Have you ever been frustrated by how long it takes you to actually get through the trading system development process? To finish doing all of the design work that testing the optimization? Making sure your systems are robust and all of these things?

I went to high performance Academy High Performance academy with Brendon Burchard a couple of weeks ago in San Diego and I learned something which was super cool and has really changed the game for me with my trading system development!

What I learned was Brendon’s concept of block time. What he talked about at High Performance Academy was to take your time and allocate a block, like a 50 minute block and do absolutely nothing but the one thing that you’re focused on delivering. And for me you know 50 minutes on trading system development used to get me nowhere.

In that amount of time I would previously do a few backtesting runs, a few different optimizations and try a few different rules but never really achieve anything. If you can relate to that then this is going to be really powerful.

What I learnt to do at High Performance Academy was to take the 50 minute block that I’ve allocated and do absolutely nothing but trading system development.

You see what I used to do is open up my computer to run a back test, and while the back test was running I would go to Facebook, go do some email go do these other things. Then when the backtest was finished I would come back to it, have a look at the results and try to interpret them and then take the next step.

But what I realized is that flicking between tasks like this is a HUGE mistake!

So what I’ve started to do as a result of the learnings from High Performance Academy is, instead of flicking between tasks when my back test is running I’m instead using the time when the backtest is running to think about what I’m going to do next to journal about what I’m doing right now and what the results are telling me.

This means I am directing all of my creativity at the trading system development process I’m working on right now rather than getting distracted and focusing on all sorts of other useless things (like email and Facebook).

The benefit I found even just yesterday when I allocated one block of time to do this was amazing. I did no e-mail, no Facebook, I didn’t look at my trading account, nothing!

For the entire hour I was doing the trading system development and let me tell you I got through three times more development work than I would normally have done because I was eliminating the distraction I was focusing solely on the task at hand, solely on the development of this one stock trading system.

What I found at the end of the hour I had made more progress I documented more ideas and I had clear steps and better outcomes than I would if I’d have just taken my normal approach of doing some backtesting doing some e-mails at the same time while the test was running and doing Facebook all of that all that stuff.

So my trading tip for today is really to just focus!

If you were willing to spend the time and just focus on one thing and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes in your trading system development work. That little a little bit of time when the back test is running and the optimization is running, your computer is just churning away – Take the that time and dedicate it to creative thinking or brainstorming what to do next and to documentation of exactly what you’re doing now and the trading system performance results you are getting. Do this and you’ll find that your training system development will accelerate dramatically.

You’re also going to have much better ideas, you’re going to close off ideas so that you can move on you can eliminate the bad ideas and move on to test more ideas and improve your trading profitability.

If you want to make more progress, better progress and design better systems then allocate block time and do nothing nothing at all apart from trading system development, thinking about system development and documenting your trading system development efforts. Eliminate those distractions close down down Facebook close down email, close down your stock broking platform, closed down everything else apart from the the the application that you’re using for your backtesting.

For me that means I have Amibroker, Microsoft OneNote (for documenting my results and thinking) and Microsoft Excel for recording my system performance results.

Doing this I’ve found my productivity just improved so dramatically it’s ridiculous. If I’d done this from 15 years ago when I started trading God knows how much further I’d be along now. So I encourage you allocate some block time to do your trading system development with zero distractions – even if is is for just one hour!

That’s what I’ve learned for this week about my trading. Hope you can find a way to apply that in your trading life too.

So that’s all for this this video. Seeing you in the next one. Buy for now!