Dedicated Space: Guaranteeing Progress
by Showing Up Where the Work Gets Done

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #557: Dedicated Space: Guaranteeing Progress by Showing Up Where the Work Gets Done

Jeff Sanders
Have you ever struggled to get something done over and over again and yet find that no matter how much discipline you apply, you still can't get to what matters most?

Most people don't need more discipline to do anything, just an environment that optimizes the odds of success.

This is the 5am Miracle, Episode #557 – Dedicated Space, Guaranteeing Progress by Showing Up Where the Work Gets Done.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer specializing in delivering high-energy, interactive, and action-oriented presentations and workshops focused on productivity, wellness, and personal and professional growth.

If you want to learn more, head over to JeffSanders.com/speaking.

Now in the episode this week, I'll break down why discipline is failing you, why a dedicated space is the best answer for just about everything, and how you can rebuild your calendar to organize your life and work around your new, dedicated spaces.

Let's get to it.

Where do you work out most consistently?

Years ago, I built a home gym.

And I loved it.

I thought it was fantastic.

I was invested in all new gear and dumbbells and weights and bars and just you name it, I was really digging into turning my garage into this fantastic location to work out in my house.

There was one big problem though.

I don't like to work out at home, but I didn't know it at the time.

I kind of knew it.

It was trying to change my behavior and thought, you know, if I've got the right customized equipment here at my house, well, then I have no excuses to not work out.

It's literally in my house every single day.

Why wouldn't I work out?

It's right there.

Well, I didn't.

In fact, I spent most days just walking right by it and ignoring it completely to just simply move on with my day.

And I wouldn't ever actually use the equipment.

I can't say never, but it was so rare.

It was by no means worth the money and the time and the energy that I poured into this home gym.

And so after months of just walking by this equipment and deciding, you know what, this just isn't working yet again, another day, another non workout, I sold all the stuff.

I gave it away.

I just gave up and said, this is not for me.

This strategy failed.

And the better option, the one that has a guarantee of success for me was to buy a gym membership and then have a gym bag, drive myself to the gym and work out no matter how much extra time that might take to have to commute there and back or have to figure out my calendar to make sure I have time to actually go to the gym.

It didn't matter.

I was going to make sure that that was my new focus because the home gym just failed, which then just begs the question, well, why, why would I have to go buy a gym membership to work out when the home gym is literally right in front of me every single day, all the time?

And the answer comes down to distraction.

The answer comes down to an environment that is designed for something specific.

My personal goal with progress, productivity, daily habits, daily execution is to guarantee the result that I want.

And honestly, I'm not too concerned about the methodology to get there as long as the end result is there.

As long as it's ethical and legal, I'm totally fine to do just about anything to guarantee that I get what I'm trying to get to.

And so from that perspective, my goal from this example of exercise was to guarantee that I got a workout in at least four to five days a week.

And so the question was, well, what does that look like?

How do I have my calendar built around the exercise?

How does my life really fit into this?

My energy cycles, my sleep, my personal fitness goals, everything had to be brought in.

And then really ask the question, what does this practically look like?

What is my day to day look like to guarantee the workout actually happens?

And once it dawned on me that working out at home was just never clicking, never really truly working the way that I thought that it would, well, I then remembered that when I go to the gym or go to the park to go for a hike or a run, every single time that I show up in those spaces, I work out.

Every single time.

And yet when I have the home gym and I might walk into my home gym with this expectation of exercise, well, my kids are still here.

At the time I had the gym, my dog was still at home.

My laundry was still there.

My kitchen was still there with dishes to be done.

My wife was still there.

Excuses, distractions, other things, life was still happening while I was in this space that I thought was a dedicated space.

I thought it was built out to exercise, but it wasn't.

It was still in my house and my house is a great place for a lot of things, but it is not a great place for me to exercise.

The one place where I can guarantee that result is when I go to a place that is exclusively built for that activity.

So in the case of my life, that means the YMCA here in Nashville that I go to is my gym.

At the time of this story, I'm telling of the home gym switch to an actual gym membership.

It was the Gold's gym in Nashville, but either way, it doesn't really matter.

