5 Habits That Will Kill Your Time Management Efforts

Engaging and maintaining your productivity is a difficult thing to do for most people, especially when the Internet is just a mouse click away, and unfortunately, your bad habits are killing your productivity. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. All it takes to get your productivity back on track is a little awareness and some quick action on your part. Here are six habits that will kill your time management efforts and decrease your productivity.

Multitasking

Of all the bad habits, one of the worst and most common is multitasking. Multitasking tricks you into producing incomplete, subpar work daily. When you fall into the habit of multitasking, you aren't doing multiple tasks at the same time, but rather you are giving partial focus to a single task while giving the majority of your attention to switching jobs.

Not Having a Work Routine

You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you are in the habit of working whenever you feel like it. It is essential you establish a work routine if you want to get your mind into a productive gear. Without a work routine, you will always go into your work mode cold, which can make getting into the zone much harder.

Being a Perfectionist

Another common productivity killer is perfectionism, which can manifest itself in many ways, including being thrown off balance when thing don't go your way or having unrealistically high work standards. When you set unrealistic standards for work, you will tend to work your tasks to death. This can lead to falling behind, which then causes a mountain of tasks to buildup.

Having a Giant To-Do List

When you are creating your to-do list, it can be easy to get overzealous and fill it with a dozen or more tasks, that you most likely won't be able to complete. If you can only finish half of your to-do list at the end of the day, it can lead to you feeling overwhelmed. Unfortunately, when you start to feel overwhelmed, you can quickly lose your momentum.

Being Indecisive

Indecision can quickly bring a productive work session to a halt. When you don’t know what to decide on, you end up sifting through the information you have and mentally rehearsing the pros and cons until you end up making a decision. Indecisiveness can eat up a lot of energy and willpower in the process and derail your work.

These are just a few of the bad habits that could be responsible for killing your time management efforts. If you find that your productivity is lacking, take a look at your daily habits to see if any of them could be sabotaging your time management efforts and productivity.

5 Ways For Entrepreneurs to Do Less and Accomplish More

Entrepreneurs are both blessed and cursed. On the one hand, they have more control of when, where, and what kind of work they do. On the other hand, most self-employed business people tend to end up working crazy hours. Fortunately, there are some simple ways for you to start to do less while accomplishing more.

Employ the 80/20 Rule

If you want to get more done in less time, then you need to create your daily work schedule around the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. Creating a daily work schedule using the 80/20 rule will allow you to spend 80 percent of your day working on the most critical tasks, and 20 percent of your time on the menial, but necessary tasks.

Disconnect

If you want to keep your mind fresh and your energy levels up, then you need to take a break from your work frequently. Don’t continue to work under the assumption that you have to work harder to accomplish your goals. Taking frequent breaks throughout the day and disconnecting from your email and phone calls, and stepping away on the weekends, will allow your brain to refresh and your body to recover.

Be Willing to Say “No”

Those who are highly successful have to contend with many demands on their time. It is essential that you know what it is you want to achieve and be willing to say no to other projects. Working less and achieving more is necessary for a balanced life. If you can’t achieve that balance, then you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and on the verge of burning out. Prioritize your tasks and be willing to pass on other work and projects.

Have a Plan

While most entrepreneurs have a long-term plan on how they’re going to reach their goals, they fail to plan and prioritize their days. When you are scattered throughout the day, you aren’t able to maximize your time. If you want to get more done, then you need to set some time aside every evening to plan out and prioritize the tasks you need to accomplish the next day that will move you forward toward achieving your goals.

Outsource Where You Can

This doesn't just apply to work tasks that someone else would be better suited to complete. Think about the 20 percent of menial, but necessary jobs that you have to complete every day and determine if you can outsource them to a freelance or contract worker.

While it is impossible to restart your career overnight, taking these five time management strategies can significantly improve your productivity.

