Most people are unaware of the 13 hidden productivity tips that can help them get more done easily and effortlessly. These tips are often overlooked because they’re not always convenient to use, but in the end, these little things will save you a lot of time!
It’s the common myth, that we need to get more things done in our limited time. But the truth of being more productive is not by doing more but it’s by doing less.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss different ways that you can make your workday easier with some simple productivity hacks.
The following are 13 productivity tips that you can start implementing to help get more things done easily and effortlessly. These strategies were my personal experience and study from the top best selling productive books.
- Start with an end in mind, Clarity = Productive
- Apply the 80/20 rule
- Eat the 3 frog with the ABCDE method
- Prioritize your energy and not time
- Meditate for 10 mins every day
- Celebrate your success
- Treat your time like money, track it
- Don’t multitask, task batching
- Leverage other’s time, money and experience
- Be a leader and delegate
- Automate, eliminate or outsource
- Sharpen your saw
- Review with PDCA method
Let’s get started:-
Start with an end in mind
A quote by Brian Tracy, successful people are those who are willing to delay gratification and make sacrifices in the short term so that they can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term. Decide exactly what you want. Write out your goals and objectives before you begin. Once you planned out what you want to achieve, your mind will be able to execute it.
It’s simply clarity = productivity
A cluttered mind will be a waste of time and energy. It’s hard trying to remember what to do next or catching up on fires that happen every day, like endless busying without a clear pathway to success.
We can start every day with an action plan or to-do list and review it every day. In my case, I use a notion weekly tracker to keep a record of my to-do list.
Here is what we learnt from the book Eat the frog by him.
- Decide what you want. Do this exercise alone or with your boss. Don’t stop until you are crystal clear about what is expected of you and in what order of priority. Clarity is productivity.
- Write it down. Think on paper or notion
- Set a deadline. A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency. It has no real beginning or end
- Make a list. Add everything you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. As you think of new activities, add them to your list. Keep building your list until it is complete
- Make a plan. Organize your list by priority and sequence. Decide what you need to do first and what you can do later. Even better, lay out your plan visually in the form of a series of boxes and circles on a sheet of paper. You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to achieve your goal when you break it down into individual tasks
- Take action on your plan immediately. Do something. Anything. An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. Execution is everything
- Take action every day. Build this activity into your daily schedule. Never miss a day.
Review your goals daily. Every morning, start with your biggest frog to achieve your most important goal at the moment.
Revisit your goals every week. Schedule time for at least 20-30 minutes on Sunday to plan your weekly plan. Make sure what you’re doing it’s aligned with your big goals. By doing this, we can increase our productivity slowly and gradually, it might change your life in the way you can’t imagine.
Apply the 80/20 rule
A higher priority/importance will always get done first. Do not try to multitask when you have a lot on your plate because it’s hard for the mind to switch focus every few minutes depending on how much there is on your ‘to-do list. This can be wasteful of time and energy. Remember being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
I once listen to a quote by Tim Ferris, he said what you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.
We should focus on doing things that could move the needles and make an impact. If we do it consistently, many of the small things in life will be knocked off by the important things automatically, just like the domino effect.
We have no need to do more things, but it’s crucial to do the right things with our limited time. Being busy is most often used as an excuse for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
Remember the 80/20 rule: 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results
Often, one item on your list of ten things is worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.
Here is his 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things):
1. Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen.
2. Make a cup of tea and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper.
3. Write down the 3-5 things — and no more — that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually = most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.
4. For each item, ask yourself:
– “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”
– “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?”
5. Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.
6. Block out at least 2-3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.
7. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at least 2-3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work.
8. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
Eat 3 frogs with ABCDE method
The Law of Forced Efficiency: “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing. We should focus on doing things that give us the highest return even if it’s hard. Doing a lot of small things great won’t be able to help us to progress in life or make an impact.
Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task. It’s the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
Develop the habit of eating your frog, first thing every day when you start work.