I chose a gym that has dedicated equipment and space and an environment designed for optimal fitness.

And so then the only question was, what does my calendar look like to guarantee I show up and do the workout?

Because once I'm there, it's not a question.

This is the crux of the entire episode.

This is the crux of this entire concept.

Once I got myself to the gym or got myself to the park for a hike or a run, working out was no longer a question.

If I was there physically wearing my workout clothes, had my gym bag and was prepared to spend 45 minutes or an hour doing a workout of any kind, easy, medium, hard, doesn't matter.

If I was there, the workout was a guarantee, an absolute guarantee.

And this has been my ultimate question about progress in general for anything you want to accomplish.

What does a guarantee truly look like?

And the best answer unequivocally across the board for any activity, physical fitness, work, personal hobbies, you name it, the podcasting itself, like I'm doing right now is a dedicated space.

You do not have excuses in a dedicated space.

You don't, you can't, they're not there.

They don't exist because it's not possible for them to exist because the environment was crafted for success in that arena.

So I want to talk more about this this week, talk more about what it means to have a dedicated space, how your calendar looks with that, how your life can be built around these spaces.

Because the ultimate goal here is what I'm calling a guarantee.

And that's a very tall order, right?

Guarantees in life don't really exist.

So we're going for the highest odds of success.

And the only way that I've seen that play out in my life, in my work, personal, professional, you name it, is that I have a specific environment that has been customized and crafted and beautifully designed to achieve the specific result that I want from the time that I spend there.

When that happens, that's as close to a guarantee as I'll ever see in my entire life.

And I believe the same thing is true for you as well.

So let's discuss this dedicated spaces, guaranteeing progress by showing up where the work gets done.

And I want to pivot this conversation just slightly to discuss the concept of discipline.

Because when it comes to guaranteeing progress, when it comes to the question of, did you do the work you set out to do or not?

This conversation somehow always winds up asking the question, are you disciplined?

Are you the kind of person who is hardcore, who's confident you can get the job done because you have trained yourself to make sure that things always happen?

The way that I see this is that if you have to work really hard to do something, something needs to change about where you are, not who you are, or even what you are doing.

Your environment or location is the biggest, most important factor when it comes to your odds of success in accomplishing any given task.

Yes, you can exude more discipline.

You can train yourself.

You can practice.

You can become the kind of person who overcomes excuses more often.

You can change the tactics, the strategies.

You can change what you are trying to accomplish and move the goalposts to hit one that actually aligns to a better vision for your reality, that aligns to who you are now.

There's a lot of things you can change.

My argument though is that none of that comes close to the environmental impact on your progress.

I looked up the definitions of discipline for the episode this week and I thought that they were very interesting from the perspective of this conversation.

Let's just break down a few of them.

The first one I actually found online from one of my friends on LinkedIn.

He said that discipline for him was showing up even when you don't feel like it, which from the conversation around going to the gym, that's a great example, right?

If your goal is to go work out and you don't feel like working out, well then you have to "discipline yourself" to show up and do the workout.

In that sense, discipline is the willpower.

It is the force and the drive that gets you to do the work you theoretically just don't want to do or don't feel like it in the moment.

The emotional drive is lacking.

Another definition of discipline is to train yourself to do something in a controlled and habitual way.

In my line of work with habit training and trying to figure out routines and calendars and productivity, this makes sense to me.

This idea that discipline really aligns to this controlled habit formation, that you are going for something that is routine, that is consistent, but the control factor says that there are boundaries.

There's a way to say, "There's a way I'm doing this that works in a very specific way, and I'm not going to veer too far from that because I have a mission and an objective that I plan to hit."

The third definition I found says that discipline is the conscious or unconscious motivation that directs your actions towards societal behavior or norms.

In other words, we are influenced by factors such as the fear of consequences or punishments for not doing something.

It's kind of the opposite of the angle of, "Well, I want to exercise because I want to grow stronger and build muscle and burn fat," as opposed to the fear of the consequence of saying, "If I don't exercise, I'm going to feel lethargic and weak and tired and sickly."

Discipline plays a very strong role in the execution of any goal.

