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Case Study: How Keeping Score Increases Productivity

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A very long time ago, I wrote about keeping score, and I wrote about the results of my first score card. I have been using the score card for months, and I do not plan on stopping. Score cards enhanced my time management and productivity, and score cards continue to amaze me today. Before I created a score card, I thought it would have been impossible for me to write 25 blog posts in one week. Not only did I do that, but I also finished reading an entire book and created the blueprint for my upcoming membership site, Total Social Media Domination. The following week, I was able to accomplish 12 different goals which all required a good amount of work. Some of the things I did that week were:

  1. Write 20 blog posts
  2. Finish reading Blue Ocean Strategy from start to finish
  3. Write 5,000 words for an upcoming book, Unlock Your Potential

There were 9 other goals similar to those three, and I got them all done in one short week. What once looked impossible has now become a routine of accomplishment.

The main reason the score card works is because you have to write down what you plan to accomplish for the week. If you think about the things you have to accomplish, it is easy to forget about some things and reduce expectations for other things. If I thought of write 20-25 blog posts every week, I may think at some point in the week that writing that many blog posts is too challenging. Thinking about it could have resulted in me lowering the bar to 16-18 blog posts for the week. Writing everything down forces you to be accountable, and making yourself accountable gives you no one else to blame but yourself for anything that goes wrong on your score card.

It is the desire to get a perfect score that motivates me as I continue creating score cards and getting tasks accomplished. You may not get a perfect score when you create your score card. In fact, I almost never get a perfect score. It’s not because I am not productive. Instead, it is because I raise the bar very high. I could easily get a perfect score on every score card if I only assigned myself 10 blog posts every week, but then I would not be able to publish two blog posts in one day.

If you want to get better time management and increase your productivity, you need to use a score card. Write down the goals you want to accomplish and use tallies to indicate how close you are to accomplishing a goal. Then, draw a big checkmark next to any goal that you accomplish. It’s that easy, but it is going to make a big difference in your time management and productivity.

 

How To Accomplish Bigger Goals

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goal achievement

There are some people who struggle to write 1 book within a year while other people are able to write a high quality book every month. There are some people who can accomplish big goals while others find it difficult to get the smallest goals accomplished. Some people wish they could get more accomplished faster while others want to go from the big goals they are accomplishing right now to accomplishing even bigger goals.

Getting better time management will give you the time you need to get the bigger goals accomplished. After you find more time in your day and manage it more effectively, you need to create a weekly scorecard. As you get more better at creating scorecards, you need to raise the bar higher for yourself.

When you raise the bar higher for yourself and accomplish bigger goals, it is important to gradually raise the bar higher. If you immediately go from writing 10 blog posts every week to writing 30 blog posts every week, it will be overwhelming. Instead, go from writing 10 blog posts in one week to writing 15 blog posts in one week. Then go up to 20 blog posts in one week and continue to work your way up until you are able to write 30 blog posts every week.

Raising the bar higher combined with effective time management and accountability will allow you to accomplish the bigger goals. What are your thoughts about the list? Do you have any additional advice to achieve bigger goals? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

7 Habits Of Highly Productive People

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Completed Checklist

There are some days when we get our work done, and there are other days when we do not get any work done. While most people go through not getting their work for a majority of the time, others are able to get their work done on most days. These are the highly productive people. Those are the people who others envy when they can’t finish a project on time. Productive people come in many shapes and forms, but they all share these seven habits that allow them to be more productive than the average person.

