" and the process repeats. The idea is that if you win enough days in the week, you "win the week" and if you win enough weeks during the year, you "win the year." There's an entire podcast episode on Winning the Day and the Power List that I recommend listening to, if you're interested.
Once a task has been successfully completed for 21 straight days, it's considered a habit that you no longer need to track and can do automatically. This opens up your list for a new task.
As an example, some of my tasks have included
- A 45 minute workout
- 20 minutes of blogging
- 10 minutes of visualization
- Read 10 pages
- Drink 1 gallon of water
- 20 minutes of learning
- 10 minutes of cleaning
Something that is nice about the power list is that if you actually do it every day, it's extremely easy to gain insight as to when you're falling behind or getting off track, because you're marking tasks as failed and days as a loss.
There's even another program by Andy that could be combined with the power list called 75 hard (and Live Hard if you want to take it up a notch). These programs are definitely a challenge, but can change the way you think and live. I haven't actually made it to the Live Hard portion, as I have yet to successfully complete 75 hard.
In just the past two months though, using the power list has helped me
- Read 6 books
- Start a business
- Write 7 blogs
- and start a journey in real estate investing
Needless to say, I'm excited to start 75 hard again in the next week or so, and plan on actually making it through this time!
