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5 Time Management Hacks To Boost Efficiency

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Time Management Tips

Time management is the most important way to get more done. While there are certain ways to get better time management such as setting the goals and giving yourself the deadline, there are certain hacks that can boost your efficiency as well. These are five of them.

  1. Wake up one hour earlier. The earlier you wake up, the more you will be able to focus at the task at hand. When you wake up, you need to start the day off productively by working. Some of the most successful people wake up before 6 am. If you can do that, then that would be great. If you can eventually wake up at 7 am instead of 8 am, then that’s great too.
  2. Be happier. Happiness is the key to success. In fact, happiness is the truth. By being happy, you will have a deeper appreciation for what you are accomplishing. You need to be happy with what you are doing in order to see growth. If you are sad at work and do not look forward to the work you have to do, you need to give yourself new work to do that makes you happy.
  3. Listen to motivational music. There is motivational music that simply makes us want to be productive. I listen to the classic Rocky music before running on the treadmill. In fact, I listen to the Rocky music several times while I run on the treadmill. The music has worked wonders in my ability to run longer distances on the treadmill without feeling too fatigued…or too bored.
  4. Turn essential tasks into habits. In order to become really good at your work, you need to turn the essential tasks into habits. When I had difficulty writing and thinking of my own sentences, I was not a professional writer. Now that I am writing blog posts and books, I have had more practice. I turned an essential task into a habit, and now it is easy for me to write 4,000 words every day during the school year. I anticipate writing over 10,000 words one day in the summer.
  5. Take 30 minute naps. Naps are important to refresh the mind. Studies have shown that the people who sleep for 6.5-7.5 hours every day are the ones who live the longest. No matter how many hours of sleep you get, there will be some moments in the middle of the day when you feel tired. You may feel exhausted because you did a lot of work or just because you are a bit tired. Taking 30 minute naps is a great way to relax and take a break. After the nap, you will be wide awake and ready to go back to your big project.

Those are the five ways to hack time management so you are able to be more efficient with the time what you have. What are your thoughts on the list, and do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and/or tips below.

 

5 Ways To Get Your Goals Accomplished Faster

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Goals

The big reason many goals remain unaccomplished is because people do not know how to accomplish them fast enough. Most people go into their goals with no set plan. With this “blindfold mentality,” people do not know how to accomplish their goals. The only reason people remember and still try to accomplish these goals is because they were written on a piece of paper somewhere or just happen to be recalled every once in a while. However, what if there was a way to get your goals accomplished faster? In fact, there’s five ways.

  1. Wake up earlier. Waking up early removes all of the distractions that take place later in the day. The earlier you wake up, less things get in the way of you accomplishing your goals. Waking up early also has several health benefits.
  2. Give yourself the staircase. You cannot get from one floor (where you are now) to the next floor (where the goal is accomplished) without creating the staircase to get you there. If you want to write 7 blog posts every week, you would do 1 blog post every day and add steps to your staircase until you accomplish the goal.
  3. Write your goals on a score card. I wrote a blog post about how my first score card dramatically increased my productivity. Since then, I have been using score cards every week to track my productivity and my ability to accomplish goals within a certain amount of time.
  4. Improve your time management skills. Watching TV is easier than writing. Watching TV does not involve any action on your part, but writing requires thinking and the ability to turn thoughts into sentences. However, writing will help your business more than watching TV will. Many people do not know how to effectively manage their time which is why many hours get gobbled up for unnecessary reasons. These are some tips that will help out with improving your time management.
  5. Never lower the bar. Lowering the bar once results in a temptation to lower the bar even further. Cutting back from 4,000 words every day to 2,000 words every day and remaining that way for several weeks could eventually result in the ability to surpass 1,000 words every day. Lowering the bar lowers hopes, expectations, and dreams.

Those are the five ways to get more done faster. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips that you would like to add? Please share your thoughts and tips below.

 

It’s Not About Making Ideas

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It’s about making ideas happen. Thinking about the idea is easy. Making the idea happen is the hard part. Your idea can be a multimillion dollar business, but you only get the multimillion dollar business by putting in the work and effort required.

Thinking about a successful idea does not guarantee success. Implementing the idea, and making that idea grow will allow you to become successful.

Once you come up with the idea, make it happen!

 

Do The Work Right From The Start To Accomplish Goals Within Their Deadlines

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Last Minute Stress

When we give ourselves a deadline, many people make the mistake of doing the work as the deadline approaches. Some authors give themselves a month to write a book they were supposed to write within a year. As the deadline approaches, we put in more work than we have ever put in before.

Instead of living the crunch time lifestyle as the deadline approaches, why not do the work in the beginning. I was recently listening to one of Seth Godin’s lectures, and he explained what happens when people work in the beginning and when people start working as the deadline gets dangerously close.

