Clarity Where it Matters
How Tracking the Right Progress Wins Every Time

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #599: Clarity Where it Matters: How Tracking the Right Progress Wins Every Time

Jeff Sanders
Good morning and welcome to The 5 AM Miracle, episode #599: Clarity Where it Matters: How Tracking the Right Progress Wins Every Time.

I am Jeff Sanders, and you have reached the podcast that is dedicated to dominating

your day before breakfast. I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer,

and to learn more about that, head on over to jeffsanders.com slash speaking.

Now, in the episode this week, I'll break down why confusion is the ultimate obstacle to success.

How to find the simple and clear answer to any problem, and how to track the right progress to maintain clarity and the fastest path to the next finish line.

Let's dig in.

I have built the most amazing investment spreadsheet I have ever seen.

And no, I am not a financial advisor.

And no, I am not going to share this spreadsheet with you or anyone else online anytime soon.

unless I radically change careers.

What I did here was address a problem of mine

in the most familiar way that I know how,

tracking data on a spreadsheet,

in order to see where I am, what my plan is,

and what likely outcomes I can expect to see in the future.

If you're struggling to solve a problem,

achieve a goal, or decide on which direction to go next,

you need clarity, you need a spreadsheet,

a map, a plan, an outline, a table of contents, an Atlas, a filter through which to see everything that matters and everything that needs to happen next.

The episode this week is about clarity and tracking the progress you need to achieve greater clarity.

Nothing beats clarity, especially if you have been struggling, fighting a losing battle, or you keep finding yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place with no clear direction on where to go next.

So let's break down the real issues at hand here.

And then I'll do my best to shed some light on what you can do now to move forward with more clarity on your current adventure.

So let's kick this off with a conversation on why confusion is the ultimate obstacle to success.

So I had to look this one up because this is a story that I heard years ago, but I found the answer that I was looking for, which was many studies that have looked at consumer behavior.

specifically around buying decisions.

And so what I found here said that studies that look at the buying decisions of consumers

show that too many choices, known as choice overload, can lead to reduced purchase rates,

increased decision anxiety, and post-purchase regret because the mental effort to choose something becomes overwhelming.

I knew a guy years ago who spent some time in prison.

This long backstory here.

I'll tell that about a different episode.

But the long story short here is that when he got out of prison,

he told a story about going shopping for deodorant.

And he went to the store and saw this mountain of choices,

this entire wall filled with dozens and dozens of different deodorants he could choose from.

When he was in prison, he had no choices.

Here was the one you can use, you're done.

But for him, there was so many choices he could not figure out what to

choose? Do you choose price? Do you choose quality? Do you choose color? Smell? Like,

what is the factor here? What's the filter? How do I know what to do?

In other words, if you are struggling with something, you don't want 300 options.

You just want three. You know, I don't want to compare and contrast dozens of choices.

I just want to easily know the best answer and then move on with my day.

Confusion ultimately causes stagnation.

We don't act when we're confused. We run. We don't make a confident decision. We delay making any decision at all. We don't feel emotionally settled and at peace in the middle of a debate about which direction to go next. Instead, we feel stress and anxiety because we're lost. Being confused equates to feeling stress about indecision and anxiety about a lack of clarity.

and fear about the future because we don't know what's going to happen next.

I don't know how to explain this any other way besides saying you know what I'm talking about here because we've all been there.

That confusion and stagnation are best friends.

If you don't know what to do, you sit there.

Right?

Now, in the case of fear, you might say, well, there's fight, flight, or freeze.

So in some cases, if you're confused about something, if you're struggling,

fearful, there's tension, you might choose to fight, or in other words, address the

problem head on, but that's the least common solution.

You may choose to run, in which case you are literally going to say, I don't want to deal

with this, I'm going to get myself as far from this as I possibly can, or freeze,

which means your nervous system just shut down and you're so overwhelmed with what's

going on, you literally physically, emotionally, cognitively,

can't move, can't decide, and you're stuck.

None of these choices are fantastic.

The fighting choice, yes, potentially is the answer,

but it's a little bit aggressive.

It's a little bit intense to say

that for any problem we have,

we have to fight our way to get the solution.

I think there are smarter ways to approach most things

that require a lot less emotional intensity in that direction.

Let's go at that for a second.

If confusion equals stagnation, confusion can also create friction. Friction slows our

progress. It reduces our productivity and makes us frustrated because we expected

to be so much farther along than we are now. And you know that feeling.