With the pursuit of progress towards something you care about, yes, discipline will always be there.

But my argument is not to downplay discipline.

It's to argue that if you are leveraging discipline as your primary motivator, if that is the thing you are relying on for your success, you will fail almost every single time because we as humans are not disciplined like we want to be.

We tend to be lazy.

We tend to take the easiest path.

We tend to just find the excuse to not do the thing.

That's why the environment matters so much because my goal is to craft a lifestyle with boundaries that make sense, that kind of just nudges us in the right direction even when we don't feel like it, even when we have the excuses, even when we could find a thousand distractions to pursue, and yet we are in a location that says, "No, those things aren't available right now.

You can't be distracted by them because they're not here.

You can't be disciplined away from this because the opportunities are gone.

The only direction to flow is towards the thing you came to do."

Everything aligns to your success in these spaces.

That's the intention.

It's not to train yourself to do things that suck.

It's not to train yourself to do things that are hard.

That is a whole world of itself that is helpful, but it is not as helpful as the environment, not even close.

You could have very weak discipline in your life and still achieve more than a disciplined person.

This is the crazy part, right?

This is the shocking part.

Undisciplined people can still be more productive than disciplined people if the environment nudges them in the right direction.

This is the biggest kind of aha moment I've had in the last few years of my life.

I have tried for years to discipline myself to do all kinds of things I don't want to do.

I'll have more examples of those in just a minute, but one thing that I have realized without question is that discipline doesn't work.

It's not the answer.

I'm not trying to do things that are hard because I'm not going to want to do them.

I'm going to find the excuses.

My intention is to leverage the fact that I naturally want to do things that are easy.

Okay, great.

Well, then let's make something easy.

Greg McKeown's book, Effortless, a really important concept with the idea that we're trying to the best of our abilities to make it easy, to do the things that need to get done.

We're not trying to make them hard.

We're not trying to overcome big challenges.

We're just simply trying to make sure the thing we said we would do actually happened.

That's it.

And from that perspective, there are a lot of ways to approach it that I think are actually a lot more palatable, a lot easier to step into.

It's kind of like the idea of taking a really big mountain to climb and saying, "Forget the mountain.

We're going to take a few steps forward."

We're not thinking about the entirety of what's going to happen, just what's right in front of us.

That's kind of the idea.

If your goal is to go to the gym and work out, your actual first step is to put on your gym clothes, to grab your gym bag, to get in the car and drive to the gym.

It is not to work out vigorously.

That's not step one.

You might get there by the end of the workout, but that's not where you begin.

We tend to have this kind of thinking of the hardest part of this is where our brain just like really drives home like, "Oh, it's going to suck.

It's going to hurt."

Nike has a bunch of commercials out right now that I've seen that I hate because they keep focusing on the discomfort of running and working out.

Their entire marketing strategy, I have no idea why this is happening.

They are really doubling down on, "Look at these people who are disciplined to run in the rain and to push through difficult challenges."

It's this ridiculous mantra of, "You've got to have grit and discipline in order to achieve your goals."

It's so silly because Nike makes money off of people who don't yet work out that much, who aspire to exercise, who want to get off the couch and do things.

They don't want to do things that are hard.

They don't.

It's the wrong approach.

I could rant this for a long time, but my point is we as people are trying to do things that are more likely to result in success than the things that are not.

That's it.

If your environment, if your calendar, if your system of living pushes you in the direction of success, that's awesome.

And if it doesn't, it needs to change.

So the answer to all of this is a dedicated space to overcome the productivity challenges, the emotional challenges, the discipline and excuse challenges, the dumb Nike commercial challenges.

All of that plays into, we are striving to do the next most logical thing that just says, "Yeah, I can go work out.

Yes, I can go to the coffee shop and send my emails today for my sales calls or whatever.

Yes, I can go do the next thing."

So from that perspective, I know it's just a little bit, I firmly believe that a dedicated space is the answer to your generalized productivity challenges as well as your specific ones.

So the example I've used quite a bit just now, going to the gym is a phenomenal location to lift weights.

Going to the park is a great location to go for a walk, a hike, trail running, et cetera.

