How to WORK SMARTER | 8 Strategies for Productivity in 15 Minutes

If you want to learn how to set boundaries, use the right tools, and plan your day, then this video is for you.

And one of the gaps with entrepreneurs is that they feel like because they own their day, they can spend it like they want to. You cannot spend it like you want to.

They say that hard work won't kill you, but I don't want to take the chance.

So no matter how late at night you go, before you wrap up, just take 4 minutes and really think through everything that you have to get done for the next day.

What's up, Believe Nation?

It's Evan.

My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So to help you on your journey today, we're going to look at 8 proven ways to work smarter, not harder. Enjoy. Coming up at number 1 is set boundaries with Eric Thomas.

I have a ritual where even if you're my closest friend, I have boundaries. So just because it's my company, it doesn't mean I can take calls all day, right? I have boundaries. So you can't call me at a certain time. Why? I'm working. So if I'm on the phone all day, just be— and I'm saying this to entrepreneurs because one of the gaps— and we'll talk about this later in the show— but you got to find the gaps. And one of the gaps with entrepreneurs is that they feel like because they own their day, they can spend it like they want to. You cannot spend it like you want to. You, so if you were working for IBM or you're working for Ford, whoever you're working for, you couldn't be on the phone all day at a major corporation talking on the phone. So, so why do you allow yourself to talk on the phone when it's your business? Matter of fact, it's yours. You should probably, you should make sure there's no phone calls going on. It's your business. So one of my rituals is when I get started, there are no interruptions. When I get started, I don't care if it's my wife, my children, they know that from a certain time frame I'm going all in, and I can't go all in answering the phone. I can't go all in watching TV. I can't go in with the distraction. And so some entrepreneurs are like, why am I not blowing up? Because you don't— you're not in abstraction. You don't have that, that, that moment of your day. I don't care if it's 2 hours, 4 hours, where you shut the entire world out. No Twitter, no Facebook, no, nothing.

No Instagram.

No Instagram. We love that Instagram. So, but just for 2 hours I'm going in, and once I come out, then we can do Instagram. And I'll be honest, your content probably would be stronger if you had that, that time of isolation, of solitude, where you give yourself a chance to think, you give yourself a chance to go in, and when you go in, you go 120%. So yeah, that's like that.

Number 2 is use the right tools with Tai Lopez.

And the amount of— and guys like Warren Buffett, I mean, he says He loves quoting that one quote. I don't know the exact quote. I should have memorized it. But he goes, they say that hard work won't kill you, but I don't want to take the chance. I think that's how it goes. And he quotes that. And he says, I pretty much sit around all day looking for opportunities. And since 1965, I think, 51 years ago, they've made 25 good decisions that have made almost all their money. So on average, every 2 years they were able to find— so what he spends all his day doing is reading and looking, being observant. So I do think you have to be aware. But hard work is very uncorrelated with wealth. And it will get you— it's the biggest— so I was talking about there's a lot of people out there giving business advice about working hard.

A lot.

There's not one. There are some more than others. But Alex Meyer says his theory, he calls it— what did he call it? Little Mind Theory or Ant Theory. That basically it's a primitive impulse that if you say to people, you know what, working hard is going to get you far, it jives with our primitive mind because 50,000 years ago it was true. There was no technology. The man who, you know, hunted with a spear, but even then, the one who had a spear versus the one who just used his hands, still won. Technology has been beating everything. So what actually is correlated with wealth is using tools before most people are. So you want to look for tools. To me, social media is just a tool, just like a caveman who had his bare hands versus a caveman who came up with his first spear. Or if you study history, you had the Bronze Age and things like that. And during those ages, we'll look at the Incas. Have you ever read the story? Not Pizarro, but who was the one who went to the Incas? Not Magellan. Well, one of them. It was what, 30 soldiers that beat 100,000 Native Americans? They had horses and armor, and they just decimated a whole— it was like 25 men. That's how— if business is war, right? You want to be like that. Let other people have 100,000 people. And you won't burn yourself out.

Number 3 is work in 90-minute chunks with Robin Sharma.

The myth of the harder I work, the more productive I will be has been debunked by the science. If you study human performance, here's what they've realized, and Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz have done some great work in this field, but here's what the science says. Optimal performance and productivity happens in 90-minute chunks. 90-minute cycles. So, what am I saying? Work for 90 minutes and then take a break to recover. Then work for another 90 minutes and then go for a walk. And then work for another 90 minutes and then take a drink of water. And then work for another 90 minutes and maybe take a nap or read something interesting that's not related to what you were doing. What will that do? It will keep your mind focused on the work at hand. It will increase your energy because energy is like a well. You deplete it, you need to fill up the well again. And it will really keep you at your productive best and will also keep you inspired rather than getting burned out.

Number 4: Follow the 80/20 rule with Brian Tracy.

When it comes to making your daily to-do list, make sure that you're working from the 80/20 rule. If you have 10 items to do on your list, 2 of them will be more important than the other 8 put together. You can do this by asking yourself, If I were to be called out of town for a month, what is the top 20% of my tasks that I must accomplish today? By knowing how to prioritize tasks and working from a list, you increase your productivity and output by 25 to 50% each day. After you've made your effective to-do list, make sure that you create time blocks dedicated to each task. Keep in mind that new tasks and responsibilities will come up continually. Phone calls will come in, emails will need to be dealt with, and meetings will need to happen. The key to working smarter is also setting aside chunks of time for those unexpected tasks that will come up. Scheduling your time this way reduces stress and makes you feel in charge of your life.

Number 5: Learn to delegate with Richard Branson.