  1. They plan their day out the night before. Remember when it was bad in high school to start the big project the night before it is due? That problem does not apply to productive people when they plan out their days. Most productive people plan out their days right before they go to bed. If you plan your day in the afternoon, then you are losing time that you can be productive in. Your productivity wanes as the day goes by, and since productivity is at its lowest at nighttime, productive people use this time to write down their goals for the next time.
  2. They give themselves closer deadlines. Highly productive people give themselves 1 week to accomplish the same goals that take a month or two for the typical person to accomplish. A closer deadline gives these people less time to procrastinate and make mistakes. This allows highly productive people to realize how valuable time truly is. You may have read on this blog before that time is our most valuable resource or heard it from someone else. Giving yourself closer deadlines will allow you to fully understand why time is our most valuable resource, and with less time there is less fooling around.
  3. They write down their goals for the week. Highly productive people take one week at a time. They write down the goals they need to accomplish for the week and then use a tally/checkmark system to indicate how close they got to accomplishing everything on the list.
  4. They give themselves bigger goals. As the goals on the list become easier to accomplish, highly productive people challenge themselves by giving themselves bigger goals and less time to get those goals accomplished. The bigger goals further establish how time is their most valuable resource and gives them less time to procrastinate.
  5. They barely watch TV. Television is productivity’s greatest villain. The average American spends 32 hours every week watching TV. There’s so many things that can be done in those 32 hours other than watch TV shows (and some can be very depressing or teaching immoral lessons), and highly productive people know that very well. They take full advantage by limiting the amount of time they spend watching TV every week so they are able to find more time in their days.
  6. They wake up early. In a sense, productive people start their work “before life happens.” There are not nearly as many things to do at 7 pm as there are things to do at 7 am (other than work). In addition, the earlier someone wakes up, the more willpower that person has. Willpower is a big source of productivity that wanes as the day progresses. Waking up earlier allows you to tap into your full willpower and get the best of it.
  7. They don’t think they have enough time. Highly productive people do not think they have enough time to get their goals accomplished. Highly productive people are continuously raising the bar higher and making it harder for them to accomplish all of the weekly goals. As a result, when something unexpected happens to the time schedule, these highly productive people feel uncomfortable losing all of that time. These highly productive people may be doing seven or more hours of productive work every day, but they feel as if they never have enough time to accomplish all of their goals.

Those are the seven habits of highly productive people. By learning to implement and develop these habits overtime, you will become a highly productive person. What are your thoughts on the habits? Do you have any additional habits you have that keep you productive? Please share your thoughts and your own habits below.

 

Why Running Will Make You More Likely To Succeed

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running

There are many articles on the web that mention exercising as a way to become more productive. I started to read these kinds of articles during my freshman year when I recently joined my school’s cross country and track & field team. When I saw that exercising increases productivity, I was astounded. Increasing productivity was one of the (very small) reasons why I continued running track (the bigger reason is that I enjoy the sport).

One of the big things about cross country and track & field is that the committed athletes who love the sport always want to get better. In the running world, PR does not mean press release. Instead, it stands for personal record. When an athlete gets a PR, the athlete celebrates that PR for a day, but on the following day, that athlete wants to set another PR. I remember boosting my workout from 4-6 miles every day to 8 miles every day over the summer. Now, I plan to run over 16 miles every day in the summer (if it happens, I’ll be in really good shape). I quickly realized that the runner’s attitude towards getting more PR’s has been the recipe to success all along.

If you become an active runner, you will want to get better every time. You will want to run the mile faster this week than you did last week. Active runners decide to run longer distance and more challenging workouts in order to get better times. This constant need to improve leads to longer workouts which ultimately leads to a more successful running career–whether you are running for fun around your neighborhood or hope to make it to the Olympics.

Once you apply this mindset to one thing, it will be easier for you to apply this mindset to other places as well. One of the places you will be able to apply this mindset is your niche. When I found the time to think of my entire journey as a runner and entrepreneur, my blog started to improve in traffic and content as I ran more often.

The big spike in traffic for this blog (my blog went from 500 views to over 10,000 views in 5 months) started during my sophomore year of cross country (that’s when I started to take running very seriously). In addition, this is the same time when I went from gaining 50 followers every day to gaining over 300 followers every day. In addition, I found the time to write two blog posts every day weeks before the first cross country practice for sophomore year.

Just to prove that I’m not making any of this stuff up, Steve Scott (there are a lot of Steve Scotts in the world) is a self-published author who is poised to make over $300,000 every year from his Kindle books. It just so happens that Steve is also a marathon runner. Is it just a coincedence? I think not.

What are your thoughts about running? Are you an active runner? Do you plan to become an active runner? Please share your thoughts below.

 

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.