The Truth About Productivity: Can Alarms Really Help You Stay Focused?

In this reaction, Matt dives into the idea of using hourly reminders to keep yourself aligned with your “highest self” and avoid distractions. While the concept sounds good in theory, is it really practical for staying productive as a business owner?

The idea of stopping everything every hour to question if you’re on the right path sounds a little over the top. Sure, if you’re mindlessly scrolling or wasting time, this could be a helpful tool. But what about the tasks you have to do that might not be glamorous but are essential to running your business?

This video discusses whether this productivity hack is truly effective or just an unnecessary distraction.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series, watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video:

So if you are a business owner, you’ll know how hard it is sometimes to always show up as your best self for work and stay motivated and how easy it is to fall into traps of having a negative mindset. To set alarms on my phone for every single hour of the day, simply say would higher Vicki be doing this? Obviously, insert your name there. So every single hour of the day I have an alarm that goes off and asks me if I am doing what my highest self would be doing and whatever I’m doing in that moment when I get that alarm reminder and I’m not doing what I feel like my highest self would be doing, I simply just stop doing it. So if I’m scrolling on my phone or if I’m talking negatively to myself and I get that reminder, it puts me straight back in alignment with my highest self. 

Matt’s Reaction: 

OK, I’ll stop there. First, apparently she doesn’t have time to do a video and separately put on makeup. She’s doing both at the same time, which I guess is multitasking, but it seems a little distracting to me if you’re planning to give people advice on how to be more productive. Well, maybe multitasking is more productive than putting makeup on and doing videos with business advice at the same time, so maybe I’m off base there. As far as setting reminders to stop yourself every so often to see if you’re doing useful tasks, I guess if that’s a time management tool that helps you great. But to me, one, sometimes you’re doing things that you would rather not be doing but have to do. Maybe it’s some admin task and there currently isn’t someone else that can take it over for you. Well, yes, maybe that’s not the highest task you could be doing at that point, but it needs to get done. It all needs to get done. So you’re gonna have to find a time to do it. So just stopping that in the middle and saying I should be doing something more important, probably not realistic. And yeah, if you are just scrolling your phone or watching mindless videos on TV or whatever else, you know, if you need a reminder to help you stop doing that, that’s good, I guess. But I think those are probably things we all know without a reminder that that’s probably not the highest and best use of our time. But then sometimes you just need a break from doing what you were doing. I don’t know. If this helps somebody, great. I’m not sure it’s the best advice I’d say it’s the best advice I’ve ever heard. I’m not sure most people are going to bother with setting an alarm that goes off every so often, every 30 minutes or an hour, to see if you’re wasting time when it goes off. I think the people who want to get it done, get it done. And the people who are going to screw around are going to screw around whether there’s an alarm on their phone or not. That’s just my take. We’ll see.