#RichLifeLawyer Show 014: Productivity Tips of Successful People

Ever feel like you go all day, look up, and you’ve accomplished little of actual value?

Feel like you are spending all of your time responding to emails, putting out fires, and doing what everyone else wants you to do instead of what you should be doing?

Then this week’s show is for you.

Productivity isn’t necessarily about doing more stuff in less time.

Productivity is about being able to do what’s important to you first.

Productivity is about recognizing and identifying all of the empty minutes in your day and being intentional about using them for good.

To get the entire scoop you can do one of three things:

Watch the video (above);
Listen to the podcast; or
Read the transcript below.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Christopher Small

P.S. Do you have kids? Have you completed guardianship paperwork? Have you done it correctly? Click here to find out what happens if you don’t do anything: Are you okay with a judge choosing the guardians of your children?

P.P.S. Do you own a business? Do you have a plan so the business, and your family, can survive if something happens to you? If not, click here to learn how simple it is to protect your business and your family from tragedy: 5 Ways to Protect Your Business from Catastrophic Failure.

P.P.P.S. Do you have no kids and think you don’t need an estate plan? Single and think a will is only for married couples. You couldn’t be more wrong. Click here to learn more: 5 reasons estate planning is a must have even if you don’t have kids.

Christopher Small is a Kirkland estate planning attorney who helps people get rich and live forever. He is also the owner of CMS Law Firm LLC.

Three Cornerstones of a Rich Life Transcript

Hey everybody, this is, welcome to, gosh can’t remember an induction. Welcome to episode fourteen, one four of The Rich Life Lawyer Show. As always I’m your host, Christopher Small, excited to be here with you today. Where we talk about productivity secrets of the super wealthy, super productive, super successful. Whatever you want to say these are some of the things that people do. They get a lot done. And get a lot done fast. So they have time to do the other thing that they want. Alright, so let’s talk about, so these productivity secrets are secrets that I myself use, not to say that I am super successful or super wealthy.

Although I may or may not be. Depends on who you ask. But this is how it goes. So, first things first, every, I do a thing every Sunday. I called a Sunday pre-game. Stole this from my friend, Andrew Norman, who is also a super productive person, gets a lot done really accomplishes his goals and sort of gives after, I really like Andrew but what you do there is you basically, you basically kind of plan out your week. So hopefully you have some goals that you’re working toward on whether they be yearly goals or quarterly goals, which you back down the monthly goals and then you can back that into your week.

So you can say you know, what I need to do this week to reach my goals. My big goals. My monthly goals. And you figure that out and then it doesn’t all just end there though. What you do is you try to plot it out. Thing about what you when you do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Given the fact that you have to work. Given the fact that you have meetings at work and things like that and then you begin to arrange your schedule. So that you get six things done every day. Only six all you care about the six. You’re going to get six things done. You’re going to write these down.

So Monday you want to get these six things done and the way that i do it is. I don’t, on that Sunday pregame I don’t necessarily map out everything i want to do day by day. I definitely pick out what I want to have done on monday. And then typically on Monday night I’ll look at the Sunday pregame list and I figure out what I want to do and get done on Tuesday. But if you’ve got these six things, you write them down. Then you look at each thing and you figure out how much time, it’s going to take you to get done. If it’s a big project, then you want to break down what step you’re going to do that day. To get the project done and that that time around.

All the time of those six things should not be more than like six hours because that’s the true amount of productive time you’re going to have in a day. Because you’re gonna have people messing with you, you’re going to have people popping in, you have all these kind of stuff. You’re going to wonder then once you do that, once you take that time, then you want to take those activities and actually input them into your calendar. Even if you are the only one that’s doing something. So you’re reviewing a document or you’re creating something. Put that on your calendar. And then when that time comes. The next day, you do it.

You also, it’s important to schedule in what I call water cooler time. So time you’re going to check your e-mail, time you want to talk to coworkers. I would also then schedule a specific time to return calls. Typically I do it between 11:30 and 12 or 11 and 12 and then 4 and 5. So twice a day I just block out some time to return any phone calls that I need throughout the day. I will also block out typically a half hour. Maybe like a 10:30 and a half hour 2:30 to check email. And then everything else goes in the middle. That way, and then, what you do is you have one rule every day. That is just to follow that calendar.

Just do what it says. Get to work, don’t mess around and get stuff done. If you follow that productivity tip right there, I guarantee you, your productivity, your what you put out, will skyrocket. Your effectiveness will skyrocket. The amount of open time you have will skyrocket. Because what happens you’ll get stuff done you’ll say like okay, now what do I do right. Because there’s this rule, I can’t remember what it’s called where you fill the time allotted for something. Like if you have an hour for a meeting. To go sit a meeting for an hour. Even if you could have been done in fifteen minutes.

So that’s the big, so those are some big productivity tips and I’ll leave you with one more productivity tip and that is to eliminate needless interruptions. Okay and this is particularly true if you have like a staff or if you have people that come to you with questions. What you want to let them know is like look, I want to answer your questions and I want to help you but I only want to do it at this time. Okay so if you have a question that pops up instead of coming in to my office and wrecking my concentration on the things that I’ve been working on. Write them all down and then at 11:00 to 11:30 is question time.

You know come in there anytime you want, open office, and we’ll talk but otherwise I’m going to be working on projects of myself that I don’t want to be interrupted on. And it’s not a mean thing, you know this isn’t coming from a place of spite or anger. It’s really about look, this is the best way for us to both utilize that time. This is the way that I can give you my full attention. So let’s try this and see how it works. So, question of the day. What I want from you. Is what is your best productivity tip? Tell me because I’m always looking for them. So leave a comment below. Remember if you have questions, I can answer them. Twitter @richlifelawyer, go to Facebook.com/richlifelawyer. Just leave a hashtag #richlifelawyershow. To make sure that I can find them when I’m searching and I’ll answer. So, have a great day, see ya!