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How can you do more in less time?

Today, being ‘productive’ is at an all time low. With social media, text messages, emails and so on, it’s no wonder why so many people have a hard time staying focused.

I was having a conversation with my friend, Ron Friedman, author of “The Best Place To Work” and one of the topics we covered was how to beat the odds and become super productive with your day and in your life.

During the conversation, he shared his top 10 ideas that he’s learned throughout his career.

After a few minutes of explanation I stopped him mid sentence and let him know that I REALLY want to share these ideas with my students and would love to feature him on our blog.

Unfortunately he turned me down. He said he was too busy with his upcoming summit.

But then I thought of an idea. I said, “Let’s make a deal”.

“I’ll be a guest on your upcoming summit if and only if you write out your top 10 ideas for productivity for my students.”

There was a bit of a pause.

But finally he caved and said, “Fine. If you join my business summit, Harv, I’d be happy to write this article for you”.

So I did. You can register for that business summit here (he interviewed me and other top performance influencers) and you can read Ron’s article below.

Make sure you take notes and you read the article in whole, you’re going to get a lot out it!

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The 10 Best Productivity Ideas of the Year
By Ron Friedman, Ph.D.

Over the past decade, work has grown infinitely more complex. Technological advances have led to round-the-clock work schedules and mounting expectations. At the same time, we’re bombarded with endless distractions – from text messages and conference calls, to the latest viral videos and breaking news stories burrowing their way to the top of our inboxes.

We do everything we can to maintain our focus, yet the battle for our attention escalates by the day. Now more than ever we need strategies for being productive. But where do we start?

Earlier this year, as part of an online summit taking place in April 2017, I invited 50 best-selling productivity writers to share their insights for achieving top performance. Here are ten overarching themes that encapsulate their advice for navigating a rapidly accelerating informational landscape and achieving peak performance at work.

1. Own your time.
Our most satisfying work comes about when we’re playing offense, working on projects that we ourselves initiate. Many of us know this intuitively, yet we continue to spend the vast majority of our days playing defense, responding to other people’s requests.

Many of the experts I interviewed believe that top performers take steps to ensure a favorable offense-to-defense ratio. Tom Rath, author of Are You Fully Charged?, recommends blocking out time to work away from email, programming your phone to only ring for select colleagues, and resisting emails first thing in the morning until you’ve achieved at least one important task.

2. View busyness as a lack of focus.
There’s a satisfying rush we experience when there’s too much on our plate: we feel needed, challenged, even productive. And yet that pleasurable experience is an illusion. It robs us of our focus and prevents us from making progress on the work that matters most.

Sociologist Christine Carter, Ph.D., an expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, put it this way: “Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.” Instead of viewing busyness as a sign of significance, top performers interpret busyness as an indication of wasted energy.

3. Avoid the “Victim Trap.”
When things aren’t going your way, it’s easy to point fingers or feel sorry for yourself. However, the more we embrace negativity, the more that negativity spreads. As author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind T. Harv Eker points out, “what you focus on expands.”

The next time you find yourself blaming others or complaining, recognize that you’ve entered the role of victim. It’s a disempowering mindset – one that prevents you from getting ahead. A better approach is to deliberately direct your attention to the actions you can take to improve your situation.

4. Challenge the myth of the “ideal worker.”
Far too many of us continue to believe that an “ideal worker” is one who works constantly, often at great expense to their personal life – but there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Being productive requires recognizing that you can’t work for extended periods of time and maintain a high level of performance. As humans, we have a limited capacity for focused attention. And yet, as journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Overwhelmed Brigid Schulte points out, we have been seduced into thinking that if only we try harder and work longer, we can achieve anything.

Top performers take a different approach. They recognize and honor their physical limitations by getting plenty of exercise and sleep, cycling between 90-minute bursts of focused work and short restorative breaks, and taking time to disconnect from email for some portion of their off-hours.

5. Intentionally leave important tasks incomplete.
We often race to finish assignments quickly so that we can move on to the next item on our list. But Wharton professor and psychologist Adam Grant believes that resisting this urge can actually make us more productive.

