5 Tips to Be More Productive (and get more done!)

5 Ways to Increase Productivity

It’s been 5 days, 2 hours and 41 minutes since I first sat down to try and write this video. Staring at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Maybe just a quick couch nap to get my mind right. Productivity. It can’t be that hard to write about. Oh, what’s the S&P 500 doing right now? Did I mail the rent check out? What’s new on Instagram? How to be more productive. No. 4 ways to stop procrastinating. Can I even think of 4 things? I think I’ll just take the day off.

Let’s talk about 5 ways you can increase your productivity.

I’m one of those people who has a hard time relaxing. When I’m not working, in the back of my mind I’m usually thinking I should be working. If I don’t get everything accomplished that I wanted to in a day, I feel bad. If I don’t do some sort of work on the weekend, I feel like I am being lazy. Essentially, my mental and emotional well-being is tied to work, which I could make an entirely different video about the pros and cons of hustle culture and everything that ties into that… but that’s not this video. This video is for those of you that want to get more done in a day. Maybe you want to build a business, switch careers, learn a new hobby, or set yourself up to be financially free in 10 years.

So here are ways you can do just that.

Your Why

This is where everything starts for me. My why. Why I want to be productive. What’s the reason I’m sacrificing my weekends or getting up off the couch after dinner to get in more work. Historically, I’ve put in time learning new skills or software to make up for my limiting college degree – an associates in recording arts – so outside of a recording studio environment, it doesn’t account for a whole lot. So essentially, my why has been having a career doing something that I find enjoyable and that pays the bills. But I’ve always wanted to build my own business of some kind. I didn’t always know what – I just knew that I had an entrepreneurial spirit and have always been fascinated by the business side of things.

If you saw my video about how much I earned from the ten different jobs I’ve had, you may have noticed that I rarely just had one job. Usually there was something else I was doing – whether I ended up making money from it or not.

For about three years, our channel Mango Street was the only job I had – but running that channel encompassed so many different ideas and projects and ways to grow the business outside of simply making YouTube videos. Whether it was starting a co-working space, developing photo editing presets, or creating online courses, we pretty much always had a new project in the works. And then last year, I launched this channel as yet another way to diversify and create videos about another one of my passions.

Also, for the past year and a half, I’ve devoted a lot of my time to learning how to trade stocks and options. My why here again is two-fold. First, I like it. Well, for the most part. I find it interesting, challenging, and rewarding. Second, when done right, it’s another form of income. I’ve used stock market gains to buy land for a future real estate project and help with the down payment of our first home. So those are the reasons I’ve spent so much time with the stock market.

To me, “the why” is the ultimate motivator. It’s a reminder of your longer-term goals. Something that helps you get through the short-term pain. If your why is “I don’t know, I just want to make more money,” I’d encourage you to dig deeper. What will that money afford you? A better place to live? Eliminate your debt? Maybe that money will free up your most nonrenewable resource: your time. If you have a bigger picture “why” like spend more time with your spouse and kids that can serve as your reason why you should be more productive.

Write It Down, Break It Down

Whenever I feel overwhelmed with everything I have to do, Rachel always tells me to write it all down. Physically, on a piece of paper. This gets it out of the dark, swirling abyss of my brain into more manageable chunks. I take a few minutes to think of everything going on – maybe I need to send assets off to a client or create a thumbnail or make a trading plan for the next day. Oh, and I need to send our contractor a list of questions. Just write it down. This way, when I’m working on one task, I don’t need to worry about forgetting everything else I need to do. It’s all right in front of me, and I can get to it one by one. It’s so simple, yet effective. At least for me.

Plus, it’s oh-so satisfying to cross something off of a to-do list.

But let’s say your objectives aren’t so clear-cut. Maybe you know what your bigger goals are like starting a computer repair side business or creating a YouTube channel. You have to take these bigger goals and start to break them down into small, actionable steps. So let’s take the computer repair business. You have the know-how. You don’t have customers. Set a goal to acquire two new customers within two weeks. How will you find these customers? Well, you could try advertising. You could go old school and print off flyers and hang them at your local grocery store. Or you could build a beautiful website with Squarespace… just kidding, they aren’t sponsoring this video. But let’s say you do need a website for your business. You can easily start that tonight after the kids are in bed and your spouse is fully engrossed in an episode of The Bachelor. Write that down.

This will depend on how meticulous and organized you like to be, but you can break down these goals into actionable steps throughout the week.

Maybe you spend an hour on your business’s website tonight and will spend tomorrow night finishing the website and building out your online presence on Facebook and Instagram.

