Simon considered himself a very organized person. Everything had its place, he had systems, and beautifully color-coded lists.

But he found himself constantly procrastinating.
Sure, he had all different ways to get himself to do the work such as starting with the ugly frog, or breaking it down into smaller tasks, and it helped. Somewhat. Many tasks still felt like a challenge.
And cuz he loved organizing, he’d find himself organizing as a form of procrastination. Making lists felt productive but wasn’t *actually* productive.

Simon would get frustrated with himself, "I can see exactly what needs to be done. It's all written down. Why can't I just do it?"



Simon wasn't procrastinating because of the actual work.
He was procrastinating because of the set up of the work.

The way the lists were organized meant that Simon’s brain need to do quite a bit of work just to get started on the work.
All it took was switching up HOW the tasks were listed and Simon’s procrastination drastically dropped.
I know, it sounds too good to be true, but I’m gonna share with you exactly what we did and by the end of this episode, it will make sense.
You’ll be able to reorganize your list for the final time, so that way you’re just doing the work instead of wasting time organizing your lists over and over again.

But first, you’ve got to understand…
Thinking is not one big thing. Thinking is made up of 28 thinking skills, called cognitive functions. With 28 thinking skills, naturally we all have stronger ones and weak ones.
The stronger ones are helping us do what we want to do and the weaker ones are making things we want to do more challenging.
Find out how strong each of your thinking skills are by taking the thinking skills assessment at: www.lifepixuniversity.com/cf


Categorization isn't just about putting similar things together. It's about organizing information in a way that makes it easier for you to do what you want to do.

Simon had categorized by Project
-Cohort information together
-One-on-one client information together
-Branding work together etc

At first glance this seems to make logical sense.

Except, there are many different aspects to cohort work and they each use different parts of the brain.

There’s the sales calls, the messaging, the prep for the cohorts, supplies for the cohorts etc. Each aspect is so different from one another, they require different frames of mind. Sales calls is outward energy while writing copy the content requires deep quiet work. The only thing that’s similar is that they both are related to the cohort.


Simon needed to organize his tasks and lists based on what will make it easy to get the work done.

It’s a whole lot easier to get deep work done when you don’t need to worry about the call you have at 11 am. You end up no really wanting to start before 11 because you know that you're going to have to stop midway, or if you do get started beforehand, you're just looking at the clock the whole time, wondering how much more time you have until 11 am.


Instead, you can schedule all you calls in one day.
You get dressed once for calls and you’re able to stay focused on the current meeting as long as your meeting doesn’t go overtime. Even if one meeting is about hiring and another is about sales call, both you’re in frame of mind, asking questions, seeing if it’s a good fit.

But categorizing your tasks doesn’t just stop and meeting and deep work.
It’s about really understanding how can you organize what you need to do in a way that will be easiest for you do.

There are certain tasks that are easier for you to do different times of day. Categorize your tasks accordingly.

Simon realized he found it easy to make calls while driving. Except some calls required he had documents available to reference in middle, so that doesn’t work.

Beforehand, Simon had one master list of people he needed to call.
Now he categorized the list differently.
Calls he can make in the car and calls he needs to do by his desk.
This way, when he’s in the car, his brain doesn’t waste energy trying to figure out which people would be a good idea to call now. He can just call the next person on his car list.

Another observation Simon had was that he got another wave on focused energy in the evening.
Previously, he would have used that time to catch up on emails or DMs. “It really doesn’t make sense for me to waste that focus on time on busy work” he told me. “Now I plan for a specific deep work task to get done during that hour or two”
Then when the time comes, Simon can just execute


Personally, I know my brain works best right in the morning, so I give myself the deep the work to do then. By 4 pm my brain is not in the same space, so I purposely plan for the little tasks like answering emails to happen at that time.


To plan in a way that is actually easy for your brain you’ll want to keep in mind 3 things:

1. Self-awareness. What works well for YOUR brain? Use this understanding to plan accordingly. Just make sure you’re not using it as an excuse not to do the work. Yes, that means there are times where I need to do deep work at 4 pm even if that’s not my brain’s best time.

2. Test. This one is overlooked sooo often. Just because you’ve always done it a certain way it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Be open to testing and trying different ways. If it worked better awesome. If not, also awesome, you learned more about yourself. Also remember to test in different stages and seasons. Something that didn’t work for you some time back, may work better now.

Personally, for ages I’d go running in the morning so that I’d know it would happen. Then I tested running in the evening and I found for this stage of my life, I like it better! It gives me the morning to do my deep work and the clears my brain after work.

3. Improve Categorizations. The stronger your thinking skill of categorizations is, the easier time you’ll have organizing things in a way that works for your brain.
This the exercise I suggest you do to improve categorizations

Improving Categorizations

1️⃣Take a stack of index cards or sticky notes, and on each one write a separate task that you need to do this week.

2️⃣Then, split your index cards into separate groups.
One group for tasks that take less than 10 minutes.
One group for tasks that take 11 min - 30 min.
One group for tasks that take 31 min - 2 hours
One group for tasks that take 2+ hours

3️⃣ Once your cards are all split accordingly, put them back in one big pile

4️⃣Now you're gonna split them again.
This time you're gonna split the cards based on how much you enjoy the task.
One pile for tasks you really enjoy doing.
One pile for tasks you do not enjoy doing.
And pile for tasks that are neutral.

5️⃣ Once your cards are all split accordingly, put them back in one big pile

6️⃣ Now you're gonna split the tasks based on importance.
One pile for tasks that are important and have high ROI
One pile for tasks that are important but don't have any major ROI
One pile for tasks that are not important.

7️⃣Once your cards are all split accordingly, put them back in one big pile

8️⃣ Now you're gonna split the cards based on what you think will be easiest for you to do together.
(It’s time for you to make up how to split the cards!)


Remember how I said earlier, there is no one perfect way to group?

You will learn the best way to group for each situation,
the more you group and are open to grouping in new ways.


There’s a good chance your brain will resist changing how you categorize because the current system "makes sense" and "looks organized."

But as soon as you start getting better results from categorizing better, you’ll WANT to do this. Keep practicing categorizations. Keep experimenting. You’ll get there.


It literally took Simon ONE session to see the result of categorizing differently. He came to the next session and shared not only how much he got done but also how much more energy he had at the end of the day.

Personally, categorizations is my favorite thinking skill to improve, because by changing the order in how I did my tasks, I saved 23 hours each week.

If this is hard and you want to get better at it, join us in our 90-day program Optimize Your ADHD Brain: www.lifepixuniversity.com/oyb  I’d love for you to have the same kind of results


Cheers to Peak Brain Performance!