“I used to sit down to write and not want to get up until I was done with a chapter or an argument,” Grant told me. “Now I will deliberately leave sentences just hanging in the middle and get up and go do something else. What I find when I come back is that I don’t have to do a lot of work to finish the sentence, and now I also have a bunch of new ideas for where the writing should go next.”

What Grant is leveraging is the human tendency to ruminate over unfinished tasks, otherwise known as the Zeigarnick Effect. If you start a project and leave it unfinished, you’re bound to think about it more frequently than you would after it’s done.

Instead of aiming to finish important tasks in one sitting, try leaving them incomplete. Doing so will encourage you to continue thinking about your work in different settings and, in the process, position you to uncover creative solutions.

6. Make a habit of stepping back.
In a knowledge economy, productivity requires more than perseverance — it requires insight and problem-solving. Research indicates quite clearly that we are more likely to find breakthrough ideas when we temporarily remove ourselves from the daily grind. This is why the best solutions reveal themselves when we step into the shower, go for a run, or take a vacation. Top performers view time off not as stalled productivity but as an investment in their future performance.

7. Help others strategically.
High achievers, Grant argues in his 2013 book Give and Take, tend to be Givers — those who enjoy helping others without strings attached. While giving can certainly help you succeed, Grant’s data also reveals that helping everyone with everything is a recipe for failure.

So how do you do it right? Top performers, Grant says, avoid saying yes to every helping opportunity. Instead, they specialize in one or two forms of helping that they genuinely enjoy and excel at uniquely.

8. Have a plan for saying no.
The more commitments we agree to take on, the more likely we are to experience what author and consultant Rory Vaden calls “priority dilution.” This is when the sheer number of obligations we’ve committed to prevent us from doing the work that matters most.

One method of counteracting priority dilution involves having a strategy in place for saying no, so that you don’t have to stop and think about how to phrase your response each time you need to turn someone down. Create an email template, or write out a script that you can use when doing it in person.

When dealing with a manager who is asking you to take on more than is reasonable, think outside the yes/no paradigm. Consultant and writer Greg McKeown recommends having a conversation with your manager and listing all the projects you’re currently working on. Indicate which items you think are priorities and invite your supervisor to share his or her opinion. It’s a way of illuminating the constraints you’re under without ever saying the word “no.”

9. Make important behaviors measurable.
To make progress toward any goal, it helps to track our behaviors. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, an expert on happiness and habits, sees monitoring as one of the keys to behavior changes, saying, “If you want to eat more healthily, keep a food journal. If you want to get more exercise, use a step counter. If you want to stick to a budget, track your spending.”

Marshall Goldsmith, the well-known CEO coach, agrees. Every evening, he reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every important behavior he hopes to achieve. Among the items: the number of words he wrote, the distance he walked, and the number of nice things he said to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

10. Do things today that make more time tomorrow.
A final theme to emerge is that top performers look for ways to automate or delegate activities that are not a good use of their time. Vaden suggests asking yourself, “How can I use my time today in ways that create more time tomorrow?” Evaluating your to-do list through this lens makes it easier to commit to activities that are not immediately enjoyable, like automating bill paying or creating a “how to” guide for other team members to help you delegate repetitive tasks more easily.

All of these suggestions are useful individually, but they also highlight an important trend.

In the 1990s, being productive mainly required good time management. Ten years later, the advent of email led to an expanded workday, and productivity demanded that you manage your energy, not just your time.

Over the last few years, we have entered a new age in which managing your energy and time is not enough. Today, the magnitude of information rushing toward us from every direction has surpassed our capacity for consumption. No matter how much time and energy you have at your disposal, you can’t be productive without mastering the art of attention management.

Resisting the lure of busyness, having a plan for saying no, maintaining a relentless focus on self-directed goals that only you can achieve — these are the skills we need to cultivate in ourselves to succeed, both at work and in life.

Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone… and felt your blood boil?

We’ve all been there. Someone says something that gets under our skin and then it’s game over. Before you know it, you’re reacting negatively and following old subconscious programming.

