Eric Siu shares five productivity moves: optimize sleep with a mask and 66-68°F room, hire someone to cook your meals, use TextExpander to skip repetitive typing, schedule 15-minute meetings instead of hour-long ones, and outsource errands to couriers and delivery services.
All right, so today we are going to talk about 5 overlooked productivity hacks that are going to help you grow. But before we do talk about it, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform you're on. Okay, let's talk about the first one. And yeah, all of this relates to— doesn't matter, your normal life, business life, whatever. So number 1 is sleep optimization, and there's some subcategories in here. I can go on and on about sleep optimization, but a couple things that stick out to me. So I went to Amazon and I bought this sleep mask for $20. It's a silk sleep mask. It sounds a lot fancier than it really is. You put it on and basically all the light is out. You're basically— your eyes are closed. And I always thought wearing a sleep mask was stupid, but it actually helps quite a bit. The other thing I'll say is make sure that your room is at about 68 degrees. So when I think about 68 degrees, like, my friends used to be like, oh, 75 degrees in a home is like perfect. 75 degrees is way too hot. If you look at the pro athletes out there, they sleep at about 66 to 68 degrees when they're going to bed. And what I'll say is, look, if you can't deal with the cold, like I can't deal with too much AC, I'll turn on the AC before I start showering. And then that's a good 20 minutes, 30 minutes of cold air that blows throughout your home and it helps a lot. The other thing I'll say too is if you are able to somehow block out the noise, meaning wearing earplugs, whatever it is exactly, That's gonna help go a long way too. I can go on and on, there's a bunch of other stuff I've done around sleep optimization, and I just— oh, one more thing I'll add, a purifier. An air purifier goes a long way. I no longer sneeze in my home, so that's been a big change. So, number 2. Number 2 is hiring a cook. So, it sounds a lot richer than it really is. It's, oh, who does this guy think he is, like hire a cook, right? No, it's not like a butler or anybody like sitting in your home, like living with you, making food for you. It's actually someone, and I literally put up a job posting up on Craigslist, and I asked for 3 pictures of food that they make, and then basically they made some food as a test run, and the food, honestly, relatively speaking, it's not that expensive. It's equal to what I would pay in LA for like a salad when I go out to eat. So it's worth it because the person cooks the food, delivers the food outside my place, I grab it, I put it in the fridge, and I just microwave it. It saves a lot of time. Speaking of time saving, number 3 is around couriers. So a courier service could be like Postmates, it could be like Instacart. Oh, sounds rich. It's really not if you value your time. If you value your time and time's not renewable, right? What you can do is when you're busy doing other things, people are out there shopping for you in the supermarket and then they are also out there, um, getting food from your favorite place and they bring it up to you. Guess what? You've just saved 20 minutes and you spent that 20 minutes Maybe you do that twice a day. That's 40 minutes. Maybe that's 60 minutes. Maybe it's 2 hours. Who knows, right? But you compound that over an entire year, all that other time that you saved, you could have spent doing something more productive. All right, so that's number 3. Number 4 is TextExpander. So TextExpander helps you save more time too because you find yourself saying the same things over and over and over. And when I'm typing like sales questions or interview questions, Or hey, uh, you're interviewing for us up in our downtown LA office. I don't want to type the same 3 paragraphs over and over. With TextExpander, I just hit 2 keys and boom, the paragraphs come out. It saves me so much time. They actually give you some statistics as well in terms of how much time that you have saved overall. All right, number 5, last but not least, is scheduling meetings not for an hour, not for 45 minutes, not for 30 minutes, Schedule them for 15 minutes. So I have a little, here's another little hack for you. You can use a Calendly or a ScheduleOnce link, and instead of saying, oh, what time works for you? Oh, these 2 times work. Oh, those times don't work for me. Well, these times don't work for me either. And then you start getting mad at each other, and then there's all this back and forth. You could've saved it using something like ScheduleOnce or Calendly, so that's kind of a bonus. But scheduling your meetings for 15 minutes, I find that it requires people to be succinct, get to the point, and then I don't wanna talk to you anymore. Just get to the point. I'm gonna do what I can to help you, and then that's it. But what happens is when you stretch it to 30 minutes or even an hour, people start to dilly-dally, they start to talk about the weather, they start to talk about their, you know, their pet rock, whatever it is exactly. Like, it starts to get old, and you wanna get to the point. Your time is valuable. You're seeing the centralized theme right now, right? Taking care of your body, right? So you can operate better throughout the day, but also optimizing your time too. If you can do those 2 things, you're gonna have this mentality that you should be optimizing this, this, this, right? Don't become like a machine, but the more you optimize, the better you're going to become as a performer overall in business and also in life. Hope you enjoyed this. Uh, let me know what you think and, uh, we will see you tomorrow and don't forget to watch the next tip.
