5 Tips to Get More Done in Less Time

Most fresh starts to the new year go a little something like this:

• January 1: you set all the goals, and you are PUMPED to make progress!
• January 7: you've been making progress! Although other tasks start creeping back in.
• January 14: your focus has waned: you're hitting some goals occasionally, but so many things are vying for your attention. You're starting to feel more and more overwhelmed!
• January 21: yes, you've done it again: you threw in the towel on your goals. At least now you won't have the stress of too many things competing for your attention at once!

You started with motivation and momentum, but finding the time to keep it going became more and more difficult to maintain.

That's the reasoning we ALL (including myself) have accepted when we find that staying consistent with goals is just too hard: there's not enough time!

Work, family, friends, fun, hobbies, exhaustion, urgent tasks due sooner than expected—how do you honestly expect to get all the things done?!

As you have likely have experienced, throwing in the towel does give you temporary relief...but not too long in the future, that nagging feeling to go after your passion, make fitness your priority, or be more present with the people you love creeps back into your mind.

With each passing day, the desire to go after it again becomes more and more of a pull until the intensity reaches a point where you can't ignore your feelings anymore: YOU ARE READY TO MAKE TODAY THE DAY! ...again.

If this cycle sounds all too familiar with the topic of goals, you are not alone: it's a common loop that can slowly eat away at your self-confidence while firing up your go-to habit of being overly hard on yourself (I promise, I'm not a mind reader!).

To help you take back control of what's most important to you in your life, I have compiled your top 5 factors to get your focus back—and stay focused—to follow through on your goals to reignite your momentum:

1. Progress Over Perfection

You are going to have a goal. You are going to take action to make it happen. Then life is going to happen.

You can plan and mitigate foreseeable obstacles all you want, but unless you have a strategy to keep you in the game, you won't want to get back in it if you feel you've already left.

One of the biggest barriers to pharmacists creating a consistent pattern of progress is that they focus on perfection, rather than progression.

As the role of a pharmacist is highly focused on covering every little detail and realizing that one small error can literally mean life and death when a patient is involved, it's easy to transfer this belief to other areas outside of pharmacy.

While being all-in on your goals can be a game-changer, if you focus more on what you got wrong than what you got right, you will feel like you're losing, even when you're actually winning.

Your Antidote: keep score of your wins.

Mechanism of Action: celebrate yourself!!

This can be a tricky thing—and may even feel a bit awkward if you're not used to actually doing it—but was so was trying your shoes the first time. DO you even remember tying your shoes today?!

As you've practiced it so often for so long, it has become an automatic habit. Imagine what quality of life and progress you can create if celebrating yourself became that automatic, too.

You CAN do it, but if you're not sure where to start, there's an excellent book I recommend you buy (print or audible) by Mel Robbins called The High Five Habit .

You can make learning the high-five habit as simple as listening to it while walking. Look at you maximizing your progress! Take this seriously, and you won't feel so serious about life. Trust me.

2. Trash your To-Do's

Hear me and hear me loud and clear:

when you focus on the 'how' first, it'll become your expressway to overwhelm.

How am I going to do this?

How am I going to have time for this?

How am I going to find what I need to make this happen?

When you focus on the how first, you will come up with a lengthy list of to-do's that grow and multiply as the day goes on.

Perhaps you've seen it: your day starts with 10 things to do, you cross off 3, and by the end of the day there are now 25 to-do items on your list!

The solution is to simply flip your focus to something else first before you look at the why:

The WHAT: what do you want? What is your ideal outcome? What do you want to accomplish?

Second, focus on the WHY: Why do you want that? What would it mean to you if you got what you want? Why is achieving that so important to you?

If you focus on those two things first—the what and the why—and I mean really focus with as much vivid detail, visualizing in your mind's eye what your life would look like if you had what you want, something profound will happen: you will create intense emotion. Positive emotion! You'll feel fired up, passionate, and committed to making it happen. This is important because of one simple fact:

taking action is energy in motion, e-motion.

If you want your outcome, you'll have to take action (you know this). But is taking any action the most effective? Or is taking intentional action at a clear target going to maximize your efforts?

Once you get clear on what you want and why you want it, the how will often appear from a ray of clarity to help you get what you want. This is the ultimate form of being resourceful: you're using your own emotion to drive your goals forward.

Your Antidote: get clear on what you want and why you want it.

Mechanism of Action: physically write these out, then say them aloud visualizing having achieved/attained what it is you want as if you already have it!

3. Dive into Deep Work

Have you ever tried to sit down with a book you've been looking forward to read...but 2 minutes in, you get a text, so you check it because it's "just real quick", and then find it takes you 5 to 20 minuets to get back into "reading mode"?

Or as you're reading, you remember you want to make a lunch meeting with a friend tomorrow, so you stop to write it down because "it will only take a second"? It takes yet another 5 to 20 minutes to re-focus into reading mode, and on and on this goes.

What you're experiencing is called attentional residue, having to spend time refocusing on the task you set out to be focused on in the first place. Multi-tasking is something that's essential in the pharmacy, but will leave you stuck on your goals that matter to you the most.

Your Antidote: focus on only one goal at a time.

Mechanism of Action: schedule chunks of time and commit to only focusing on that one thing.

There is a whole science to this (which would make for excellent focused reading time!) and is expertly explained by Cal Newport in the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World .

4. Check Your Points

How often do you check in with your goals? Every January 1? There is a simple rule of life and human psychology you can use to your advantage:

you get what you focus on.

The world is constantly competing for your attention, and left undirected, you will feel pulled in thousands of different directions.

Side effects will include confusion, overwhelm, and frustration.

But if you write out and read what you want daily, your focus will be on what you want, not what the world and marketing agencies want you to want.

Your Antidote: stay focused on what you want and why you want it.

Mechanism of Action: write your goals out and revisit them daily!

5. Flip Your Script

I repeat:

if you don't keep score, you'll feel like you're losing when you're really winning.

Think back to what you learned in pharmacy law: if you didn't document it, it didn't happen.

So if you're spending your time, money, and energy trying to improve yourself and accomplish what matters most to you, document your journey!

Looking back to tip #1, seek progress over perfection. If you're not taking note of the progress you've made along the way, it's easy to feel like you've "done nothing" or "haven't made any progress" as most things worth working for take time.

Documenting what you've learned, accomplished, or experienced that move you forward will pay major dividends long-term, as they will build your habit of consistency.

Specifically, writing what you are grateful for will shift your focus away from unmet expectations and toward appreciation.

When you trade your expectations for appreciation, your life gets an upgrade in that moment.

Your Antidote: document your wins

Mechanism of Action: gratitude journal daily!

Gratitude journaling needs to be as simple as possible, and can be done in a variety of ways: voice memos, typing wins in a notepad app on your phone, or *physically writing your wins pen-to-paper at the end of each day.

*I highly recommend writing these down as the most effective way, and it literally will take you mere minutes to make an incredible investment in yourself and you progress.

Pro tip: make your journal feel magical, because if you do this practice consistently, magic is what you'll create. Make it fun and luxurious by treating yourself to a notebook that's extra-special, devoted only to your magic moments of gratitude. I bought this one last year , and have been using it daily ever since:

There you have it: 5 tips to get more done in less time! We all have the same 24 hours in a day, but how to get more focused, present, and intentional about the time you have is what will truly create consistent momentum to speed up your progress from where you are, to where you want to go!

With love,

Adam Martin, PharmD, ACSM-CPT, NAMS-CNC | [email protected]

*For more content like this delivered to your earbuds on a weekly basis, SUBSCRIBE to

Available on all podcast platforms!