Here’s the problem with the early stages of entrepreneurship..
Most amateur entrepreneurs confuse busyness with being productive. They think that if they can spend more time on their business ideas, that they will make more money.
WRONG.
In reality, the goal of making money online is not to trade more of your precious hours for dollars.
(If you wanted that, then you could have just gotten another job)
The ultimate goal of making money online is to produce the MOST AMOUNT OF RESULTS (Money)
While putting in the LEAST amount of time in.
Don’t be like the amateur entrepreneurs that become slaves to their businesses.
Become a freedom fighter instead and figure out how to make more money online with less time.
Here is exactly what I learned on how to be productive and make more while working less in my current businesses.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1oP_POMXiY[/embedyt]
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1. Do The Worst Thing in the Morning
“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” – Mark Twain
What we aren’t usually aware of is that the thing you are avoiding to do the most could be the biggest factor that boosts your income.
This was my biggest productivity problem back in the day.
I would normally postpone the most difficult of tasks until later on in the day.
The worst part was, this gave me a lot of time to dread the day knowing that the task was looming over my head unaccomplished. And because of this, it made me very unproductive.
Instead of being present in the moment, and instead of using my mind and my problem-solving skills to actually take my business and my brand to the next level..
I would never actually get around to doing the hard task.
What helped me turn things around was doing the hardest task the first thing in the morning.
That way, if that was the only thing I ended up doing all day, it will still increase my daily revenue.
So here’s what you need to do my fellow freedom fighters..
Ask yourself what is that ONE THING that you are putting off the most..
And commit to taking massive action on that one thing the FIRST THING IN THE MORNING..
The best thing about it is that if you get that out of the way first, even if you don’t end up doing all of the menial tasks for the rest of the day on your to do list..
You would still be positioning yourself on a compounding path that can make you more money in your business.
2. Batch As Much As Possible
I first learned about batching in Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Workweek.
I was spending way too much time reading useless emails in my inbox. And it was taking up all of my time that could have been used to do more productive results-based tasks.
So instead, I would only check emails at 12 pm and at 4 pm.
But instead of doing them one at a time like I would do whenever an email came in..
I would use those times to read them all and respond to them within just 30 minutes. I compressed the entire day’s worth of emails in only that small time frame.
This ended up freeing up so much of my time to focus on making more money.
I ended up doing the same with my YouTube videos.
At first, I used to make them every day but then I get burned out and lost motivation. But then I began batching two weeks worth of videos in just two days.
So now I just work really hard for two days and have the option to travel or recharge for two weeks and get re-inspired.
Since everything is automatically scheduled on YouTube, it now brings in more money while working less time than my initial approach of recording every day.
How crazy is that?
Getting two weeks of work done within 2 days!
Batching has given me the ability and the luxury of time to either travel, to just sit back and relax and to get my creativity up and running once again.
Now what’s the one thing that you do monotonously every single day for a week?
Instead of doing it every single day, step back and try compressing the time and batch it in a short period of time.
You’ll be surprised on how free time its going to give you to now oversee the long term vision of your business instead of just micromanaging and wasting too much time and effort on details that doesn’t really matter.
3. Do Things That ONLY Produce Results (And Outsource Them)
This is how you really make more money with less time:
(drumroll please..)
You build a team.
On top of the list of things to do is to first outsource the things that annoy you and that you hate doing the most (product research, competitor analysis, customer service)
The second most crucial thing to outsource in your ecommerce business are the MMAs or the Money Making Activities..
A.k.a. everything in your business that makes money.
At the end of the day, those things are creating traffic, capturing leads, and converting sales.
So what I usually do is I screen recorded my process and handed each of the videos to each of my 8 employees from the Philippines that I had built up over the time from upwork.com.
I then have them do the specific tasks for me (they are way smarter than I ever could be).
The goal is not to trade 10 hours every day for money. The goal is to LEVERAGE a team of individuals’ hours in a day.
If the typical solopreneur works 8 hours a day..
And if I hire 8 people and each works 2 hours a day, I will outwork the solopreneur by 2X. That’s 16 hours a day since I am now leveraging other people’s time other than my own.
Another benefit about having a team is that it completely removes you from the business entirely.
When I worked alone, I used to juggle 8 to 10 different jobs in my business.
That is why so many e-commerce people work 8-10 hours a day.
Screw that!
But now that I have 8 employees.. those 8 jobs are divided amongst them and gives me more time to focus on the future of my businesses and my personal blog site and my youtube channel.
Remember guys, the goal is not to leave your job just so you get hired by yourself to work on another job.
So ask yourself what is it that you are doing on a daily basis?
Is it easy?
Is it mundane?
List them all down. Then split that list into a step by step procedure which you can give to someone else to do.
If you want to be that freedom-fighter, then your main goal is to create value for you and for your customers and to build a team of winners to do the work for you so that you could have the free time to do whatever it is that you want to do.
And to focus on the bigger things at hand like building your personal brand.
4. Give Yourself A DEATHline
Now you might be thinking..
”but Mike I don’t have the time”
Oh really?
How many hours do you have in a day?
Think about Oprah, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet..
You have 24 hours in a day..
AND SO DO THEY.
So don’t come up to me with the B.S. excuse that you don’t have the time. You don’t have a time issue. You have a motivation issue.
So to fix it..
Imagine if you were going to die, within the next 10 years.. What would you differently do that you are not doing right now? This is what I actually did..
I convinced myself that I was going to die at age 30.
When I did that, it began forcing me to start asking myself the questions that I wasn’t initially asking myself. Would I work a 9 to 5 job and trade 8 hours of my life doing the things that I don’t wanna do just so that I could die at age 30 without being accomplished?
Without feeling fulfilled?
And without doing the things that I have always wanted to have done?
Hell no!
So I worked my ass off like all hell broke lose.
Because knowing that I had 10 years to live would give me no time to complain.
The beauty of it is once you GIVE YOURSELF A DEADLINE, and more specifically a DEATHline, is when the time comes of your hypothetical death..
you have already front loaded all the work, and now you can just enjoy your life!
Now live whatever the hell of a life you want knowing that you can because you have already paid your dues.
I saw this quote by Peter Thiel..
It went along the lines of
“Why can’t your 10-year goal be your 6-month goal?”
Compressing the amount of time will allow you to start asking yourself the right questions necessary to get there.
Once you understand that time is the most valuable thing, you can now use it as an emotional leverage to take action every single day.
You could literally start living a lifestyle that’s a lot faster and sooner than you normally think you could’ve thought is possible if you don’t have that scarce time mentality.
So hopefully these 4 productivity hacks help!
QUESTION: What things do you do today to stay productive? Comment below!
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