What if new habits can dramatically increase your productivity? What if you spend an hour a day reading, exercising, or spending time with your family? In the book “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management”, which went on sale in 2015, keynote speaker and expert Kevin Kruse interviewed seven billionaires, 13 Olympic athletes and 239 entrepreneurs who entrusted him with the keys to not Feeling overwhelmed by the lack of time.
Among the interviewees are: Richard Branson, founder of the multinational conglomerate Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, director of Berkshire Hathaway and the third man with more money in the world; Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of the Airbnb real estate platform; Mike Cannon Brookes, co-founder of software firm Atlassian, among others. Kruse summed up in tips how to achieve a correct optimization of time.
Ten Tips to Manage Time Efficiently:
1. Think in minutes, not in hours: most people cut off activities according to hours and half hours. The truly productive know that each day has 1440 minutes and that each and every one of them count.
2. Fight against postponement by traveling in time: productive people know how to anticipate their future self-sabotage with realism, and try to find solutions.
3. Check your email a few times a day: productive people are not constantly updating their email, or respond to every sound emitted by your mobile phone. Instead, they schedule certain times in the day to check your inbox quickly.
4. Follow the formula “80/20”: known as the “Pareto Principle”, in most cases, 80% of the results come from only 20% of activities. Productive people know which activities lead to the best results and look at them ignoring the rest.
5. Touch things only once: if it is something that will take five or ten minutes, productive people leave it done at that time, without postponing it for later. This reduces stress because they can remove it from your mind, and it is more effective from the point of view of time because you will not have to waste minutes to do it later.
6. Focus on one thing: Hyper productive people know how to recognize their “Most Important Task” and work on it for an hour or two each morning, without interruption.
7. Always get home for dinner: there is always something else to do, something else that should be done, something else that could have been done. Productive people know that not everything in life is work, so they distribute their 1440 minutes in each of the important areas: work, but also family, exercise and hobbies.
8. Avoid meetings: meetings tend to time-consuming; Start late, gather the wrong people, wander without reaching the central issue and go on for hours and hours. Productive people avoid having meetings every day and, if they are essential, ensure that they do not extend beyond what is necessary.
9. Delegate everything you can: to do without the “I” as much as possible is what productive people do, since it is impossible to be everywhere doing everything at the same time.
10. Be constant in the morning routine: a good breakfast, some exercise, read the newspaper. These are activities that these people respect and seek not to postpone.