If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. When choosing between two important tasks, start with the most important one first.
We should eat the 3 frogs every day, every week and every month.
A prioritization method Brian Tracy recommends is the ABCDE method:
The ABCDE Method is a powerful priority setting technique you can use every single day.
Start your work by doing your most difficult task first. This is truly “Eating your frog.”
Start with a list of everything you have to do today. Place an A, B, C, D or E before each item on your list:
- “A” are tasks you must do. The frogs of your life. If you have more than one “A” task, rank them by writing A-1, A-2, A-3, and so on. Your A-1 task is your biggest frog of all.
Examples of A activities: Writing your book, writing sales copy, coming up with offers and promotions for your company, creating sales funnels, shooting videos, doing webinars, hiring the right people, investing in companies, learning and upskilling, talking with your major clients or partners, setting the company cultures and direction.
- “B” are tasks you should do. These are tadpoles.
Examples of the B tasks are like creating the process for the companies, creating proposals, setting the systems, creating Facebook ads for clients, training and onboarding staff, talking with your clients, getting the speaking opportunities, delegating your works to your team, writing blog or contents.
- “C” are tasks that would be nice to do.
Examples of the C tasks are coaching, motivating your team, deciding the new office location, team party gathering, looking at the analytics, doing reporting. Prepare the legal docs with lawyers, team meetings.
- “D” are tasks you can delegate. If other people can do it, delegate to free more time for the “A” tasks that only you can do.
For example: running errands, getting gifts, booking the flight ticket and vocation, designing ad images and banners, driving, preparing your meals, repairing and fixing something at home, video editing and uploading, scheduling social media posting.
- “E” are tasks you can cut. They may have been important at one time but are no longer relevant to yourself or anyone else.
Discipline yourself to start immediately on your “A-1” task and then stay at it until it is complete. Eat the whole frog and don’t stop until it’s finished completely.
How to develop the habit of eating your frog:
- At the end of your workday, or on the weekend, make a list of everything you have to do the next day
- Review this list using the ABCDE Method combined with the 80/20 Rule
- Select your A-1, your most important task
- Assemble everything you need to start and finish this job and lay it out ready for you to start work in the morning
- Discipline yourself to start on your biggest frog. Work without interruptions
Do this every day for 21 days until it becomes a habit. With this one habit, you become unstoppable.
Prioritize your energy not time
The secret of productivity tips always laid in the number of things we did every day. But it’s not like that.
The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us are not,” said Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Their message: To be a consistently high performer, you have to manage your energy, not your time.
If you’ve ever managed your time, such as by making to-do lists, prioritizing assignments, and scheduling specific times for each of them, you know how easy it is to get sidetracked during a normal business day. A single email or meeting may distract you or completely rearrange your priorities.
Our never-ending career or status chasing has gained us more works to do. The more responsibilities we have, the more decisions we must make. Yet this increase in status comes with a hidden cost. The more decisions we have to make, the more decision fatigue sets in and saps our energy.
Because our brain must focus on making a new decision, we waste time and energy by making snap decisions. When you work for yourself, you must reduce the number of decisions you have to make in order to conserve your energy for your most important work.
Reduce decisions through elimination, automation, and delegation, so you can use your limited energy on your most important decisions
You may get far better results than the modest improvements you might earn through time management techniques. Here are 17 ways to get more energy:
- Sleep well, get at least 7-8 hours of quality sleep daily
- Have a great & healthy same breakfast every day
- Eating low carb diet to avoid dizzy
- Have power nap for 15-20 mins daily after lunch
- Avoid making small decisions like what to eat, or what to wear
- Wear the same clothes or shoes if allowed
- Avoid facing your laptop or phone at the 1st 2 hours of your day
- Mute all the notifications and unwanted emails
- Turn off your phone call ring tones and only set it for your parent or loved ones, avoid sales calls at all cost
- Turn your phone and laptop to a dark theme, avoid unneeded colours that catch your attention
- Make sure your social media accounts are hard to access
- Turn on focus mode for your laptop, phone and tablet
- Setup Deco to cut off your internet after 10 pm to avoid doom scrolling
- Avoid unneeded discussion and meeting
- Avoid dramatic people that will impact your days
- Spend time thinking & reflection
- Rest before it’s needed, like take a lunch break after the meal
- Spend your evening by doing nothing or just play
- Align what you do with your purpose, and you will have endless energy
Time management is all about getting through a “to-do list” as quickly as possible.
