Have you ever seen a TV show about entrepreneurs or a magazine about entrepreneurs and just been totally blown away with the level of productivity that they have or at least seems that they have to get stuff done that they do? I don’t even understand where they find the time and the resources, except for the little bit of understanding that I’ve gained so far.
“GET MONEY!” Baby Steve was quickly discovering how to turn this “birthday” thing into a profitable venture business.
I get quite a bit done in my side jobs, in extracurricular activities, but I haven’t quite found that next level up that these entrepreneurs have discovered to help them achieve levels of awesome productivity that most people couldn’t even dream of. If you’re ready to be ultra-efficient and maybe even become an entrepreneur on some level yourself, well, from what I understand of it, here are four things that you need to have a better understanding of them:
1) Understanding Outsourcing
I have just recently come across this, and whether that’s transcribing things that you dictate, having articles written for you or working on programming tasks through people who are much better at it than you are…outsourcing can be an absolutely wonderful way for you to be productive.
If you have the money to pursue this path and not enough time to do some of the things yourself, there’s no better way than to go with people that are much higher qualified and better off to do tasks for you with the right compensation. You do the right research and you’re fair to the people that you deal with, you can get absolutely amazing work from the tons of outsourcers that are available.
2) Understanding Leverage
Leverage, I’ve seen tons of definitions for this term and it wasn’t until I came upon my own definition that I really began to understand it. Leverage as I see it is getting out more than you put in. This means you put in a dollar, you get two. You make a product and you can turn it into 10 different ones from that one singular creation event at the beginning.
How this translates into some of the work that I’ve done, for instance, this post here was dictate. So I’ll take this audio and turn it into a video later. And then I’ll take some of the text and make a PowerPoint slide and turn that into something I can share with some of the people I know and I talk to.
And I can continue to share and spread these ideas from that singular article that I dictated at the beginning. That’s leverage. Do it once and continue to reap rewards for a long time to come.
3) Understanding Scheduling
If you’re constantly hopping between small tasks back and forth, you’re not getting the right things done. Bouncing your attention between gigantic goals that you’re aiming for, daily duties and individual project milestones can really drive you nuts if you’re not sure how to handle everything.
But if you can get a greater understanding of scheduling, to-do lists, priority and urgency, you can begin to see how everything fits into the overall picture of what needs to get done and work those things accordingly.
4) Understanding Time’s Value
Not too long ago I figured out exactly how much money my life is worth to the second. This isn’t too complicated. You take the amount of money you bring in every year and divide it by 8,760. Now that’s the number of hours in a year. You can go further if you want seconds. But you do that and you’ll find out where you’re at.
And when you have that number, which is something like $6 an hour, asleep or not, for someone that makes about $53,000 a year, you know that if you have to go wait in line to get some postage stamps, that that waiting in line has literally cost you $3.
Okay? So if the reason you stood in line to do it yourself is to save $0.50 instead of going to a kiosk, well guess what, you just paid $2.50 more than you could have, and lost a half an hour of your life. Understand what your time means to you and act accordingly.
The Entrepreneur In You Wants Out!
The four step guide to do-it-yourself entrepreneur level productivity involves understanding outsourcing, understanding leverage, understanding scheduling and understanding times value in your life. Get these things in order and you can be as productive as you want to be and maybe the next big entrepreneur.