Success Hack
Success Hacks on How to be Super Productive
“Win your morning – own your day”
The Right Amount of Focus Hack – CEO of Major Company
The 95% versus 100% rule – A guy moved to Santa Monica and was hiking and enjoying the beautiful view. He started running and always pushing harder but he couldn’t beat his best time of 43 minutes! Every single time, it was 43 minutes. At the end of the run he was in a lot of pain, huffing and puffing, and he wasn’t really excited about it anymore, so he decided to just go for a bike ride. He enjoyed it and started noticing everything, like the beach, the trees, and the wind. Unfortunately, when he looked up, he had a pelican shit in his mouth. He realized that, notwithstanding the pelican, it was one of his best bike rides ever! When he looked at the time, it was only two minutes longer than his normal ride. Plus, he was huffing and puffing for only two minutes. The idea is sometimes it’s okay to go only 95% and knock off 5% so you can be able to breathe and not burn out and enjoy other things going on!
If you don’t allow yourself to take off 5% every now and then, you open yourself up to one of the biggest enemies to production….burnout.
How to Avoid Burnout
Breaks Thru the Day Hack – Arianna Huffington
Before, Arianna separated time into work time and break time, and always wanted to maximize work time. Now she realizes to separate the two – time spent taking breaks, taking a walk, working out, unplugging, and meditating – that’s all work, time too. Time spent unplugging and recharging makes her better, more effective, happier in her work and in her life!
Much of the world is still living under the collective delusion they have to choose between their own well-being and success. Science tells us the complete opposite – when we prioritize our well-being, performance goes up across the board. 3/4 of the startups fail, entrepreneurship is about making decisions. Nothing impairs the quality of your decisions faster than running on empty.
Taking breaks will help restart your mind and allow you to think clearly. It is all about taking care of yourself, something we all need to focus more on.
Self Care Hacks – Missy and Jon Butcher
Missy and Jon Butcher are Founders of Lifebook – Mindvalley. They have compiled a list of self-care hacks.
- Do self-care
- Short breaks – take weekends off
- Better breaks – take mini-vacations – weekend trip – once a month
- Bigger breaks – take one week off a month – Mark Victor Hanson
- Take 2-4 weeks off a year – Travel
- Do long cycles of work followed by a long time off where you get to rejuvenate
- Mother nature heals! Go camping for the night and if you can fast as well! This is the ultimate cure to what is ailing you! Hanging out in mother nature!
- Stop working at a certain time, no matter what, each day – ex. 5 pm or 8 pm! Commit to shutting off then!
- Women – get a massage or take a bath with Epson salt – it gets rid of all the toxins in your body!
- Take a break and go for a walk – you get to let all that hard drive go and be able to wake up better prepared to solve those problems the next day!
- Women – especially moms – you are always taking care of others – you need to take time and do self-care for yourself!
Remember, self-care needs to be an offensive strategy, not defensive, so you can get ahead of it and avoid burnout! These are great hacks! Use them and you’ll be able to rejuvenate and feel better. Your mind will be more creative on a regular basis!
Self-care puts you in the mindset you need to be. Once you take care of yourself, you can start becoming the person you want to be…someone who is highly productive.
Productivity Hacks
Calendar Architecture Hack – Adam Fisher
Adam Fisher runs a $2.2 billion hedge fund, which amounts to the designing and implementing of a repeatable schedule every day! It should be defined as the ability to create your day to only focus on activities that move or motivate you toward your goals! It’s also designed to keep your day from being filled up with “gristle”, or activities that don’t serve you!
Fisher understands that having the right things on your calendar is vital to productivity, but what are those things?
3 to 5 Things Hack – Tim Ferriss
You should start out each morning listing the 3 to 5 things that are making you anxious, then ask yourself if it will make your day if you knock these out today. If the answer is yes, then schedule an hour to two hours to focus on knocking out those 3 to 5 things. Remember, 1 to 2 hours of focus does not mean 10 minutes of a productive day of productivity… Remember busyness equals laziness
Listing these three to five things and then figuring out how to solve them appeals to both sides of our brain. You may remember from high school biology that we have two halves of our brains that are responsible for two different areas of our lives. One is creative, the other logical. It is important that we work on both halves.
