Productivity Tips to Get You More Focused, Organised and Achieve more with less effort and time

If you're reading this thank you for engaging in this edition and getting this far in. Thing is from competing internationally while simultaneously running a business in multiple locations with staff and completing my PhD, I know a little bit about productivity hacks and how to get the most out of your day, and how to streamline things and do things in the most efficient way. I realised pretty early on that things are like Parkinson's Law. If you give something an entire day to do it, it's going to take an entire day: however long you attribute a task to take, is how long it will take to do it. So therefore, when you are not planning, you're planning for failure. You're planning for something to take a long time that doesn't necessarily need to take a long time. And the things that we want to spend more time on are our needle movers, the things that are going to help our business or the things that are going to help us to spend more time with our family instead of spending a whole bunch of time on something that doesn't matter and it's pretty much just a “fluffer” task.

I personally use the following things in my life and these are habits that helped me. It's not to say that it's the only way to do things, but it is to give you a little bit of introspection for what might work, for you some things to try out. And they're not in any particular order. Take what you need, implement what you need, leave what you do not.

1.Email subscriptions, your emails are like going off in a battlefield at just all times of the day and night. So if you are sitting on your computer allowing email notifications to pop up all the time, every time you look at it, it isn’t 2 mins you are losing: you lose 10-20 mins of productivity, potentially more! It takes a further 10 or more minutes to get back and focus on the task that you're trying to get back to. So this is something that's going to SAP quite a lot of your time if you're not on top of your email inbox. One of the great ways that I learned from the four hour workweek was to check my emails (unless I'm waiting for something) twice a day and to send an email out of office. As if I'm not in the office. That will tell people the times that I respond to their emails so that they're not following up because they haven't heard from me in the last hour. Because, yes, most people expect you to be getting back to them instantaneously when it comes to email. And while that's their expectation, unless it's an emergency for you: It does not need to be answered immediately. So one way that you can do this is, like I said, only checking your email twice a day, maybe in the morning but not right upon waking and then probably towards the end of the day with enough time to be able to follow up on anything that needs to be done before the end of the day. And then you're not dwelling on it overnight when you finish work. Between that, I also found this really great service called unroll me, which is www.unrollme.com to get rid of any subscriptions that I really didn't know that I'd signed up for.

2.Apps on your phone. So apps on your phone will insist that they will give you notifications as soon as the notification comes in, and be constantly scanning for these notifications as well. A way to do this is to absolutely remove all notifications except potentially one for your banking. You'd be surprised at how much easier it is in your life when it only allows an app to show badges and not sending you a notification from the app. Our aps are there for convenience and for productivity but they really can sap it if the notifications are coming through and just pinging pinging pinging so decide which notification that you want and hide all notifications from apps that really don't matter to the grand scale of needle movers in your life. Facebook and messenger for instance, can be ones that you make so that you can only see badges and therefore when you're actually on your phone. That's when you'll only be able to see what's going on. Some people suggested deleting those apps as well because unless you actually know how to go in, do what you need to do and get out of the apps, then you're going to be spending a lot of time on apps that you don't need to be there. One really good exercise you can do that makes you really reconsider the involvement of social media on your phone is to think about the last five people that you messaged on Instagram, or Facebook. And what did you say? And if you can't really answer that, and instead you're just going on for passive scrolling, then potentially you might want to consider how much time you're spending on these apps. Or if you go on and your intention is to interact. Then spend that time interacting and get off as soon as your timer goes off.

3.Advertising blocker on my computer. I've got an extension that's called Adblock. And I get all of the ads blocked from websites.

4.I spend a bit of time timing and measuring the activities that I do during the day and I make it a bit of game so that I don't get to the end of the day and don't know what I've been spending my time on for the day I keep a very general list of what I've been doing and how much time it took up. You'd be surprised at how many rabbit holes that you end up down unless you pay conscious attention to what you're doing especially when you're on the worldwide web that has access to absolutely everything and everyone.

