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.

Click here to learn more and see if it’s a fit for you.

214: Become a Master of Productivity, Discipline, and Focus

November 5, 2021January 26, 2017

John Lee Dumas is the host of EOFire, where he interviews today’s most successful entrepreneurs 7-days a week. JLD has grown EOFire into a multi-million dollar a year business with over 1,500 interviews and 1.5 million monthly listens. His latest project is The Mastery Journal: Master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days. You can learn more at TheMasteryJournal.com.

Longtime listeners may remember hearing John way back on episode 15 of The Side Hustle Show. 3.5 years and almost 200 episodes later I’m excited and honored to have him back on the show.

212: Micro Habits: The Too-Small-to-Fail Plan for Big Results

December 3, 2018January 19, 2017

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

That line from Aristotle may be one of the most overused quotes in history.

But it’s overused for good reason: it’s a good quote. At least the first part. Aristotle was onto something for sure: we are what we repeatedly do. I agree with that 100%.

The issue I have is with the second part: Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

211: Double Your Energy in 7 Days: How to Feel Your Best and Get More Done

November 5, 2021January 12, 2017

Perhaps what we need isn’t more hours in the day, but more energy in our hours. That’s ultimately what this episode is about: feeling better and more alive so we can get more results from our businesses.

Yuri Elkaim is known as the “health whisperer” for being able to get to the heart of what matters and produce amazing health, weight loss, and fitness results where there seemed little hope.

Yuri is a former professional soccer player, a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, the author of The All-Day Energy Diet.

197: Prioritization, Elimination, Automation, and Delegation for Side Hustle Nation: A Productivity Roundtable

June 2, 2023October 13, 2016

This week’s episode was something a little different as I was joined by three of my favorite productivity podcasters, Erik Fisher, Mike Vardy, and Paul Minors.

Combined they have more than 300 productivity-themed podcasts under their belts and represent 3 different countries!

Since getting the most out of our limited time is a ongoing struggle for side hustlers, I invited them on the show for a unique roundtable format to see what’s working today and what wisdom we can glean from their archives.

The 30-Day Meditation Challenge: Am I 10% Happier?

November 4, 2021September 12, 2016

In August I embarked on a personal challenge to develop a meditation habit. If I could do it every day for a month, maybe it would (finally) become a routine practice.

Inspiration for the challenge came from a conversation with Dan Harris, an Emmy award-winning journalist who discovered meditation as an effective way to calm the voices in his head.

Dan convinced me to give it another shot, citing scientific evidence that meditation has a whole host of benefits including lower blood pressure and increased focus. So I committed to meditating every day in August, and I recruited 47 side hustlers to join me for accountability.

My Time Tracking Results: My Decidedly Un-4-Hour Workweek and Passive vs. Active Income Time

January 27, 2020September 21, 2015

Last week I shared one of my favorite productivity hacks: tracking your time. This simple act helps keep me on task during the day, plus gives me some cool insight on where my hours actually go. It all goes back to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed”, right? My Results – How I Spent … Read more

Try This Dead-Simple Productivity Hack

October 18, 2021September 14, 2015

To make the most of your side hustle hours, try this super-simple productivity hack: tracking your time. There are a bunch of fancy apps that will do this for you (Toggl is one I’ve used in the past), but for my latest trial I just logged tasks and hours in an Excel sheet. Each day … Read more

500 Days of Cold Showers (Plus 14 Listeners Share Their Experience)

January 5, 2023July 20, 2015

Yesterday marked 500 days since my last warm shower.

When Nick Reese challenged me to start taking cold showers last March, my initial reaction (and you can hear this on the podcast), was “that sounds horrible.”

But since I’m all about different experiments, I figured I’d give it a shot for a month and see what happens. And the weird thing is, some good things started happening (over 25 comments on this original post).

123: Time Hacking for Side Hustlers: How to Get More Hours, Clarity, and Results

November 4, 2021July 16, 2015

If you’re looking for ways to squeeze more out of your limited side hustle hours, this is the episode for you. I’m excited to introduce Julie Sheranosher, host of the Time Hackers podcast.

Julie and I met at World Domination Summit in 2013 — she flew in all the way from Israel — and she is one of my favorite people and true time management pro.

I feel like my productivity has improved over the years, but I’m always learning about new systems and “hacks” to test out. One of those hacks was simply writing down my top 3 priorities for the next day the night before.

96: Essentialism and Finding Your ONE Thing

October 15, 2018February 27, 2015

In Hawaii and on the plane home I read two books with very similar themes:

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
Both titles share the common message of FOCUS — de-cluttering your day, your work, your mind, and your life.

They came at a good time because I was starting to feel overwhelmed with projects and wanting to pursue new ideas and opportunities as they came up.

Usually Hustling, Occasionally Social