The next stage is, you know, is to be a great delegator and not try to do everything yourself. Try to find people who are better than you all the time. Try to find people who are better than you to put you out of business effectively. So, you know, whatever you're spending all your day doing, Try to find someone who's better than you to do that, to replace you at it so that, you know, you can go off and think about the next big picture. You know, an entrepreneur is not a man, not a manager. I mean, an entrepreneur is somebody who is great at conceiving ideas, starting out, starting ideas, building ideas, but then handing over to really good managers to manage the businesses. You know, the moment you've got more than one business, you can't be hands-on doing everything.

Number 6: Manage your emails effectively with Tim Ferriss.

How do I deal with email overload? There are a few tools that very much help for this. So the first that I would mention is a tool called Boomerang. What Boomerang allows you to do is schedule automatic follow-ups so you don't have to remember to check if someone has replied, for instance. And you can set parameters for that You can also set a time, a future date and time when your email will be sent. This is extremely, extremely helpful. The next tool is Email Game. It seems very silly in some respects because it's gamified, but you'll generally knock out your email probably 40-50% faster. And the reason for that is it doesn't allow you to look at your inbox. It takes you sequentially through every email. You can't just click on it and go, "Eh, I don't wanna deal with that right now." Mark is unread. You can't do that. The next is to routinely go through your inbox, star things that are from close family, important contacts who manage your life, let's say an accountant, lawyer, whatever it might be, and then archive all the rest with the assumption that if it's important, it's going to come to you a second time. And the last recommendation I would say is that you should you should not treat email like a chat tool. And whenever possible, you should use an augmenting tool to handle that function. My team and I use Slack for a lot of these conversations. I would additionally say that just emptying your inbox does not mean you've accomplished anything.

Number 7, pre-commit to one task with Thomas Frank.

Pre-committing to a task is simply building some sort of device that binds you to finishing it before you actually get started. And to do this, you can use what are called commitment devices. It's why I use BeMindful reminder to ensure that I create 2 things every week on my website. If you have some way of making sure there's a consequence for not getting your work done, you're gonna be more motivated to stay focused on that work. This can be as simple as writing down that you're going to get X done in 30 minutes, and if you don't finish within 30 minutes, you know that you've failed. You've externalized that goal by writing it down, and now that you've failed it, you're gonna feel bad. You could even do something crazy like hiring a lady off Craigslist to slap you in the face like Maneesh Sethi did, or you could stay within the realm of sanity.

That's cool too.

You can also pre-commit to one task by eliminating your ability to do anything else during that time. This is often called the burnt ships technique, and it's in reference to an inaccurate but still compelling story about Hernán Cortés telling his men to burn their ships before they attack the Aztecs. The motivation for doing this would have been to keep his men focused on the task because they had no other option. They couldn't go back.

And number 8, the last one before the bonus, is Plan Your Day with Marie Forleo.

So no matter how late at night you go, before you wrap up, just take 4 minutes and really think through everything that you have to get done for the next day. So here's how I usually do it. First thing I do is I open up my calendar and I take a look at all the appointments that I have for the next day and the time that those appointments will take. Like this: 1 o'clock, I got a team call that lasts 30 minutes. 3:30, I have a MarieTV script review that'll take about an hour. And then I have a 6:30 spin class. Then I write down all the projects and the tasks that I need to get done, and I give myself a little bit of an estimate about how long I think each project or task will take. Of course, these are estimates. Sometimes I get things done faster and sometimes they take longer, but at least I give myself a baseline to work off of. 9:00 to 10:30 AM, I'm gonna write a first draft of a sales video script. I'm gonna give myself about 90 minutes. Then from 11:30 to 12:30, I'm gonna review my social media schedule, give myself an hour for that. And from 2:30 to 3:00, I'll do a little email clearout. And finally, I make a new little section at the bottom of my notepad with personal things that I need to handle for that day. For example, get Nanny a birthday card and mail it. That'll take me about 30 minutes. Order more Kuma food, all of 10 minutes. And book a haircut for the next month takes me about 5 minutes.

Boom!

That is it. Super simple. So when I do this, it informs exactly when I need to be at my desk and working, which tells me when I need to wake up to have enough time to do to do my little morning routine and get everything done without feeling rushed or stressed. The worst thing you can do is wake up in the morning and go straight to your computer and open up email, and then all of a sudden you're pretending to work all day, and at the end of the day nothing important ever got done. Nobody's perfect, and of course not every day goes as planned, but this system gives you the best chance possible at making sure that your most important projects get done. Especially if you have an inconsistent schedule.

Now I've got a special bonus clip on working smarter with Jack Ma, but before getting to that, the question of the day is, I'm curious, what is your number one tip that you have learned on how to work smarter? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really excited to find out. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever Your one word is much love. I'll see you soon and enjoy the bonus.

Who works harder, the people at eBay or the people at Alibaba?

Sometimes you have not only have to work hard, you have to work smart.

So would you say you work smarter than eBay?

I'd have to say yes, right?

Well, so far.

Yeah, so far. So far.

Okay. Because I think, you know, we are pretty lucky people. And the people see you, yeah, you work very hard. True, in this world there's so many people work very hard, but they're not that. I told my team when we IPO'd, I asked a lot of people sitting there, I say, you know, all of you guys, Monofly guy, millionaires and so rich. But 15 years ago, who are we? It's so difficult for us to hire people 15 years ago. People who are not that bad. I said people can walk, still walk on the street. We hire them. Because nobody believe internet. Nobody believe internet. And they join the company. Those people who believe they're smart, they were headhunted by to the other company. They set up their own company. Those people, nobody go to headhunting them. They stay. Today they become successful. Very key reasons we insist, we persist, we never give up. We believe the dreams together.

So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy.

The most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you, or that sums you up, or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.