In this post, I am going to focus on productivity and how to get more stuff done in your already busy day. I find the most used excuse when I ask people why don’t they start their own online business is that they don’t have enough time.
We all have the same amount of hours in a day, so why do so many people have no time and others have so much of it to spare and still seem to get so much done? It’s actually all about the way you utilize the time you have that makes you more productive.
How To Get More Stuff Done
Let’s first take some time to look at the flaws and time suckers that you currently have in your day. Get your paper and pencil out and make some notes. It may surprise you to see just how much wasted time you will find in your day. You will also be amazed at how much extra time you will find.
If you are not sure where to start, ask. yourself the following questions:
- Do you have any extra or free time at work?
- Do you socialize at lunchtime or spend the time working?
- Do you spend too much time on your hobbies?
- How much time do you spend on your mobile device? (This one is normally a shocker)
- How much television do you watch each day?
Idle time adds up, so look carefully at how much time you waste each day. I am sure most of you will easily find at least an hour or two in this list alone.
An hour or two extra each day could be put to great use, especially if you have been wanting to start your own business so that you can eventually get out of the rat race.
Time Wasters To Remove Or Limit From Your Day
Try either removing or limiting some of these to free up some more time for yourself:
- Social Media – it’s easy to spend a few hours here without even realizing it.
- Mobile Device. Did you know that the average person spends about 3 hours a day on their device?
- Checking email constantly wastes a lot of time. Try to set time aside for this and not more than five times a day at most.
- Watching TV for hours?
- Checking your stats and analytics. A good habit is once a week. Checking each day can just make you despondent because some days are always better than others.
- Commuting – try to consolidate your trips so you end up driving around less.
Things You Don’t Want To Remove From Your Day
These are things that you do need in your life. The point of having your own business is in fact so that you can spend quality time doing things you love. Obviously in the beginning you need to work hard, but once established it does get easier, especially if you don’t have to have your full-time job to contend with anymore.
So don’t remove the following from your schedule:
- Family time, as this is the reason you started a home business in the first place. (well for most of us anyway)
- Travel or a holiday. You can take your business with you and still get a few hours done a day, but you do need time to recuperate.
- Personal Health very important, so never neglect this.
- Your own happiness. If you are not happy, no amount of success will help you to feel better.
- Educating yourself. This should be happening in some form every day.
Now that you know what to get rid of and what to keep, here are some tips to keep you moving forward.
Amplify what you are good at and remember that you don’t need to be good at everything at once. If you love to build a website, but hate paid advertising or social media, focus on learning everything you need to do to get your website up and running first. Later you can pay somebody to do the parts you don’t like once you start earning.- Look at what you are good at and work on getting better at that.
- If you are not good at something or have no interest in it, move on to something else. Remember there is always somebody out there willing to do what you don’t want to. The point of having your own business is to enjoy doing the work more than you currently enjoy your full-time work.
- Don’t jump from project to project. Focus on one thing until it is done. Complete each task before moving onto the next.
- Outline tasks for the next day the night before. If you know exactly what you need to do in a day, your day will be more productive and you will have more flow to your day.
- If you don’t finish all the tasks on your list, carry them over, and don’t be too hard on yourself. Planning your tasks will bring ton of efficiency to your day. Don’t be scared to schedule more into your day than you can complete, because if you complete your tasks, you tend to get lazy for the rest of the day. Rather have to carry things over to the next day.
- Try to do things in the same order to create habits eg. first, check emails, then answer, then do comments, then write, etc. This also helps you to have a level of consistency in your day.
- Never multitask, unless you are driving or gyming and listening to educational audios at the same time. You will end up doing less.
- Do the hardest work of the day when your brain is most alert. It’s different for everyone. Learn to recognize when your best time is for focused activities.
- Have a bigger picture of where you want your business to go. Work out how much you need to make in a month and divide it so you know how much you need to make in a day.
- Make notes throughout the day as you get ideas so you have something to draw from to organize your next day’s work. If you have a list of tasks you can focus on you will end up getting so much more done.
- Learn how to amplify your writing proficiency for your website. This is how I do it.
Understanding Time
Here are some interesting points to ponder.
- If you can get an hour more productive a day you can get nine extra weeks of productivity throughout the year.
- There are 1440 minutes per day. For every minute you can get back in your day will amount to 6 hours in a year.
- As there are 24 hours in a day, every hour you can redeem give you nine extra weeks in the year.
So is your productive side on when you are standing in the grocery queue or watching TV?
Use those idle minutes as best you can. I do keyword research on Jaaxy while waiting in queues, and it’s actually amazing that you can be growing your business in some way instead of wasting those idle minutes.
In front of the TV, I am always doing something with my hands to keep my mind active.
Also remember that sometimes it is not about working hard, it is about working smarter.
The trick is to plan your time and make sure that your work time is productive.
Please comment below if you have any other tips and tricks you would like to add on how to get more stuff done.
