In This Episode…
This first edition is a simple welcome to the upcoming podcast series dedicated to helping you achieve more from your efforts. It covers the following points:
- The benefits to you of listening to this podcast
- An introduction to Michael Tipper, the host of the podcast.
- Why there needs to be a shift form knowledge based development to behaviour based development
- The problems of too much “knowing” and not enough “doing”.
- The staggering amount of information on “Time Management” available on websites, Amazon and YouTube.
- How the challenges of our internet/social media driven world have created the need for a new generation of personal productivity
- How the podcast will draw upon the latest developments in neuroscience and performance psychology
- The importance of developing habits that get our work done, but also keep individual well being in mind.
- Why there is a mental health crisis related to how we manage our work looming on the horizon (if indeed it’s not already here!)
- What you can expect from the podcast
Edited Transcription
Hello and welcome to this introduction to the Profit Productivity Podcast where you can profit even more from your time and develop your ability to get more of the right things done quicker by applying the tools and techniques, tactics and strategies and productivity mindset of the world’s most effective people.
You’ll benefit from listening to this podcast if you relate to any of these statements:
- You want to be more productive, you want to be more effective or you want to be more efficient depending on which word best reflects what is important to you.
- You struggle with being overwhelmed with everything you have to do.
- You find that procrastination is getting in your way of a productive day.
- You feel you need to be able to do more than you’re currently doing in the time available to you,
By applying the information you’ll learn here, you’ll be able to achieve your goals. You may even develop peace of mind and get your work life balance in check.
And that’s the aim of this podcast.
So who am I?
Well, my name is Michael Tipper and I been in the people development business for over 20 years. After a career in the military, I developed into a business speaker, author, trainer, and facilitator. First of all, starting in the area of memory and learning improvement and then moving into the development of leadership.
Now throughout all that time in both my military career and in the career I’ve had as a speaker and a trainer and author, I have always been focused on how to get more out of my time. Having run businesses, worked with thousands of people and written books (amongst many other things), to be able to take control of my focus and get more out of my day has been a real drive for me.
I was known as a “busy man” in my military career. The commanding officers I worked for, would often pick me out for important tasks they wanted doing because they knew as a busy man I was likely to get them done.
About 10 years ago, because I was productive and because people started asking me how I did it, I started teaching the techniques I was using.
So I’ve always had a strong interest in applying this material as well as a strong interest in the rationale and psychology of it. Also, being an engineer by background, I love systems and processes. I love getting things effective and efficient so my mindset has always been focused on that.
Why do I want to start doing a podcast about this now?
Well, based on the work I’ve been doing and having worked with over 100,000 people personally, developing their skills across a wide range of techniques I’ve come to a startling realisation. With the Internet and the rapid proliferation of information, we need to shift from knowledge based development to behaviour based development.
There is so much information out there. The problem is, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, too many people focus on gathering lots of tools, tips and techniques but use few if any of them at all.
Let me just give you one example of the vast amount of knowledge available on just one topic of relevance to this podcast. If you do a Google search on the term “time management” (using inverted commas to narrow the search to the specific term) it will return over 65 million web pages. If you do a similar search for “time management white paper”, there are over 21,000 results for that.
A YouTube search on the same term won’t tell you how many videos there are, you have to scroll down and count them yourself. I got as far as 105 videos before I stopped counting. The longest of those was three hours and three minutes, the shortest was 1 minute and 40 seconds. If you take an average length of about 15 minutes each (a rough guess), there are 26 hours of viewing time on the topic just in the first hundred videos.
If you go to Amazon and do a search for time management in the books section there at 80,000 returns. So there’s an awful lot of information about time management available to you.
[Just as an aside, the term “time management” is itself a misnomer. You can’t manage time. And this I think, is one of the problems many people face in trying to get stuff done. But that’s one of the ideas I want to explore during a future episode.]
With this podcast, I going to work through the best information I can find and identify the least and best behaviours necessary to become the most productive we can be.
My passion now is to work out what or how can we do something with what we know. How can we apply it so it serves us in the best possible way? How can we train ourselves so it becomes habitual?
This behaviour based approach instead of a knowledge based approach is one I’ve started to see take effect in the leadership development arena and I want to bring it into the personal productivity arena. The Profit Productivity Podcast is going to be looking at that shift.
I also have my own self interest at heart too because I also want to upgrade my own skills. The tools and techniques I’ve been using have worked really well for me and continue to work really well. But I know I need new techniques and strategies because of the advances in neuroscience and performance psychology.
I want to find out more about those and bring more of those into the way I operate, as well as share them with my clients – professional people who are interested in developing their own abilities to become more effective, more efficient and ultimately more productive.
What’s also driving me is this: the environment i operated in as that busy man in the military and in the early part of my business career is very different to the one we’re in today. The Internet with its global connectivity and the 24 hour availability of information means that more than ever, our attention is being grabbed at every single opportunity.
There’s also an “on demand” expectation from society for resources, information and even our personal availability. I’m starting to see a number of things that concern me.
First of all because our focus gets drawn away so easily from what we’re doing because of things like social media and the easy to consume “soundbite” approach to information, people aren’t really focusing enough in order to get things of significance done as quickly as they’d like.
But not only that, what I’m also seeing and to a certain extent what I’ve also experienced myself, is a crisis looming on the horizon. It may already be here, but I believe there are significant issues around mental health in terms of our ability to focus and concentrate on the daily challenges we face.
Therefore another reason for me to take these steps and start researching more and identifying what works is to bring a better quality of wellbeing, certainly to my activities in the work that I’m doing, but also help others achieve that as well.
This podcast will track my journey through that research. I’ll share what I find – the stuff that works, and the stuff that doesn’t.
So that’s my introduction to this podcast.
I look forward to sharing with you the ideas I find together with my experiences of applying them over the coming episodes. I also look forward to engaging with you to find out the challenges you’ve got, and what great ideas you have I can share with other listeners.
