Top 6 Tips for Productivity

 

Top 6 Tips for Productivity

These are the top 6 tips for productivity that I’ve learned by way of experience as I’ve been surfing the Internet and learning Internet marketing. 

I‘ve learned by trial and error and want to help you avoid the pitfalls that I experienced.

I believe in self-improvement, and I also believe in working smarter along with working harder.  I’m especially interested in improving productivity as this allows me to have a much more flexible schedule and spend more time with my family.

I continue to refine what I do, and I am continually improving my productivity, because I’m open-minded about learning new skills and trying new software programs to increase productivity and time management.

So this information that I’m sharing today is coming from my real world experience in the area of tasks and activities relating to working at home.

Your productivity will have a direct influence on the amount of money that you earn simply from the fact that you gain knowledge along the way.

So I’d like to share some some principles of productivity that we can practice together.

Top 6 Tips for Productivity

It’s all about achieving more and accomplishing more.

Increasing productivity is about working less, a whole lot less hours but working more focused when you are at work.  It also means that you can enjoy better results for your work.

If you don’t have it already, this will ensure you getting a healthy balance in your life, becoming well rounded.  It’s really easy to get off track when you’re building your own business as we all have a tendency to spend way too much time and energy, neglecting family and other responsibilities. 

Finally, you want to be able to achieve your goals within a reasonable time frame, because common questions that most of us ask when getting started making money online is “When is this all going to fall into place?”  “When am I going to be making money on a regular basis?”  You don’t really know…but the faster the better, right?

Most online businesses and most businesses in general fail.  Why?  I believe many times it is due to burnout.

Average aspiring entrepreneur lifestyle:  Work, work, work, and never taking time for yourself or to slow down.  Your productivity begins to suffer, and you feel burned out.  You continue to push yourself because, after all, you have goals to achieve!

Eventually either you get physically sick or one of your family members or friends forces you to take a vacation because of how overworked you are.  You feel that your life is out of balance with too much work, and not enough time devoted to other areas and other responsibilities.

You also feel that you never have enough time in the day.  At the end of the day you feel like you barely got anything done!

There are many days when, despite working all day, you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything in that there’s still a lot on your plate – you didn’t get through anything important.

You get to the point where you wonder if it’s all worth it, and if you’d be better off living a normal life like your friends and family.

Top 6 Tips for Productivity

So if you’ve experienced even one of the things above, it’s likely due to certain habits that you formed that I’d like to help you with.

One of the most frustrating things is when you get to the point where you wonder – when is the money going to come?  “When am I going to start making money from home?”

The scenarios I’ve listed above are mostly due to not using your energy and your time optimally, and it’s the result of habits that you’ve developed, probably unconsciously, that are actually fairly easy to break.

Once you do break them, you’re going to see a huge improvement in everything.

There is help!  These top 6 tips for productivity will help you to drastically improve your efficiency, getting you faster results – so your business will grow faster than ever.

 

There are two very simple elements to increasing your productivity:

1. Planning

2. Execution

Simple, right?  But it’s how you plan and how you execute.  You need to incorporate your planning and execution of that plan into a daily routine hence daily repetition.  So it’s daily repetition of the right way to plan, and the correct way to execute that plan that’s going to get you results.

The keyword is DAILY!

It’s all about habits – what you do on a regular basis to make habits is what matters.

If you work long hard hours one week and put in your very best and burn yourself completely out, but then the next week you’re so burned out that you barely do anything, that will not help you achieve your goals.

Consistency is what will give you the results so you want to keep your level of energy up, and you want to maintain balance in your life.

This is done by having the right habits, and habits are formed by what you do every single day.  Daily repetition is very important.

Six daily principles: centered around maintaining a healthy level of energy.

You can’t just continually be putting forth energy and effort with no way of recouping that energy and restoring your energy level.  You might think that if you work all day, all night, nonstop that you’re going to get better results, and you’re going to get more done, but it’s not true.