While energy management is developing a set of habits around your most essential goals.
Habits initially take a lot of energy to develop because you have to consciously think about developing them. Focused thought requires a lot of energy.
Once a habit is established, however, it will save you a lot of energy and time because those particular routines will now be automatic, not requiring any thought.
The brain, according to evolutionary biologists, conserves energy by forming habits. Every day, you perform around 40% of your actions without having to think about them.
Why are “to-do lists” so draining? It’s because each activity becomes a decision, requiring effort. Habits have the ability to significantly reduce your “to-do list” while also saving you energy by transforming regular work activities into habits.
Want to be more productive? Manage your energy, not your time.
Time might be a constant, but your available energy isn’t.
Meditate for 10 mins every day
Meditation has been scientifically proved to be beneficial to our brains. Meditation will help you focus your attention and, as a result, enhance your productivity. If you practice meditation on a daily basis, you’ll be able to complete more tasks in the same amount of time.
Meditation is a straightforward technique of focusing on the present and current situation. Meditation may be difficult to fit into your busy schedule, but there are a few easy strategies that you can use not only to relax but also to increase focus and productivity. Here are a few ideas for integrating meditation into the workday.
- Music Meditation: Meditation music is a fantastic group or individual exercise that can be done at the workplace. When done simultaneously, it produces a shared sense of calm that spreads throughout the company. It may also be practised for brief periods throughout the day alone to assist you to reduce stress and improve attention.
- Counting breaths: A 5-minute session of meditation with deep breathing, while counting the breaths, can help you unwind for the rest of the day. This simply demands that the employee sit down comfortably and breathe in and out while doing it.
- Use meditate apps: Follow through the guided meditation session with mobile apps like Calm, Headspace or Behance. Find one that matched your need and keep practising.
Celebrate your ideal life
In sports, visualization has been utilized for a long time. Muhammad Ali’s famous statement “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it – then I can achieve it,” demonstrates his trust in the power of vision. But he’s not the only one who relied on imagery to propel his sports career forward.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was also a vocal advocate of visualizing how he wished to look, and he continued doing so. Later, in politics and acting, he utilized the same method.
According to a study published in Neuropsychologia, mentally simulating the movement of particular sections of your body trains the muscles as effectively as if you were physically moving them. Our mind is truly astonishing!
It’s been used by professional sportspeople, Olympic medalists, and other elite athletes. It’s also popular among the upper class. And now, all kinds of top performers in all fields utilize it.
We all have this amazing ability, but most of us haven’t been taught how to use it effectively.
Visualization may help you rapidly achieve your goals, objectives, and aspirations by instilling a sense of urgency in your life.
The four most significant advantages of using visualizations to focus on your objectives and goals are as follows.
- It invigorates your creative subconscious, which will begin generating innovative ideas to achieve your objective.
- It programs your brain to be more receptive to and recognize the resources you’ll need in order for you to realize your goals.
- It is a powerful mental tool for attracting people, resources, and circumstances into your life to help you achieve your objectives.
- It gives you the drive to do all that it takes to realize your objectives.
You may see that visualization is beneficial for all sorts of groups of people and in a variety of scenarios, as it helps you to achieve your objectives, picture your future, cope with stress, and much more.
I have an inspiring session learning from Ken Honda about EQ money. He is a Zen millionaire and best selling author, in his lesson, he taught about celebrating success before the actual event.
