How I Maximize My Productivity Every Day

In the early days of my business, I was working hard every day, but I wasn't very productive. I would work 10-12 hours each day, but at the end of the day I looked back and couldn't really tell how anything I did that day drove my business forward.

These days, I'm in a place where I'm able to maximize my productivity every day...regardless of how many hours I worked.

In this episode, I talk about the three daily practices that have helped me increase my productivity and get more done every day.

In today's episode, I'm going to talk about how I maximize my own productivity every day. This is super important, it's a really important topic, because one of the biggest daily struggles for entrepreneurs, in all honesty, is managing their day. That doesn't mean just managing their time, but their energy, their to-do lists, and really everything else that goes into running a business, because it's a lot. When it's just you, when you're playing this role of solopreneur, you don't really have the same level of accountability that you do with a more traditional employment situation, because you don't really have a boss, looking over your shoulder, you don't have an external accountability structure. What that means is that it's even more important to be even more conscious of not just how you're planning your day, but how you're going through every piece of it as a whole. 

Thinking back to my early days in the business, I really struggled with maximizing my productivity every day. Sometimes I would wake up on Monday morning, and I would go all in, and I would work hard, work myself to the bone. Then by Tuesday morning, I would be so exhausted because I just burnt myself out. But more often, what happened was that I was working all day every day, but it wasn't actually feeling productive. I was working really hard, but it wasn't feeling like I was getting a lot done. Part of it was that I wasn't necessarily doing the work or taking the actions that I needed to be taking in order to drive my business forward, so while I was taking action, I was not necessarily taking the right actions. 

The other piece of it was that I had a massive to-do list every day, and I never got everything done on that list, which obviously means that at the end of every day, I looked at my list and I said, “Wow, I didn't get a lot done.” It also meant that I started to create this somewhat rolling to-do list, where I don't have an isolated to-do list for each day. It's just this one big list that continues growing perpetually, and that's an absolute kiss of death for productivity, because it never ends, because you never see the progress you're making, because every time you cross something off, two or three new things get added, and that's not going to help you see what you're doing each day and making sure that you're moving in the right direction. 

Fast forward to where I am today. I can pretty confidently say that I maximize productivity every day. Now, does that mean that every day is wonderful and amazing, and I feel like a powerhouse? Not at all. What it does mean is that every day I am taking concrete, powerful action towards the growth of my business, so that no matter how many hours I work, I am finishing every day, feeling like “Wow, I got a lot done, and I really made an impact on my business today.” That's arguably what's more important in this conversation: knowing that you are moving in the right direction, because that's what's going to help you realize whether you are being productive or not.

In that vein, there are three really big productivity—I'm not going to call them hacks, I'll call them practices—that I have been embodying that have really helped me get to that point. Obviously, I can't go into each of them in as much depth as I would like, but if I had to say the three things that have made the biggest difference, not just in my productivity, but in my business as a whole, it would be these three things. 

The first is to identify your main objective each day. This is not necessarily a task, because a task is different from an objective, but identify the number-one objective that you want to reach during that day. Oftentimes, that will be a task or require one or two tasks, but you always want to have that one shining star that if you know that you get nothing else, that if you get that one thing done, if you meet that one objective today, you'll still know that you've had a productive day, because that action will have been something that will have driven your business forward. It doesn't have to be massive. It doesn't have to be a huge objective. It doesn't have to take hours and hours in one day to accomplish, but it does have to be something important. It does have to be something that drives your business forward in a really concrete way. That way, like I said, you'll get to the end of the day, and you'll say, “This is the thing that I accomplished today, and wow, that feels good.” 

The second is to block time in your schedule specifically for your revenue-generating activities. These are the daily driving tasks that you need to be taking that drive your business forward, things like outreach, or content posting, or anything that starts conversations with prospective clients. This could be 30 minutes; it could be 60 minutes; it could be two hours. It doesn't really matter, but you want to make sure you block out the time for those revenue-generating activities every single day. Personally, I like to do that towards the beginning of the day, because that's where I feel that energy most, but this can be whenever during the day that you want it to be. 

The point here is very similar to the first productivity practice, which is around taking the time for the most concrete actions that are going to make a difference in your business, that are going to help get you clients. The act of blocking time for this isn't just about making time for it. It's also about limiting the amount of time you spend on it. Say you're taking a Facebook organic approach to your client attraction, well, it can be really easy to sit down to do your revenue-generating activities and then look up at the clock and realize that six or eight hours have passed. That's what we don't want to happen here, because if you're spending that much time in one day on your client attraction process, that's a problem. You're probably not actually being as productive as you could be. 

And the third is to balance the number of meetings you have in a day with the number of tasks that you need to accomplish in a day. This is really important for me, because I tend to be more of an introvert, which means that meetings are great—I really love talking with prospective clients, working with my clients—but they do take a huge amount of energy from me. Personally, I try not to book more than three meetings in a day, because what I have noticed about my own pattern is that once I have more than three meetings in a day, I'm really not able to accomplish much else. So I've started to really balance the number of meetings I have with the amount of other work I need to do in a day. If I have one meeting, my to-do list that day is going to be a little bit chunkier, but if I have three or more meetings, my separate task list for that day is going to be a little sparse, honestly. 

I keep that in mind when I'm planning out my day, because I know what I have found is that if I have a ton of meetings and a huge amount of stuff to do as well, I'm not going to get much on the to-do list done, and where that's going to leave me is getting to the end of the day, feeling tired, but also feeling like I had a pretty unproductive day, even though I was working really hard all day. 

The main takeaways from today's episode are that if you're feeling like you're falling into a pattern of not being very productive, three things to try are to first identify that main objective every day; second is to block time for those key revenue-generating activities; and third is to be really conscious of how many tasks you're committing to on days when you have perhaps a lot of meetings or other kinds of engagements like that. 

As always, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I look forward to having you tomorrow, and until then, have a great day and take care.