31 Little Life Upgrades: Small Optimizations to Improve Your Days
What little purchases or changes have you made that had an outsized impact on your overall happiness?
This is something of a sport in our house.
Productivity
Make the most out of your 24 hours every day!
If your biggest side hustle holdup is a lack of time, these posts and podcasts episodes will help you build more efficiency into your weeks.
Productivity is a constant journey and I’m always experimenting with new hacks and tactics.
5 Core Habits
In a decade of studying productivity methods and “hacks”, I’ve found that just a handful of keystone habits tend to make the biggest impact on my personal productivity.
Those keystone habits are:
- Setting short-term “sprint” goals, and breaking those down into the smallest actionable steps.
- Identifying your top 1-3 priorities each day and measuring your progress on those.
- Practicing gratitude.
- Establishing and tracking too-small-to-fail “micro habits”.
- Identifying and tracking your Key Performance Indicators.
These are the habits I baked into The Progress Journal. It’s a physical paperback journal I use to keep me on track and making meaningful progress.
It’s not a huge time commitment or massive lifestyle shift. In fact, using this journal should take less than 5 minutes a day.
The Productivity Pyramid: A Framework to Make Real Progress
We’re all dealt 24 hours a day. I believe how you spend that time, or maybe rather how you invest it, should give you some sort of return.
That could be a monetary return, sure. But it could also be a return in personal satisfaction or impact on others.
Today, I want to introduce a productivity framework I’m calling The Productivity Pyramid.
11 Simple Ideas that Tripled My Business
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective.
This post (and podcast episode) are inspired by my presentation at FinCon last month. I broke my own rule of not seeking out any speaking gigs, and submitted for a breakout session.
The idea was a bit of an homage to the conference: 10 FinCon Breakthroughs that Tripled My Business.
Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant: When, Where, and How to Do it Right
The hard truth is that we all have a limit to our capacity and how much we can do in and on our businesses — and that’s a tough pill to swallow for some entrepreneurs and small business owners.
But when you’re up against that ceiling you have to decide between two options — you can settle in, like OK, this is my life now. Or you can ask for help in breaking through, and that’s what this episode is about.
Growing your team in such a way that you have some breathing room in your schedule and in your mental bandwidth to do the work that’s required of a business owner, instead of the work of the business doer– to borrow from Sean Marshall in episode 312.
322: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each
“We are simultaneously gods and worms.”—Abraham Maslow Power plus humility, right? It’s a great combination and something to keep in mind as we try and build our businesses. We can accomplish amazing things, and yet, we’re gone in a flash. Mere blips on the historical radar. But let’s be the gods of our side hustle … Read more
5 Ways to Be More Effective Every Day – In Just 5 Minutes
Side hustlers know a thing or two about productivity.
After all, building a business is hard work — and doing it with limited hours is even more challenging.
You know it’s not just about getting more stuff done; it’s about getting more of the right stuff done.
Because busy doesn’t always mean effective!
302: Catching Up with the $30k a Month Piano Teacher — How He Grew His Business While Cutting Back His Hours 97%
You might remember Jacques Hopkins from episode 223, where he broke down how he turned his hobby of playing piano into a solid $20k a month online business at Pianoin21days.com.
Things were going great; he had a bunch of happy customers, he’d quit his engineering job to focus on it full-time, and he was doing what he loves.
261: Health and Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs – The Most Overlooked Productivity Hack?
I felt gross. I was tired from chasing a toddler around, out of shape, and fighting a series of frustrating injuries.
And I realized it was hurting my output at work. Building a business takes real energy and real brainpower, and I wasn’t performing optimally because my body wasn’t performing optimally.
I knew I had to do something about it.
25 Productivity and Automation Hacks from a 6-Figure Freelancer
There’s a great deal written about how to find work in the first place, but once you have it, how do you manage everything effectively? You must avoid becoming a victim of your own success, keep your work-life balance healthy, delight your clients, and ensure you still have enough projects coming in.
If you want to work in harmony and avoid the anxiety monster, you need to look at every aspect of your work and ask “How can I make this better?”
How to Find Time for Your Side Hustle: 3 Fundamental Productivity Hacks and How to Unlock an Extra 2 Hours a Day
You’re busy. I get it. There’s never enough time in the day to get it all done.
Yet you’re reading this … so that tells me you have a least some free time to dedicate to improving your productivity and starting or growing a side hustle.
This post will share 2 non-negotiable truths about time, my 3 favorite productivity hacks, and how to arrest the 9 biggest time thieves in your life to free up an extra 14 hours a week.
