PDF Summary:Organize Tomorrow Today, by Jason Selk, Tom Bartow, and Matthew Rudy

If you often find yourself overwhelmed by your task list and obligations, Organize Tomorrow Today can help. With sports and travel writer Matthew Rudy, authors Jason Selk and Tom Bartow teach you how to increase your productivity, maximize your time, and set yourself on the path to success. Combining backgrounds in athletics, psychology, and finance, Selk and Bartow have worked for decades as advisors and coaches in both the sports and business worlds. Their programs have helped countless athletes and business professionals improve their job performance and become some of the most successful members of their fields.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to prioritize and prepare for your tasks every day. We’ll also discuss how you can improve your life through positive habits, evaluate your daily progress, and communicate effectively with yourself and others. In our commentary, we’ll touch on other authors’ advice for improving your productivity and examine some of the science behind Selk, Bartow, and Rudy’s strategies.

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If a behavior feels good, you’ll want to repeat it, and this repetition forms a habit. As time goes on, your brain incorporates the habit into your regular activity. You end up doing it without thinking, even if it doesn’t ultimately serve you.

For example, maybe you have a busy day at work, and you have to stay late at the office. You were going to cook when you got off work, but you’re too tired, and you decide to get takeout on the way home. Once you have your food, you’re happy—it tastes good, involves little clean-up, and required minimal effort to acquire. As the weeks go on, you’re still busy at work, and you find yourself getting takeout more and more. Once it turns into a habit, your brain expects the reward, and you’re barely cooking at all.

Why Good Habits Are Harder to Keep

As the authors state, we’re more likely to repeat a behavior and make it a habit if it makes us feel good in the moment. In Atomic Habits, James Clear takes this idea further, arguing that we often reinforce bad habits over good ones because of our need for instant gratification.

Because of lingering survival instincts from our evolutionary past, humans value immediate rewards over future ones. Generally, bad habits offer a positive outcome in the present, and we don’t see their negative effects until later. Therefore, our brains are built to favor bad habits over good ones. For example, smoking reduces anxiety and makes people feel good in the moment, but it has devastating effects on the body later on. In contrast, good habits, like saving money, often require us to sacrifice things we want in the present (like buying new things or going out to eat) for future rewards that feel intangible.

According to Clear, you can combat this pattern by reinforcing good habits with actions that make your progress toward future rewards feel more tangible. For example, if you’re trying to build a habit of avoiding social media, spend the time you’d usually spend online starting a book you’re excited to read instead. You’ll feel instantly rewarded for doing something that’s beneficial in the long term (becoming an avid reader).

Be Consistent and Keep Going When It’s Hard

The authors argue that although we often start habits without realizing it, we can also consciously start new habits to make positive changes in our lives. For example, if you want to learn another language so you can travel to a new country, you may decide to practice the language for an hour every day.

Unlike the habits we fall into by accident, conscious habits take work to maintain. Even though the behavior will help you make positive changes in your life, you may not always feel like doing it. To keep a positive habit, the authors argue that you must push forward and maintain the behavior even when it becomes difficult.

(Shortform note: It takes a lot of difficult work to start and maintain a habit, but this work is considerably easier if you can find someone else to help you. In The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy suggests that finding someone else to start your new habit with will help you maintain it. Having someone else going through the same experience will keep you accountable, and you can support each other when things get difficult.)

The authors offer a few tips for increasing your chances of successfully starting and maintaining a healthy habit:

Tip #1: Always Do the Habitual Behavior at the Same Time of Day

Selk, Bartow, and Rudy suggest picking a time for your habitual behavior and forcing yourself to do it at that time every day. By designating time for your habit beforehand, you’re removing the option to not engage in the behavior and avoiding the temptation to procrastinate. For example, if you want to start cooking dinner at home every evening, build cooking into your daily schedule and make sure you’re in the kitchen at that time no matter what.