You're looking at your to-do list, your project list, your current goals,

and you're just going, man, I thought I was going to do better than this. I thought

I would be so much farther along.

You know, speaking of that investment spreadsheet that I created the top of the show,

there was so much just kind of apprehension about wanting to address that particular issue in large part,

because if I looked at the numbers, the numbers might tell me something I don't want to know.

I don't want to know reality.

I want to run from it, right?

I don't want to see the numbers because they might tell me that things are bad and that things in the future could be epically worse.

this is the problem with fear.

It's the problem with confusion.

It's the problem of a lack of clarity.

Not only do we stagnate, we also have that friction of saying there's a frustration

here, there's a tension here, and we have to be able to get ourselves past that.

Friction feels like pain.

It reminds us that there is a better path and we're not on it.

There is a solution and we haven't found it yet.

and that tension, that feeling of friction there is one that reminds us,

this is a problem that won't go away.

It's not going to go away until we address it.

There's not going to be some magical solution that just shows me out of nowhere.

The answer is going to be us doing work.

So at some point, that friction has to be addressed head on.

If you want to reduce the friction and actually avoid the stagnation,

there has to be a simple solution to clarify what's most important in the middle

of the mess. One thing that I have seen that is pretty undeniable is the magic

of the number three. Confusion, if you look at through the lens of goal achievement,

you're looking for probably the top three. Another example, you don't want to

read, let's say, the top 36 books on a topic, hoping to learn everything about it.

You really could just read the top three books on that topic and understand 80 to 90%

of what actually matters. You also don't want to break.

brainstorm dozens of possibilities and then analyze every single one of them one by one.

Really, the goal is to brainstorm, which is healthy to do, but then quickly identify the top three that stand out that clearly beat the rest of the pack and double down on those possible solutions.

You know, back of the day when I was in high school, my high school class did a performance of Schoolhouse Rock, the musical.

And in that show, there's a wonderful song called Three is the Magic Number.

And honestly, it is.

Three is the magic number.

It works so wonderfully well to say,

if I am debating thousands of possibilities,

epically infinite number of potential solutions or avenues to go down,

I'm not going to choose with thousands of solutions.

I'm not going to choose with dozens.

I'm not going to choose if there's more than three.

But somehow, once I get it down to just a couple, just a few,

it's so much easier to compare, contrast, make a choice, and move on.

One of the key things about productivity is efficiency.

And efficiency really is kind of the epic battle we have to transition between things

as much as it is to do something a little bit faster with less friction.

So in both of those examples, you're looking for speed and kind of a fluidity or a flow.

On the one example of efficiency inside of a project, yes, of course you want to be able to say,

let's get this thing done faster. I know what it is. Let's get in and do the work.

But the other piece, the transition between tasks is where most of us get stuck.

There's a lot of wasted time when we're trying to pivot from one thing to another.

And one of the best ways to reduce that efficiency loss is to have fewer things to switch between,

which is a roundabout way of saying do less to achieve more.

Don't have so many options. Don't have so many tasks.

Don't look at your calendar and feel overwhelmed by it.

Look at your calendar and your task manager and feel empowered by it.

How do you make that transformation?

How do you see a calendar and a task manager for the day and think to yourself,

this is what I want to do with my day.

I'm excited about it.

Let's dig into it.

That feeling can feel very far away if your constant feeling is one of stress and anxiety

and the fighter flight or freeze syndrome kicks in.

You just don't know what to do because the whole thing's one.

big hot mess.

Three is the magic number.

Go back to the basics,

have fewer choices,

and work with those.

Because if you want to succeed

in anything,

stop considering all your options.

All is way too many.

All is overwhelming and exhausting.

And that's not the point.

You know, I've said before in this podcast

that when it comes to physical fitness

and exercise, that I have chosen

my key activities.

I love to be on the trails,

and in the gym. And that's it. I don't do anything else. I rarely swim. I rarely cycle.

I never do any other physical activities literally besides spending time on the trails,

hiking or running, or time in the gym, lifting weights, or using the sauna.

That's all you're going to see me doing. It's a very short list of physical activities,

and yet when I do those few things, I get tremendous results from them. Yes, I could explore other options.

There are plenty of physical fitness activities to be done, and many of them are wonderful.

But I don't have time for all that.

I have time for a few key things, and I double down on those.

I get results that I love.

I don't go on with my day.

Everything in your life is about figuring out how to identify those couple of core things that matter.

So narrow down the field to your top three and then get to work.

