8 Small Changes to WORK LESS and EARN MORE Money

If you're looking to work fewer hours while still growing your income, you don't need to go to the extreme. All you need to do is make a few small changes and stick with them over a long period of time to dramatically change the way that you earn money forever. Start by using the focusing question. So this comes from Gary Keller's book The One Thing, and the entire book is really centered around this specific question: what is the one thing I can do that such by doing it will make everything else easier or totally unnecessary? Tim Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. One day he was speaking at an event and was asked, what do you do in a day? You're the most productive person I've ever met. How do you manage your time throughout the day? He said, I'll wake up, drink some coffee or tea, maybe I'll read, go for a walk, I'll meditate, and I'll just kind of hang around. Because in that entire time, what he's doing is asking himself this question. He's pinpointing the one thing that he can do, like being the big domino, that when you knock over that one domino, it's going to make all the other dominoes tumble over. Now you most likely aren't going to pinpoint this perfect task right away. You may need to spend some time marinating this question and really thinking about it, but that time away from the office is going to be well spent because when you do pinpoint that task, it's really going to make everything else easier or completely unnecessary. Embrace the 80/20 rule. Now you've probably heard of the 80/20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto principle, that states that 80% of our results come from only 20% of our efforts. I guarantee that you spend 80% of your time on 20% of the apps on your phone. 80% of the time you probably wear only 20% of your clothes, and 80% of your revenue only comes from about 20% of the things that you do. Now the question is, how do we pinpoint that 20%? Grab a pen and paper and get everything out on the table, and I mean everything. Make a big list of all the different tasks that you juggle in your business. List everything from content creation to marketing to customer support to building products to admin work to collaborations, and get it all laid out right in front of you. Doing this will allow you to see all the different tasks that you actually do on a regular basis. And now it's time to pinpoint which ones are more important than others. For example, if your one thing, that big domino, was to create a digital product that you could turn into a passive income stream, some things that you could do would be to change the colors and animations on your website. You could answer customer support emails, or in other words, do admin work. Or you could just close your eyes and hope that you'll magically make more money. Or you could create valuable content for your audience. Email a special offer to your list, create new products that you can sell, or collaborate with other creators who share your audience. Doing this will allow you to prioritize the high-value tasks that actually make you money. Set clear work hours. Ideally, you want to set your work hours in the hours where you are at your peak. You're the most awake, the most alert, and the most productive. So what's that time for you? Are you more of a morning person, or do you prefer to do things later in the day? There's no wrong or right, it's just catering to what works for you. And also ask yourself, how many hours do you want to work in a week? Personally, I used to work 50 to 60 hours per week when I was in construction work, and when I left construction to start my own business, I said I never want to do that again. I want to work about 20 hours per week in my business. Now, when you decrease your work hours, what you start to do is leverage what's called Parkinson's Law, which states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. For example, if your professor gives you an assignment and says you have 1 month to complete this assignment, you're probably going to take the entire month. But if your professor gave you the same exact assignment and said you have 1 week to accomplish this, you're gonna hustle more and get it done in that week. So we can leverage this tool in our business by just giving ourselves fewer hours to do the work. If you gave yourself all day every day to do your work, you would end up wasting a lot more time than if you gave yourself a condensed amount of time to do the work. Leverage time blocking. Now you might be thinking, oh, I've tried time blocking before, that doesn't work, it's too strict. I used to feel the same way until I started to use big time blocks. So in my calendar, I have 4 major blocks of time, and this is how I break up my day. I wake up at 5:20 in the morning and I go to the gym, and then I have breakfast, hang out with my girlfriend, I do a little bit of meditation and some visioning for my day and what do I want to accomplish for that day, my big domino. And then from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM, I have my work hours. And then from 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM, I have dedicated family and friends time. And then starting around 8:00 PM, I have my wind down and sleep time. What this does is give me an idea of where I'm at my day and just a visual representation. And for me, that really helps. Set clear boundaries. Clearly communicate your availability with clients, colleagues, friends, and family. It's important to set these boundaries so you can protect your time, whether you are working, hanging out with family and friends, or you're resting. Sometimes I'll lean a little bit into family and friends time if I'm just finishing up a little work project, but typically around 2 PM I'm done, sometimes even sooner. As long as I got my major tasks that's going to move the needle in my business done for the day, it doesn't really matter to me if I finish a little early. When I'm in family and friends time, I want to be with family and friends. On the weekends, I'm not going to work, even though of course I could. I could always work more. But by having these boundaries in my life and actually sticking with them, I'm able to have a life of relaxation and productivity. Leverage digital products. If you really want to grow your income and decrease your work hours, invest time into creating digital products things like ebooks or online courses. When you create digital products, they do not require a lot of upfront storage, packaging, or shipping like physical products. They cost very little to create and are easy to update, and you can sell to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And the best part is there is no limit to the amount that you can sell. Digital products are what allow you to essentially print money out of thin air. And if you want to know how to turn your knowledge, your ideas, and skill sets into digital products that you can sell, I created a 5-step guide that walks you through how to earn your first $500 per month of passive income in just 5 simple steps. There's a link in the description if you want to check that out. Create efficient systems. System stands for save yourself time, energy, and money. When you create systems, they should be designed to streamline your workflows and repetitive tasks. Now, there are 3 ways that you could organize tasks. You can either eliminate, automate, or delegate. If you did what we talked about in the 80/20 rule and you laid out all your tasks, you could look at them and decide which ones you can eliminate, automate, or delegate. Most things nowadays can be automated with the different AI and tools that we have at our disposal. So when you have a system that does the heavy lifting for you, you are able to step away and do the other things that you want to do, whether that's a different type of work or spending time with your family and friends. For example, in my business, I have systems that allow me to get discovered by my target audience, bring them to my website, to nurture them, to make sales, to book phone calls, and all this stuff happens whether I'm working or not. And that's only possible by creating systems. Craft smart templates. Templates are great for frequently used documents, like if you're sending proposals and different emails to people. Now they can take a little bit of work up front, but they're going to save you a ton of time down the road. For example, I have a podcast where I interview experts in different industries and interview them on how they started their online business or grew it to being the empire that it is today. So I like to use a tool called Toby that organizes the different tasks that I have in my business. I have one for interviews. Anytime I'm doing podcast interviews, all the tabs that I use for a podcast interview are inside of here, and I can open up all the different tabs at the top. What's cool is that I have my interview questions already laid out and my interview email template because I kept writing the same exact email to everybody that was on my podcast, and I do a lot of different interviews. So this, all I do is copy, paste it into my email, and I just need to change the name for whoever the guest was that was on my podcast. And that's the power of using templates. So it used to take me about 30 minutes for each podcast interview. Now it takes me about 5 because I streamlined my process and I created templates to help me accomplish the task faster. Now, if you like this video, you're going to love this video. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.