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Biggest Time Saver of All

Here is one of the biggest time-savers of all:

Outsource and delegate work that you don’t personally need to do.

Generally, there are two big stumbling blocks that prevent people (especially business owners) from taking advantage of this productivity booster:

1. You think you need to do it all yourself. However, once you start outsourcing, you’ll find that others are able to do just as good of a job as you. And in many cases, putting your tasks into the hands of a professional means you’ll get an end product that’s even better than you can produce. (This is especially true if your skill level is competent but not above average.)

2. Secondly, some people look at outsourcing as an expense. However, it’s actually an investment, since outsourcing means your time is free to work on other important tasks. In addition, if you figure what your time is worth per hour, you’ll likely find that a professional can actually complete the task for “cheaper” than the cost-per-hour it would take for you to do the same task.

You can delegate outsource anything and everything, both personally and for your business.

Example: At home you can split the household chores up among all the family members (including the kids). When you’re working on your business, you can outsource things like customer service, content creation, product creation and much more.

Tags: Time Management

Handle Tasks Quickly

Usually the best and most efficient way to handle any task is “touch” it once and take care of it rather than taking the time to try to organize the task for later completion.

Tip: Although note that you shouldn’t necessarily take care of tasks as they come in, as doing so will likely diminish your productivity. Instead, you should take care of them at some specified time.

For example, instead of returning phone calls the moment you get a message, instead you can return all your calls during a scheduled block of time that you set aside just for that purpose.

Now let me give you an example of what I mean by “touching” a task once and finishing.

Let’s take email. Sometimes people sort their incoming email into different folders by priority, such as family (non urgent) email into one folder, urgent business email into another folder and then non urgent business email into a third email.

Basically the priority is like this:

High: Urgent business email.
Medium: Non urgent business email.
Low: Non urgent family/friends email.

However, it’s usually NOT a good idea to sort urgent email.

That’s because in order to sort the email, you need to read it and take the time to determine that it’s urgent. Then you continue sorting through your other email and putting them into their proper folders. Finally, you return to your non urgent emails to answer them.

But you’ll need to read them again and then compose your answer. And that means you’ve handled the same email twice in order to reply to it – that’s a waste of time.

Instead, set aside a specific time to answer your email and then read one, answer it and move on to the next email (without sorting). That way you “touch” each email just once, which saves time.

Tip: The exception to this rule is if you do indeed have family and friend emails mixed into your business emails. In that case, in that case, you may want to save your family and friend emails for your non-work hours.

There are two ways to make sure you don’t handle any of these emails twice.

1) You can use a completely separate email for your personal and business emails.

2) If you get personal emails into your business account, then set up your email account to automatically sort personal emails into a “friends and family” folder. Then you can deal with these emails during your free time.

Tags: Time Management

Bring Out Your Competitive Spirit

You probably realized that this tip is really a one-sided bet.

That is, you’re betting a friend that you’ll be more productive and get your to-do lists and goals complete. If you lose, you lose your money or valued possessions. But the only thing that happens if you win is that you get your money back.

If you’d like to make it even more motivating, you can actually make a bet with a willing friend. In this case, you don’t have to deal with painful amounts of money. That’s because the real motivator here is your competitive spirit.

If you’re the type who likes to win, then this might be a good way to make yourself more productive.

Example: You can bet your friend dinner that you’ll make your first $100 online by the end of the month. If you win, you get dinner. If you don’t meet your goal, you need to buy dinner for your friend.

To make this even more motivating, tell all your other friends, family and colleagues about your bet. The more people who know, the more uncomfortable you’ll be if you do NOT meet your goals. And that means you’ll likely be ultra-productive just to avoid any discomfort or embarrassment.

Tags: Time Management

- Get Your Submission Ready.

It’s important to get everything you need ready for submission before you actually start the process. This helps keep you organized so that there are no roadblocks in the way when you do submit. As you go through the submission process you’ll notice that there are many different categories available. Different directories classify niches in different ways, so it’s helpful to browse the sites to plan in advance.

Another important step to getting your submission ready is researching your keywords. Just like it was helpful for article marketing, it’s also helpful for directory submission. Since you don’t have much room for descriptive text, you’re going to want to focus on your main keyword or a few main keywords.

Finally, you need to craft an appealing description for your site. Remember that many people go to these directories to find relevant websites. Your description needs to be as enticing as possible. This will help you get more traffic because more people will click on your site’s link and visit.

Tags: Directory Submission

Rewards Punishments

Rewards don’t work for everyone, especially those who don’t use rewards that truly motivate them (or those that treat themselves to the reward no matter what).

In that case, you may find that punishments work.

Here’s how to use this tip to increase your productivity…

First, decide on an amount of money that would be truly painful for you to lose right now. Whatever that number is, add 10% to it.

Example: If $1000 would feel like a hardship for you, then tack on another $100 to make it a total of $1100.

Next, give that amount of money to a trusted friend along with a written agreement that outlines how and when you’ll get the money back. You can do this in one of two ways:

1. Set up milestones. When you meet each milestone, you get a portion of the money back.

Example: You might set up four milestones where you get 25% of your money back. Alternatively, you might set up a series of milestones where you get 10% of the money back for the initial steps and 50% back when you complete the final step.

2. Get it back only when your overall goal is complete. Here you don’t get the payments as you complete milestones. Instead, you only get it back at the completion of your stated goal.

Tip: Getting all the money back at once or getting the majority of the money back at the end works best for most people. That’s because it’s more painful to lose most or all of the money as opposed to just a small portion of your money.

Also, you may give something else up that’s important to you. For example, do you have a particular possession that you’re especially fond of, such as a classic car or some other antique or collectible? If so, you may consider giving that to a friend in lieu of cash.