You'll figure out the answer a lot faster if you don't give yourself an infinite number

of possibilities to choose from.

Now, the second core piece today is the conversation around finding the simple

and clear answer to any problem you may be trying to solve.

The first key to this, and this is a really important one, if you

are a perfectionist. There is rarely, if ever, a perfect answer. In school,

you were likely docked points for not choosing the right answer. But in life,

there are no exact right answers. That's extremely rare. Instead, there are options.

And you just have to pick one, hopefully one of the good ones, or one of the great ones.

And then you go. You act upon that and you make something happen. You don't have to

search for perfection in the real world.

and if you let perfection stop you from progress, you're doing it backwards.

Perfectionism kills more dreams than all the C students in the world who tried and failed a hundred times and maybe didn't do so well in the classroom, but somehow in the real world, they're killing it.

I've seen this time and time again.

I was an A student in school.

I really valued getting top grades.

But somehow, that level of perfectionism and that striving for high achievement in the academic.

world, it doesn't play well in the real world in many scenarios because the real

world cares about results.

They don't care about grades.

You can, you might choose to.

You might want to make sure that your website you design is perfect and all the

colors are exactly right.

But your customer on your website, they don't care about the colors being perfect.

They just want an answer to their problem.

They want a solution.

They want a good product.

They don't care about all the fancy frills and bells and whistles.

You do. And that's the disconnect. If you care about perfectionism, you likely

are missing the boat on what truly matters for what you're trying to achieve.

Related to that, you don't want to let optimization stop you from making a few

mistakes as you jump in without all the answers right away. So once again,

it could be pretty later on. You want to get to the important parts right now.

In my podcast is a pretty good example. The world of podcasting is extremely

complex if you really dig into the weeds of it. There are so many things you

could do to optimize audio quality and content and potential interviews. And

if you jump onto YouTube and do video versions and just there's an endless

amount of marketing potential and cross promotion and my gosh, there's so much

potentially to podcasting. And if I had said at the outset, I'm going to master and

optimize and perfect every single one of these before I launched the first episode, I would

launched. This show would never have existed. Instead, I said, here's a reasonable

bar of quality that I want to hit. As soon as I hit that, the show is going to

launch and off I go and I'll figure out the rest later, which is what I've done.

And now here I am 12 years later just on the eve of episode number 600.

Over a decade of work and it only showed up because on day one I showed up to say

I'm here whether this show is good or not. I'm going to write.

record this thing and it's just going to be what it is and I'm going to move on from

there. And it is incredible how many people, high achievers specifically, who value

perfectionism at such this ridiculous level that it completely stops them from doing

any work whatsoever. The fear of failure, the fear of mistakes, the fear of looking

goofy in public. It is incredible how much those types of silly fears stop real progress.

may prevent us from doing things that actually means something.

This falls right in line with don't let the opinions of others

stop you from learning how to do something poorly or to be a beginner again.

Our goal here is to be okay with day one.

To be okay on the very first day to say, I'm new here.

I don't know what's going on.

Teach me.

Let's learn.

Let's grow.

Let's perfect this later.

But for now, let's just get in, get our hands dirty.

embrace the lack of knowledge by acting upon that and doing something that's going to push you forward a lot faster.

There's a whole conversation I'm not having here about perfectionism, but this is such an important conversation because for most of the fears that we have, most of the frustrations and anxieties that we face while pursuing projects, they can be tied back in many cases to this level of quality that we are striving for that is unnecessary.

literally could be ignored and you just get what's good enough and then you

stop. That's it. Good enough is good enough. Get there and move on. It's hard.

It need to me to say that out loud. I can feel myself having this tension of saying,

no, no, no, but Jeff, it could be better. Why would you not launch this thing?

It could be better. Wait for it. No, no, you shouldn't wait. This needs to happen

now. Whatever this thing is you're thinking about, get in now. Let it be dirty. Let it be

let the mistakes come. You will get more progress, more ideas, more creativity,

more potential from the action you take, the messy action that you take,

than the perfect action that never happens at all.

The next piece to this, to find the simple and clear answer to any problem,

is to become an explorer. In that same vein of saying, I'm going to get and get my hands

dirty, you want to be able to be okay and excited about exploration.

Nearly everything that I am good at now only came to be because I was willing to kind of get in and look around to see what's available.

And you can find answers to most of the things if you just allow yourself to be that beginner, have that beginner's mindset, and learn.

And this could come from a great book that you read, YouTube videos that you watch, a mentor that you connect with.

