Hustle gurus love to tell you to work smarter, not harder. Thing is, working smarter and working harder aren’t mutually exclusive. You can do both… given you have the right tools in your toolbox. Today, I’m giving you exactly that - the tools you can use to work smarter AND work harder!
1. Processing Your To-Do List
As your business grows, the list of things you could do grows too. You eventually reach a point where you can’t do it all. You start feeling like you’re behind. Like you’re missing things. Like things are falling through the cracks. Why? Because you only have 24 hours in a day, just like everyone else does (yes, including Wiz - but he’s a machine from Mars).
How do you manage your unlimited to-do list with your limited time? By prioritizing, delegating, and eliminating.
Prioritize by highlighting your to-dos which will bring you the highest return on the resources you’d invest in them.
Delegate by getting someone else to do the to-dos you don’t have the desire and/or time to do yourself.
Eliminate by storing the rest of the to-dos somewhere. I suggest starting a Notion document called “Backlog”. Consider these items “nice-to-dos” instead of have-to-dos. You’re not eliminating them from possibility, you’re eliminating them from your mind (for now). Review your backlog every now and then to see if anything makes sense for prioritization or delegation. Add in future nice-to-dos as they come to mind.
2. Managing Your Time
It shows you a simple 3-step strategy you can use to bring order to the chaotic mess of to-dos swirling around in your mind. This strategy is one of the first things I help my performance coaching clients build.
Getting things out of your head and into your calendar is one of the absolute best things you can do for your productivity and your sanity. Your goal should be to get to the point where you
• wake up in the morning
• look at your calendar for that day
• have a good idea of what you’re going to be doing that day
This doesn’t mean you’re micromanaging every second of your time. It means you’re managing your time so you aren’t losing hours every day trying to figure out what to do.
3. Maintaining Your Focus
When you sit down to work, you need to be able to focus. You need to be able to reach and maintain flow state until it’s time for a break or until the task is done.
What is flow? It’s the holy grail of peak performance - a state of maximum focus. Everything else ceases to exist except you and the thing you’re working on. You’ve probably experienced flow while playing sports or video games. You can experience it with work if you know how to.
Here are 3 things you can do to reach and maintain flow:
Use Pomodoro timings for work and rest. People usually start with a work:rest ratio of 25 minutes on to 5 minutes off. Research into productivity suggests the sweet spot lies between 50:10 and 75:15. Experiment and see what works for you.
When you’re working, leave your phone out of sight and on silent mode. A study showed that a phone being in your line of sight reduces your performance on attention-based tasks. Sounds from phones are cues for the habit loop in your brain that makes you want to check your phone.
Clear your virtual and physical workspaces. Shut down the 69 tabs you have open. Close the programs you never use. Shove those papers in a drawer. Fewer distractions equals more productivity.
