How to Kick Ass at Work and Be the Most Productive Person You Know
Do you want to triumph in your work and achieve jaw-dropping results?
Are you ready to vanquish what is stealing your time and energy?
Is it time to stop struggling, grow a backbone, and reach mind-blowing levels of productivity?
Read on to find out what prolific superstars do every day to unleash their wondrous success.
1. Set Audacious Goals
Don’t just set audacious goals, write them down. Refer to the goals every morning. Research someone who has achieved what you desire and use their path as a guide. Visualize the steps and actions you need to take to get to where you want to go. Big and brave goals will release energy. Most importantly go and ACT towards achieving the goals every day.
2. Join the 5 am Club
Some of the healthiest and most successful people on the planet wake up early every morning. Wake up at five, and you're earning yourself two to three hours to invest in exercise, self-care, learning, and working without distraction or interruptions.
Start getting up every morning at five to start your day. Does this sound impossible? Prime your mind at night before you fall asleep. Promise yourself that the second you open your eyes, you will count to three and jump out of bed. It sounds stupid. It will work.
Immediately engage in five minutes of exercise. The exercise will wake you up better than a cup of coffee and clear the fog from your brain.
3. Start Your Day with Yoga
You may know that yoga has a long list of benefits for your health. Did you know that Yoga will improve your productivity too?
Commit to starting your day each morning with yoga, and you will be training your mind to focus. Focusing on the breath and tuning in to the observer within you will pull your attention away from mindless thought loops and being emotionally reactive.
Calming your mind, remaining the balanced observer of your emotions instead of getting caught up in their spiral, and breath work will train you to retain focus. You won’t just get more productive. You’ll start devoting your best energy to the work that matters the most.
4. GO! Immediate Action
Stop thinking and start acting. Count the three and act. Speak out your innovative idea at the meeting. Create a new video. Call up the potential client. Action will create a feedback loop that will positively fuel more activity. You don’t get work done by thinking about the possibilities.
5. Stay Active All Day
The ultimate productivity tool in the world is exercise. So do some early morning yoga at five am, then go for a walk after lunch, and engage in aerobic or strengthening exercises in the evening.
Stand up at least once every ninety minutes to move. Go outside, climb some stairs, do some desk yoga, or get old school and do twenty jumping jacks.
The movement will boost your energy, sharpen your focus, and enable you to sit down to work again refreshed.
6. Your Best Physical Fitness
Strive towards reaching the best physical fitness of your life to watch your energy explode. You may think that exercise will exhaust you and decrease the power you have for your work.
The opposite is true. As unbelievable as it may sound, exercise will supercharge you with energy, and reaching your best physical fitness level will skyrocket your ability to kick ass at work.
7. Iron Routines
What do Thomas Edison, Stephen King, and John Grisham have in common? They are all successful in their careers and masters of productivity, and they follow strict routines. Their routine regulates everything from when they get up in the morning, to when they work, exercise, and relax. Create a routine and stick to it consistently to maximize your mastery and productivity.
8. Be a Minimalist
Dirt and clutter suck the energy out of a room and infringe on your productivity and creativity. Declutter your office, home, car, schedule, and relationships. Simplify and streamline. Do you need all those apps on your phone? Is your productivity app saving you time, or wasting it? Delete it!
Go for clean, empty spaces to free your brain to produce its most brilliant work in record time.
9. Be Consistent
Invest time every day in working on the medium and long-term projects that are most critical to the success of your career or business. Even ten minutes a day adds up to over an hour each week. Don’t underestimate the power of showing up and investing the time every single day.
10. Eat That Frog
Set a priority at the close of every workday for the next day. Get your most critical work done before lunch the next day.
11. Eliminate the Energy Vampires
Eliminate the energy vampires from your life that are sucking away your excitement, enthusiasm, and self-belief. If you can’t eliminate energy vampires, take immediate action to counterbalance them with people, activities, and media that will cause your motivation to soar.
12. Seek Out Inspiration & Positive Energy
You are going after audacious goals. You need positive energy to spiral you upwards. Be aware of everyone and everything that influences you in your life. Actively seek out podcasts, books, documentaries, people, groups, and activities that inspire, motivate, and charge you with energy to act.
13. 5 Minute Rule
Do it now if it will take five minutes or less instead of putting it on a list or wasting mind space UNLESS you are in your flow of pure focus in the morning on your critical work. Don’t let anything pull your attention away from what matters the most, even for five minutes.
Give anyone also the courtesy of five minutes. At the end of five minutes explain how you will take action or follow up with them at a later date.
14. Release Addictions
You can sell your TV, ban all news sites from your laptop and phone, commit to living drama-free from this moment forward, ban all excessive alcohol, drugs, and sugar consumption, give up complaining, exit the lousy relationship, refrain from gossip, or stop shopping.