5 Practices for Entrepreneurs to Increase Their Productivity

Regardless of how successful you already are, like most entrepreneurs and business leaders you probably would like to become more productive. However, the work involved with managing a company can create a ton of stress, which inevitably leads to a decrease in your productivity levels. Here are five proven practices that you can use to increase your productivity dramatically.

Use Your Calendar

Most people only use their calendar to remember special events and birthdays, but this dramatically undermines the power that your calendar can serve in increasing your productivity. A simple strategy that can increase your productivity is to schedule the major tasks you have to accomplish during the day. Don't just create a to-do list with the functions you need to accomplish, but time block your most important tasks and projects that you need to get done.

Plan Your Day in Advance

Planning your day in advance can help you get a good night’s sleep because you won’t end up staying up all night trying to remember everything you have to get done the next day. It also helps you to wake up excited about attacking your day because you already know what you need to do instead of wasting time trying to make a plan.

Perfect Your Morning Routine

If you want to take your productivity to the next level, then you have to perfect your morning routine. How you start your day is an excellent indicator of how the rest of your day is going to go. You need to find something that works for you and start putting it on your calendar. If you want to increase your productivity, then you have to get serious about your morning routine.

Develop a Sense of Urgency

Not having a sense of urgency will not only keep you from increasing your productivity levels, but it will also keep you from reaching your full potential and achieving your goals. Create a trigger that will remind you to move forward with a sense of urgency. Whether you write a reminder down on a notecard or put it in your smartphone, you need to have something that will continuously remind you to get moving.

Limit Distractions

If you don’t make an intentional effort to limit the distractions around you when it’s time to work, your productivity will take a hit. Keep breaks to a minimum, limit chatter with others, and stop surfing the Internet when it’s time to get some meaningful work done.  

For entrepreneurs, every minute counts. To help you increase your productivity, put these five practices in place and notice how quickly you start to accomplish more throughout your day.

The Top 5 Time Management Apps for Entrepreneurs

Your time, as an entrepreneur, is valuable. Every minute you waste looking for your to-do list is a minute that you’re not earning money and building your business. Rather than hiring an assistant to help you keep track of your time, why not try one of these five time management apps for entrepreneurs.

Todoist

Todoist is an app that recognizes that not every task on your to-do list is equally important. You can create multiple products for different aspects of your life and business. As you add items to your agenda, you can set priority levels and due dates. Todoist will then show you the essential tasks with the nearest due date first.

Toggl

Toggl is an app that shows you how much time different tasks take to complete. This is the perfect time tracking app for entrepreneurs. Toggl allows you to track various activities with the touch of a button, then adds up how much time you are spending on that activity each day, week, and month. This can allow entrepreneurs to know their average hourly profitability for each client and task.

RescueTime

RescueTime can help you stop distractions once and for all. It runs securely in the background of all your devices and tracks how much time you spend on different websites and applications throughout the day. It will give you an accurate picture of how long you are spending on Facebook, email, and other distractions. It will provide you with detailed reports on your productivity so that you can see where you need to improve.

Letterspace

Letterspace is a notetaking app that is perfect for the disorganized mind. The app allows you to use #hashtags and @mentions within your notes and then organizes your thoughts in the sidebar next to those tags. If you forget to tag your notes, the app also has full-text search capabilities so that you can find what you're looking for easily.

Instapaper

If you ever get distracted by an interesting video or article, Instapaper can help you stay on track. Whenever you come across something while browsing the Internet, Instapaper will send it to the app. This way you can read it later on any device. It also allows you to comment on and highlight text in an article so that you can save and retrieve information as well as share it on social media.

These five time management apps will help you stay focused on what matters most so that you can quickly grow your business. Incorporate your favorite apps into your daily routine and see how much you can accomplish.

The 5 Best Ways to Dramatically Increase Productivity

Being productive at work can be challenging. It can be hard to know where to start managing your time in ways that are conducive to your productivity. No matter who you are, it can be a struggle to understand how to structure your time effectively. No matter who you are or what you do for work, you need to be on point with how to manage your time. Here are five of the best ways that you can dramatically increase your productivity.