But what if you could learn to operate from a more positive, proactive programming?

Today I’m going to show you exactly where to begin, so that you don’t absorb other people’s poor belief systems any longer.

First of all, noticing that you are becoming irritated, agitated, upset, feeling hurt or whatever it is, is the first step to moving forward.

The first step is always awareness of what’s going on… noticing that there’s a trigger and noticing how you respond to that trigger.

We are programmed to respond to certain situations, certain triggers and certain people in certain ways… these are like grooves on a record.

And remember how records used to skip? Well, it didn’t really mean that they skipped. It means they got stuck in one spot. There’s a groove that they got stuck in, and then you couldn’t hear the rest of the album or the rest of the record.

Well, it’s the same with us. Us humans, we get stuck in grooves and subconsciously react on autopilot.

Now, if you notice something and become aware of it, but then you beat yourself up for doing it, you’ve made the situation way worse for yourself.

I’m going to share a quote from my Zen teacher Cheri Huber. She says, “If you beat yourself up for noticing, you will train yourself not to notice.”

And without noticing, there is no change that can occur.

So what are you going to do now? You’re going to notice without judgment.

When testing situations, you need to understand that the situation is not you, that the other person is not you – and moreover, that those things are not necessarily things that you can even control in the moment.

The bottom line is that you must separate yourself from those situations and separate yourself from the mind that is getting upset around those situations.

If I receive criticism about the way I teach, it’s easy for me to feel hurt or angry about that, but that isn’t me talking. That’s the small self, the ego self, the fear-based self, the protective self.

That’s not who I am.

Of course, it is a part of me like my hand, my finger, my ear, my hair or my nose… but it’s not me.

Understanding that allows me to separate that. It allows me recognize that it’s only my protective mechanism doing its job the best way it knows how to do it, which is reacting in that manner and therefore making me feel the way I feel right now.

Once I can separate myself from that part of me, I can notice it, be aware of it without judgment and just simply say, “Thank you for sharing”.

When it comes to other people, they’re just trying to feed you their poison. An why would you want to eat their poison? Just because somebody gives you poison doesn’t mean you have to eat it. It doesn’t mean you have to swallow it. It doesn’t mean you have to wallow in it. It doesn’t mean you have to bathe in it.

What I always say is, their poison is theirs. It comes from their background and their conditioning. It’s not them either.

If you have poison inside you, what are you naturally, to protect yourself, going to try to do? Get rid of it.

So next time someone is saying something nasty, or something negative, or even anything that you feel is not becoming to you, understand this is their own poison.

If you argue with them, it means you’re trying to give back their poison.

Again, it’s their own stuff. It’s their own stress. It’s their own fear. That’s all that’s happening.

Now you can look at it and simply say, “Thank you for sharing.” If you’re really a good friend, you’ll listen for a bit and let them express it… but not absorb it.

If you can imagine black poison coming out of their mouth, then it’s easy to understand it has nothing to do with you.

When I’m in seminars, believe it or not, at the break most people are very grateful and are there to learn—but some other people are there to be right.

Of course, to be right, I have to be wrong. So they’ll come up to me and criticize something about me or my seminar, and I generally just thank them and move on.

They might then insist on telling me why they didn’t enjoy my presentation. Eventually, I’ll need to move on to the next person, and have forgotten what that person said in about a millionth of a second because I am not going to let that slime stick on me.

Do you know why?

It’s because I have another student who is grateful, happy and wants to learn and I am not going to transfer that first person’s slime onto my next person.

No way am I doing that to them, so I’ve got to let it go quickly.

Of course, sometimes I get hooked in. After the interaction, I feel myself all jittery and I think “Why did I entertain that?” I’ll judge myself right away, but then breathe through it.

And it’s these times when I decide to let it go and move on, that nobody has any criticism for me!

It’s the way of the universe: when we accept things as they are, instead of resisting, things seem to work in our favor.

I understand there’s a subconscious response with certain issues and fear, but it’s a practice. How do you think you change your subconscious? You change your subconscious/unconscious first by making the unconscious conscious.

