Productivity is the name of the game. I don’t care what you’re doing… creating products, writing sales copy, driving traffic, etc. If you can’t do any or all of those tasks efficiently, you will make less money. Period. If it takes
you 12 hours to set up a “money getting” site, when it could’ve taken you 2… you just lost 10 hours of “profit time”.
It gets worse. Taking a long time to do anything creates a NEGATIVE association to that task. Therefore, next time you have to do it… you’ll naturally be resistant to it. Because you’ll think of the last time you did it… how long and cumbersome it was… and pretty soon you’ll find creative ways to procrastinate on it.
Put this in your mind and keep it there – developing peak productivity is one of the most valuable skills you can cultivate in your business. And I’m going to show you how to do just that.
Peak Productivity Starts With Measurement
Peak productivity starts with measurement… and one of the best measurements is to know if today will be a “success” or “failure” for you.
Question: do you know if yesterday was a success or not? The day before? And the day before that? You should know the answer to that… EVERYDAY.
Here’s how you know if a day was a success or not: if you met the MEASURABLE goal you set for that day. Wait, what’s that? You don’t set a goal every single day for that day? If not, you should do so ASAP. If you follow this one practice alone, your productivity will at least triple. Simple as that.
Long term goals are dead. The chaos of the marketplace and the rapid change we all experience these days makes long term goals ineffective. You need short term goals. One a day.
So here’s what it looks like. You wake up in the morning. You know exactly what you need to do that day to define the day as a success. Then at the end of the day you simply look back at your goal…
And ask yourself – did I meet it or not? If you go day after day not meeting your goal – then who are you kidding? You’re screwed. You either need to change your goals or change how you approach your goals.
Every single day – you should have a goal for that day. Then you do it. Welcome to the world of high level productivity.
The Perfect Productivity Killer
Here’s a statement you should agree with – striving to be perfect is imperfect. You know what perfect really is in the market place? Good enough is PERFECT. There will be times when you don’t write exactly what you wanted to write when you send an email out to your list. Who cares? As long as you got the basic point across, it doesn’t matter.
There might be a time when you’re setting up a blog and you want the header to be slightly different… but you tweaked it… and tweaked it… and tweaked it… and you can’t get it there. Who cares? Is the header really that important? No. Move on.
Tying this to your daily goal will help you out tremendously. If your goal for that day was to spend 3 hours driving traffic, that’s 3 hours less you have to spend tinkering with other stuff. So that helps there. But it goes beyond that – your customers don’t want perfect.
They HATE it when you try to be perfect. Because they’d rather have “good enough” NOW than perfect 4 weeks from now. They just want the information. They just want the technique.
Here’s what will help you to eliminate this whole “it has to be perfect” problem — you can always improve it later. You can always make it better later. So put it out there and set the goal that two weeks from now you’ll go back and spend 2 hours improving it.
Better to get it out to the market place as quickly as possible, and THEN improve it based on feedback instead of trying to make it perfect. You do no one a benefit if you try to make things perfect. Not your customers. Not you. No one. So work for “good enough” instead.
Always Use A Deadline
Here’s the best strategy to force yourself to work for “good enough” – a self-imposed deadline. Every task worth doing in your business must have a deadline attached to it. And to take it a step further – when that deadline is up, you’re done.
The nature of the deadline makes you deal with the most critical elements of a task. If you don’t have a deadline on a task, then you can focus on anything for any period of time, because there is no sense of urgency.
Here’s a sentence you should put in your brain and keep there – anything worth doing in business must have a deadline attached to it.
Checking email must have a deadline attached to it. Writing a blog post must have a deadline attached to it. Setting up a website must have a deadline attached to it. Writing a sales letter must have a deadline attached to it. ANYTHING worth doing must have a deadline attached to it.
When you follow this principle, you will easily triple your productivity.