(Shortform note: One potential downside of this strategy is that time-driven habits can feel monotonous, making the experience of doing the behavior unpleasant and making the habit less likely to stick. If scheduled habits don’t work for you, try context-based habits instead. When a habit is based on context, specific circumstances (like feelings and places) trigger the behavior, rather than a specific time. Context-based habits allow you to build your behaviors around your moods so that your habits fit more naturally into your daily life. For example, you might start a habit of taking a walk every time you feel stressed.)

Tip #2: Acknowledge When You’re Struggling

If you ever feel like skipping your positive habit, the authors argue that you should acknowledge that feeling. To work through a struggle, you first have to recognize that it’s happening. Additionally, every time you recognize a challenge and then overcome it, your success will trigger pride and positive momentum to tackle the next challenge that comes.

(Shortform note: Mindfulness techniques like meditation can help you acknowledge your feelings—including your struggle to maintain your habit—without judgment. Meditation teaches resilience and fosters equanimity, giving you the tools to navigate highs and lows with strength. When you’re struggling with your habit, try a brief, guided meditation that helps you face your feelings and find the root of your challenge. After you overcome challenges, try a gratitude meditation that helps you appreciate your success and cultivate positive, motivational emotions.)

Tip #3: Look Ahead

Selk, Bartow, and Rudy suggest imagining how your life will be different five years from now if you keep going with your new habit. Visualize this future in as much detail as possible. Then, imagine what your life will look like if you abandon your healthy habits. This will remind you why you want to make this change for yourself and what you’ll miss out on if you don’t.

(Shortform note: Other authors also advocate positive visualization: In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins argues that the first step toward positive change is to decide what you want in your future, giving you a destination to work toward. However, Robbins suggests that you only focus on what you do want, not what you don’t want: He claims that imagining what you don’t want will bring more of what you don’t want. Therefore, according to his advice, the authors’ second step of imagining a future in which you’ve broken your habit may not be very helpful.)

Common Challenges to Habit Maintenance

Once your new habit is a part of your daily routine, you may feel like the hard part is over. However, the authors warn that you should still be aware of factors that might tempt you to break your habit. When you recognize your personal set of challenges to your good habits, you can better address them as they appear. Here are some common circumstances that lead people to break habits:

Circumstance #1: Interruptions to Your Routine

According to the authors, special circumstances like sickness and holidays can change your daily routine. When these circumstances interrupt your routine, you may pause your habitual behavior out of necessity. However, since habits require consistency to remain strong, a prolonged pause can make it difficult to return to the same pattern of behavior right away.

For example, let’s say you normally practice a second language on a learning app every evening, but then you take a two-week-long vacation and don’t practice at all during your time off. When you return to everyday life, you may find it difficult to get back into the habit of studying the language because the behavior is no longer automatic.

(Shortform note: Once something interrupts your routine, it can be very difficult to get back on track. However, there are several strategies you can use to improve your chances of success. First, when you restart your routine, complete tasks in the same order you normally do them. Even if you get a later start, follow the typical progression of your day. Performing the same routine will be more efficient than inventing a new sequence. Second, take a day to reset if you need to. Call out for work and spend it doing anything required to get your life in order, like cleaning, checking items off your personal to-do list, and re-establishing your habit.)

Circumstance #2: Slow Results

Another factor that may threaten your habit is discouragement. The authors assert that sometimes, the positive results you expect to see after starting a new habit won’t be immediately apparent. Don’t let this discourage you—you’re still succeeding just by making a positive change for yourself.

(Shortform note: To make your progress clearer (and therefore more encouraging), try tracking it with milestones and rewarding yourself when you reach one. For example, if your habit involves drawing for an hour every day to improve your skills, you could reward yourself when you’ve drawn every day for a week, a month, and so on. Even if you don’t see a marked improvement in your drawing skills during that time, the number of days you put in is an achievement in itself.)

