Five ways to make your life more productive

Life is about making more out of what you have. You always have to be conscious of where you’re spending your most valuable resources:

• Time
• Energy

So I am going to share a couple of productivity hacks that will help you make more money from your time and energy.

• Be a mad scientist

The fundamental way to keep growing is to build a method of creating new ideas, ranking the best ones, developing a plan to implement them, monitoring and assessing them and finally changing your approach.

By following this framework you can achieve success much faster than the average person. As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

• View failure and success as results, not as failure or success

When you change what success or failure is to you, you learn to better control your mood and emotions. As a result you will perform more consistently. Consistency is more important than great sporadic performances.

In sales and in business, consistency is crucial. You have to predict your income in order to plan. You have to ensure that you can predict your performance over time so that you know when you can do things in your life and in your business.

The professional that is committed to consistent performance will be able to predict, just like a great sports person can predict with great accuracy whether they can achieve a goal or not. The same must apply to you.

• Spend 80% of your time on studying and preparation, and 20% on execution

Focusing on production all the time will drain you and leave you without the capacity to perform at your best. The more time you spend preparing, the better chance you have of success.

Cristiano Ronaldo practises 1 000 free kicks after each training session, in order to take three free-kicks per game, to score just one goal. That one goal is the difference between success and failure.

The more time you spend on preparation, practice and research, the better chance you have at ‘winning’ with little burnout.

• Get one thing done at a time

The best way to get nothing done is to work on more than one thing at a time. Focus on one task at a time and then move onto the next one. Human beings are poor multitaskers.

Have you ever noticed that when your computer has a lot of programmess open, it slows down rapidly? The same thing happens to you. When you have too much going on at a specific time you can’t process things fast enough and as a result, nothing gets done.

• Work smart and not hard

Look for the things that will provide the most impact to achieving your goal and only focus on those things. If something will make a 20% contribution and another thing will contribute 80%, do the thing that will contribute 80%.

Focus on results, not effort. There are people that work hard and have little to show for it. It’s best to focus on high impact/high return activities first and pass on the other stuff to your team.