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With a team working for you, at some point, you will struggle with one fundamental thing: productivity. Then thus doesn’t matter whether you are a complete beginner just starting out in your business or you are already an accomplished entrepreneur. At this point you might start looking for productivity hack.
The big question is, how do you really get more done and more accomplished in the same time that everybody else has? How do you get more out of your day?
I’m not going to pretend that I have figured this out. Are you thinking that you will get a perfect blueprint, and as soon as you start with it, everything will change? Well, I’m not here to share any such type of blueprint. You might feel discouraged to know that such blueprints do not exist. But nothing to worry!
I will share with you what works for me and what I have found to be the most effective for me to move my business forward. Obviously, I have a team as well, but this applies to me individually.
I apply that to me individually because your team just helps you accelerate the business. It really doesn’t help you to shorten your to-do list. We as humans have this tendency to get more, to want more, regardless of how much we have done already. And that’s why if you are someone who is driven, passionate, who wants to get more out of your life, you will always have a large to-do list that you will need to tackle.
Rule for Productivity Hack: Write Everything Down
The number one thing that I do in order to be productive is to write everything down. The reason I do that is that I want to have and a micro and a macro level view on everything that I need to do. So I really just take a piece of paper and list everything down.
Just number one, two, three.
And I don’t look at a particular order. I just write everything that is in my head. So whatever I can think about, whatever I think I need to do, I write that down. Once I have done that, then I have two things that I really look for when I look at the to-do list. Those are the most urgent things I have to do.
But how do you determine what is the most urgent…
Well, ask yourself…
Is there something on that list that can hurt my business, hurt my life on a big level that if I don’t do this right now, this today or this week, something horrible is going to happen?
So I look at that first, I write that on a separate list as the most important thing at that moment in time.
But then the second thing that I look at is the tasks that fall into the mid-level importance tasks. These are really fore-planning tasks. So I ask myself, is there something on my list that could profoundly impact my business if I tackle the task right now which would have an impact within next two, three weeks?
And the reason I do this is because if you do this every single day, what will end up happening is that your to-do list will mainly consist of tasks that are going to be important over the period of the next two or three weeks.
So you end up working on really important stuff that on a mid-level moves your business and your life forward.
It doesn’t consist of a number of super urgent things that all have to be done immediately.
Now when you have that list done, the most important thing to do here is not to rush on execution. And this is what a lot of people think they need to do: tackle the list immediately as soon as they start work in the morning. As soon as you are ready to start the day, you tackle the number one thing on the list, I personally don’t do that.
What I do instead, I take a pause.
I take, for example, I go out for a 15-minute walk or I drive to a coffee shop to grab up a cup of coffee or something like that. So I can get my mind out of that environment where I created that to-do list, right?
Because your environment consists of a certain energy and so you want to get out of that for a moment so you can look at that from the outside. Within those 15 to 30 minutes, I really assess whether what I was thinking was super urgent is really urgent.
Does it really need to be done this way? Can I actually sacrifice that loss and instead move onto something which will impact my business after maybe three weeks or something like that?
I also look at those higher impact things and stop and think about that. Whether that really is that important and the most important thing I should be doing right now.
So this is my productivity hack and everybody can have their own.
Obviously you will figure out how to do something to accomplish things based on who you are, based on your personality. But this is what works for me and helped me in generating leads and increasing my productivity.
For example, I just recorded a podcast, but I actually took a break. I went out to drive to a coffee shop to grab a coffee and while I was driving I was recording a podcast. And this is also a productivity hack where it’s not super important for me to put it out right now, but it will have a positive impact on my business over the larger periods of time, right?
So after some time, it will have an impact on my business, which is why I am doing this, right?
So this is how you can start to tackle it. And obviously it doesn’t matter which level you are at. You will face an issue where you have too much to do and you still need to kind of figure it out ways how to focus on what really can move your business forward.
