How I Increased My Productivity In 2018 ....

haha LOTS of ways!! How much watch time does Netflix get PER DAY? "oh, but I'm watching a documentary and learning" ...whatever you gotta tell yourself!

Checking email and checking our cell phones. I have my phone on silent most of the time. It is SO rare that someone needs to contact you for a true emergency. It's crazy how people check their phone for every little beep, vibrate and other noise.

Email...we are conditioned to feel important when we get an email. Someone took the time to send me an email...I wonder what it could be! I learned a great productivity tip from the 4 Hour Work Week that it's completely unnecessary to keep email open all day long. It's very disruptive to see new emails come in, open them and read them. We condition the senders to email us any time of the day and we will reply asap.

It's better if we condition the senders to realize I'm only checking and replying to email twice a day - maybe 3 times, depending on the job description. These times are morning, noon and evening. You can email me anytime you want, but don't plan on me reading or replying until one of those 3 times.

I normally have quite a few things on the go so spare time isn't an issue. However, I think that the golden rule is to ask the question "What is going to earn me money?"

Times when you don't have any work??

Wow, that takes me back. Back to around 1997 and my first job and I first exhausted my To Do list.

I was getting paid a salary, so what did I care? I'd done my job.

Except that's not how I think.

I made a book called What To Do When There's Nothing To Do.

It was for me and for other staff in the organization. And apparently they needed it.

What this indicates to me is you're still thinking like an employee. You need to start thinking like a business owner. I figure you are capable of thinking like a business owner, because you're here and looking for new ways of doing things. So come along.

A business owner doesn't think in terms of tasks. That's how a technician thinks.

Your role is not about tasks. It's about expanding the writ in which the business may run.

So when there are no tasks to do, wow, that's great. Most business owners would love to get there--in fact, to do what I'm going to talk about in a moment, they must typically harshly carve chunks of their schedule out and block off from interruption. This would be Maker work, to match up with Paul Graham's post.

Here are just a few things you should be doing...deliberately making time for, if your tasks have not run out:

1. Seek out new joint venture partnerships with other business owners who already have lists of pre-qualified buyers whose interests overlap with your offer, or have a problem you solve.

Your cost of customer acquisition by other traffic sources is already at a certain level. This is the amount you can easily give to the list owner as commission.

Not fighting for qualified leads should be a major goal of every business.


2. Review existing processes and systems to find out if they can be improved.

Is anything in your business written down? No? Then get started on documenting the processes.

I guarantee you things you think you understand...you don't.

There will almost assuredly be one or two or more broken feedback loops, things you didn't even suspect were broken. And it's no fun when three weeks from now you discover an important thing didn't happen because the feedback loop was broken, and nobody saw the problem developing.

Have you been doing things one way for a long time? Are you sure this way is the BEST way?


3. Check in with your customers.

Are they happy or unhappy with what you're doing for them?

Is there something else you could sell to them, another problem you could solve for them, a new income stream you could open up by leveraging the trust you've developed so far?

Do they have something to tell you about your marketing, something that will greatly improve its effectiveness if you implement it?


These are just a few of the things I get my clients doing. Imagine what happens after 6 months or a year of consistent application of only these three ideas. Usually the owners have to carve out the time to do them...if you have spare time to fit them in, even better because you won't fight doing them due to pressure from existing tasks.

Owners don't think like employees. There's always something to do.