Imagine the ideal life you want to achieve in the next 1 year, whether it’s publishing a book or scaling your business to 10 million per year, or starting your own company, owning your favourable cars. Whatever it’s, imagine it in your mind and express it as detailed as possible in your mind. You must picture the scene as fully as possible, using all of your senses – you can see it, smell it, hear it, feel it, and taste it. As you can, record as much information as you can, including your clothing, a look on your face, minor body motions, the setting and any other individuals who may be present.
For many individuals, closing their eyes while doing it helps, and for others, writing everything down rather than thinking about it only in their minds is preferable. Inhale deeply while thinking about the event as if it had already occurred.
Take time to live in the moment. Imagine what you would see, hear, and feel if you were there now. Visualize yourself already being there and celebrating that moment’s success. Feel the emotion, and energy you have when you have achieved what you want, remember that feeling.
To help you achieve the powerful meditation, Ken Honda shared this technique in his lesson:
- Think about what you want to celebrate in the future
- What about it excites you the most
- Feel as if it’s already happening right now
- Breathe in and feel the excitement in the present time
- Do this exercise for 10 seconds or 10 minutes throughout your day
- Do something small every day to achieve this dream
A vision board is another method to picture your future. In “Let Me Introduce You To a Remarkable Person”, you’ll find more details about it. The process involves taking a blank poster and filling it with snippets and photographs from publications that represent your desired life in a specific amount of time, such as 6 months, 3 years, or more. It’s critical to display your completed vision board in a visible location at home or work so that you’re reminded of it on a regular basis.
Visualization – seeing the objective as already completed in your mind’s eye – is a crucial technique employed by the world’s most accomplished individuals. Visualization works because it taps into our subconscious minds’ power.
When we think of objectives as finished, our subconscious mind generates a contradiction between what we’re imagining and what we presently have. Our minds are programmed to resolve such situations by working to build a current reality that corresponds to the one we’ve imagined.
The subconscious mind is activated by visualization, encouraging it to work harder at coming up with answers. You’ll also notice a rise in motivation and find yourself performing actions that you normally avoid but that will help you reach your goals.
It’s all about visualizing in your head, on paper, or on a blank canvas. Take it with a curious and open attitude and try out several options until you discover what works best for you.
It can be done at home, on the bus, during lunch breaks, or even at the workplace. Its major advantages are that it may be completed everywhere – on the subway, at home, or even at work. Keep exploring and constructing your ideal life utilizing imagination to its fullest potential.
Treat your time like money, track it
We can figure out that almost everything in life is about time if we dig a little further. We work hard to reach our goals so that we may feel accomplished at some point; we wait for holidays to spend quality time with family and friends. In reality, our life is defined by the time we have on this earth or any other.
I had been saying yes to everything and everyone; I was always accessible for calls and social media. Every day, I was bingeing on YouTube. I was fulfilling whatever task was assigned to me without any sense of how valuable my time is.
To be honest, it’s suck.
Like as in your life is not worthy, and we keep busying other’s people business and keep fixing other people issue without having enough attention to our own lives and challenges.
I want a change, and therefore, I start to treat my time as money.
If I have 24 hours a day, what would I do every day to maximise my returns? What are the activities that will bring us closer to our ideal life? What are the things that spark joy? What are the things that do nothing good for us and drain our limited energy? What are the things I should stop doing once and for all?
I learnt to say no to more things and ignore all the meaningless conversations. This mindfulness made me take the following steps:
- Turning off my notification, vibration, ring tones
- Leaving network and groups
- Deleting apps that I don’t use
- Throw away things I don’t use
- Say no to 98% of temporary projects that can’t give us long-term benefits
- Stop replying to a meaningless conversation
- Create more time for creative works like writing & personal branding
- Creating company process & system
- Learning new skills
- Investing companies and software
- Hiring and finding talents
- Track my time spent with Clockify
“It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” — Steve Jobs
Even by doing what is beneficial to us, it could mean putting someone else in lesser priorities, and someone might be pissed off the way we changed. But who cares? The world will not end. In our limited time, we should prioritise our life and time and make our life remarkable by making the right choice.