Turn Off All Distractions

Every time an email pops up on your screen, every time your phone buzzes, or when your office door opens, your train of thought is destroyed. We all like to believe that we can both participate in a group chat and write our presentation, but the truth is, we can’t. Your best work comes with silence. If you want to increase your productivity, then you have to turn off all the distractions.

Stop Multitasking

It can be incredibly tempting to want to try and take care of several tasks at once. However, it has been proven that multitasking just doesn't work. If you think that you can efficiently juggle phone calls, emails, and presentations without losing your productivity, you're fooling yourself. If you want to increase your productivity, you need to focus on one task at a time.

Take Breaks

You might think that spending more time working will help you get more things done; however, when you're burned out, you will never work as well. Studies show that taking regular breaks during the day will dramatically help increase concentration and boost your mood. To help boost your productivity, take short breaks and walk around the office or grab a mid-day latte.

Implement the 2-Minute Rule

Make the most of your time by filling those tiny windows of downtime with actual tasks. Finding and completing tasks that take less than two minutes to finish will save you time during the day. If you have tasks that you can complete in two minutes or less, just jump in and do them.

Tackle the Biggest Tasks When You’re Alert

Understanding when you work best is key to completing the big projects on time. No set schedule works for everyone. If you're a morning person, tackle your big tasks when you first start your day.

Not every day will be productive, so don’t beat yourself up over it. Instead, try to refocus your energy and implement these productivity tips into your day. Once you find what works for you, you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done.

4 Time Management Tactics for Busy Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur entails many professional and personal traits. It takes a lot to be able to launch, execute, grow, and scale a business. As a result, entrepreneurs have to be extra careful with every decision, and being able to manage their time correctly is an invaluable skill. Here are four, time management tactics that busy entrepreneurs can employ to get more done. 

Break Down Activities Into Simple Problems

It requires more energy to utilizing your consciousness, but this is something that can be avoided if you can simplify your problems. Improving your time management skills will require you to establish a process and then break it down into smaller, automatic operations that you can grasp quickly and that don't require intensive consumption of your resources. Successful entrepreneurs take the time to break complex tasks down into smaller pieces to make the process easier to comprehend and follow.

Create  Prioritization System

Priorities differ from business to business and are generally shaped around deadlines, the importance of execution, ROI, and reach. Learning how to prioritize both your long-term activities and the short terms goals that are necessary for you to realize incremental results is critical and requires you to plan your tasks carefully.

Start with a Simple Task

The quickest way to become demotivated is by failing to complete a complicated and broad task over the course of the day and will prevent you from realizing progress with your weekly planning. The best way to break the ice is by starting your day working on a trivial task that will give you a head start. Starting your day with a simple task will put your productivity in motion and allow you to focus on more complex projects later on.

Create a Long-Term Roadmap

Planning is a repetitive task that can drag you away from your day-to-day activities. Creating a long-term plan can allow you to better focus on your goals and help you decide whether new tasks that come up are in line with your goals. When you can define the well-known duties that are crucial to your success, you can determine the expected outcomes and measure them every month. Preparing a long-term roadmap will also provide you a clearer picture of your weekly availability.

No matter how efficient your strategy for managing your time is, there is always room for improvement. With these four, time management tactics, you can start to improve your productivity and accomplish more throughout your day.

​
Each baby step forward you take is still a step forward

Let’s get one thing clear, we have been conditioned by society and technology to expect big results in as little time as possible. Anything from 15 minute pizza delivery guarantees to 2 day prime Amazon deliveries to instant online downloads, we want the biggest and best things in life in minutes. In fact, some of us have become so impatient that we expect the very best things life has to offer delivered yesterday. Talking about setting ourselves up for a letdown.

There are many challenges in your life that will take quite a bit of effort, attention and energy. You may be going through school. You may be trying to earn a degree. You may be trying to get your dream job. You may be trying to convince your boss to give you a well earned raise or promotion.