You should actually be working less, fewer – more focused hours during the day and do that over a consistent basis.  You cannot maintain going full throttle ahead on a consistent basis as the quality of your work starts to suffer.  You usually don’t even notice that it’s suffering, but there’s no way around it, it definitely does.

Daily Principles – Tip #1 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #1. 100% effort at work and 100% ‘effort’ at rest.

It’s common sense when you’re in front of the computer that you want to be 100% focused.  The reality is, the human mind cannot stay focused for very long actually.  Technically you can only focus on one thing at a time, and it’s a very short period of time before you start to get mild burnout.

What I do is called a ‘Power Hour,’ which means I work in short spurts of 50 minutes and then take a short break.  You don’t want your day to span from early in the morning until late at night if you can help it.  Try to just work six hours. 

This will actually be one of the hardest things for you to do when you’re building a business, is to actually force yourself to stop, especially if you’re working from home – it can be really difficult.

You must do this!  You have to just set hours and stick to them.  What’s going to happen is when you set an hour to end your work day, you’re going to know subconsciously that you can’t work past five.  So, that right there is going to give you the extra energy and wherewithal so that you are more focused during the day. 

If you just think that you have an unlimited amount of time to work, and your schedule is whatever you make it, and you’re just kind of going off the cuff . . . day-to-day – that’s just a recipe for disaster!

You’ll be much more productive if you give yourself a schedule.  You must do this!

Daily Principles – Tip #2 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #2.  Follow morning habits – warm-up for your day.

Ease into your day and get your mind flowing the way that it needs to in order to be focused and relaxed when you sit down to work.

Our bodies actually flow in a certain rhythm so if we have morning rituals that we continue each and every day, we’ll make the best use of our time and be able to stay focused and get our mind engaged more quickly.

What you do in the morning sets the tone for the entire day.  And it’s important to keep those rituals up during the day so that it keeps your mind in a relaxed state, whatever it takes to keep you at a low stress level.

Daily Principles – Tip #3 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #3. Ease into the day – don’t work for at least the first 30 min. after you awaken.

Make sure you take care of yourself get something to drink, get something to eat.  Give your mind time to warm up.

I personally take time to read my Bible and pray – have a nice breakfast, then I get my mind focused on my daily goals.

Daily Principles – Tip #4 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #4.  Moderate exercise

Take 30 min. for physical activity every day at the minimum.  It’s one thing to know it, and it is another thing to do it – we all know that exercise is beneficial, and it would be fantastic to get in the habit of at least walking 30 min. per day.

Your body will break down from the mental stress of working to build your online business, sitting in your chair at your computer…

It’s an isolating thing to build an online business from home, and it’s also stationary, and you have to keep moving because your mind and your body work together to renew energy.

It’s not just your mind that you need to take care of – you need to take care of your body also.  Walking is enough, and I can’t speak highly enough about staying hydrated and keeping water by your desk.

I recently bought an elliptical machine on the recommendation of a friend and find that it suits my needs very well.

Daily Principles – Tip #5 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #5.  Eating plan

It’s very important to eat healthy.  It’s a great idea to eat a big breakfast, a small lunch, and snack throughout the day on healthy things such as nuts, yogurt and fruit, then a moderate dinner.

It is wise to not over eat and to snack throughout the day to avoid that heavy feeling you get after lunch when typically we feel very tired after eating a big lunch.

Daily Principles – Tip #6 of Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Daily Tip #6.  Go to sleep before 11 p.m.

Be in bed before 11 p.m. and try to get a minimum of seven hours of sleep.  This will maximize the amount of rest that your body actually receives during your sleep.  This has been scientifically proven.

Here is a post about newbie Internet marketing mistakes to avoid.

Planning:

It’s about doing the right things on a regular basis every day, day in and day out – not having these huge bursts of energy all of a sudden and then feeling burned out.