Separate Creative and Logical Time Hack – Jay Shetty
Jay states he read some research that basically said you cannot as a human think both logically and creatively at the same time. Think about it, how many times have you been in a really creative space and then have to stop and start thinking about numbers or something else? It makes it really hard to switch from a creative space and have to start thinking about numbers or something else. It’s really hard to switch on and off right? Jay states he plans it out and just goes really deep and creative in one shot. Then he makes time for the logical tasks or other things at a different time!
Here’s an example from my own life – I want to go spend a month in a monastery practicing with the monks. So that I can take time for learning, I’m going to plan my business content, my creative space, ahead of time so I could take months to be able to travel! I’m just going to turn Instagram, Facebook, and everything off and focus on my deeper learning. Then I handle meetings about numbers with my team at a separate time, so I can just focus on the logical side!
Making time for each part of our brain can help maximize our productivity. Just take a further look into how going to the monastery has help Jay with his company.
Why Deep Immersion Works
Three Steps Forward, Three Steps Deep Hack – Jay Shetty
People spend a lot of time doing things for only 10 minutes a day. That’s great to take the 10 minutes for focus! But how much focus would you have if you can actually meet with a subject or learning hack. Say for example you want to date someone to see if they’re a good match. Do you think you will learn more about them if you spend 10 minutes a day with them, or if you go do a weekend trip to see if you are going to be a good match? That’s why you always want to deeply immerse whenever you’re doing something! This is because your entire body, mind, and soul work together as a deep effect on you to where it stays long-term and you’re actually able to have the transformation! The more time you’re able to spend focusing on it at one time, the deeper transformation will be! Whatever it is that you want to focus on, whether it is your relationship, your career, or your growth, to get deeper learning, spend 2 to 3 days getting deeply immersed in it so we can have a bigger transformation!
You always need to be working, even if you are taking a break. There are always ways we can be productive even if we aren’t directly working on our business. If you aren’t working on being productive, you put yourself into a zero-sum reality.
Jay’s response when people say he should be working all the time. “So, I’m taking a month off to go to the monastery. I’m getting deeper into how I can serve and make more of an impact in the world. People are always like, Jay, how can you shut off for an entire month? It reminds me of my hack to be able to be good creatively, and then deeper with logic and focus on doing deep meaningful work at one time. One of my teachers says that in order to go three steps forward you have to go three steps deep! And that is why I go for 30 days. So, when people say how can you shut off when your business is doing so well, I remind them that it’s because I’m doing those 30 days. It allows me to grow deeper and have a bigger impact!”
Zero-Sum Hack – David Meltzer
David Metzer was delivering a speech during spring break at a school and a lot of kids showed up. He told himself that these kids are going to be the ones that are going to be successful. The reason why – they don’t zero sum themselves out! Here’s what he means. He has clients who are set up for health and fitness goals and so they workout 3 to 4 times a week. Then the rest of the week they take a break! Whether it’s in the nutrition or the workout, they zero sum themselves out. So whatever effort they put forward on those four days, it’s balanced out when they stop. David always wants to get ahead, go the extra mile, so in this case is working at least six days a week taking a day off! And with that, just by doing that extra two days, you’re able to get exponential growth versus no growth, and you can’t say that I’m not seeing any results. Same with the kids that showed up on spring break. Not only did they show up after studying for the whole year, but they took that extra time and plugged in during spring break when they should be off. So, if you will want to get ahead, go the extra mile and don’t zero-sum yourself out! Go that four days a week but then do the 2 days extra so you not only don’t zero sum yourself out, but then experience exponential growth!
**Disclaimer** Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors in our posts. We’re not looking to win the spelling bee, or even compete. Our goal is to give you the main concepts and short implementable strategies, or what we call “Success Hacks”, so you can implement them right away and get the results you want. To that end, many of the hacks are paraphrase of a paragraph, chapter of a book, or a podcast interview. These are a summary and main points so you can gleam the wisdom and use it. They do not reflect the author or expert’s opinion that’s being quoted. For more info on any of the hacks, feel free to go to the source or Join Our Success Hacks Nation FB Community to ask questions.