The top performers understand that they have a lot of earning potential.
They can make more money per hour, and they can get back any money they spend, but they cannot gain extra time. Top performers have no problems spending money to regain time. You can accomplish that by hiring a cleaning service, renting a car, or having someone bring your groceries home to your house instead of you having to go to the store.
People who are busy value money less than individuals who don’t have a lot of time on their hands, so they handle every aspect of the project themselves.
They’re also less likely to invest time in things that they don’t excel at or require a significant amount of effort and. They exchange their time for money. They spend their time attempting to save money, but in the end, they wind up with nothing: They don’t make any progress that will truly help them generate more results and future income for their business.
We can earn back the cash if we lose everything, but there’s no way we can regain our time. It became clear to me that time was my most valuable asset. Even if I don’t become a millionaire, my time is still extremely valuable.
Don’t multitask, try task batching
One thing that may be said about the working life is this: If you don’t manage your time, it will manage you.
How do you keep meetings, email, team chat, and “busy work” in check while also having focused time for the things you really care about when it’s increasingly difficult to be a digital hermit? Because becoming a digital recluse isn’t an option for most of us, we’ll need practical methods to help us focus in a world
That’s when time batching comes in.
When you multitask, you feel like you’re getting things done, but in reality, it prevents you from finishing your most important task. The batch approach provides structure without sacrificing any of our objectives. It aids us in becoming better timekeepers. 
Task batching is the process of combining several (usually smaller) activities together and scheduling specific time slots to finish all at once.
You’ll minimize the amount of context switching you have to do throughout the day by doing similar activities in a group.
For example, putting two 20-minute blocks aside to process email during the day is more effective than checking your inbox every 15 minutes.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, is a big proponent of time blocking. Every evening, after finishing his day’s activities, he spends 20 minutes planning the following working day:
“Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.”
When you set aside a certain amount of time to work on one thing, problem, or activity, you bring all of your mental resources to bear on one item rather than spreading them over many things. The more you single-task, the stronger your mental muscles become for deep work and the easier it is to stay focused.
Leverage on other’s time, money and experience
Do you want to get more out of your own time without having to work any harder? If you want to be rich and productive, it is critical to use leverage.
In fact, you need to use massive amounts of leverage. The more leverage you apply, the more leverage you’ll require. Before you think that I’ve lost my mind and only suggest borrowing money till it kills you, let me explain myself clearly.
The misconception that leverage refers only to borrowing money (also known as gearing) is widespread. Leverage is so much more than just borrowed money. In actuality, there are seven varieties of “leverage” and the more of them you employ, the richer you’ll become.
The ability to control a lot with little is known as leverage. It allows you to act on more than just your own behalf. You can change things much more quickly using leverage. The faster your journey to wealth, the greater your leverage.
There are 7 forms of leverage
- OPM (Other People’s Money)
- OPT (Other People’s Time)
- OPW (Other People’s Work)
- OPE (Other People’s Experiences)
- OPI (Other People’s Ideas)
- Scalable Production & Distribution
- Scalable Customer Base
We all have limited time on earth, it’s wise to tap on different resources to maximise our impact in life.
To accomplish big things, top performers understand that they’ll need the help of others, additional skills, and more time. They leverage other people. They utilize other people’s connections, time, and knowledge rather than having to accomplish everything on their own. They don’t have to know everything. They don’t have to complete everything on their own. They don’t have to come up with anything new themselves.
They do this by utilizing other people, collaborations, mentoring, and coaching: they use others’ time to save up their own so that they may allocate it to things that produce results faster.
People who are too busy selling their time. Typically for a low price. They exchange their own time for others to utilize it to accomplish something else, and they frequently get paid per hour rather than per result.
They sell their time rather than utilizing other people’s time, and this is a significant difference.
