The Today System: How to Increase Your Productivity One Day at a Time

By Mike Sturm

In The Today System, an audio course from Scribd Coach, personal productivity expert Mike Sturm runs you through the best practices for increasing productivity to achieve your goals. Explaining his “Today System,” Sturm advises listeners on choosing a productivity system that works for them; designing a manageable productivity system using only a 3x5 notecard; managing unexpected drop-ins; and more. He also shares exercises along the way so you can put what you’ve learned into practice immediately.

If you’re looking to step up your productivity and achieve big goals, Mike Sturm’s Today System is sure to be an asset.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094447087

Mike Sturm

In The Today System, an audio course from Scribd Coach, personal productivity expert Mike Sturm runs you through the best practices for increasing productivity to achieve your goals. Explaining his “Today System,” Sturm advises listeners on choosing a productivity system that works for them; designing a manageable productivity system using only a 3x5 notecard; managing unexpected drop-ins; and more. He also shares exercises along the way so you can put what you’ve learned into practice immediately. If you’re looking to step up your productivity and achieve big goals, Mike Sturm’s Today System is sure to be an asset.

Book preview

The Today System

THE TODAY SYSTEM

How to Increase Your Productivity One Day at a Time

MIKE STURM

SCRIBD COACH

Copyright © 2022 by Mike Sturm

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781094447087

First e-book edition: October 2022

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

Scribd.com

For more, visit www.scribd.com and follow @Scribd on Twitter and Facebook.

About Scribd Coach

This ebook is brought to you by Scribd Coach, a new imprint from Scribd dedicated to short-form, inclusive, and insightful personal and professional growth courses written by recognized experts.

Each Scribd Coach course is available in audiobook format or as an ebook transcribed from the audio course — like the book you’re about to read. If you’re interested in the audio edition of this course, or if you’d like to read more personal growth content from Scribd Coach, check out the Scribd Coach imprint page. 

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Introduction

Hello and welcome to The Today System: How to Increase Your Productivity One Day at a Time, a course from Scribd. My name is Mike Sturm.

Our lives are busy and filled with tasks we need to accomplish daily to keep everything afloat. We often get caught up using complex scheduling systems that are supposed to make our lives easier. However, in reality, they actually complicate things more. Instead of increasing our productivity, these systems can slow us down. We can become so bogged down by our long to-do lists that it can be difficult to know where to start. Because of this, we continue to put things off, even when they’re on our list of things to do.

That’s why on November 20, 2020, I made a decision that would change my life - even though I didn’t know it at the time. I took a basic 3x5 index card and wrote down six things, in order of their priority, that were important for me to do that day. Just six things. It felt manageable, and immediately helped me feel a bit more in control of my day.

But putting my tasks in priority order was only part of the solution to my problem. After all, it was nothing new, and I had certainly done that before. I needed something else to reinforce those priorities throughout the day. So I created a simple scoring system that would award me points for completing each task on the card. More points for items higher up on the list, and fewer points for items lower on the list.

At the end of the day, I added up my score of how much I accomplished. Then, on the back of the card, I jotted down a few notes about the tasks, what I had accomplished, and how I felt about my progress.

The rest, as they say, was history. One year later, I saw significant progress in my professional and personal life. My productivity skyrocketed all because of a simple notecard. From there, I developed a four-level system that has helped a lot of other people improve their productivity, transforming their endless to-do lists into something more manageable to help them live more intentionally—in harmony with their goals and values.

Tracking my priorities on a simple notecard helped me to live in a more intentional way. It changed my life and now I want to help change yours.