Exploration has many different forms.

In the case of my trail running days, yes, exploration was literally physically good.

going into the woods to find new trails to run, which I really enjoy doing.

But likewise, I really enjoy getting myself into areas I know very little about.

You know, in the last six months, this investing project that I've had going on,

massive progress for me in that front, because I allowed myself to explore,

to learn a lot more and to see what was out there.

And that's what allowed me to then feel so much more confident about this amazing spreadsheet I've now built,

just simply because I gave myself the freedom to be a beginner and to explore to see what's possible.

So your goal is to embrace going on adventures and really view it that way.

Instead of viewing something as a fear-based project that you're forced to do, flip that script and somehow view this as, wait, I get to go on an adventure.

I get to be an explorer.

I get to go do something.

I get to go do something.

I don't have to do it.

I'm choosing to opt into this.

And so you do some research, you see what's out there, and then you do it again tomorrow.

And the third piece to find the simple and clear answer to any problem is kind of the backwards logic that the simple answer will actually find you.

So if you aren't sure, if you have found the right answer yet to a problem, you haven't.

This has been more clear to me than anything else recently, which is that the simple and clear answers are.

so obvious that you will know the moment you have found them because they stand

out in such an obvious way. Simplicity is bold. Simplicity is loud. Simplicity is so

impossible to miss. You know, I see this all the time in my project files.

If I'm working through something where I'm currently brainstorming and researching

and exploring, then my notes that I take personally to write down all this information,

the notes are messy. The notes have a lot going on. There's all.

all kinds of ideas. They're not only connected yet. They're kind of all over the

map. But then as I work through it day by day, I filter the ideas, I delete the

bad ones, I bring the good ones to the top. I go through that process of organization

and exploration. Well, by the time I'm done, what I tend to have is obnoxious simplicity.

We're talking just one sentence. Here's the answer right in front of me. And the rest is

just noise. The rest can disappear because I know the answer, because I'm still.

staring at it, right in the face.

Once you're there, simplicity has found you, the work is now done.

Or the work is now clarified, and you get to now go do that work.

The point of this is we're looking for that single sentence, that single answer.

You know, the late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, was really famous for his management style,

specifically around simplicity.

And so there's a lot of stories of him back in the day where he would tell his development teams

or working on a new app.

Okay, bring me a prototype and I will analyze your work.

And they would come in and say, Steve, look at this awesome new app.

And he would say, no, this is not awesome.

This is confusing.

There's too many buttons to click.

I don't like it.

Do it again.

And bring me the one click solution.

A one button solution.

That's what I want.

And the teams would say, well, Steve, we can't do that.

We need all these buttons.

You'd say, no, come back when it's one button.

And then eventually they would.

And all of a sudden, the app is a lot.

better, the user experience has improved dramatically, and Apple becomes well known

for being a company that creates more simplistic, easy, clear, beautiful

products and software.

And so you see the point here.

Simplicity is not just something you can apply in the business world.

It's not just a strategy for how to choose the right next workout.

Simplicity is the answer to all of your problems.

Whatever it is you're trying to solve, the simple answer is almost always the best

possible choice. And the challenge that we face is being able to identify what simplicity

means in the context of the work we're currently in. And every single one of my

projects, all of them, whether it's my personal investment project, my next podcast

launch, my next book I'm working on, next speech to give, right, whatever the thing is,

my new diet that I just refined this summer, all of these things I'm working on,

the challenge is to take the messy beginnings and turn those into very clean,

simple, beautiful finish lines. That's the work involved. Taking all the mess

and making it something beautiful. If you can do that and get really good at

the skill set of that, you can solve anything. You can solve any problem. You can

tackle any challenge because you know the process. You know what it takes to become

a beginner and an explorer and a researcher and a note taker and an outliner and an organizer

and that all of a sudden you're executing at a high level and the end result just shows right up.

You know the answer.

You do it.

That's the process.

And we all go through this all the time in a variety of ways.

We may not frame it that way or organize it necessarily in our minds in that way.

But that's what's taking place in nearly every case.

We go from the mess.

We find the answer.

Now, the last piece of this conversation this week is how to actually track the right progress to maintain your clarity and your fast path to the finish line.

This is the spreadsheet conversation. It's hard for me to express exactly why I'm

I love productivity so much or organization so much until I look at examples of

my own personal systems for organization and almost all of them come down to some

form of a spreadsheet, an outline, a table of contents. There's an organizing document

that clarifies what's most important, the data that I need, and what to do next.