You’ve probably heard the saying “failing to plan, is planning to fail…”  So it’s no secret, but do we really know what it means to truly plan?

It’s easy to write something on the calendar, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about planning out each week, each day, and each hour of the day to the T.  It’s a whole other level of planning than what most people are used to.

So what does it mean to truly plan?  It means planning things by the hour and also setting a deadline and setting goals – these are very important as well.

Top 6 Tips for Productivity

Here’s a breakdown of my week:

• Sunday night I set a schedule for my coming week.
• Monday through Friday I carry out the plan that I made on Sunday night.
• Saturday is chore day and family day.
• Sunday is my worship day, but in the evening I review the previous week’s progress and set the schedule for the following week.

I set goals which is very important. It’s a good idea to set one-month, three-month, six-month, one-year and five-year professional goals.  It’s a good idea to review those goals frequently at least once a month.

I suggest you write your goals on a poster or a whiteboard in your office, and also mark them on a large calendar that hangs from your wall.

Read these goals aloud morning and night – it’s important to verbalize what you need to be putting into action.  Setting goals are important because it’s subconsciously ingrains within you that you need to be getting something done by a certain time.

Without even knowing it, you’re going to be doing all you can to reach those goals because once they’re written down, and you start reinforcing them, it just kind of happens automatically.  You have to set those end dates because you can be the best planner around but if you don’t have a time frame, the systems won’t work.

Write out the dates of your work week:  October 31 through November 4th.

List out the various tasks that you would like to have completed by the end of this work week.  Now remember, we’re working 8 to 5, or whatever you can part-time, and we need to keep the balance our life.  We are not working from sun up to sun down!

Underneath each task is a list of the specific things to do in order to accomplish that task.  This stuff has to get done by the date listed, it’s not optional, it’s a must do.  Because we have these deadlines, and we have a short window in which to do them, this creates urgency and extreme focus during the day.  This happens naturally.  If you know there’s a deadline, and you treat the deadlines seriously, you will get it done.

You’ll stop having days where you feel like nothing is getting done even though you’ve worked so many hours.  You will start becoming super productive.

Try this for just two weeks and your business is going to grow at a great pace!

As ideas come to you that you may want to implement in the future, you can create sub lists that detail your ideas and how to implement them.

As you’re making your main To Do List on Sunday night, you can pull the tasks from those other sub lists according to what you want to include for the coming week.

Prioritizing:

You always want to ask yourself the question:  “Is this going to make me more money or not?”  And you want to do the things that are going to make you more money. 

So if for instance, you find yourself working for two hours on perfecting a graphic, you have to ask yourself is that really going to make me more money?  No it’s not.  If your website isn’t perfect, is that going to be a deal breaker?  No!  It’s not.

So you want to focus on the things that do make you money – IPA, Income Producing Activities.

You want to make sure you’re getting plenty of traffic because no matter how nice your website looks, if you’re not getting traffic, it’s not going to make you any money.

You want to make sure that your follow-up e-mail sequence is really strong.  You want to make sure the you pick good affiliate products. 

Don’t get hung up on the small things that don’t affect whether or not you make money.

I highly recommend going ahead and tackling the most difficult tasks first thing in the day, and even if it’s not difficult, maybe something you don’t like – getting it out of the way first. 

This will give you a great sense of accomplishment and set the stage for success in accomplishing your tasks and goals for the day, and consequently for the week.  The rest of the day becomes much easier.

Planning is not glamorous, but it is so important to productivity.

If you have a problem with procrastination, it would be smart to get an accountability partner.  You would think twice about disappointing someone else if they are counting on you.  ShortKeys  and Dragon Naturally Speaking  have greatly increased my productivity and are tools that I would not be without now.

Thanks for reading Top 6 Tips for Productivity and please share on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

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Tagged as: healthy balance, improving my productivity, Income Producing Activities, IPA, learned by trial and error, planning, Power Hour, prioritizing, self-improvement, Top 6 Tips for Productivity, working smarter