People often are very busy, work late nights, have no time but at the same time feel that they’re not making progress and are not productive. This often compromises their health, well-being and overall happiness feeling. High performers have found a way to produce more without these compromises.

HOW

Below 3 productivity fundamentals, in next sections 3 advanced practices to increase your productivity.

1. Set clear (explicit) and challenging goals: This increases engagement, enjoyment and inspiration to maintain focus. It increases your effort & you work more quickly. Motivation leads to productivity.
2. Maintain Energy: See energy habit. Your brain needs downtime to process information and recover. Going away from your desk every hour for a break increases productivity with 45%.
3. Maintain Focus: Avoid information overload at the start of the day (e-mail, data,…), avoid distractions and interruptions, avoid multitasking, find your peak-concentration state.

The overall feeling of having a balanced life has a positive impact on productivity. You should focus on balancing happiness or progress in your major life arenas, instead of hours. Every week rate your happiness on a scale of 1 through 10 and also write your goals for each of these 10 life categories: health, family, friends, intimate relationships (partner or marriage), mission/work, finances, adventure, hobby, spirituality, and emotion. A Simple weekly review helps to rebalance and avoid that one arena of life becomes more intense, important, and time-consuming than others.

INCREASE THE OUTPUTS THAT MATTER

Figure out which outputs will advance your career, will make an important contribution to others, and will make you remembered. Those outputs are the few things that you have to produce exceptionally. Focus consistent effort on those outputs and produce many of them over the long term. Example: Instead of learning every marketing technique, focus all your effort on creating and marketing as many qualitative online courses. After deciding your outputs, try to spend as much undistracted time as possible on them (60% is the sweet spot). The other 40% ends up in everyday tasks of work or running a business (strategy, management, e-mails,…) that can never be eliminated completely.

CHART YOUR FIVE MOVES

If you want to make big meaningful things happen then you have to think before you act, create a plan and work through it step by step. First of all decide what you want to achieve (align with your outputs). Then, ask yourself: “If there were only 5 major moves to make that goal happen, what would they be?”. Think of each major move as a project that can be broken down into deliverables, deadlines and activities. It’s very important to figure out the 5 moves by analyzing successful people that have already achieved your goal. If you don’t know the moves, you lose. Finally fill the project activities into your calendar taking up to 60% of your time, cutting out less important activities off your calendar.

GET INSANELY GOOD AT KEY SKILLS

To become more productive, become more competent. Determine the 3 major skills you need to develop over the next 3 years to win and start mastering them with the “progressive mastery” method. The steps in the progressive mastery method are: 1. Set specific stretch goals to developing that skill, 2. Attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and results, 3. Identify the critical success factors, and develop your strengths in those areas (fix your weaknesses), 4. Develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure look like, 5. Schedule challenging practices developed by experts or through careful thought, 6. Measure your progress and get outside feedback (Find a coach or mentor), 7. Socialize your learning efforts by practicing or competing with others, 8. Continue setting higher-level goals so that you keep improving, 9. Teach others what you are learning.

EXAMPLES

OUTPUTS THAT MATTER EXAMPLES

• Blogger: more frequent and better content
• Cupcake store owner: discern 2 best-selling flavors and expand distribution in just those two
• Parent: increase frequency of free time and great experiences with the kids
• Sales rep: more meetings with high quality prospects
• Graphic designer: pump out more great images
• Academic: quality of the curriculum and classes, or number of published papers or books
• Apple: dump many products and focus on massively scaling fewer products
• Walt Disney: building up production of movies

CHART YOUR 5 MOVES EXAMPLE

The 5 secret moves to publish a best-selling book:

1. Finishing writing a good book. Until that’s done, nothing else matters.
2. If you want a major publishing deal, get an agent, or just self-publish.
3. Start blogging and posting on social media, and use these to get an e-mail list of subscribers. E-mail is everything.
4. Create a book promotion web page and offer some awesome bonuses to get people buy this book. Bonuses are crucial.
5. Get 5 to 10 people who have big e-mail lists to promote your book. You’ll owe them a reciprocal e-mail – meaning you agree to promote for them later, too – and a portion of any sales they might make for you on other products you may be offering during your book promotion.

PROGRESSIVE MASTERY EXAMPLE

You’ve determined that specifically wanted to develop your skill as freestyle swimmer:

1. Set goals for how fast and efficiently you entered the water, swam a lap, executed a turn, finished your last 10 meters.
2. Before every practice, remind yourself why it was so important for you to get better at this, and you talked about your goals with someone who cared about your performance. Maybe your why is to get fitter, win a swim meet, or lap your best friend a few times.
3. You determined that a critical factor to success was your ability to work your hips efficiently in the water and that your major weakness was a lack of finishing stamina.
4. Every night, you visualized the perfect race, imagining in detail how you would move through the water, kick off the turn, power through fatigue, go for it in the last few strokes.
5. You worked with an expert swim coach who could give you regular feedback and who helped you design harder and harder practices to reach higher and higher goals.
6. You measured your progress in a journal every time you swam, and reviewed the journal, looking for insights on your performance.
7. You constantly swam with people you really enjoyed swimming with, and you entered competitions so that you could face better swimmers than you.
8. After every swim session, you set higher goals for the next session.
9. Once per week, your formally mentored another swimmer on your team or taught a swim class at the local community center.

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