Tags: Time Management

Distractions Procrastination Perfectionism.

All of these things can hinder your productivity. But one way to keep on track is to reward yourself as you cross things off your to-do list and meet your goals.

In order for this to be a useful way to increase your productivity, you need to set up rewards that you truly want (and not something you would do for yourself anyway).

Secondly, your reward must be proportionate to your goal.

So small steps deserve small rewards, while meeting bigger milestones and goals should result in bigger rewards.

Example: Let’s suppose you want to complete and publish a book. You may set up a smaller reward for yourself for finishing the book, such as splurging on your favorite bottle of wine. Then you can set up a bigger reward for making your first 100 sales, such as going out of town for the weekend to your favorite vacation spot.

This won’t work for you’re the type who’s tempted to enjoy the reward without actually meeting the goal. For example, maybe you decide to buy the wine anyway even though you’re only half finished with the book. If this sounds like you, see the next tip (Tip 18) for a different type of motivator.

Tip: You can make this tip even more effective by telling your accountability partner about your intended goals and associated rewards.

Tags: Time Management

Get Someone to Hold You Accountable

There mere act of publicly stating your goals is one way to motivate yourself to achieve them, which in turn makes you more productive. But here’s another way:

Recruit someone to hold you accountable on a daily or weekly basis. (In return, you can do the same for him.)

Here’s how it works…
Let’s say you decide to touch base with your accountability partner three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).

On Sunday night or early Monday morning, you tell your partner what all is on your to-do list for Monday. On Monday night, your partner contacts you and specifically asks you what you accomplished.

After you tell him what you did or did not accomplish, then you tell him what’s on your to-do list for Tuesday and Wednesday. Again, he contacts you on Wednesday night and you tell him what you did or did not do. And again, you tell him what’s on your list for Thursday and Friday. And so on.

You can see why this works.

Most people feel embarrassed telling their accountability partner that they didn’t finish the tasks on their to-do lists. And if you’re like most people, you’ll feel even more uncomfortable lying.

So in order to ease this psychological discomfort and embarrassment, there’s only one thing for you to do: Take action.

Tip: Be sure to choose a partner who’ll reliably contact you and hold you to your to-do list. I say this because sometimes if you tell a friend you watched TV instead of outlining a chapter, he might say something like, “Oh, that’s ok – you can do it tomorrow.”

You don’t want someone who’ll rationalize or make excuses for you (or let YOU get away with making excuses). You want someone who’ll hold your feet to the fire and strongly encourage you to stay on track.

Tags: Time Management

Is It Okay To Say No?

I mentioned this tip earlier in the report. Basically, sometimes you just have to say “no” to other people.

You may feel guilty. They may deliberately try to make you feel guilty or otherwise manipulate you. But if you say “yes” to every request, you won’t have time to work on your own to-do lists.

Chances are, you will say yes to some people or to some specific requests. However, you need to prioritize these requests just as you prioritize your own to-do list. That is, make a list of people who you’re most likely to say yes to. And then prioritize requests as they come in.

Tip: If someone who’s not on your “priority list” makes a favor request, consider if the request advances your own to-do list or if there is a bartering opportunity available. If not, say no.

Most people find that it’s actually pretty easy to decide whether to say yes or no to a request. The problem comes down to actually saying no (because of the aforementioned guilt).

Here’s how to do it: Simply politely but firmly say, “No, I’m afraid I’m unable to help you.”

Don’t offer an explanation. If you do, the person will likely argue with your explanation. Don’t even open the door to debate. No matter what the other person says or how they push, just tell them no without explanation as to why you can’t help them.

Tags: Time Management

Focus Time

You often hear about folks praising those who multi-task. I mean why just do one thing when you can do two or more things in the same amount of time?

That’s true only in certain cases. The tips above are perfect examples: You can certainly make out a grocery list or a to do list while watching TV. And you can certainly do some reading (or listen to digital books) while doing things like driving. Waiting for an appointment or exercising.

However, multi-tasking doesn’t work very well when you’re trying to do two tasks that use the same resources.

Example: You can’t write a report and write an email at the same time.

Think about it: You’re writing an email. Then you turn your attention to your report. You have to now read the last few paragraphs that you created previously to reorient yourself to the task. You write a page of your report and then go back to your email. Now you spend a minute rereading the email so you can recall your previous train of thought.

And so on.

Point is, you’ll spend more time just going over your previous work again and again to help you refresh your memory and reorient yourself to the task. And that wastes time.

There’s a better way: Single-task. Focus on one thing at a time. Finish that one thing. And then turn your full attention to something else.

Tags: Time Management

Down Time To UP Time

If you’re like most folks, you probably spend a lot of time waiting…

• Sitting on the train, waiting to get to your destination.
• Stuck in traffic, waiting for the congestion to clear.
• Waiting at the doctor’s office, waiting for the mechanic, waiting for the parent-teacher conference to start, waiting for the commercial to be over so you can get back to watching your favorite TV program, waiting to pay at the grocery store…

You can manage your time better by turning your downtime into productive time. For example:

⇒ Answer emails on the train.

Tip: If you don’t have a connection to the Internet, then download your emails into an email client like Outlook Express before you get on the train, answer them and put them in your outbox so they go out the next time you connect.

⇒ Create your to do lists while waiting for a doctor’s appointment.

⇒ Use a voice recorder to create verbal to do lists, get organized or make notes while you’re stuck in traffic. You can also catch up on your “reading” by listening to iPod books or books on CDs.

⇒ Pay bills online or create your shopping list during commercial breaks while you’re watching TV.

⇒ Return short phone calls while walking between a parking lot and your office or store.

Bottom line: If you have (involuntary) downtime, you probably can fit a small task into that timeslot.

Tags: Time Management