The first thing you do is consciously come up with a method for stressful or intense situations. For example, “The next time a person raises his voice, I’m going to respond like this,” and you consciously create a method that works for you.

You’ve got to let it go consciously first.

When does the conscious become unconscious? Through repetition and practice.

You can’t do something one time and have it become unconscious or subconscious overnight. It takes frequency.

You do it again and again, and pretty soon that dendrite takes over. That neurological pathway becomes the path of least resistance, then it becomes unconscious.

Once you have your own method of dealing with this toxic energy, and you’ve practiced it enough times, it will make its way into your subconscious.

From here, you’ll be able to repel the negative energy from those around you, and instead focus on all the positive and exciting things happening around you.

And the best part? Once this mindset is a habit, you’ll be truly unstoppable in every area of your life.

“What Harv? There are two ends to marketing?”

I hear it ALL the time, and it’s probably going to be news to a lot of you, which is why – and I’m going to repeat myself because I can’t be more emphatic about how true this is – so many businesses fail. Most business people, if they’re thinking about it at all, think that marketing is mostly compromised of getting people’s initial interest. While that’s obviously a huge part of the success – building game, marketing is actually a double – edged business strategy.

It’s the costliest and most time-consuming part of a company’s life – getting the customer in the door the first time. In fact, it costs five times more to gain a new customer than to keep the one you already have. And that’s just it, another crucial aspect many businesses fail at. Offering one product to a new customer is great, but not offering more, different, or ever – newer products keeps them a one – timer.

Unsuccessful businesses fail to follow up with additional products or services. They don’t have an array of complementary items to offer. Successful businesses that do have a variety of offerings create perpetually-new customers by delivering ever more products and services to the same people, while still gaining new customers.

This is the only way to build not only more revenue but also the next most important thing you can capture from a customer after you’ve gotten their attention and interest, and that’s TRUST. In this age of ever – increasing skepticism and cynicism, trust is hard to come by. If people don’t trust you, they’re less likely to listen to you, and even less likely to spend their money on you.

If they have bought from you once, they have already shown a level of trust, so your job is to create a circle of trust whereby you deliver what you promise, and invite satisfied and happy customers back for more. This is where the money’s at. These customers are providing your future wealth. You’ll make some money from one-time customers, but obviously not as much as repeat customers.

So one end of your marketing strategy is to get first-timers in the door, and the other end is to have a line-up of products and services that you can offer once they’re in. Two marketing systems, two product lines. One gets them into the circle; the other keeps them in. You almost have to treat these two ends as if you’re running two separate but similar businesses. That’s how separate they should be.

Your exercise is to set a line – up of front end and back end products and services for a business you have now or a business you’d like to start in the future. Creativity and imagination are your allies. If you can’t think of products or services, make them up! Innovations happen by creative people figuring out how to make something that exists even better, or by being imaginative enough to anticipate future wants and needs and creating something that may not even exist now. Also think; “What am I absolutely great at that I could duplicate beyond me, over and over again?”

Look at what your clients want and how you can support them. If you execute this right, you’ll go from a decent income to real wealth relatively fast. The headaches are in the front end, but the money is in the back end!

When was the last time you gave yourself some space – physically and mentally?

We often forget just how much our physical state influences us – but it’s arguably one of the most important factors in living a happy and successful life.

Today I want to tell you about a powerful lesson I learned regarding this while on a yoga retreat with my daughter – one which changed my life.

We went to this ashram, and there wasn’t that much going on – other than the fact that there was meditation and chanting, pranayama and yoga.

My daughter, as many of you know, lives in San Francisco and she’s a very busy young woman. Not only is she the manager of a well-known store, but she also go-go dances at night, which is something she’s been doing since she was in college and she enjoys it very much.

While we were at the ashram together – all she did was sleep.

Finally, she started getting a little bit of energy on the third day, and she was really starting to enjoy it. We laid on a hammock together and we were looking up at this tree.

She asked me “Why am I so tired? I didn’t even realize it.” I said, “I don’t know. You tell me.” She said, “Dad, I’m constantly on the go. I never stop.” And then it hit her – she was burnt out.