The people who work in the beginning are able to get their goals accomplished before the deadline. Working in the beginning and finishing before the deadline will give you the overdelivering effect which is always good to have.

The people who start working towards the deadline create an overwhelming schedule that is virtually impossible to implement unless sacrifices are made for that period of time. Some bloggers who try to write a book sacrifice updating their blog to add content to their books as the deadline approaches.

Working in the beginning will save you a lot of time and stress. Starting to work towards the end will result in deadlines that are not reached. The reason most people do not get their New Year’s resolutions accomplished is because they start working to accomplish their resolutions with 6 weeks to go before the New Year.

There are two choices that you have. You can either start early or rush in a desperate attempt to get some goals accomplished as the deadlines approach. Your best bet is to start early so you aren’t cramming everything in later.

 

How To Create An Effective Schedule

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One of the best ways to effectively manage your time is by creating a powerful schedule. The ideal schedule is an uncomfortable adventure that results in progress in the right areas while not being a burden at the same time. I enforce a strict schedule on myself every summer that ultimately allows me to get a lot of work done but also gives me some time to kick back and relax. I do not schedule anything just to put more work on the table. Everything has a purpose. Just to give everyone an idea, this will be the typical day for me this summer.

  1. Work out for 4 hours. I want to have a very strong Junior year for my track and cross country teams.
  2. Work on a book for 1-2 hour. I want to finish another book during the summer and have it published before the New Year. This will make sure Lead The Stampede is not my only physical book.
  3. Create videos for 1 hour. I will be launching membership sites and training courses in the near future. Summer is going to kickstart that.
  4. Write blog posts for 1 hour. That’s enough time to write at least 5 blog posts every day.
  5. Write video scripts for 15 minutes. Before I start a video, I need to know what I am going to say. Speaking off the cuff was horrible, and those days are over.
  6. Other business activities for 30 minutes (reading or responding to emails). When they come up, they will get done.

I understand that I will not be able to do this every day in the summer, especially on vacation days. Regardless, my goal is to get as close as possible towards accomplishing all of these goals on my schedule. This 9 hour schedule does create some discomfort, but the discomfort is needed in order to get more accomplished. It still beats the 9 to 5 (no traffic),

The key elements of my schedule is that everything has a purpose, it is not an easy schedule to follow, and it promises big rewards for being implemented. The idea of getting big rewards (for me, that would be a bestselling book, a membership site with the potential of making thousands every month, and getting a lot faster) will allow you to push through the work. By giving yourself high standards, you will be able to get more accomplished. I could easily get by with writing two blog posts every day and not doing anything else. However, I would not be able to unlock my potential by limiting my growth.

You will never know how much you can truly accomplish until you raise your standards.

 

5 Ways To Respond To Emails Quicker

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Responding to emails can be a pain in the neck, especially when they prevent you from getting any of your work done. Avoiding emails is not an effective way to solve the problem because responding to emails will allow you to build connections with your potential customers. However, there are some ways to respond to emails faster so that you have more time to do your own work. Here are 5 ways to do that.

  1. Have a signature that automatically appears at the bottom at the bottom of all of your emails. Are you getting tired of writing sincerely and your name for hundreds of emails? I was getting tired of doing the same thing. I decided to find a way to automate that part of my email. I did some searching on Google and found out how to have an automated signature on the Mac. Now, this automated signature saves me more time.
  2. Choose the right emails to respond to. Some emails are more important than others. As you get more emails, you will not be able to respond to them all. On some days, I read over 100 emails, but I do not respond to all 100 of those emails. That is because some of them have the no-reply, but if I responded to 100 emails every day, I would not be able to write any of these blog posts. When responding to emails, respond to the most important emails first and work your way down.
  3. Give yourself a daily rate. For the most part, I respond to 3-5 emails every day and send out 2-4 emails every day (not including the blog posts). When I go above the daily rate, I know that I am losing valuable time to write blog posts, write my book, or work on a training course. For the most part, I avoid going above this daily rate, but as the amount of time I have increases (summer), and I am getting more emails, I will increase these rates. Instead of guessing how many emails you will send and respond to in a given day, you have a standard.
  4. Look for patterns. While sending out HARO queries for my book Lead The Stampede (which will be out this summer), I noticed a pattern in how I responded to emails. Instead of writing the same thing 50 times, I only wrote it once. Then, I simply copied and pasted what I would have typed into the 49 other emails with small changes (name of the person, the story, etc).
  5. Hire an assistant. When you start to make it big time, you should hire an assistant to respond to your emails for you. Not only will this make you look more professional, but you will also have more time to do your work. The assistant can tell you about important emails you got for the day so you can respond to the right ones instead of reading all of the individual emails that appear in your inbox.

Those are the five ways to respond to emails quicker. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips that you would like to mention? Please share your thoughts and tips below.