So examples I have in my life that I've used for many, many years now. The first is my

running log or my fitness log, which I've used, I think, since 2007. So it's been

going now for nearly two decades. And this is literally a spreadsheet that keeps track

of every single workout that I've ever done in that time frame. So I could literally

go back in my data and tell you every single day for the last, what is that, 18 years.

And I can tell you what I've done on any given day, whether I worked out or didn't.

If I did work out, what I did. Now, why would I need that kind of data on a spreadsheet?

doesn't really matter. The answer ultimately is it matters in the moment and it matters

for the season of life that I'm in. And then I can look back at previous seasons and I can

see trends. And all of a sudden that data comes to life because it then tells a story

of who I was in the past, who I am today, and then likely who I can become going forward.

And that kind of data is priceless. It's incredible to see what's possible because you have

the data you need to be able to make the next best decision. And so in the example

of fitness, and the examples of diet and personal health, yes, spreadsheets are amazing.

And of course, in the world of business, I use spreadsheets all the time for my sales

trackers, whether that's speaking engagements, podcast, ads, sales, whatever is I'm doing

at the time. I have sales spreadsheets for just about everything. Those for me are kind of

a work in progress and they change a lot.

Those are not nearly as consistent, but they are always important, depending

on the season I'm in and the work that I'm doing.

Of course, I just recently developed this new investment forecasting database

spreadsheet that is fan fricentastic, and I will discuss more about that,

almost guaranteed going forward.

And then, of course, the one that you've heard on this podcast for 12 years, which

is the weekly review checklists and all of the review checklist that stem from that,

being able to organize the review process of figuring out what happened before

and now based on that, what are my next best actions?

This to me is the point on tracking the right progress.

I emphasize the word right because you can track a lot of progress.

You can collect data on anything.

But if the data doesn't actually help you make the decision for your next action,

the data is just fluffy.

It's a little bit useless.

In fact, let's go back to my investment spreadsheet for a second.

While I was developing that, I looked at examples of other spreadsheets.

I downloaded a lot of free ones online and I analyzed them to kind of pick and choose the best elements that they had, and I incorporated those into my own.

And so what I customized for myself was a combination of my own ideas and the ones that I pulled from others.

But when I looked at the other spreadsheets, there was a lot of data that I found to be fluffy.

A lot of charts and graphs and extra data points and all kinds of databases

that were just useless for me.

Maybe that person found it valuable, but for me, it was the wrong progress to track.

It was the wrong data to analyze.

And when I saw that, it was immediately clear to me that those are distractions.

Anytime you are tracking progress that is unnecessary, you are developing an

endless amount of work for yourself that has no actual tangible value.

it therefore is a massive waste of time.

Back to the example of my fitness log that I've had for nearly two decades.

I have refined that fitness log endlessly.

It's very similar to where it was in the very beginning and yet somehow extremely different.

And the reason why it's different is because I have realized that certain data points were not worth keeping.

You know, in a certain season, I may track my number of push-ups I'm doing per day.

Another season is how many marathons did I run?

But each season changes, so the data points need to change along with those.

And so if you're tracking goals that you don't care about, you need to refine your spreadsheet.

But if you're tracking the progress that leads to the result you're trying to get,

you will have that clarity front and center to know what matters and to act upon that.

And that's the ultimate test.

Can you act on this data?

If the answer is no or I'm not sure, then that data is useless to you.

If the answer is obviously yes, you've got the answer you can move on now.

Because the goal of all of these spreadsheets and databases and tables of contents,

all these organizational tools, is to tell you what matters so you can do something about it.

This is always about action.

Everything that we do here is about making the next right choice.

Having said that, if you want to optimize these spreadsheets to get that type of clarity on your actions,

I would recommend making organizational tools by hand, as opposed to automations you may find in modern day apps.

There are so many apps for your phone.

There are apps for the computer.

There are apps all across the world to say, well, here is, you know, this company made this solution for you that automates this process.

Just use our tool.

You know, pay a small monthly fee and here's the answer.

Nearly always, that's not the right call.

And it's not because somebody else decided.

what information you should look at.

Someone else decided your priorities.

Someone else said,

here's the data points you're going to stare at

every single time you log in.

But that's not helpful, unless it is.

If it happens to be helpful for your current goals,

that's great.

But there's a pretty good chance

that the things they said matter

you don't care about.

But if you build your own spreadsheet,

if you build your own table of contents

and database trackers,

well, you can customize these things

and only look at the information that matters.