Simple, actionable, cross-off-able steps.

Without this, you may easily derail your productivity by googling about website templates, which leads you to YouTube, which suggests you watch this video, and next thing you know, you spent your hour of productivity doing absolutely nothing. You’d be better off watching The Bachelor on the couch with your spouse… which is fine too, maybe you wanna reverse engineer the lighting setups they use on an unscripted reality show so you feel like you’re doing research for your YouTube channel.

Clear Your Mind

This next one is simple, yet effective. Sometimes when I sit down to work, I’ll keep getting distracted by one thing I still have to do, unrelated to the task at hand. And usually, this is other unrelated item is something that I don’t really want to do, but I know I need to do. And it probably wouldn’t take more than 5 minutes of my time and it’d be gone for good.

Maybe it’s finally paying that parking ticket that’s sitting on my desk. Or making that doctor’s appointment. Or emailing back that one person or sending off that one invoice.

I always think “oh, I’ll get to that later. I’ll do that tonight. Or Sunday. Or some other time that’s just not right now.” The problem is I don’t usually get to it. And then, it’s there tomorrow, interrupting my focus.

So the solution here is the most obvious one: if there is something simple that is fighting for your focus, stop what you’re doing, and take care of it. Pay that parking ticket. Make that phone call. Send that email. Get it off of your plate and out of your mind so you can focus on the real work you need to do. You’ll get more stuff done with your focus improved and little distractions eliminated.

Now it can be a little bit of a slippery slope if you aren’t disciplined. You go and pay that parking ticket or send that invoice and then you check your bank account and then you get that email from Zillow and start looking at houses completely incongruent with your bank account and then your texting with your wife about whether your indoor pool or outdoor pool will be the saltwater one or maybe both and how you really should get those swim lessons you’ve been wanting.

Block Distractions

When there’s something I don’t want to do – like I don’t know… writing scripts for videos, I often look for any sort of distraction I can find to procrastinate just a little bit longer. I often find myself checking Twitter and endlessly scrolling for far too long, far too often. This is where you need to set some limits for yourself for your own good. You can use a browser extension called StayFocusd or BlockSite and add whatever distracts you to your list of blocked sites. With the paid plans, you can set your “focus windows” of time frames where certain sites will be blocked, but I’m just using the free version. This way when I’m in middle of writing a script and I…. oh lemme just check Twitter real quick… dangit, I guess I should go back to work.

You can also set app time limits on your phone. On average, Americans pick up their phones 262 times per day.... which is like every 3 and a half minutes you’re awake…. And that’s kind of crazy to think about. It’s become such a mindless habit – I find myself doing it all the time and it wrecks my concentration and leads to a lot of wasted time.

So, set some strict time limits on your time-wasting apps because it’s pretty crazy how much every second adds up.

If that doesn’t work for you, you can take the Matt D’Avella approach and just straight up delete the apps from your phone if they are really causing you to lose focus.

Increase Focused Time

So to sort of combine the last three things into one, if you can increase your focus, you can easily decrease the amount of time you need to spend “being productive.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day, yet research suggests less than three hours of that day is spent doing actual work. Activities like reading news sites, checking social media, chatting with coworkers, eating, etc. takes up more than half of the work day. And honestly, sometimes I find that to be true in my own life. I can spend the first half of the day looking at the stock market and responding to YouTube comments when I have a more pressing video edit I need to get done. Then I really focus up the last half of the day and crank the edit out in just a few hours.

So to extrapolate that to your side hustle or computer repair business or whatever – if you can be laser focused when spending time with these activities you can likely accomplish way more than you think.

You have your actionable to-do list right in front of you. You’ve blocked distracting websites. You’ve thrown your phone in the trash. All that’s left to do is the actual work. And keep that pen handy to cross off those items as you go.

BONUS TIP

For a little bonus tip, look at your list of things you need to do and try tackling the most difficult item first. For me, it’d be writing this script. If I can just finish the script, everything else will seem easy or maybe even fun. You aren’t dreading the hardest task left on your list, you started with it and got it done. The snowball is now rolling downhill, gaining momentum and you are now an unstoppable productivity master, making gary vee jealous.

Final Thoughts

Everyone works differently and focuses differently, but these are tips that I find to be super helpful. If you have things that work for you, let me know in the comments below, and I will compile it all into a self-help book that I will sell millions of copies of.

Okay, now instead of watching yet another YouTube video, write your to-do list and get to work! Or don’t, I’m not your boss. I’ll see you in the next one.