Whatever form the challenge takes, please understand that it's something you have to work on. It's something that often takes a long time. This is what trips many people up.

We live in a world that is increasingly impatient. As recently as 10 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable for pizza shops to deliver pizza in 30 minutes or else it's 100% free. Do you think that's still the case in most metropolitan areas in the United States? Absolutely not.

Today, we have reached a point where if your pizza guy does not deliver your pie within 15 minutes, you expect a refund because you want that pie to be absolutely free. That's how impatient we have become.

This is why the concept of some sort of long journey towards expertise, credibility and authority is very irritating to a lot of people. 9 times out of 10, people would rather dispense with the process of paying their dues.

You have to understand that you can't become some sort of overnight expert. You can read all the books in the world regarding a particular subject, but you're not going to be an expert in that subject until you actually carry out that information.

For example, if you are a lawyer and you spent a lot of time in law school reading everything you know about personal injury, all the theory in the world, regardless of how many bits and pieces of information you have managed to memorize, are not going to help you when it comes to deposing the other side, talking to a huge number of claims adjusters and eventually taking your case to trial.

There's a big divide or disconnect between theory and practice. This is why it's always a good idea to not assume that just because you learned certain things that it will automatically or magically transform you. Focus instead on each baby step forward you take. Each step is a victory.

It may seem small and it may seem irritatingly long, but you shouldn't be impatient. Each baby step forward you take is still a step forward. Click here to figure out how to develop real unstoppable confidence from this information.

​
Refusing to expect big starts is one of the keys to success

I remember the first time I learned how to ride a bike. After several false starts that involved me and my brother scraping our knees and becoming bloody messes, we were able to stay on that bike. It was one of the happiest days of our lives. There’s just something about that “I did it” moment when you push on one pedal then the other and it quickly dawns on you that you won’t fall off the bike (and hurt yourself again). I suppose it’s close to the feeling of a bird flying off its next for the first time.

Sadly, far too many of us quickly go from the thrill of discovery and achievement to the expectation that now we can do the most extreme version of whatever it is we achieved. Talk about getting ahead of ourselves. But we do it anyway.

The interesting thing about my biking experience was that we automatically assumed that the next day, we can race in the tour de france. We basically racing all around the block. We were biking long distances. We shot out of the gate, so to speak.

Here's the problem. Regardless of how excited you may be when you first learned something, please understand that at first, there will be challenges. Don't expect things to go smoothly. They often never do.

This should not be a surprise. After all, you just figured out how to do something. Does it really make sense to expect that you will be able to do it like an expert soon after you learn it? I know it sounds reasonable and this seems logical but let’s face it, people often throw logic and reason out the window when they get excited.

Instead, be prepared for hiccups down the road. Sure enough, I almost got hit by a car. I missed becoming a potential quadriplegic by mere inches. In fact, I could've been killed. There was so many close calls during that first week. How come?

Me and my brother expected to bolt out of that gate and become the best bicycle riders we knew. This is a serious problem because I was expecting big starts. It doesn't work that way.

Regardless of what you're doing, regardless of what you're focused on in life, don't expect big starts. Instead, understand that change happens in two ways. You can be making incremental changes externally and this is a good thing.

However, at the same time, you're also changing from within. You think you may be going on a process. In fact, you may be thinking that you're going on a simple journey from point A to point B. But, interestingly enough, this journey changes you.

The process that you're in, regardless of how complicated it may be and regardless of its specific details, changes you. Allow it to happen. Allow the stage to sink in. This is how you become more self confident because this is based on competence.

Competence is based on lived experience. It's not something that somebody gives you. It's not something that happens randomly. It's definitely not something that occurs to you magically, mystically or accidentally. You have to work for it. You have to sacrifice. You have to commit.

To figure out how this all works out to create in you unstoppable self confidence, click here.

​
Constantly challenge yourself to maintain your confidence

You have to understand that if you want to build your self confidence, you have to actually do something. When you do anything, you lay the foundation for increasing levels of self confidence. How come?