A lot of people have this same issue, and it reminds me of a treadmill. Sometimes you have one of those auto programs and it starts with the warmup, and you start going faster and faster.

You don’t even realize how fast you’re going – until you stop.

One day at the ashram, we were staring at the trees surrounding us. I asked her to look at what was around the branches, the space in between, and it was like, boom. She said, “Oh my God. That’s it. I have no space. I’ve given myself no space in my life for nothingness.”

The truth is, there are only two things in the universe. There is space and there is information.

Those are the only two things that exist – and 99.999% of it is space.

There’s just a little bit of information infused in that space, and that’s everything that you can basically absorb with your senses.

This works on both a macro and micro level. For instance, when I look around, I can see a bunch of grass, and the space between those blades. When you go deeper, you see a molecule – but if you look with a higher-powered microscope, you see atoms, neurons, neutrons and everything around that.

But it’s mostly all space.

That means that almost everything is space, infused with a little bit of information.

And here’s one of the most important lessons I want you to know: in that space is Spirit. It’s the universe. It’s wisdom. It is present moment. It is the highest level of living within that space.

And you can’t access that wisdom unless you allow space to just exist.

That’s why meditation is practiced by so many people who want to be, or are, enlightened, because it gives you space between your thoughts.

The thing is, when we are really young, we have our space, but then what happens is we have these things that are loaded on us called responsibilities.

Pretty soon we learn that our life consists of the treadmill.

We forget that we were off the treadmill before we got on it – and then we forget we can actually get off the treadmill.

Here’s a question for you that I don’t want you to answer: Are you personally intelligent enough to be successful and give yourself enough space to at least be able to connect with Spirit and enjoy your life?

The only part of you that says you can’t do it is your conditioned mind. Does your ego mind want you to do that? No. Why?

Because you’ll find space. And what happens if you find space? You’ll find Spirit. Then what happens?

Well, if you find enough Spirit, your ego mind loses its job and it doesn’t want that because it’s a protective mechanism.

There is a part of you which is your higher self, your true wisdom or your higher wisdom. If you give yourself some space, you will see what the treadmill looks like – because right now, you can’t even see the treadmill.

In Ayurveda, they believe you only have a certain amount of energy in your life and when you run out of that energy, it’s over. Of course, certain things deplete your energy and certain things enhance your energy – and effort doesn’t necessarily deplete you.

It’s all about how you come at the problem, and the perspective you bring – which is a direct response of your physical well-being and sense of inner calm.

And this all begins with giving yourself space.

When you hear a song, it is the space between the notes that makes up the song. It is the space between the words that makes up the sentence and the meaning.

If you didn’t have the space between the words and the space between the letters, it would all just be one big line.

It is the space that delineates and emphasizes everything else around it.

Without the space between the letters, you couldn’t read. Without the space between the words, you couldn’t understand anything.

It is the space that makes everything else in your life better. Without that space, everything turns into one big piece of mush.

Giving yourself that space is the main step to getting yourself connected to Spirit. It also is the main step to live a quality life.

Next time you’re stressed, or rushing around, take just 10 or 20 minutes away from it to just be.

Give yourself the gift of space, and you’ll begin to see your life change for the better – in every single way.

We all know life is a ride—and one that often has its ups and downs, obstacles and challenges, and periods of pure joy and happiness.

Sometimes, though, moments of self-doubt creep in and in those moments we might not feel like doing anything. It’s like our goals and “why” disappears… and everything comes to a standstill.

Have you ever felt like this?

If so, you may wonder why you’re feeling this way. The truth is, the fact you even notice when you’re feeling this way is a good thing… because at least you’re noticing it.

Many people may miss this, or don’t think to question why they’re feeling unmotivated in the first place.

And as we know, the first key to all change is awareness.

So when you’re feeling in a funk, how do bring yourself out of it and regain the motivation you need to keep pushing forward on your path to success?

There are two ways I know of to overcome this lack of motivation, and here they are:

1) Be the warrior.

The first way to motivate yourself is to be the warrior.

