The Real Secret To A 2-Hour Work Day
I recently attended a network event as a panelist on the subject of social media. Before the panel discussion part of the evening began, a group of about one hundred attendees who work in PR and/or own a business, were mixing and mingling in the pre-show drinks and nibbles party.
I was standing in a circle talking to a group of people, all involved in running their own businesses. As we talked I noticed a difference between how these people worked to build their businesses (or at least how they talked about their work) and how I work on my business. They seem forever busy, and while they were brave enough to start their own business, the amount of labor hours they put in is significant.
The problems people have with their relationship to work became clearer when I mentioned that I’m doing a productivity course from Eben Pagan (Wake Up Productive), whom none of them had heard of.
I told the people in the circle how I often have a nap in the afternoon if my body feels like it, which got a laugh from some, presumably because they couldn’t imagine sleeping in the middle of a work day. I felt the need to defend myself and explain the nap is actually beneficial for my productivity (Eben suggests this in the course – though I didn’t need him to give me permission to take a nap, that’s for sure!).
My naps are short, usually around 20-40 minutes long and are not solid sleep, more like a dozing in and out of consciousness. I feel amazing once I get up, very clear and coherent – it’s like a reset button when you are feeling tired in the afternoon. Eben, and people he quoted, concurred about the effectiveness of napping for improved productivity.
This concept, the idea of “not working” when it’s designated work time based on what society tells you or how you have conditioned yourself, is something that lots of entrepreneurs and certainly employees have trouble coming to terms with. If you’re working for someone else then obviously you can’t just go to sleep on the job and if you are working for yourself the sense of obligation to keep producing is very strong – you feel guilty if you don’t work a 12 hour day.
Personally I got over the typical working day time structure a long time ago. Truth be told, I never really had to adopt it because I went from school, to university to running my own business at my own pace, so I never had the stringent nine-to-five mentality applied to my life, even if most people around me live that way Monday to Friday.
Do You Work Too Hard?
How To Brain Dump Tasks To Increase Your Productivity
I’m going through Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive (currently closed) video training program (Eben is fast becoming my favorite mentor) and one of the first starter tasks is to write down everything you are thinking about so you can “clear your mental desk”.
This reminded me of a technique I first came across from John Reese called the “brain dump”. Neither John or Eben invented these techniques of course, but that doesn’t really matter. John’s Brain Dump is slightly different to Eben’s clear your mental desk, but the principle is the same.
The idea is to get everything out of your head on to paper so you can stop thinking about it. As an entrepreneur – or just a human – we have a lot of things we need to do and keep track of, especially if you have a family as well.
When I returned home from overseas as expected there were a lot of little things that needed to be done. My lawn had grown to about a meter high, and needed cutting. My house needed a good clean. I had to buy food, pay bills, sort out my car registration, and all kinds of odd things – and this doesn’t even include the business tasks!
Over the first few weeks my brain kept collecting things I had to do and storing them for later. As I worked on the computer and walked around my house, certain objects or emails would trigger a reminder of something that needed to get done. This actually causes stress as your brain is constantly feeling the pressure of needing to do something but not actually getting it done.
I’m fairly good at dealing with that kind of stress as I tell myself to be patient and get it done when I can, but that doesn’t make the problem go away and of course, the task needs to get done eventually. It pays to become aware of how you think when it comes to task accumulation in your brain.
This is not a new problem for me, but thanks to Eben’s course I was reminded of a solution to help deal with mental clutter, especially during periods of new starts, in my case returning home from overseas and the new year beginning.
How To Brain Dump
How To Become An Efficient Procrastinator
Everyone is a procrastinator on some level. Some of us are terrible offenders, spending hours doing useless things like browsing facebook or blogs or walking up to see what is in the fridge multiple times a day, all in an effort to avoid the work we know we should be doing.
Over the past few weeks I implemented a method to help get the most from procrastination. This technique means you still procrastinate, in that you do something that is not exactly what you know you should be doing, but you still get results from your activities rather than waste time on idle tasks.
I call this efficient procrastination and here’s how it works.
Your focus needs to be on action. The whole reason I started thinking about this technique in the first place was after writing my article – Are You Drowning, Treading Water or Swimming? – which made me realize as long as the majority of daily activities moved me forward in some way, I could count that day a good one.
Once you realize that action is key, the next step is to isolate actions that lead to results of some kind for you and your business. Generally some tasks require more work than others and some you enjoy more. It’s precisely because of the tasks that you don’t enjoy, yet are critical for your business to move forward (or for you to move forward personally – like say studying for an exam), that you look for ways to procrastinate.
When you are sitting down, working on something you don’t really enjoy or you are tired of and that procrastination urge hits, it’s time to go and do something else, however that something else is still an activity that helps your big picture. You must choose a swimming forward task, not a time waster.
