How to Be Productive without Feeling OVerwhelmed

A common problem I hear from ambitious students and entrepreneurs is they’re feeling overwhelmed every day. 

Too many meetings, too many tasks, and too many things to accomplish. 

Especially if you’ve got huge goals as many of you do… it sucks feeling like you’re not making enough progress.

So ask yourself...

Even though I'm busy, am I being productive?

In this post, I’ll share with you a sweet tip on how you can make more progress without feeling overwhelmed… Let's get to it!

Productivity Solution
Okay, so If you want to more productive- making sure you spend time on the right activities is very important. 

Why? 

Because if you spend your time on the wrong things, you waste lots of time, and it will take longer to reach your goals.  

I know, right? 

Anyway, so the solution to this problem is to use what’s called the 80/20 rule. You’ve probably heard of it before. If not…

The 80/20 rule states that 20% of the things you do produce 80% of the results you see. In other words, 80% of the things you are doing are time wasters...

Things like: 

• checking your email more than once per day
• spending too much time in meetings in person or over the phone
• too many thoughts about the to-do list and worrying about not getting it done
• too much planning, and not enough executing to see if the market responds to your idea
• too much messing with my fingernails (I know...)
  
  

Those are just a few examples of the 20% of actions that don’t produce results. I know for me, I definitely spend too much time thinking and checking my email too many times per day… what are some things you think you can remove from your work day to be more productive? 

What are the few actions you could do right now that will move the needle toward your desired results? 

Keeping the 80/20 rule in mind...

Here’s what I want you to do...
At the end of each day, take a look at EVERYTHING you spend your time on… and ask yourself the following questions:

• What things did I do today that hardly moved me closer to my goals?
• What actions did I do that moved me closest to my goal?
• Could I do more of those actions? How would that look?
• What could I stop doing, or delegate to free up my time for more important things? 

If you make a habit out of doing this every day… I promise you’ll be astounded at how much more progress you’ll see in the next 6 months… 

Even writing this note right now, I’m thinking of what I could remove from my to do list for today to be more results driven and how I can plan my week ahead of time on Sunday to focus on activities that drive results.

And here’s an extra special tip- when you do the 80/20 rule, and remove the 80% of the fluff from your work day… you can do the 80/20 rule again to dig even deeper.

That being said, starting tonight I'll be reflecting every night to influence what to focus on for the next day and blocking 90 minutes (~20%) of every work day to focus on my priorities.

Catch my drift? Let's get ittttttttttt!