The experiences of others are one of the greatest resources or leverage available to you. It’s a huge waste of your time and pointless to try and learn everything you need to know through trial and error. You may profit from the experiences, knowledge, and mistakes of others.
You’re not alone if you use leverage. You may draw on the assets of all the people and resources you need. One individual’s skills may be multiplied many times over. Systems of production and sales can operate and develop independently of the inventor or owner through leverage.
Leverage allows you to set up automated systems that operate without your intervention. Creating wealth necessitates the use of leverage. Understanding, mastering, and fully utilizing leverage are essential if individuals want to become wealthy or stay on the money track.
Delegate and be a leader
In the book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, he said this in the book “The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.”
Leadership is the key to your effectiveness and success. In reality, leadership has a multiplier effect on achievement – by improving your leadership abilities many times over without increasing your success dedication, you can significantly raise your overall effectiveness.
As a leader, delegating is critical since you can’t and shouldn’t do everything yourself. Delegating enables your team to grow in confidence, trust, and professional development. It also aids in the identification of who is best suited to undertake responsibilities or projects as a leader. As it frees up your time to do challenging and more impactful tasks, which will move the whole company or team to a higher position.
To discover which of your duties should be delegated, use the guidelines below to conduct an audit of your activities. Jenny Blake, a career and business strategist, suggests performing an audit of your duties using the following criteria:
- Tiny: Tasks that appear to be insignificant but add up over time are known as tiny activities. These may be handled by an assistant, such as scheduling meetings, arranging flights for business trips, or removing spam/marketing emails from your inbox
- Tedious: Tasks that are time-consuming, such as copying and pasting lead information from your marketing automation software to your CRM, are known as tedious. Tedious activities do not require a lot of expertise and may be readily be delegated.
- Time-consuming: It is always better to split time-consuming duties into smaller pieces and delegate portions of the work to others. If you do a task frequently that takes a long time, search for alternatives to outsourcing parts of it.
- Teachable: Do you have any duties on your plate that you could easily hand off to someone else? If a chore is completely teachable—if it doesn’t need specialized knowledge that only you possess—it’s a good candidate for delegation.
- Terrible at: Maybe you don’t have any design abilities, so producing images for your blog pieces takes six times as long as it would a professional designer. It’s also preferable to delegate the task to someone who can do the job effectively and quickly.
- Time-sensitive: Maybe it’s better if you handled all of the project’s time-sensitive activities yourself, but if you don’t have time to do it all yourself, it’s time to look for solutions to delegate pieces of that job to other teams members.
Here are some suggestions to assist you to delegate effectively so that your team is able to share the work and achieve success.
- Choose the right person for the job
- Explain why you’re delegating
- Provide the right instructions
- Provide resources and training
- Delegate responsibility and authority
- Check the work and provide feedback
- Say thank you
“If you want to do a few minor things correctly, do them yourself,” writes John C. Maxwell. “Learn to delegate if you want to achieve great things and make a significant impact.”
You can increase trust and commitment among your staff, improve productivity, and ensure that the best people are carrying out tasks that match their skill sets by delegating effectively.
Automate, eliminate or outsource
Automate
Another smart method to get rid of your time is to utilize automation. Ask yourself if you can automate any activities using technology, so you’ll never have to deal with them again.
Automation is a workhorse of productivity because it works for you whether you’re sleeping, travelling, or working on another project. It can likewise reduce some of your daily routines from your workflow, making your job more pleasurable.
“Use technology wherever possible instead of brute force. Try to automate as much as possible first.” — Tim Ferriss
You could also consider automating the following:
- Sort out your email with an email filter and labelling tool
- Set up a chatbot to handle your customer support
- Set up marketing automation to follow up with your clients
- Setup automated recurring bill payment
- Setup automated recurring invoices to send to your clients
- Use accounting software such as Waveapps to calculate your tax
- Use software to calculate payroll
The goal of this section is to highlight the importance of automation. Automation may be an incredibly efficient way to free up your time and energy for the most important duties. You may “set it and forget it” with automation. As a result, I strongly advise you to consider how you might automate repeat activities.
