Our podcast co-host, Augusto Pinaud, has been coaching clients on productivity for many years, and devised a tool that he uses with them to help overcome managing the high-level goals in conjunction with lower-level projects and maintenance/administrative activities of daily and work life. In this week’s episode, Augusto goes into detail on what his tool, Impact Journal, is and how to use it in your personal productivity system.
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Impact Journal
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Raw Text Transcript | Impact Journal
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. We have a treat for you today where we're going to be focusing on the impact journal. And if you don't know what the impact journal is, then you're in the right place. So Augusta Pinaud has created the impact journal, which is a method for being able to a method and kind of a document for being able to help you facilitate focusing on your goals. And so with that, I'm going to actually turn the microphone over to Cousteau so he can kick us off and explain A little bit about what the impact journal is. And then we'll get into the conversation.
Augusto Pinaud 1:04They impact journal is one of the tools that are part of the Connect invisible dots framework, you know, and I created this tool, really in reality to us our response of what I was hearing from my coaching clients and the concept of impact. When I show this product or when I do presentations, I always begin there was a definition of what impact is because that's really what this journal is about. And impact is nothing else than the effect of influence of one person thing or action on another. What I notice on my own system, as well as the system of my client, coaching clients and people even highly productive people that I know it is that is really hard for people to keep focus on the direction of the impact they want to realize. So the impact journal is nothing else than a tool to keep people engage with where do they want to go?
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:06I'm interested on behalf of the listeners for you to kind of flesh out for us. What was kind of the, you know, as you were working with clients, and trying to devise the impact journal itself, if you could explain a little bit about what it what it does, in terms of the the, the reading part itself kind of explains the backstory, but if you could summarize a little bit of the backstory, not the backstory, but if you could summarize a little bit of the method itself, of what people are doing throughout the day, with regard to the impact journal, and the structure of each of the impact journals, journal entry days, and then we can kind of discuss from there.
Augusto Pinaud 2:53Let me begin for what was what was looking on the impact journal, what I found Is dairies I grew up with people who have no What do they want to go on? They have it written down on a review with a certain number of allegedly. Okay, and there is the rest of your task. The problem is that towards the end of the day, or when you say okay, now this is the time for me to make an impact. I'm full power, I am mentally ready. I have time. Let's go and now you open your system. And if this will be a movie, you will hear the bird. Okay, everything went went down. Because the problem is we have mixed all those tasks that are important, that are going to create that impact with everything else we have in our lives. That's a problem. second problem is when you only have a little bit of time to create that impact and in the perfect world. We will have hours of hours and the reality is most people I work with. And I know, don't they have little windows on Windows little windows come, the more we can able to pick out of that impact, set them closer we're going to get to that. So because of that, I start helping people identifying those three things to where do they want to go where those impact priorities and goals were so they could have them easily to access. And finally, what was the rest of their daily and maintenance task and everything else that need to happen in their world? By the way, the three of them are important. But what I found is that most people have only two of them. They know where they want to go. And they have a set of tasks. Lewis Carroll's famous for saying if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. In theory. What I have found with my coaching clients is when they don't know where they want to go, they evaluate opportunity a with a set of criteria as opportunity B with a criteria that will fit better with opportunity B. And the same thing with the rest of the opportunities. And then they wonder why they are confused? Why you start working with them, get them clear, where do they want to go? When the opportunities arrive, and they can evaluate against a set of centers that they have defined, it is much easier to define which one of those opportunities belong where I remember the first time I show the concept to somebody, and the answer of this person, person appreciate a lot and was Wow. What happened to me is I didn't want to see the system. And the reason this person would not see the system where he has these pockets of high impact was because they did not want it to see all the things that were nagging at them. Hey, we all have Okay, we all have the lightbulb that we haven't changed because has not been priority has not been a strategy to do it. But that doesn't mean that when you open your productivity system is not in there. Yeah. You know, the things that you didn't want to do the things that you are ignoring the things that you conveniently forgot. And because of all those things, what happened is we tend not to open our productivity system. What this distinction does is allows you to be able to open and find what are the things that are priority that aren't going to get you close to those goals. In a Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian hockey coach used to say you missed 100% of the shots that you don't take. If you only have 20 minutes a day to make impact. And you don't take those shots. Guess how many? How much percentage of those you're going to miss the second Part of this is what Brett or what was what create this empire journey. You know we have in the productivity world what I call the Stephen Covey's school Stephen Covey was famous for say you figure it out what is your mission in the world and go down until you get to buy bread? And then you have what is what I call the David Allen school, David Allen, is exactly the opposite way say no, no, you figure it out that you need to buy bread and then go up until you identify your mission in the world. And that is great, except that things have changed so much on a such high speed that for most people, that system fall apart. What I have identify working with clients is that falling apart happen around every 13 weeks. So what the impact journal
claim is, let's define your direction your where your priorities are. For the next 13 weeks, unrevised him daily. What happened when you start looking at those goals daily is the reticular system activate, and you start looking at opportunities that otherwise you will have missed. It's an exercise that takes five minutes. Okay, maybe seven. And E's really make a significant difference.
Art Gelwicks 8:23You're talking and it's interesting that you mentioned Lewis Carroll, because that kind of goes along with my question. This process of reflection, I've seen it in in numerous cases where it can become rabbit holes, getting locked in on a specific set of challenges or a specific set of goals or ideas that you have for the future. And you wind up not moving out of that particular rabbit hole to encompass everything that you need to. How does the impact journal help mitigate that, avoid that or deal with it?
Augusto Pinaud 8:57That is a recent you have the tree thing sorry. Just Still need to do the third things, the maintenance tasks, you still need to cook food, buy food for your dog. I know that what tend to happen with that you get stuck is you feel you're not making progress. You are not getting close when you separate and you create that portion. Where did you see all the things that you are making impact when you review, you know what you are doing? regarding those goals,
