What Makes Highly-Productive People So Successful?

This week, What makes a super-productive person? What do the most productive people do that other people do not do? That’s the question I am tackling this week.

 

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Script

Episode 141

Hello and welcome to episode 141 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a fascinating and challenging question to answer. What habits and actions do the most productive people use to male them so productive. It’s a question that has interested me for years and I have quite a long list of ideas I have collected over the years that this week I will share with you.

But first… If you are struggling to make a time management system work for you, or you feel your personal time management is terrible, then I may have a solution for you. Earlier this year I developed a new way of managing your workload called the Time Sector System. It’s a system designed for the twenty-first century and shows you that the only thing you can control is when you will do something. 

It does not matter what it is you need to do, in what order or how many tasks you have to complete within a project. The only thing that matters is when are you going to do it. After all, no matter how urgent, pressing or important a task is, if you do not have time to do it, it will not get done. 

So, if you want to learn a system that shows you how to manage your time properly, take a look at the Time Sector System. Full details of which are in the show notes. 

Okay, it’s time for me now thank you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Helena. Helena asks: HI Carl. As someone who has been interested in productivity and time management for a long time, what do you know about how really successful people manage their time and get the important things done?

Hi Helena. Thank you for your excellent question.

Before we get started, I need to address the elephant in the room. Whenever I talk about what I have learned from super-productive people I have met and read about, cynics will always point out that these people have an army of personal assistants doing a lot of their work for them. 

And while this is true to a point. It is far too defeatist and simplistic. You see, super-productive and successful people were not always super productive and successful. What helped them to become the way they are is not an army of assistants, but a clear sense of what is important and what is not. 

What these people know, and many others have not figured out yet, is that your work is divided up between high-value tasks and low-value tasks. 

The high-value tasks take your goals and projects forward faster and more effectively than the low-value tasks. Low-value tasks need doing, but the super-productive among us demote their value on their to-do lists and where possible delegate those tasks to other people. 

Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you are paid $30.00 per hour when you are working and you have six shirts to iron for next week. Now I know from personal experience to iron six shirts would take around an hour to do—well it would for me. If you spend one hour doing your ironing, you have lost $30. Alternatively, if you took those same six shirts to a cleaners around the corner it would cost you $10.00. 

So, which is the better use of your time? Doing work that will pay you $30.00 or ironing the shirts that will pay you nothing? 

If you take the shirts to the cleaners the net gain to you financially is $20.00. 

That’s how the super-success manage their time. They understand the cost/benefit of the work they do. It’s how they think and that way of thinking is very different from the way most people think. 

So while you may not have your own personal assistant, it does not mean that you have to do everything yourself. There are ways you can delegate your work. All you need do is get a little creative and know the value of your time. 

For those of you starting our with your own business, maybe you could look into hiring a virtual assistant to do some of your admin tasks. You do not need to pay a virtual assistant for a forty-hour week, you only pay them for the time it takes to do the tasks you want them to do. 

All you need do is work out how much it would cost you to delegate the task against the time you save and the amount you would make by better leveraging your time. 

What it comes down to is knowing which tasks are important and which are not. I know that sounds simple and obvious, but it is surprising how many people do not do it. Most people treat every task as equally important and this is why most are stressed out, overwhelmed and feel they are making no progress at all on their goals or their projects. Not all tasks are equal. Most of them are not at all important. 

Another way of working this out is to think in terms of the 80:20 principle. 80% of your results will come from 20% of the tasks you perform. So what you need to decide is what those 20% tasks—the ones that will give you the 80% return. Once you have established that, you can then try and delegate the 80% that do not do very much. 

Another area where I see highly productive people excel is in how they manage their calendars. Your calendar is sacred territory and you should never ever allow anyone else to have control of it. 

Now if you work in an organisation where your boss or anyone else can arrange meetings on your calendar you need to find ways to prevent that from happening. One way, for example, is to block time out on your calendar so you are shown as not being available. You can create ‘fictional’ meetings with yourself to do focused work so your calendar shows you are busy at certain times of the day. 

Another trick you can use is to plan sessions of work a month or two in advance. If you know you have a project at the end of August, for example, you could block two days off around the 20th August. When you do this two things will happen. Firstly, your sub-conscious mind prepares you for it and secondly, if you tell people in advance—like a few weeks in advance—they are less likely to be upset or concerned about it. I learn that trick from one of the most productive people I have ever met. It works brilliantly. 

The final thing super-successful and productive people do is they say no a lot more than they say yes. You see what these people understand is that if they spend more of their time each day on the high-value tasks, they will become more successful. If they spread their attention and say yes more often, they end up spending far more time on low-value tasks and they know when that happens their income and productivity suffer. 

There’s a wonderful story about Steve Jobs where if you asked him for his time and it judged what you were asking him to do was low value, he would just ignore your request. He would give you a blank stare—if you asked him in person—or would ignore your email/text message. Now that’s going beyond saying no. That’s saying nothing. People soon got the message. 

So, Helena, if you want to become a super-productive person and enjoy the benefits that come with that, you are going to have to make some uncomfortable decisions. For most people making these changes requires them to come outside their comfort zone and ask some very difficult questions. It’s easy to delegate blame to your company, your boss or your clients. When you do that, you are taking the easy road and it will banish you to a life of regret. And I do mean that. When you look back on your life in ten or twenty years time you will regret being so available to other people. You will regret not accomplishing the things you always wanted to accomplish and that is not a nice place to be. 

So if you are ready to start the journey, the first thing you can do is establish what your high value and low-value tasks are—this is why a “do not do” list can often be useful. It shows you what are low value and what you should delegate or just find a better and faster way of doing them.

I hope this has been useful to you all. You do have the power to become highly productive, you just need to decide how much you are willing to sacrifice.

Thank you for your question, Helena, and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish all a very very productive week.