Breaking Routine | Discover Top Work-Life Hacks for Entrepreneurs and You

What are my favorite work-life hacks? So I recently did a video about my favorite YouTube channels and the ones that I subscribe to. There aren't that many, the ones that I kind of watch all the time. And one of my loyal YouTube followers, Neil Polshuk, wrote in to ask me, Evan, I love the Tim Ferriss channel that you, you added. What are some of your favorite work-life hacks? And that's a, that's a tough question for me because for the past, I don't know, 10 years, I've been doing a ton of experiments on myself and my productivity, on things that I like and don't, and what works. I'm constantly changing around my schedule and the things that I do, and I live kind of a weird lifestyle, I guess, compared to most people. You know, I wear barefoot shoes, I use a stand-up desk, I go snowboarding in the middle of the afternoon. I go all over the place. I'm in the office 3 hours a day from Monday to Thursday. It's kind of— it's different, I guess. And it's come from years of kind of trial and error. It wasn't just one day I woke up and tried to do all these things all at once. I don't use my cell phone. My phone number isn't on my business card or my website. That's another big one. Anyway, so some of the ones that have had kind of the biggest impact for me personally I'm going to share 3 of them and hopefully this helps answer the question. This one made me think, Neil. It made me think. You're making me do some hard work today. The first one was when I first started delegating. I remember with my first company, my software company, I always kind of had in my head that I had to do everything myself or my partners would do it, but not the idea of having somebody come on to help me. And the first person I brought on board was for 1 hour a day. I couldn't afford to hire a full-time person and I was growing increasingly frustrated with all repetitive tasks that I had to do, and it was like I can't focus on the bigger stuff because I'm so crunched down and doing these stupid things. And I felt like somebody could do this better than me. And my, my aha moment, I guess, came when I realized that I don't have to hire somebody full-time, which I couldn't afford. I can hire somebody for a little bit amount of time. And there was a guy I knew, his name was Rob, first guy hired, and it was for 1 hour a day. And I was doing a bunch of database work that I hated, and I gave it to him, and he was better at it, faster at it than me. He got a lot more done in that hour than I could, and it freed up an hour of time for me to go and do more stuff with my business. And that was just a little improvement, I guess, to my life at the time, but it just set me on this course because now I hate doing things that are repetitive tasks, and as quickly as possible, as soon as I get bored with something, I'm handing it off. To someone else to do, or maybe killing a project. But I am not stuck in repetitive task mode and being held back from doing things that I need to do to grow my business. And that just, I don't know, it kills your creativity, it kills your productivity when you're stuck doing repetitive things that you hate over and over and over again. So ever since that one small event of hiring Rob for 1 hour a day, I've been looking to make my workflow easier and more efficient by hiring people. The second was chunking my time, and this one came to me as a result of reading The 4-Hour Workweek. And the idea here is anything that you do multiple times per week, do once per week. You do things multiple times per day, do once per day. The first biggest improvement for me was email. I used to be the guy who was super fast on email, answering right away. You know, I get that alert when it came into my Outlook at the time, and I would go and answer right away, and people would respond how fast I was, and it was great, but every time I went to check my email because something new came in, it distracted me from something else, and I ended up not getting my other tasks done. I would just basically be on email all day, and it just killed my creativity and my productivity. And so what I did was I said, okay, I'm gonna do email. I started it twice a day, and then I went down to once a day, and now I don't even have a set time for email. I do it when I'm not doing anything else. And just unloading that was a huge relief for me. It freed up so much of my time, because think about when you get interrupted, at least for me, it takes me another like half an hour to get back into the zone I was in. And so that elimination lets me just focus hardcore on set tasks, and it really helped me. I've applied that chunking to everything I do in my schedule. So I do my videos on a Wednesday, So I speak with my media coach Wednesday morning. Today's Wednesday. I spoke with Jenny this morning, and I sit down and do my videos. And so I'm kind of— I'm in video mode. I'm thinking video. When I'm in the shower, I'm thinking what I'm going to talk about my video, washing the hair, what's going to happen in my video. And I'm ready to do back to back to back to back to back videos. And it's great because setting up the video camera and the microphone and everything, getting the questions ready takes time. And so I don't have to do that each time. I do it once per week and I'm done. On Thursdays I do my meetings and interviews and my radio show, and I'm kind of in that zone that day. So I'm not worried about admin tasks or anything else related to the business. I'm just meeting people, talking to people, and it's easy to go from one meeting to the next to the next to the next Hangout on Google or whatever it is that I'm doing. Again, I found before, if I had meetings all over the place, half an hour before a meeting I found like my productivity was shot. Like I can't start something new because I know I have a meeting coming up. In 30 minutes, so I'm just gonna do little tasks, right? And I just found that happened too much. But when you have back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings, it kind of just puts you in that zone and helps you flow through without being distracted by what's happening next. And then on Monday and Tuesday, I'll do more of my solitary work or project work. So if I'm writing my newsletter or writing an article or doing something that I can just do by myself, You know, maybe I won't shave that day, whatever I feel like doing. I'm kind of in that zone, and I find that just setting up my week that way really helps me. And then the third thing that I discovered, and this was the hardest one for me to break, I think, was, was flow and momentum. So one thing I found with my chunk schedule was I was getting a lot more done, right? By chunking my time, eliminating the email to certain parts of the day, I got so much more done during the day. But then I sometimes found myself wanting to continue on, on something and having to stop because it fell outside my chunk. So I would chunk my day into 90-minute segments. I found I would, I would work best in sprints of 90 minutes and take a break, then something else for 90 minutes. And knowing that I only had 90 minutes kind of forces me to go crazy fast. But I found just sometimes when I was working on a project that I wanted more time. I was really feeling this idea. I was really feeling it. And so I was in flow, and I found if I came back to it the next day, I'd be like, what was I thinking about yesterday? What was that project I was working on? I don't— I would write notes. I don't even remember what they mean anymore. I don't know if that happens to you guys. It happened to me. And so I would break my chunking schedule only if I was in the flow. And because the stuff that you create when you're in flow is so critical, so important, that's like the big picture life-changing stuff, you have to keep going on it. And you don't want to fool yourself and say, you know, I'm in the flow on these emails, this is great, I'm answering everything so quickly. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the big ideas, the things that will change you and your business for the better. You get those things, you don't wait on them. Don't, don't wait on it and then you come back tomorrow and it's like the idea is not quite there anymore. Take action right away. I learned the rules of chunking and then I know when to break them with momentum. So those are the 3 things that in terms of work-life hacks, productivity, have helped me the most. So again, delegating even for 1 hour a day and just taking the stuff off your plate that you don't need to be doing, then chunking your time down, Anything you do multiple times, you're doing it once at a time and just set that time aside so you can be excellent at it. And then momentum. When you're in the flow, when you're feeling the momentum, that's the most important thing that you need to work, work and focus on for that day and forget everything else that you're doing because you're gonna— you have to stay in that zone. I've created a series of ZUGA guides that go through exactly how I break down those processes, how to automate, eliminate, delegate, news flow, just from my experience as an entrepreneur. It's basically time management for entrepreneurs in a series of guides. So that could be super helpful for you, but those are my 3, I guess, most impactful, most powerful things I discovered that shaped how I view the world as an entrepreneur and how I'm more productive in my life. So thank you for the great question, Neil. For those of you guys watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. You have a question, uh, or if you want to share a productivity or life hack that's worked well for you, please leave it in the comments below. And if you want to see more videos like this, you can click on my face, subscribe to the channel, and you'll see more. Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you soon.