Going to a library is great for studying.

Your bedroom is great for sleeping.

Your podcast studio is great for podcasting.

All of these are great examples of a dedicated location where when you go to this space, a very specific and obvious activity will follow suit.

Your house is not a great place for exercise because your house is not built for that exclusively.

A coffee shop is not exclusively built for you to focus and write your next novel.

Your couch in your living room is not designed exclusively for quality sleep.

So trying to do things in the wrong spaces results in the wrong results.

If you try to work out at home and it doesn't work, well, then you need to go somewhere else.

If you try to focus in a busy coffee shop and it's not working, we need to go somewhere else.

If you're trying to sleep on a couch that's not built for it, we need to go somewhere else.

This is about self-awareness.

It's about catching yourself in the moments of saying, "I'm working too hard to achieve this next thing.

I'm having to exude a lot of energy and a lot of discipline, and I'm just running against the wall here.

I'm hitting these dead ends of saying the progress isn't there."

Well, the problem there is that we tend to blame ourselves.

We tend to think we need more discipline and better headphones with focused music, things I, by the way, love that are fantastic, but none of which answer the question about where you are.

If you physically move yourself to an environment that is designed for that successful venture, then you have the resources, the people, and the distraction-free environment to execute on what you came to do.

Let's discuss the environment for a second.

In an environment that is designed for a certain activity, you're going to have, first and foremost, resources designed for that activity.

For example, you may have equipment to work out with in a gym.

In a library, you may have a quiet study space, as well as books and computers for research.

In a bedroom, you may have your bed available for sleeping, as well as some nice blackout drapes.

You see that the environment has more than just simply one thing.

It actually has all the things.

In a gym, you have all the equipment, all the possibilities.

You can swim, you can run, you can lift weights, you can use a sauna.

In a library, you can use the computer, read the books, have a quiet study corner.

In your bedroom, you have the bed, you have the drapes.

We have all of these things that are exclusively and comprehensively designed to nudge you in the right direction.

It's not just one strategy.

One of the key things here is that we try to accomplish goals by saying, "Well, I'm distracted.

Let me block social media."

Okay, that's one strategy, and that's okay.

But if it doesn't address a lot of them or all of them, you're going to find another reason to be distracted.

One of the amazing parts about dedicated spaces is that the dedication means simplicity.

It means that you are striving for one thing and one thing only, and every resource that exists there is designed to assist you in making sure that one thing happens.

If you're going to custom build a dedicated space for anything, this is the mantra you want.

It is the simplicity of defining up front what you're trying to do, and every single resource in that space has to push you towards that thing.

If it doesn't do that, if it provides a distraction or a second option, it has to go.

We're trying for the ultimate level of focus, the ultimate level of a direct action.

I have tried and failed so many times in my life at various goals because I was indirectly trying to achieve something.

I would think to myself, "Well, I want to run a marathon.

Let me go read a book about it.

Let me listen to a podcast about it.

Let me go do some hiking."

No, I'm training for a run, a long distance run.

I should be doing long distance running.

That is the direct path.

Everything else is an indirect path or even just a pure distraction that makes you feel busy, makes you feel active, makes you feel like you're making progress, but you know that's not true because the only thing that moves you towards something is directly moving towards that something.

I'm beating this point to death, but I just know that this is ...

We get ourselves caught in these traps all the time.

It's such a common thing to just want to feel like we're making progress when in reality all we're striving for are things that make us feel better in the moment, but they're not fundamentally progressive.

They're not actually serving the purpose that we're striving to accomplish.

The resources, back to this point here, the resources in your space are all designed to push you towards the direct action, towards that progressive time usage because that's the whole goal here.

We get in, we kick butt, we get out.

You go to the gym, you've got one hour, do your work, leave.

You go to the library, you've got three hours to study, you optimize that time, you're gone.

I have really moved towards a lifestyle of having not just a dedicated space, but a focus block of time that is time bound.

So I've discussed my FBOTS for a long time on this show, my focus blocks of time that are designed specifically for focus, but one thing that I have failed to, I guess, double down on over the years or forget the value of is the start time and the stop time.