Circumstance #3: Overconfidence

Finally, some people who experience a high level of success with their new habit think they can stop working as hard to maintain it and still achieve the same results. You may be able to get by with less effort for a little while, but the authors argue that in the long term, your reduced effort will undermine the positive effects of the changes you made. You’ll see a decrease in your progress, and you’ll have to go through the whole process of starting the habit again.

(Shortform note: People who experience early success in habits and subsequently put in less effort to maintain them fall into the same trap as people with bad habits: They experience instant gratification from their choice to let things slide, and they can’t envision the negative consequences that will result from their behavior later on. Before you put in less effort to maintain your habit, think about how your actions will affect you in the long run.)

When you feel the temptation to put in less effort, the authors advise you to do the opposite: Put in more effort toward your habit that day. You’ll show yourself that you’re committed and strong and that you can overcome challenges most people can’t. This will motivate you to keep going. For example, if you normally take a daily walk, but you don’t feel like doing it one morning, don’t stay in bed—add an extra mile to your route instead.

(Shortform note: According to Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, you may not always be able to practice the authors’ strategy of pushing yourself harder when you feel like breaking your habit. In The One Thing, they argue that we use willpower to establish habits, resist temptations, and do things we don’t like. However, willpower is a finite resource—every time we use it, we drain it. Therefore, if you use all your willpower on things that are unrelated to your habit, you may not have enough left to push yourself a little harder when you feel like breaking it. To protect your habit, build it into your day when you still have enough willpower to push yourself to do it.)

Keep Track of Successes and Areas for Improvement

In the previous section, you learned how to improve your life by starting and maintaining positive habits. In this section, we’ll discuss Selk, Bartow, and Rudy’s advice on how to keep track of these improvements, along with potential areas of needed growth. To do this effectively, you’ll learn how to break free from a perfectionist mindset and constructively evaluate your progress every day.

The Dangers of a Perfectionist Mindset

The authors assert that assessing what you’re doing well and what you can improve on is an important step toward success. However, many people do this ineffectively because they assess themselves with a perfectionist mindset. They focus only on their shortcomings and ignore their accomplishments.

(Shortform note: This type of perfectionism doesn’t just affect your ability to succeed at work, as the authors suggest—it can also take a serious toll on your mind and body. Research shows that perfectionism increases the risk of and contributes to physical unhealthiness, depression, eating disorders, and anxiety disorders.)

To combat perfectionism, practice giving yourself credit when you deserve it. Don’t just focus on your mistakes—acknowledge the things you do well. Positive reinforcement is a much better motivator than negativity. Additionally, measure your success by the effort you put in, not by the results you achieve. If you do everything you can to reach your goals, that’s an achievement in itself.

(Shortform note: To a perfectionist, rewarding yourself for your efforts even if they’re not perfectly successful may sound like lowering your standards and accepting mediocrity. However, as Brené Brown points out in The Gifts of Imperfection, it’s impossible to do everything perfectly. If you refuse to appreciate any of the things you do well or the effort you put in, you’ll inevitably feel perpetual shame—a very demotivating emotion. Instead, accept your imperfections as an avoidable part of being human, and you won’t feel as much shame.)

Signs That You Might Be a Perfectionist

Before you can start fighting perfectionist tendencies, you need to recognize that you have them. Here are some warning signs to look out for:

• You frequently experience negative self-talk and blame yourself for every situation. (We’ll discuss the authors’ strategies for addressing negative self-talk in the next section.)

• You frequently compare yourself to others.

• You hold yourself to a higher standard than the people around you.

• You base your self-worth on external achievements, like grades or awards.

• You spend an excessive amount of time on tasks that shouldn’t take very long.

• You procrastinate often because you’re afraid of making mistakes.

Strategy: Keep a Daily Record of Your Progress

To help you focus on what you’re doing well as well as the ways you can improve, the authors recommend writing an evaluation of your progress every day. You can refer back to the successes you’ve recorded whenever your confidence needs a little help.

(Shortform note: Consider writing all of your self-evaluations in one place, like a journal or a document on your computer. This will make it easy for you to reference your past successes so you can see how far you’ve come.)

