3 Productivity Tips that Will Make You More Productive

There's 24 hours in a day. You probably spend around 8 hours sleeping and another 2 to 3 hours eating and running errands. So after all of that, you have somewhere around 14 hours on a daily basis to spend doing what you like. My name is Zach Oldham, and over the past 5 years, I've built a marketing firm with a team of 15 people. In this video, I'm going to show you 3 strategies that I use to stay productive, even on days when I feel like absolute dog shit and everything is going wrong. My goal by the end of this video is for you to have at least one strategy that you can apply to your own life. So click subscribe and let's get into the video. Okay, the first big tip for you is to break down your tasks and goals. One thing that I do is I set different timelines and goals for different projects and tasks. By having goals for the year, month, week, and day, I can ensure that I stay on track from an overarching perspective, from a holistic view, while still getting what needs to be done on a day-to-day basis. You've probably heard millions of times to break down your tasks into different steps to make it easier to complete. But that process and how effective that process is differs based on the type of person, the type of learner that you are. There are a bunch of systems and strategies for this that can be found with a quick Google search, but I'm gonna share what works best for me. I'll begin with the yearly perspective. So for the year goals, I have a few main ambitions or passions or achievements that I would like to accomplish this year. And those are my overarching goals for the year. So some of those goals look like revenue at Flax Labs, projects that I'd like to launch and have completely finished, and also personal health and fitness goals. I then break down what needs to happen for each one of those goals. So we have a rough idea of what the year will look like, but because things are so dynamic, it's impossible to plan accordingly, and it's not worth spending too much time getting too granular with your planning. And then on Sunday evenings, I plan out my week. Getting more and more granular now. I know what needs roughly to happen this month, so I block that out into what roughly needs to happen and be accomplished this week. By the time I get to my daily goals, I have 3 to 4 main tasks that need to be completed on that day, and this makes it very easy to actually get things accomplished. For tracking all of this, I use a collection of journals, although I don't use them very much anymore as I prefer everything to be digital. My Google Calendar runs my life. It has changed the way that I think about time completely and the way that I view my own time. And my calendar actually integrates with email, my other phone calendars, my sleep tracking, or it has all of my meetings and all of the other errands that I need to do. Even like waste day and recycling day gets synced into there. And I literally pull up my calendar and my calendar tells me what needs to happen on a daily basis. So calendars are amazing and it's completely shifted the way that I think about time and actually freed up a ton of time for me and made me a whole lot more productive. So I would strongly, strongly recommend running your life through a digital calendar. If you're using any other system, it's just wasting time and making you less productive. Another way to increase productivity is by creating new habits. You're a product of what you do on a consistent basis. So creating new habits is an easy way to see consistent results in all areas of your life. I want to introduce you to a concept made popular by the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, and this concept is habit stacking. By attaching new habits to old ones, it makes them a lot easier to fit into your schedule. For example, if you want to get in slightly better shape, you can make it a rule that every time you finish a glass of water, you do 15 push-ups. That's a very random example and probably not a very effective one, but it shows you how you can connect old habits to new habits. Okay, time for my favorite tip out of all of these, and that is to delegate and automate as much as you possibly can. By systemizing the different processes in your professional and personal life, you can outsource elements of it that allow you to be more productive. For instance, in my personal life, I have meals, cleaning and laundry automated. Now, it might sound stupid at first glance, but I spend around $200 a month to have my laundry completely done for me, around $150 to $200. I spend around $350 to $450 a month on having meals prepped and delivered to my door, which saves me time grocery shopping, saves me time preparing food and cleaning up after myself. And last but not least, I have cleaning done, which again saves a few hours a month. And my cleaner actually puts away my laundry when it arrives as well. So that saves me easily 10 to 30 hours a month. So in total, I'm— I spend around $800 on having 20 hours of extra free time on a monthly basis. For professional-related tasks, there are a few tools that I'm going to highlight very quickly. One of them is Zapier, and Zapier has to be one of my favorites. This is a very easy way of linking almost every single software that's available online together. For instance, I have things like Stripe transactions automatically get sent to me through Slack. Slack is my main communication hub. That's where I'm really active. That's where I check messages all day long and that's where I'm responding to messages all day long. So this really helps me with monitoring inside my business as to what's going on. With revenue and finances and all of the stuff that most people could not give a toss about. We also use Upwork, LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job posting platforms to find talent for us to outsource work to. It's similar to how you use an accountant or a bookkeeper for paying your taxes. You could technically go and learn the tax code, but you're likely going to save yourself a lot of money and time by going and working with an accountant. We use the same strategies in our personal and professional lives again at Flax. So at Flax, we hire out when there is somebody that's going to be a much better candidate than we are for getting a task done. Then we hire somebody for that position. And as your earnings per hour as an organization increases, you have more capital to spend on outsourcing and automating. If you are working a regular job, I would still recommend having some sort of virtual or personal assistant. That you can find online and that can work from anywhere in the world that can help you manage some of the more menial tasks in your day and take them off of, off of your plate entirely. Free up that extra brain space. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to me and goodbye.