Elimination
As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “It’s not enough to be busy; ants are also doing it. The question is, what are we occupied with? “The majority of individuals keep themselves occupied by pursuing activities that are insignificant and should not be done at all. As a result, I strongly advise you to become relentless about eliminating
Take a look at the tasks and projects on your plate and ask yourself whether any of them are taking up valuable time that, if put to better use, would provide a much more favourable ROI.
It isn’t always simple to get rid of things, but it is critical that you attempt. You owe it to yourself to spend your time and energy on the most important tasks — those that will give you the greatest return on investment.
“Knocking out a hundred chores for no reason is a poor substitute for doing even one task that matters,” according to The One Thing author Gary Keller. “Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t determined by the person who accomplishes the most. However, this is exactly how people typically play it every day.”
Stop doing a lot of things, so that simply have more available for the things that truly matter.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is similar to delegation, with the primary distinction being that outsourcing assigns an operation to someone outside of your direct staff.
For most small business owners, outsourcing is a far better alternative to delegation since it is significantly less expensive and more suited to job-by-job or project-by-project work.
You simply pay someone a fee once and they begin working on the task or project you gave them. For example, you may now simply locate freelancers on sites like Fiverr or Upwork.
Let’s assume you’re a writer. In that scenario, the most important aspect of your time is focused on writing rather than other activities. You may use Fiverr and Upwork to outsource various chores such as book cover design, formatting, and even proofreading.
If you’re a course developer, consider hiring someone to handle the video editing or PowerPoint design. This way, you can focus on creating the greatest curriculum possible while freeing up your time.
Perhaps you’re a small business owner who wants to expand your social media presence. In that situation, you might hire freelancers to create attractive social media posts for you. This would allow you to devote more time to finding new clients or enhancing your sales funnel.
We need to set aside time and energy for our most essential tasks and projects in order to be highly productive. That’s how we’re able to accomplish more in less time. Not by doing more but doing less to get more productive.
Boost Productivity by sharpening your saw
Take up a lifelong study of your trade. The more skilled you become at consuming a certain task, the more likely you are to just go for it.
Getting extremely good at your most essential responsibilities is one of the most useful time management skills you can have.
What are the most important abilities for you to have in order to get better and faster results? What are the essential competencies that you’ll need in the future to lead your industry?
Make a plan, set a goal, and start working on your talents. You can do the following:
- Identify the top 10 best selling books for a particular area like sales or marketing
- Read for at least one hour every day
- Identify the top 3 speakers or people that are good at the things you want to learn or master
- Take their course and or seminar available on key skills that can help you
- Attend the conventions and business meetings of your profession or occupation
- Go to the sessions and workshops. Sit at the front and take notes
- Listen to educational podcasts in your car
Refuse to be held back by a lack of knowledge, skill, experience, or ability in any area. Everything may be learnt. And what others have learnt is yours for the taking.
Review with PDCA method
In the 1950s, management consultant Dr William Edwards Deming developed a technique for determining why certain items or methods don’t work as planned. His method has since become a popular management method, and it is used by many organizations of various types.
How you can use PDCA in your daily life to increase productivity? Spend at least 10-20 mins daily to do the following:
- Plan: Plan your day. Identify what’s holding you back personally, and how you want to progress. Look at the root causes of any issues, and set goals to overcome these obstacles.
- Do: When you’ve decided on your course of action, safely test different ways of getting the results that you want. Execute it.
- Check: Review your daily time spent and habit tracker regularly, adjust your behaviour accordingly, and consider the consequences of your actions.
- Act: Implement what’s working, continually refine what isn’t, and carry on the cycle of continuous improvement.
With regular reflection and looking for ways for improvement, we can increase our productivity and achieve greater success as we learn throughout mistakes and move forward better without repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Hope you find this blog is useful for you to find some inspiration for productivity tips, and how to achieve more without doing more. Let me know your comment below.
