How I Maximize My Productivity
One of the questions I get the most is “how do you do it all?” As humans, we juggle a lot between our professional, personal and family commitments. I work between 10-12 hours a day, workout at least 5-6 days a week, run the household, cook breakfast, lunch and dinner 5-6 days a week, nurture my marriage, etc. and still have down time, while cranking out non-stop results across my personal and professional commitments.
My tenacity is a big part of my motivation, but also I created specific habits to help me control the use of my time to set me up for success every day.
Identify and Protect Your High Productivity Windows / In my professional role, I write a lot of documents and/or have to read word heavy documents. I already know I’m a morning person and my brain is the clearest and on point for my complex tasks between 8am and 11am. That time for me is sacred. That’s when I produce the most. Nothing gets scheduled during that window. When clients ask for a call at that time, the answer is “I’m unavailable,” and then I provide them with times I am available.
Limit Calls and Meetings / Learning when you’re the most productive really makes you want to have more time to yourself to produce. Even when I was in corporate, I kept as many calls and meetings off of my schedule, including from clients. Calls and meetings are so disruptive and destructive to productivity.
At my previous jobs I would openly ask my bosses, “do you pay me to be in a meeting to sit there to listen to information I can read for myself or do you pay me to produce results because I can’t produce in that meeting/call?” The answer was always “yeah you can sit this call/meeting out.” After a while, they wouldn’t even bother me anymore and all of sudden I was productive driving results for my clients. I would say these things even as a junior level person. It’s not about being in a place of power or owning a business to be empowered to say these things, but time is so sacred and it’s OK to clearly communicate what is the best use of your time for the business.
My schedule now is something like this, client calls only happen on Tuesdays (and a lot of time they are cancelled if we don’t have anything actionable to discuss that can’t be handled via email). Then I try to shove all other calls on Thursdays, so that I’m free from calls Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. I always at a minimum block two full work days of no calls or meetings. I do this because if I’m going to be disrupted for one call, then I’ll take a day of disruption to then regain days of no disruption.
How I weed out time wasters is simple. When someone asks you if you can take a call at a certain time. It doesn’t mean you have to take it. I always respond with something like “Unfortunately, I’m not available this week due to client deliverables, but I’m available on XYZ DATE. (which I purposely make it like 2 weeks out). However, I’m available via email to discuss if the need is more immediate.” Guess what? All of a sudden, that call turned into an email and we were able to discuss the need via email.
Let’s address the one resistance comment I get all the time about my approach, “But Lissette, you don’t report to anyone.” WRONG! I report to about 10 clients, and usually clients are more demanding than bosses. I was honest with all of my clients and gave them all the same message. You pay me to produce not be on a calls. Every minute you take away from me, is a minute lost of pitching, managing a campaign, etc. So time management is a two way street. Basically, I control my time. No one else. This is an unlearning of bad productivity habits for a new one.
Everything Gets Placed in the Calendar / I have a lot of tasks to do daily and the way I tackle them is to block out windows of time where I only focus on one client at a time. I wake up in the AM, open my calendar app and knowing what I have to get done in the day I start blocking out 2-3 hour windows per client/need. So lets say if Client X texts me but I’m in the Client Y window time, I don’t respond. I wait until I get to Client X time to respond. This takes a lot of control, focus and constant training to not let unrelated distractions from a specific window of time steer you off course. The same way I schedule specific work tasks, I schedule in my breaks, lunch, walk Tego, workout, therapy check in, etc.
My Emails Don’t Control Me, I Control Them / One thing I see a lot of people struggle with, is their emails. Everyone lets their emails control them to be in a constant state of just answering emails because everyone wants their responses ASAP to show others how busy they are. Applying my client work block method applies the heaviest to my emails. I only answer emails relating to the client I’m working on at that time. I don’t get distracted by incoming emails. My clients already know they wont get responses from me the same day sometimes. Why? Because I’m paid to produce results not send an email response with “ok, thank you.”
Shut Off All Phone Notifications / Shut them all off. The only notifications I get are for text messages and phone calls. All apps including social media notifications are shut off. Our brains are already so overly stimulated. These apps’ main goal with the notifications is to keep us on our devices and also they are just disruptive AF. I go into my apps when I’m ready and check notifications then. At this point, it’s insanely hard to do business via email, text message, FB messenger, IG messenger, LinkedIn. Sorry I’m one person, I tell everyone, business for me is done on email and social is fun for me. So when someone tries to do business on DM, you will always be given my email because I can’t keep up.
So that’s all I got for today! Do you have any productivity hacks I should know about? I’m always looking for new ways to evolve my productivity and efficiencies.