So you want to get your hands dirty here.

You want to get in and craft these things by hand.

I'll be the first to say that I was not an Excel spreadsheet master until I was.

I use Google Sheets now, by the way.

Google Sheets is wonderful, extremely powerful.

It's part of my entire flow of productivity.

And one thing that has radically shifted in my life is my skill set when it comes to optimizing spreadsheets

calculations and formulas and conditional formatting and into the weeds of all these

great things.

But just six months ago, I was only average at this stuff.

And now my skill set has radically transformed so much better.

And because of that, I can customize things at a higher level.

I can see what matters and nothing else.

I can hide data points that don't matter and focus on what only does.

When you get to that point, you know that you're tracking what matters, you see what

it is, you act upon it, you move on, and then, this is the funny part,

these spreadsheets become boring.

They become what you think they were in the beginning, probably, which is that

because they're so well thought through and so clear, you don't need to spend

a lot of time on them anymore.

You reference them, you see the answer, and you move on.

I spend about 30 seconds per day on my fitness log.

I write down what I did that day, I see the goal for the next day, and I move on.

I bounce, that's it.

That's what you're trying to get to is just, here's the answer, I know what it is, there's the action next.

And you get to that point because you've crafted a solution that's that simple, that clear, and that easy to work with.

Along these same lines, you want to keep your data easily accessible.

So I've talked to this podcast many times before about an app that I use called Web Catalog.

It's on Max NPCs and it allows you to craft custom web apps from URLs, from websites.

And so, for example, you could take my Google Sheets investment spreadsheet that has a URL attached to it, and I created a web catalog custom app for it, which means there's an app in the dock of my computer, on both of my computers actually.

That's a direct link to that spreadsheet.

So if I want to be able to update it, work on it, tweak it, make it my priority, well, it's literally right in front of me.

It's the most important thing because it's on the dock. I can get access to it instantly.

Whatever it is that you're focusing on, a current project, a document, a spreadsheet, a website, any tool that you want, you should have a way to get access to it as quickly as possible.

It should be front and center in your life in this season where it matters the most.

Then if you change seasons, of course, you can then put it away and bring the next one out front and center.

But the dock on your Mac, the apps on your PC, the apps on your phone's home screen.

This is a strategy to use for life, which is that whatever those apps are should

represent your current season and your current priorities.

And if they don't, then swap them out, right?

Hide all the ones that don't matter, delete them, get them out of your way,

and bring all the ones forward that do matter.

This will change your behavior.

This will change how you function every day because then when you see these tools,

the things that matter are there, you jump in, you use them, you get the result, you move on.

if they're not right in front of you, if you have to search for them or find them,

or you've buried them into some deep, you know, bookmarking system on your browser,

or it's on some deep digital database in your online system like Dropbox or Google Drive,

if you have to hunt for your most important documents, that's wrong.

That's backwards.

It's not going to be successful.

These things need to be front and center.

And as soon as they are, you see them every day, you work on them, you optimize them,

Then, and only then, did the results begin to really show up?

So in this whole conversation about gaining clarity and tracking the right progress,

you have to analyze your whole life personally and professionally and just ask those key questions.

Do I understand what's going on?

Do I know my next actions with certainty?

Am I tracking the progress that actually means something that leads to the results that I want?

Because if the answers are no, you've got a lot of work to do.

but it's good work, it's fun work, because it's work that you can see the benefits of instantly as you do it.

And this is a process I go through every single day.

I am constantly cleaning up digital messes and notes and research, trying to craft those things into simplistic answers so I can then take direct action and get the results that I want.

That's the process of high level productivity.

And when you're there, every day, you get those endorphins, that rush of checking lots of boxes, know,

full well, you're doing work that matters while simultaneously ignoring everything

else.

That's a fun place to be.

And for the Action Step this week.

Go build a spreadsheet.

Yes, an old school spreadsheet in Excel, pages, or Google Sheets.

Just start tracking something you care about and tweak your data tracking system

little by little day by day. In a short time, you will have something tangible to

reference and learn from and act upon. This is your new guide. This spreadsheet is

your answer to success. Now, of course, subscribe to this podcast and your favorite

podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5 a.m. Miracle Community by going to

5am Miracle Premium.com. And that's all I've got for you here on the 5 a.m. Miracle

podcast this week. Until next time.

you have the power to change your life, and all that fun begins bright and early.

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© 5 AM Miracle Media, LLC