You should center your evaluation around the daily tasks you’ve completed:

Step 1: At the same time every day, write down three things you did well in the last 24 hours and one thing you can do better in the next 24 hours. (Shortform note: By identifying more successes than shortcomings every day, you’re working against the perfectionist tendency to emphasize the negative over the positive.)

Step 2: Write down one action you can take to make the improvement you identified in Step 1. (Shortform note: You can include the actions toward improvement you define in your self-evaluations on your three-item to-do list for the next day.)

Step 3: Give yourself a rating from one to 10 based on how well you completed the three prioritized tasks on your to-do list. (Shortform note: Having evaluations based on numerical ratings will help you more easily track and quantify your progress over time.)

Communicate Effectively With Yourself and Others

In the previous section, we explored the problematic nature of perfectionism and learned a strategy for daily self-evaluation. In this final section, you’ll learn another of Selk, Bartow, and Rudy’s strategies for breaking free from limiting mindsets: constructive self-communication. We’ll also discuss how to effectively communicate with others, especially when presenting information.

Eliminate Negativity in Conversations With Yourself

The authors assert that one of the biggest determiners of success is the way you speak to yourself. If you consistently talk to and about yourself with negativity, you’ll view yourself negatively. A negative self-image will hamper your ability to perform successfully—you can only perform up to the level you believe you can.

(Shortform note: Many people believe that self-criticism is the best motivator of success because it makes them work harder and better. This is false—self-criticism leads you to hide failure and perceived weakness, preventing you from learning and growing from your mistakes. Furthermore, when you only focus on your shortcomings, you’ll inevitably be unhappy. Even if self-criticism helps you reach outward success, you won’t experience success you enjoy or actually feel good about.)

To begin combating negative self-talk, first, recognize how you communicate with yourself. When you see negative thoughts about yourself for what they are, you can begin separating them from your self-image. As negative thoughts about yourself arise, stop them by setting a rule that you’re not allowed to speak to yourself that way.

Additionally, instead of focusing on the problems that might hinder your success, focus on the solutions you can use to improve things. When you center your thinking around problems, they become bigger in your mind, and you make decisions based on fear.

For example, if there’s something you don’t understand at work, don’t focus on thoughts like, “I’m not smart enough to do this,” or “I don’t belong here.” Instead, consider possible solutions, like finding resources you can use to research your question or thinking of people you can ask for help.

Common Negative Thought Patterns and How to Reframe Them

The authors offer solutions-based thinking and setting rules as useful strategies for combating negative thoughts, but they don’t expand on methods for identifying negative thoughts. You won’t be able to put the authors’ strategies into effect if you can’t recognize negative thoughts as they arise. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield discusses common negative thoughts to look out for and ways to reframe them productively:

Assuming someone thinks negatively of you. For example, you may assume someone’s mad at you without knowing what they’re really thinking. Reframe this thought by asking them how they’re feeling instead.

Thinking in absolutes with words like never, always, and everyone. For example, you might think, “My friend never considers my feelings.” That probably isn’t true, and you can reframe it by being more honest: “It hurts when my friend ignores my feelings, but she’s been considerate before, and she will be again.”

Making yourself feel guilty. Thinking about actions in terms of “have to” and “should” may make you feel guilty and reinforce your reluctance to do them. Instead of saying something like, “I have to watch less TV at night,” reframe the thought around your goals. For example, you might think, “Watching less TV would help me sleep better.”

Present Information With Confidence

Your overall success in work and life will also depend on how well you communicate with others. According to the authors, being knowledgeable means nothing unless you’re able to convey information effectively. Luckily, effective delivery of information is a skill you can practice and master. (Shortform note: If you want help learning how to communicate and present effectively in the workplace, companies like LinkedIn and Dale Carnegie offer skill courses in these areas.)

