Scores of highly successful people reveal how they manage their days in a series of interviews and Travis Bradberry* passes on some of their advice.
Having access to ultra-successful people can yield some incredible information about what makes them so successful and productive.
Kevin Kruse is one such person.
He recently interviewed more than 200 ultra-successful people, including seven billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs.
One of his most revealing sources of information came from their answers to a simple open-ended question:
What is your number one secret to productivity?
In analysing their responses, Mr Kruse coded the answers to yield some fascinating suggestions.
What follows are some of my favourites.
They focus on minutes, not hours:
Highly successful people know that there are 1,440 minutes in every day and that there is nothing more valuable than time.
Money can be lost and made again, but time spent can never be reclaimed.
You must master your minutes to master your life.
They focus on only one thing:
Ultra-productive people know what their most important task is and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions.
What task will have the biggest impact on reaching your goals?
What accomplishment will get you promoted at work?
That’s what you should dedicate your mornings to every day.
They don’t use to-do lists:
Instead schedule everything on your calendar.
It turns out that only 41 per cent of items on to-do lists ever get done.
All those undone items lead to stress and insomnia, which in essence, means that uncompleted tasks will stay on your mind until you finish them.
Highly productive people put everything on their calendar and then work and live by that calendar.
They beat procrastination with time travel:
Your future self can’t be trusted. That’s because we are time inconsistent.
We buy veggies today because we think we’ll eat healthy salads all week; then we throw out green rotting mush in the future.
Successful people figure out what they can do now to make certain their future selves will do the right thing.
They make it home for dinner:
Highly successful people know what they value in life. Yes work, but what else?
There is no right answer, but for many, these other values include family time, exercise, and giving back.
They consciously allocate their 1,440 minutes a day to each area they value (i.e., they put them on their calendar), and then they stick to that schedule.
They use a notebook:
Ultra-productive people free their minds by writing everything down as the thoughts come to them.
They process e-mails only a few times a day:
Ultra-productive people don’t check their e-mail throughout the day.
Like everything else, they schedule time to process their e-mails quickly and efficiently.
For some, that’s only once a day; for others, it’s morning, noon, and night.
They avoid meetings at all costs:
Meetings are notorious time killers. They start late, have the wrong people in them, meander around their topics, and run long.
You should get out of meetings whenever you can and hold fewer of them yourself.
If you do run a meeting, keep it short and to the point.
They say “no” to almost everything:
Billionaire Warren Buffet once said: “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
Remember, you only have 1,440 minutes in a day. Don’t give them away easily.
They follow the 80/20 rule:
Known as the Pareto Principle, in most cases, 80 per cent of results come from only 20 per cent of activities.
Ultra-productive people know which activities drive the greatest results. Focus on those and ignore the rest.
They delegate almost everything:
Ultra-productive people don’t ask: “How can I do this task?” Instead, they ask: “How can this task get done?”
They take the ‘I’ out of it as much as possible. Ultra-productive people are not micro-managers. In many cases, good enough is, well, good enough.
They touch things only once:
How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail and then put it down, only to deal with it again later?
Highly successful people try to ‘touch it once’. If it takes less than five or 10 minutes — whatever it is — they deal with it right then and there.
It reduces stress, since it won’t be in the back of their minds, and it is more efficient, since they won’t have to re-evaluate the item again in the future.
They practise a consistent morning routine:
Kevin’s single greatest surprise while interviewing highly successful people was how many of them wanted to share their morning ritual with him.
While he heard about a wide variety of habits, most nurtured their bodies in the morning with water, a healthy breakfast, and light exercise.
They nurtured their minds with meditation or prayer, inspirational reading, or journaling.
You might not be an entrepreneur, an Olympian, or a billionaire (or even want to be), but their secrets just might help you to get more done in less time and assist you to stop feeling so overworked and overwhelmed.
*Travis Bradberry is the co-founder of TalentSmart, a provider of emotional intelligence tests, emotional intelligence training, and emotional intelligence certification. He can be contacted at TalentSmart.com.
This article first appeared on the TalentSmart website.