When you decide to do something and try to get good at it, you start picking out the patterns. You start figuring everything out by breaking things and processes into parts. You start seeing the relationship of these parts and you're able to connect the dots.

Sooner or later, you are able to know the process like the back of your hand. Now, here's the thing. Most people don't do things that way. Most people would rather take things on a superficial level and call it a day. What do you think happens when you get compared to those people?

You are able to do things more effectively and efficiently. Most importantly, you are able to optimize your skills so every single day you're at the job, at school or anywhere else, you increase the value you get from your daily interactions. You stand out from the crowd. It becomes obvious to anyone looking at you or looking at your co-workers that you are not just going through the motions. You are actually doing things to take things to the next level. You go beyond the call of duty.

You're constantly challenging yourself and this creates a competence that actually produces results. The more visible these results are, the more likely you’ll get rewarded with a raise or a promotion. It is precisely those results that enable you to become a more confident person. You have a higher estimation of your ability to get things done. You don’t let the small stuff or challenges get you down. You have a completely different emotional perspective about the things you choose to do.

The more you do this, the more you realize that instead of constantly crying and whining, moaning and asking “What happened?” you become the person who makes things happen. You become the person who takes personal ownership and responsibility over what's happening in your life.

This enables you to develop direction. This enables you to feel that every single day you spend alive is spent pursuing some sort of purpose or calling. Do you see how this works?

The way to do this is to constantly challenge yourself. This means tackling new issues, going beyond what you already know, asking for more assignments, reading the employee manual to figure out the nitty gritty of whatever it is you're doing, networking better not just to boost your sales but to also know the movers and shakers of the industry.

This goes beyond going the extra mile. This is about intentionally seeking challenges because you know that challenges are blessing in disguise. If you don’t think they are, then your mindset is holding you back.

If any of this resonates with you, click here for a practical step by step guide to building unstoppable confidence. The world rewards self confident people. Be one of those people.

​
Achieve more by refusing to view challenges in emotional terms

I once had a friend who was having a tough time in graduate school. He was given a problem set that was so difficult for him that he thought the professor had it in for him. I know you're probably rolling your eyes and are thinking that this is the most ridiculous thing that you have read.

You are well within your rights to think that because there's a lot of truth to what you're thinking. You and I live in a world that we did not create. You and I live in a world that operates on rules that we did not have a voice in. We live in a world that operates on a take it or leave it basis.

The world is rough. It's unfair. It seems like a lot of the wrong people are getting ahead in life while good people have all sorts of bad things happen to them. But this is the only world we live in. We can't change the terms.

What we can change is how we respond to it. This is the only thing we have control over. If we were to take ownership over this control, we would be able to affect better changes in the world. We just need to step up and accept that even though the world may be spiraling out of our control, if we choose to respond the right ways, we may end up in an optimal place. This is a much better approach than constantly finding ourselves crying over spilled milk.

One of the best ways to come out winners in this world is to stop fantasizing about how it should be. Instead, focus on how it actually works. Once we get a clear understanding of how the world really works, then the next step is to figure out how we can make this truth work for us instead of against us.

This is why it's always a good idea to refuse to view challenges in emotional terms. The friend of mine that I told you about was having such a tough time because he was viewing everything in emotional terms. His professor probably didn't even know him. But there he was, thinking that the professor crafted this very devious test to somehow humiliate, embarrass and deny him the success that a great graduate diploma normally brings to the table.

In other words, he was looking at his challenges in purely emotional terms. He was taking personal ownership of this challenges and letting the process crush him from within.

You don't have to do that. Refuse to view challenges in emotional terms. Instead, look at challenges for what they truly are. I know this is going to shock a lot of people, but challenges are actually blessings. They push you to be more resourceful, creative and imaginative. At the very least, they push you to change how you normally think about things so you can position yourself to become a more consistent winner and victor in life.

To figure out how to do this, as well as craft and adopt your own personal self confidence plan, click here.