The authors offer two main strategies you can use to improve your outward communication skills, particularly when giving presentations:

Strategy #1: Limit Yourself to Only the Most Important Points

When you’re giving a presentation, don’t overload your audience with excess information. According to the authors, we can only hold a limited number of ideas in our minds at any one time. Therefore, if you introduce too many points, your audience will likely forget or miss several of them. Additionally, the more ideas you present, the more you’ll have to explain, possibly creating unnecessary confusion.

(Shortform note: In Talk Like TED, Carmine Gallo describes a biological reason why you should keep your presentations brief. Research shows that the brain uses a lot of glucose as it absorbs information, so listening to a speech or presentation is physically and mentally tiring. Therefore, if you talk for too long during your presentation, your audience won’t have the energy to keep listening to your ideas, let alone use or share them.)

To avoid delivering an overloaded presentation, write a concise script beforehand. Determine what your most important points are, and cut everything else. Here are some steps the authors recommend you take when producing a script:

Step 1: Plan the first five minutes of your presentation. Then, read through your script and eliminate any information that isn’t essential to making your main points. (Shortform note: The beginning of your presentation has to grab your audience’s attention, so make sure to choose an interesting opening as well as a concise one. Some common presentation hooks include starting with a thought-provoking statement, telling a story, quoting a well-known figure, or piquing curiosity with a suspenseful first sentence. In the first five minutes, also give your audience a brief roadmap of what you’ll be presenting.)

Step 2: Plan the last five minutes of your presentation. Planning the end will help you figure out what steps you need to take to get there. As in Step 1, remove any unnecessary information from your script. (Shortform note: You may want to end your presentation with a summary of your main points to reinforce them in the minds of your audience members. Alternatively, you could end with a call to action that tells the audience what to do with the information you’ve given them.)

Step 3: Map out the essential content of your presentation between the beginning and end, and make sure that each point leads to the conclusion you planned in Step 2. (Shortform note: When you’re writing the main content of your presentation, make sure to include breaks for the audience if necessary and time for them to ask questions.)

Step 4: Add anecdotes that support your points to create memorable connections for your audience and establish your credibility. (Shortform note: Before you include an anecdote, make sure it has a clear purpose and message for your audience—you’re better off telling no story than a pointless one.)

Strategy #2: Practice Your Presentation With Intention

According to Selk, Bartow, and Rudy, the most effective communicators are confident and poised, and you can build your confidence by practicing properly for presentations. We’re usually more afraid of things when we feel unprepared for them, so the more you practice, the more confident you’ll feel. To practice your delivery, the authors recommend rehearsing your presentation for three minutes, three times per day, for three days before you have to present.

As you rehearse, practice what you want to say and how you want to say it. As you practice your delivery, try to speak slowly and add meaningful pauses. When you’re giving a real presentation, this will make you seem more confident, and it’ll give your audience a chance to process the information you give them. Practicing both content and delivery will put you in the right mindset for the real thing.

(Shortform note: It can be hard to judge how well you’re presenting when you’re practicing by yourself. To get a clearer idea of how well you’re doing, practice with a friend who can give you real-time feedback. Your friend can also time you so you can keep to the three-minute time limit the authors recommend. Alternatively, make a recording of yourself that you can replay to see what you need to adjust.)

How to Turn Presentation Anxiety Into Excitement

For some people, public speaking anxiety makes the thought of giving a presentation terrifying, no matter how much you practice and prepare. Luckily, according to experts, you don’t have to get rid of your anxiety completely to be a successful, confident presenter. Instead of trying to exchange anxiety for a sense of calm as most techniques teach, reframe your nervous energy as excitement. Anxiety and excitement are similar feelings, so it’s easy to switch between them.

To channel nervousness into excitement before a presentation, start by centering yourself with a few deep breaths. Then, tell yourself out loud why you care about this opportunity and why it’s important the audience hears your presentation. Visualize the presentation going well from beginning to end, and finish preparing by listening to a song that fills you with positive energy. Use this exercise every time you have to make a presentation or speech.