A dedicated space is fantastic and necessary and probably the most important factor, but the second most important factor is the urgency, the sense of urgency in the sense that we're going to start and stop at specific times, which by the very nature of what that is, forces us into focus in a way that nothing else can, because we know the clock is ticking.

We know it's time to go to the gym.

It is now 4 p.m.

I have until five, let's go.

And then you optimize that next hour.

When those types of things happen, you get more done.

You have direct action towards the end results.

You optimize those resources that are available.

And then that one hour becomes so much more powerful than all of the other hours you were worrying about it or thinking about it or considering options and brainstorming and making excuses, right?

All that other time that's spent not working out.

Well, why not actually be there and do the thing?

And that's what this entire discussion is hopefully going to encourage you to get into that kind of a, a way of thinking and a pattern and rhythm of existing where the clock has started.

Here we go.

Do the thing, stop the clock, get out.

And if that pattern is repeated, you know, throughout the day, whether it's going to the gym or doing sales calls, having meetings, you know, working on personal projects, even hobbies for that example, if you're time crunched and need to do a hobby and you've got 45 minutes, well, here we go.

Start the clock and make it happen.

This entire mentality can be utilized across the board.

I wouldn't do this 24 hours a day, it'd be too exhausting, but I would choose a few items per day to guarantee this level of focus.

A couple of things a day where you say, this matters so much that I need a dedicated space.

I need a start time, a stop time resources.

I need to guarantee the people who are there are also not going to distract me.

There's a whole separate conversation, people in your environment will be as distracting as anything you possibly imagine, but the right people can also be exactly who you need in that time.

So as part of the resources category, people are in that as well.

So at the gym, maybe a personal trainer at the library could be a study partner in your, in your business world could be a business coach.

What you're looking for are people who assist you to move directly towards the thing and everyone else has to go.

And this is going to be the hardest struggle for all of us all the time is we want to be around good people.

We want to be around those who we love to be around, but unless those people are there to assist you with your direct action in your focus blocks, they're going to be distracting.

And so you have to decide what level of distraction you're willing to put up with and depend on how important your goal is to you.

You may have to be pretty hardcore here and really lock yourself away.

I've had many examples in my life where I literally will hide from other people to the best of my ability for a short time, you know, an hour or two, maybe three at most I do my thing and then I come back to the real world afterwards.

Sometimes we need that because people are as awesome as they are.

They are our biggest challenge when it comes to focus.

Now the third and final kind of category here on your optimized environment is the simplicity angle I mentioned earlier, the lack of options to do other things.

If your intention is to achieve a very specific objective, you cannot allow yourself to veer off on a tangents.

There has to be this sense of not just focus on the task, but also this focus on focus itself, which means identifying every single time you get distracted and then you find a solution to prevent that for the next focus block.

Whether that is an app like freedom on your computer to block social media and other websites or having to force yourself to go into the middle of the woods by yourself with no cell phone to make sure you actually do your workout.

You're looking for any and all possibilities that say, I came to this space with one objective and everything here orients me towards that and intentionally nothing else is available to pull me away from that.

Both things are true.

It's a magnet that draws you in and also a magnet that repels things that don't help you.

And when all of that becomes true, what's really shocking is how ridiculously awesome this time can be.

How powerful that one hour at the gym becomes, how productive that two hours of the library becomes all of a sudden you can do as much work in two hours you used to do in six or seven and I'm not joking here.

The power of focus is phenomenal.

The creative opportunities that pop up, the amazing new brainstorming, the just intense amount of actual productivity takes place.

Unless you've experienced this, you don't really know how to relate to this, but it once you do and you've, you've been through these focus blocks of time in a dedicated space and you've had these awesome sessions, all they're so addictive, they're so addictive and you just want more of them because they're so, so powerful.

Having said all of this, what I would like for you to do is to choose and or create dedicated spaces for each of your major objectives in your life, both personally and professionally.

So yes, that could include your diet, like in the kitchen, your fitness at the gym, your work objectives at the office, personal hobbies at home.

All of this could be at play, but start small.

