October, November, and December have always been the months where I have taken a 30,000-foot look at my life, business, and career and tried to find the one area where, if I could make significant improvements, they would have a huge impact on my level of success and overall happiness.
Being Efficient is that one area that I plan to put hyper focus on in 2020. With a super active family life and a career that requires a lot of time and effort, I’ve reached a place where I have no choice but to find further efficiencies in my day, week, month, and year.
Over the years, I have instituted solid habits like a Morning Ritual and a Sunday Ritual. I use my Daily Time Management Form as my task management system of choice. For the most part, I get a lot done over the course of a day. These three tactics have been game changers for me personally.
Being “über-efficient” is really that next level of productivity and time management. It requires you to take a deep look at how you are operating, throw out any and all misconceptions of how you’ve done things over the years, tear it apart and put it back together again in a way that will help you perform at a higher level with less personal effort.
It starts with self-awareness.
Down deep, you know that you need to make some changes. For me, my goal is to pick up 5 to 10 hours a week in wasted time and invest it back into myself and additional content creation that I can share with all of you.
I am coming at you as someone that is learning myself, not as a subject expert. But let me share with you where I am in this process and teach you how I take on a topic like this.
- Self-Awareness… realize that you need to make some changes in a certain area to improve your overall level of success.
- Commit to change… “burn the ships,” so to speak.
- Set a goal for where you want to be in 30, 60, 90 days and 1 year from now.
- Do a self-audit… ask yourself honestly, “What is my current level of execution?”
- Create your plan.
- Execute.
Currently, I’m at step 4. I am doing that self-audit. I am tracking how I spend my time, where there is time wasted, and what my potential efficiency opportunities are. My goal is to go into 2020 with additional guiding principles and a plan on how to execute my days, my weeks, and the months throughout the entire year.
Interestingly, when you are early in the audit phase, finding the 5 to 10 hours a week of wasted time will be much easier than you may imagine.
I started off by doing what I would ask you to do – that is to calculate your income per hour. Take your projected gross income and divide by the hours you work on average. Most of you work about 2,600 to 2,700 hours a year. That calculation will give your hourly rate. Now that I know mine, I’m in the process of taking a further look at my schedule and tracking my days up to Thanksgiving. Here’s what I am looking at:
- What time of day should I be doing my most meaningful work? Chances are you will see me move my “game time” schedule from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Personally, I create my best work in the morning. Late day, I can do the tasks that require less “brain power.” I just know that those hours during “game time” require solid scheduling and an understanding that the day can and will change despite focused planning and scheduling.
- I handle a lot of the logistics at home. My wife schedules and attends the majority of our kids’ activities (huge job) and I handle all of the food prep, bill pay, grocery shopping, and a lot of the pick-up and drop offs for our girls during the week and weekends. This is the area that I will most likely find the 10 hours without losing the personal touch I want to show Amy and the girls.
- Research what high level achievers are doing in their lives. Most likely, I will add a personal or virtual assistant into the mix and automate everything that I can automate down to my finances. If you’ve got any great ideas in this area, I’d love to learn from you. Send me an email.
- Once I’ve done this deep look at how I operate, I’ll start giving up some control, making changes and creating new habits.
So, essentially, I am having to dig deep and break old patterns that I’ve been stuck in for a long time to create those efficiencies that will lead to a better and less stressful life.
What is that one area that you need to improve on in 2020?
You can use the same steps and process to attack your “one big thing.” Imagine what could happen if you did this exercise each year for 5 years? Where would you be?
As you’ve heard me say, “People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 5.”
