Should you consider getting a digital productivity coach?

Do you work hard and go the extra mile, but feel like you’re on a treadmill and can never quite catch up?

Do you struggle to stay on top of the emails, phone calls, and tasks that come at you every day?

Do you feel like you’re constantly being pulled in different directions and never able to focus on one thing at a time?

Keeping up with today’s pace can be a huge challenge – every day things seem to be happening faster and faster. There’s too much information to process, too many messages to answer, too many people to please, and just plain too much to do.

Making it to the top requires commitment to setting the right priorities, and a strong dedication to saying “no” to everything else. But, this isn’t easy — sometimes we need help, guidance, and accountability from someone who’s walked the same road before.

Sometimes we need a coach.

Coaching is steroids for your productivity, and an investment in your career and happiness.

A coach can give you with an outside perspective on your situation and help you clarify your goals, then guide you in building the daily habits you need in order to reach those goals. Most importantly of all, a coach can keep you accountable for sticking to those habits so you don’t procrastinate your life away.

Most coaches are experts in creating or changing habits – I usually help my clients do this by building momentum and achieving regular “small wins” along the way. Say you had an email backlog of 1000 unread messages: getting through them may seem like an insurmountable task, but if I were coaching you I’d help you instill small daily habits to chip away at that backlog, and because you’ll make visible progress every day you’ll remain motivated to continue.

As for accountability, we tend to be very good at breaking promises to ourselves: “I’ll start eating healthy next week”, “I’ll stop constantly checking my email tomorrow”, “I’ll start saying “no” more next year”.

However, it’s much harder for us to break these kinds of promises if we involve another person – it’s in our nature to not want to disappoint. The simple act of having someone check up on us and nudge us along every day is often instrumental to our success.

How digital coaching is different

Traditional coaching involves meeting once a week (or month) and talking about our obstacles for an hour or so. In our always-on, always-connected world, this is like visiting a golf instructor at their office once a week to talk about your swing – it may be helpful, but it won’t be nearly as effective as having the instructor with you on the course, watching you practice and giving you feedback in real time.

By leveraging technology, apps such as Coach.me have reimagined the coaching process from both sides: clients can now be in touch with their coaches 24/7 via text chat or phone calls, and coaches can better track and manage their clients’ obstacles, successes, and progress.

Because a digital coach is only as far away as your smartphone or smartwatch, this type of coaching is always on, always available, and always visible. It’s like having that golf instructor with you on the course every day, available to answer any questions you have and ensuring that you keep challenging yourself.

People around the world are turning to us digital coaches, and I’ve seeing some amazing results because of this: by being available to discuss problems as they happen, I’ve helped people tame their email inboxes, plan their time, deal with their colleagues, and more — all while they have their feet on the ground and can give me instant, real-world feedback.

Some of the most effective ways in which I’ve helped my clients (and in which you can also improve your productivity), are to:

1. Be proactive in preparing for your day

If you struggle to get up early or you tend to always be late, one of the most effective things you can do is to prepare everything you’ll need in the morning, the evening before: your breakfast ingredients, the clothes you’ll wear, the bag you’ll take with you. Essentially, you need to try and make your mornings as frictionless as possible.

2. Have a daily task list

If you don’t have and follow a plan for your day, the world will make you follow theirs. Not only should your task list be separate from your email (else anyone can change your list by sending you a new email), it should include time estimates to help you schedule your work and check that you’re not overloading yourself given the amount of time you have available in the day.

3. Eat your frogs

If you complete the least-fun, most-dreaded task on your list first, you’ll be free to take on more inspiring work during the rest of the day. It may not be fun to do, but the peace of mind you gain once you get that task done will make you much happier in the long run.

4. Check your email on a schedule

Someone once said that email is a great way to escalate other people’s priorities: It’s easy to be the sender of an email, but as the recipient it takes time to read, process, and action it appropriately. If at all possible you should only check your email a couple of times a day – if something’s urgent, people will contact you another way.

5. Disconnect yourself

We do our best work when we can focus uninterrupted on one task at a time, but modern apps, devices, and offices are constantly trying to distract us. You should try to set out some times of the day during which you switch off your phone, email, and instant messengers completely and just get things done.

Even if you only do this for an hour every day, you’ll likely get more done during that hour than during the rest of the day.

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Take a digital coach for a test drive

Coach.me (backed by Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone) offers a combination of free daily reminders, community support and advice, along with one-on-one coaching for US$14.99 a week. Coach.me users have achieved goals ranging from fitness to stopping drinking to productivity to meditation.

You can search through a list of

goals coached on Coach.me here, or download the free app from your App Store and search from there. If you use the promo code
“MEMEBURN” when you sign up for text-based coaching, you’ll get your first week for free.