The warrior does whatever it takes. The warrior acts in spite of fear; in spite of worry; in spite of doubt; in spite of, “I’m not in the mood”. The warrior acts in spite of ANYTHING.

Imagine for one moment that a warrior goes out on the battlefield and there are two enemy attackers coming right at him with swords and he goes, “Eh, I don’t feel like fighting.”

That would last about a quarter-of-a-second because that warrior would have a sword through their heart and be killed in an instant.

So, it just doesn’t cut it. There is no such thing as “I don’t feel like it,” or “I’m afraid,” in the warrior’s world.

Whatever the situation, you have to get your frickin’ sword out and fight for your life. Failure is not an option for a warrior, period.

2) Be the wizard.

Many times you will need to get into warrior mode and do whatever it takes to get back on your path to success, but the second way is a bit simpler, and a bit gentler: be the wizard.

What does that mean? What is the wizard? The warrior is the yang: action. The wizard is the yin side of it: the softer side, the attraction side of it.

The yin side says “Everything is energy”.

If I’ve been working a lot or I’m not feeling all that well, I usually push through this. Generally, I am the warrior.

But the wizard has a right to come out and say, “Not today. Today, right now, we are yin. We are going to chill out for the next couple of hours, and do whatever we would like to do.”

You’ve got to do that, because if you are warrior all the time, you will burn out. If you are in constant ‘fire mode’—you will burn.

You’ve got to be the water of the wizard also. You’ve got to be able to go with the flow. I learned this from many, many years of experience—and being the warrior for nearly two decades.

For me to succeed in my business, I had to do whatever it took. Many weeks, I would work 18 hours a day, get 6 hours of sleep, and get right back at it for 3 to 4 weeks at a time.

However, I learned something about Monday’s.

First of all, I used to get up early in the morning every Monday. I’d finish on Sunday night, very late, get up in the morning… and start again.

Usually it was a travel day and you know what? I was getting burnt out. Not only was my physical body starting to fail on me, but I was wondering, “Why do I need this? I don’t even want to do it anymore.”

I was burning myself out, but I didn’t realize I was just a natural warrior. I was constantly the ‘do or die Harv’.

Until at one point I said, “You know what? I could die. This is not smart.”

And so on Monday’s, I started doing… NOTHING.

I could golf if I want. I could watch TV. I could meditate. I could trip around the neighborhood—and usually, that’s what I did.

I’d be out of town and I’d just walk out of the hotel. I didn’t know where I was going. I’d just bring a bit of money with me in that currency and trip around. I had nowhere to go, no place to be, and nothing to do.

And you know what? I added 25 years to my career—and life—because Monday was yin day. Monday was wizard day.

I was a warrior for 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. Enough was enough—I had to give myself time to just relax and do nothing.

And the amazing thing was once I just started spending one day a week as the wizard, everything changed.

So, how do you warrior yourself through the rollercoaster of emotions that comes with success?

Well, it’s simple: you be the warrior, and sometimes, you give yourself the rest you need.

Now here’s the one thing I would recommend. If you find that your mindfrick is constantly going, “I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like it,” then you need to be the warrior. There’s a difference between shying away from doing what’s necessary, and running yourself into the ground.

I pre-planned Monday’s, and that’s why it worked. If you pre-plan it, you’re more likely to stick to it—and allow yourself to relax. For me, Monday’s is ‘Yin Day’, period.

If you pre-plan then you say, “I’m going to do what I need to do and do whatever I can do today. And from 8pm on, I’m done.”

That’s why I believe in the big rocks system, and part of the big rocks should be your yin time.

The reason I’m so vehement about scheduling in your yin time is because, when you do this, then the other part of you doesn’t have to feel guilty about it—and you won’t get that mindfrick nearly as much.

My mind stopped doing that after a couple of times of practice of ‘Yin Monday’s’. It just became routine. I didn’t feel guilty. The other times, it was good being the warrior. And as we know now, it’s all about balance.

The critical point here is that simply by setting aside this time for yourself, you’ll allow yourself to rejuvenate and replenish your energy, so you can get ready for the next battle in life and be completely unstoppable.