Release whatever addiction is stealing your energy. Leverage the newfound power towards kicking ass at work, supercharging your health, and skyrocketing your productivity.
15. Work in Batches.
Schedule similar tasks to be done in one focused session. Do not do one video for your YouTube channel. Spend a day getting eight videos done for the entire month. Do not create one podcast. Schedule a day to complete four all at once. Instead of visiting one client, schedule meetings with five on the same day.
16. Primary Consistent Focus
What is the ONE THING that is the critical key to your future success and growth in your career or business? Dedicate time each day to this main thing in the morning. Set goals and seek out learning and mentoring to improve your mastery of your ONE THING.
17. Laser Your Focus
Do not multitask. Stop the leap from one task to the next. Spend a few hours each day working on one activity. You will gain scales of economy as your mind, body, and attention flow into the work. Don’t be surprised if you get even double the work done.
18. Hide for a Few Hours Daily
Do you get your best work done in the office? Hide for a few hours each day to escape all interruptions and distractions so you can achieve pure focus. Devote your full attention to producing flawless, highly innovative, or creative work.
19. Write a NO List
Do you have a to-do list? You need a NO-LIST even more. Brainstorm all the activities that are sucking up time and energy and preventing you from making leaps forward to your professional and personal success. Commit to eliminating everything on your NO-LIST from your life.
20. Disciplined Daydreaming
Unleash the vibrant potential of your creativity and innovation by letting your subconscious process and integrate.
Before the digital world people had time to think while they waited in lines, for trains, while walking, while waiting in a restaurant for friends to appear. To kick ass at work and be the most productive person you know you need to schedule the time to sit and think.
Allocating time to disciplined daydreaming will enable you to make connections, find new inspiration, or clear your brain of thoughts and focus on mindfulness and the present moment.
21. Does it Thrill You? Say Yes. Otherwise, Say NO
Start only saying yes to what thrills you. Otherwise, say no, find a way to outsource the work, or minimize the amount of time and energy you must invest.
22. Double Your Learning Rate
What are you working on learning right now? What book are you reading? What course are you attending? To kickass at work and boost your productivity you need to be learning every day. Either sign up for a class, or put together your own curriculum of books, podcasts, audiobooks, and articles to learn and master the area that will kick your career, business, or personal growth into high gear.
23. Schedule Time for Self Care and Rejuvenation
Take time to replenish and nourish your body, mind, and soul daily, weekly, and each season. Retreat yourself by following a guide to creating a wellness retreat at home. Or you can attend a yoga retreat or boot camp. A rested and refreshed body and mind will accelerate your career when you turn your attention back to your work.
24. Not Everyone Needs to Like You
You need to get comfortable with people not liking you to become the most productive person you know. Do you want to supercharge your productivity and kickass in your career? You can’t say yes to every request. Most of us have an intrinsic need to be liked, so we say yes to everything. Stop.
25. Start Creating. Stop Consuming.
Use your free time to create before you consume. Write before you read. Cook before you research recipes for the next meal. Go out and take exquisite photographs before you seek inspiration on Instagram. Paint before you sign up for a new art course.
Always start with the action, and creating, before you consume.
26. Only Check Email and Attend Meetings in the Afternoon
Protect and reserve your peak energy morning hours for your most valuable and creative work. Wait to check your email, attend meetings, and do administrative work in the afternoon.
27. Email Check Twice A Day
Only check your email twice a day and turn your alert signal that you have new mail off. Schedule time to answer and process every email when you do check your email until your inbox is once again empty.
28. Turn Off Your Voicemail
Listening to messages takes too long. If you can’t turn your voicemail off, then instruct callers to send you an email or text instead.
What if what you love isn’t what you’re good at right now? We all need to start somewhere. Start dedicating at least a few minutes EVERY day to practicing. Set goals and sign up for courses to improve.
29. Outsource What You Hate
You don’t always need to eat that frog. You can pay someone to eat it for you and save your willpower.
Better yet, you can offer up the frog to someone else who sees it as a slice of chocolate cake. One person’s misery can be another person’s happiness. While you hate writing, someone else may hate standing in front of a camera. Tradeoff and you’ll both win.
30. Go to Fewer Meetings and Make Them Valuable
Don’t go to any meetings you deem unnecessary. Insist that each meeting you attend has an agenda and a purpose. Propose that all sessions are conducted standing up, which will reduce their length.
31. Build Your Influence
Build your influence by adding value to people’s lives. Help others to grow or achieve their goals and dreams. Proactively contribute to the communities and all your relationships to build your influence and give it deep roots.
32. Know Your Strengths & Continually Improve
What are your top three character strengths, technical strengths, and knowledge strengths? Know where you are strong and what you enjoy doing the most. Play to your strengths and invest time every day in continually improving your mastery in your top three in each area.
wishing you radiant health, joy, and abundance, Heather