10x your productivity in 20 days

Hi, thanks for joining me today again. I know you were expecting us to continue on our series of building a business that can generate over 1M in revenue per year. We hear your feedback and we have listened, and yes, we’ll put it into a course in an LMS so you can learn practically, connect with other students and reach instructors one on one. More announcements will follow as to the time and cost for this.

Today though, we’ll focus on productivity. As entrepreneurs, we must place a demand on effort and time spent. Every time spent and effort spent on a project must return an equally valuable equivalent. 

It’s quite astonishing that half the things we know are things we know against our wish. We just happen to know them because, social media! We live in a day and age where social media, mobile phones and the internet dictates what we know, how we know and eventually controls our emotions, decisions, risk appetite and productivity. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have the luxury of getting distracted. Gossips, news, trending topics and viral information will always pop up and tend to take us away from our very tasks and goals. Distraction means you are not spending time doing productive things. So how do we remain productive and get work done?

I have 3 tips to share with you today. Productivity is discipline and this is exactly how you can install discipline in your business to 10x your growth

1. Identify 2 - 3 high impact tasks you MUST complete the next day

Ideally, the best way to go about this is to examine your day every evening, take a pen and book, now highlight the most productive things you did. I’ll take a moment to define productive things - being busy does not mean you are productive. Productive work means it doing tasks that brings you closer to your overall goals. So if your goal is to build a 1M per annum business, you’ll break it down into smaller tasks which you can pursue on a daily basis. These tasks are often nigh profile and range from things like launching to following up with audience, researching, hiring, developing partnerships, implementing feedbacks, plugging loopholes, launching new features, cutting back on costs, directing the team and lots of repetitive, boring but necessary tasks. If these boring tasks aren’t getting you closer everyday to your grand goal of building a 1M business, then you are not being productive in that area. Productivity is not binary. That means you can’t judge your productivity based on just one particular aspect, you could be less productive in your health goals but you are crushing your business goals daily. I thought to clarify that. 

So every night, identify all the things you did to bring you closer to your goals, then identify those things you spent a lot of time and energy on which weren’t productive in relation to your goal. This could be lots of time spent on social media; good for relaxation and catching up but spending 4 hours? Now thats an issue. Other unproductive tasks could be time spent watching TV, hanging out with friends, relaxing and all. Now I’m not saying all that is bad, I’m just saying you could cut down on those and dedicate more time to productive things instead. Unproductive tasks could also be things done in your business - for instance, spending the next 4 hours reviewing and making changes to your logo is time spent doing business things but could have been better spent doing more urgent tasks which will deliver better results to your end users. 

After you’ve identified the tasks that were productive, follow in that same energy to determine 2 - 3 tasks that are vital for tomorrow. The idea is to go to bed with a dream and wake up with purpose. 

2. Remove distractions using the 20 day rule Now you have a list.

Go back to your list and check through the activities you did yesterday which contributed to your unproductively then aggressively remove them from your to-do list for today. You can’t be partial and you can’t deceive yourself. Growth is not comfortable: remove distractions without thinking twice. It’s going to be hard in the first 30 days but psychology tells us if you are able to be consistent with a new task for 20 days, it becomes a habit and you start doing it easier. Observe the 20 day rule to form a new habit of productivity for your business. Be aggressive about it. If you fail to meet up on day 2 or day 15 or whatever date on the calendar, start again from the beginning. It’s part of the discipline you need to become productive. Never lie to yourself.

3. Set a 90 minute timer and take 10 minutes breaks in between

Get to work once you’ve identified your high impact tasks and you’ve struck off your unproductive activities. Set a 90 minute timer in front of you and start working. Take 10 minutes to stretch, take a walk, call a friend or your partner, drink coffee or do anything…but return to your desk in 10 minutes for another round of 90 minutes work. It would be helpful to use the do not disturb feature in your phone, be very deliberate and disciplined about not opening notifications from social media. Some calls can be critical so it’s ok to take calls but if they are not critical and time-bound, it would be best to let the caller know that you’ll return their call later. Productivity is discipline and it requires you to be focused. This finely leads to our final point below

4. Remove self deceit

I’ve heard there are 3 people you should never lie to: your lawyer, your doctor and your pastor. I’ll like to add a forth: never lie to yourself. Here is why it is dangerous to lie to yourself: growing up, whenever you feel sick, your parents give you drugs. Your body has come to understand the the antidote for sickness is drugs. An experiment was conducted where sick people were told to take vitamin C tablets instead of Paracetamol pain killer for their pains. The goal was to trick the body that they’ve taken their medications and it worked! As they took the Vitamin C tablet, up to 80% reported feeling better and symptoms began to disappear. What happened was that their bodies assumed they’ve taken the right medication and that was the boost it needed to start fighting the virus. Needless to say, this is not a recommended route for everybody but relating this to our talk on productivity, if you keep doing unproductive tasks and you deceive yourself that they are productive, what will happen is that you’ll eventually accept it as your truth and once your body and mind adjusts to such tasks as productive, you’ve locked yourself in a cycle of un-productivity. 

THE END

At Hala, we believe that consistency is greater than intensity. Thats why we are building  our community around the principles of improving with just 1% daily; which  compounds overtime into something remarkable. Hala is going to be a fine blend of creatives, experienced doers, starters and dreamers. We are founded on the strong belief that ultimately, we hold a duty of care to others in need. We want to balance access to opportunities regardless of colour, background, faith or income level. We value Integrity and highly regard dignity of labour within the Hala community. As a community, our success is measured by how many dreams are achieved, those broad fulfilling smiles when help arrives and how well we are able to impact humanity. These principles are consistent with Bible teachings where we draw our faith and inspiration from. You are welcome to join Hala, you’ll discover practical tips you can start implementing today to stay ahead in business.

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