5.Religiously create a to-do list and I do this on my remarkable. Remarkable is the computer that I have bought that's like a tablet that has been designed not to be over the top sensory for people with ADHD so I can write on it. It's like pen and paper and also means that I can scribble out things and delete things as necessary because often my To-Do lists I don't like after I've ticked off a few things and I want to recreate a new list again. This helps to overcome that without me having lots of scatty bits of paper just hanging around on the to do list, I'll go beside and I'll put a little code beside it to show whether it's something that's directly contributing to my income or something that is not directly contributing to my income and if it is not directly contributing to my income, then I decide whether it's a high priority task or whether it's actually of any importance at all, because oftentimes, you can get all wrapped up in just being busy for the sake of being busy because everybody likes to brag about being busy these days. And to be honest, there's a lot of tasks that really it wouldn't matter if you did not do them. I also make sure to check my To Do Lists against each other to see which tasks that I am constantly doing every day and see whether I can outsource them or automate them.

A lot of tasks I've managed to automate quite easily by using things like zaps, which is a computer software or by using things like Wellness Living which is like a booking system. It's got some automations in there as well for my fitness business, which is super helpful because I used to spend Sunday evenings and Sunday afternoons doing a whole bunch of things that were repeatable tasks that not even a human should be doing so I can outsource them to my virtual assistant to do so. This means that these tasks can be done with a high amount of accuracy. It took so much less time for the automation to do it. On top of that, I didn't get halfway started a task and then maybe get distracted from the task and have to go back and work out what the heck it was last done.

6.Remove potential distractions that are in my environment. So I make my room as less clutter as possible, so that there's nothing that I can start getting distracted with. And also then I don't decide that it's time to clean the room that I'm working in. As opposed to actually working on some things. Each week, and each month, I will write down what my goals are and my To Do Lists can help me stay on track with that. But on top of that it can help me see whether I've kind of gotten off the beaten track a bit and I'm not staying true to what the vision was in my business.

7.Another one that really worked for me was I reached out and got an appropriate mentor and coach for various stages along my journey. Now to do this, I needed to work out what I was actually struggling with. And that's sometimes the issue for people so have a look to see what it is that you actually think a coach could help you with. A coach isn't going to be able to do the work for you but they will be able to point you in the right direction and help you stay focused on the high end stuff, which sometimes goes missing in your business. But if you don't know what it is that a coach can bring to the table, then you probably aren't going to be satisfied with the services of the coach either. This is especially important at any stage in your journey because it's hard to read the label from inside the bottle and that's exactly what you're trying to do when you're in the business and you're trying to steer the ship as well as working in the business as well as working on the business. There's too many things to deal with there.

8.Final one, to make sure that your immediate circle is very positive and encouraging and I can't overstate this enough. I have been in arenas where there are people that are just PUFFERS is what I call them, they PUFF OUT your flame of excitement and they will dim your light and it saps all of the energy that you have to be able to move forward and they don't actually get any brighter by being around you either. So it's not some sort of community service to be spending your time around people that are thinking too small. It's time to make sure that we're hanging around with people that are driving themselves forward and that sort of thing, which is why within the community it's really important that we're looking to be even part of like a coaching community that can help to propel us forward. People that are striving for the same things: striving for big goals, and not people that are naysayers that are in the background that are trying to pull us back. So if it sounds like you've been surrounded by the wrong people, or potentially you're the most successful person in the room, you're definitely in the wrong room. You need to be in a room where there are people that are also striving for huge goals, but at the same time, they're already a little bit further along in their journey. Some are less behind on their journey, but they've got a very specific skill set that's different to yours and these are the sort of things that will help to take you further. So don't underestimate the power of the environment as we go through even when learning about genetics and ageing is becoming more and more important, about how the environment absolutely changes, who we are, how we present how we are and ultimately our success as well. So do not think any less of trying to surround yourself with the right people.

If any of this is an issue for you, or it's got you thinking and it's resonating with you, reach out, let's have a chat. It sounds like you should be part of us and part of our tribe. So have booked ourselves in for a call or have a little think about whether one of our courses appeals to you and join our community.