2 Uber Simple Productivity Tips to Save You Up To 10 Hours Per Week
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- In today’s Matt Hack, I talk about my own personal productivity system
- I use two SUPER simple tricks to greatly increase my output
How's it going, guys? Matt Ackerson here, the founder of Growbo.com.
You might see an American flag in the background, but I promise I’m not about to make a political speech. Instead, I have two tips for you today that can save you up to 10 hours or more per week.
Let's get into it!
Matt’s (Productivity) Hacks
Tip number one: Become aware of how much time you are spending and where it's going.
I want you to download RescueTime. It is a freemium tool that will give you insights into how and where your time goes throughout the day.
Another option, if you like doing things the old-fashioned way, is to fill out an audit chart. Here is a good example from Squarespace.
In particular, I want you to look at how much time you're spending on email. Communication (or, rather, inefficient communication) can really suck up your productive time, when you could be doing things that are more useful.
So, become aware of where your time is going in general, but with specific emphasis on communication and email.
Tip number two: Think about all the applications you use and how they suck up your time.
I want you to actually think about how many different applications you use, for both personal and professional purposes. I'm talking about social media, like Instagram or Facebook, or any other app where notifications pop up or they email you updates.
Project management applications like Trello or Basecamp, in particular, can become huge time sucks. It’s easy to fall into the trap of replying to everything out of obligation, but it really kills productivity.
What it comes down to is, yes, you can communicate with your team or answer customer inquiries—but be aware of how much time you’re spending.
So many of these applications are essentially inboxes themselves. We're just creating many multiple inboxes for ourselves, and it’s sucking and draining our time and energy when we could be putting that energy to better use elsewhere.
A 2012 survey from the McKinsey Global Institute found that on average, workers spend one-quarter of every day reading and answering emails.
There are plenty of other ways you could be using that time.
One thing you could do? Build more automated mechanisms related to your sales funnel. (If you’d like to learn more about how to build your first sales funnel, go check out our product, the Sales Funnel Blueprint.)
Personally, I’ve minimized the number of inboxes that I actually have, in the sense that I’ve limited the applications that I will readily go out and check.
My team knows that if they want to reach me for anything important, they have to use one of our team chats on Skype. That way, I get a real-time view of what's urgent or important, and I can just check it in between my other tasks for the day. It never sucks time away from something that's more important.
When you compare Skype to a traditional inbox, you realize that when it comes to email you're replying to one message, then another comes in, and another, and another … and it’s just a huge, huge suck of time and energy. And frankly, it’s lost money as well, right?
So, minimize the number of inboxes that you have.
If you work with a team, let them know what the best way is to reach you. I recommend that it is something outside of your main inbox (in other words, something outside of Outlook or Gmail) because you don’t want to have that open throughout the day. It's just going to pull you away from other things.
Final Thoughts
As entrepreneurs, we're always trying to squeeze as much productivity out of every second of every moment of the day in order to get more done so we can grow faster.
So, if you like this Matt hack, where I'm talking about productivity, leave a comment, let me know and I'll do more videos like this. It’s something that I enjoy and I'm always trying to optimize for.
If you have another question about something related to this or sales funnels in general, leave a comment about that too, and I'll be happy to consider making a video about it for the future.
Until next time, my name is Matt Ack, in the Matt hat, delivering you your daily dose of Matt hacks.
Keep hustling, Stay focused.
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