It could be just one area to really begin with.

I think fitness is the best example, which is why I have harped on that this entire time because that's the most obvious for most people.

If you want to work out and you want that time to be used wisely, well then we start with a dedicated space and we jump in and make that happen.

Now at work is the second most obvious place.

A dedicated space at work is going to vary with a lot of factors here, but the goal really is to identify a specific task you need focus for and to craft in the, to the best of your ability, a space to get that done.

This is going to require some creativity, but it is possible and is definitely worth the effort because once again, the amount of work you'll get done, it's fantastic.

Now as a secondary piece to this, you can and should run experiments.

So try a library, try a coffee shop, try your dining room table at home, try a coworking space or, Oh, another cool one are services like cave day, which are social focus services.

Basically those services are designed to help you be social.

You're literally on the internet with others, but they're also focusing at the same time.

It's a very cool service.

So check out cave day is probably the most popular there are others as well.

But those are really fun ways to test your ability to say, I'm going to have a dedicated digital space to do the same work I'm trying to do.

Also possible, also highly effective.

Now if we assume that you have chosen your specific goal you want to achieve, uh, the next best place to go is your calendar to guarantee you have the time and space available to do the thing you want to do in the location you want to do it.

My tendency here is to focus on what I call the big rocks.

And by I, I mean, Stephen Covey, uh, the big rocks concept is a phenomenal one to really identify here's the biggest, most important thing that has to get done today.

Yes, it could be in your 5:00 AM miracle time.

First thing in the morning.

It can also be later on in the day as well.

The real question is what is the most important thing you want to tackle?

How do you guarantee not only the time on the calendar, but also location.

Once again, environment here is the thing.

And once those two pieces are in place, you've got a time and a location and a start time and a stop time.

All of a sudden you've got the major framework built out to have a really effective focus block to execute a very high level.

And this could be applied once again to personal fitness work activities doesn't matter if the framework is there with these core components of time, location, start time, stop time resources.

You're in that's it.

All right.

This is not rocket science here.

This is very simple concepts, but the execution of them is the thing where all of us tend to fail because we just get caught up in the busyness.

We get caught up in the distraction and the thousand ideas we have per day.

And we miss the simplicity of saying, well, what if I just did one thing and that one thing went really well because I built my life around it.

I had the time, I had the space, I had the dedicated resources, and then I just did it and it got done.

And I didn't think about it anymore.

It just happens.

It's just automatic because it's just how I live.

It's just what I do.

That's my goal is to move myself into a place where this type of activity is just so second nature and I'm not striving to do, you know, a really difficult mountain climb.

I'm really just saying, no, I just, I took a few intelligent steps, made solid progress in a focused way, got good work done.

Wasn't distracted.

Awesome.

Check onto the next thing.

That is when great productivity really shows up really rocking productivity shows up when that becomes your norm.

So your biggest question is going to be, how can that fit into your lifestyle?

And the best way to answer that is to go to your calendar, take your goals and find the overlap of those two things.

How do the goals fit on the calendar in a consistent way that leverages all these strategies we just discussed.

I would love to hear from you on this.

I want to know if you have dedicated spaces for your specific personal goals, whether it is fitness related, whether it's work related, personal related, email me, Jeff@jeffsanders.com.

I want to hear what kind of dedicated spaces you have either custom created or you have found and discovered, but where do you get your best work done?

Where do these things happen in a focused way?

Send me your ideas because I want to share those here on the podcast and really be able to help our community of really productive high achievers.

We'll get even more value from our time because we're crafting life in a way that really aligns to our highest objectives and strategies and values.

And of course we can achieve the productivity we're all striving for in a way that's a whole lot of fun.

And for the action step this week, of course, go choose your dedicated space for each of your major objectives.

You can start with a quick list of a few things that matter most, but then choose or create a dedicated space to actually do the work in.

Don't overthink this process.

Just choose a simple and logical location that strongly encourages you to block distractions and get the work done.

Of course, be sure to subscribe to this podcast and your favorite podcast app, or become a VIP member of the 5am Miracle community by getting the premium ad free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

That's all I've got for you here on the 5am 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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