UPDATED: First, you may be wondering why there’s a lady at leisure in an article about how to be more productive. It’s for two reasons:
- When we’re more productive, we have more time for R&R, and visioning.
- Visioning is essential for achieving our goals and dreams.
So this feature image represents the privileges a productive lifestyle affords in both leisure time, recreation and ideation, for the lady is in a power-thinking pose, while contemplating nature’s majesty. This also reflects a glimpse of my ideal healthy and active lifestyle, where there is time to commune with nature for recreation, rejuvenation, ideation and health.
Most creators are dreamers and ideators with more ideas than time. Sound familiar? So how to be more productive and do more in less time? This is a hot topic amongst creators these days as well as in our small entrepreneurial family.
We have LOTS to say on this topic, so please do stay and visit for awhile, and share some of the memes below that speak to you most.
But, if you only have half a minute, scroll through the memes and subtitles to get key takeaways.
The Number One Thing for Productivity
The number one thing you can do to be more productive and accelerate your growth and development, both individually and for your business if you have one, is to set goals and work them daily. To help you with that, we have a free 30 day digital version of the iCreateDaily 90 day goals journal.
It’s About Doing More of What Matters and Less of What Doesn’t
Sounds obvious, right?! It is and yet many people struggle with this for a number of reasons. We’ll get more into that in this article, and the answers may not be the technical checklist kind of productivity system you’re looking for.
We touch on that as well, and certainly, one of the very best ways is to set quarterly goals and work them daily. However, this article goes deeper into the soul of things and works from the inside out perspective as well.
If you just want a quick fix on how to be more productive and don’t want to take a deeper dive into this topic, we highly recommend you set and track your goals with a goals journal. You can get our free iCreateDaily 30-day Goals Journal pdf download here.
I don’t think that I’m necessarily, like, a super-talented songwriter. I think I’m just really productive. One out of 10 songs is a hit. So where a lot of people will spend three weeks on one song, I will write 10 in three weeks.
Sia, Australian singer-songwriter, b.12/18/1975
Table of Contents
- It’s About Doing More of What Matters
- How to Be More Productive?
- Must You Do Just One Thing at a Time to Succeed?
- Multiply Instead of Divide
- Living Your Dream
- Assess and Align
- Essentially You
- Hacking Soul
- 7 Steps to Be More Productive
Audio Article – Do More in Less Time:
How Can We Do More in Less Time?
That’s the focusing questions we’re asking ourselves each day now, and it is a process of steadily orienting toward that goal.
Most of us go through our days, doing what needs to be done next. We hop from task to task and project to project. Sometimes we hop around to different projects before finishing the previous. Does that sound familiar?
That’s fine if you’re retired and creating for fun and hobby. It doesn’t work so well if your growing a business around your area of creativity, interests and expertise.
“If you want to grow a successful creative business in the world, it’s critical to learn to focus on productivity, efficiency and expanding your capacity. Your business growth is in your hands.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
How to Be More Productive?
We’re all for hard work. We work hard every day, seven days a week, most weeks, because that’s what it takes to build the business of our dreams. But when you love your work it’s easy to work hard and still love each day. However, we’re also very much for quality of life.
With all the many things we want to do in life, we must steadily learn how to be more productive. The best way we’ve found to get more done?
Increased Focus, Expands Capacity
- Expect more – assume you have a greater capacity than you’ve imagined. Because you do.
- Set your goals – assess where you want to go, and the steps to get there.
- Close off distractions – this is vital, as distractions derail focus, waste precious energy, and slow down progress.
- Do the work – no excuses, no hopping onto social media; just you and your work.
Expect more from yourself then give yourself the gift of getting it done.
Don’t be Foiled by Friends or Perfectionism
Setting higher goals increases your capacity to do more. Ask any personal fitness trainer. The same goes for our business and life goals.
Perfectionism
To expect more of yourself is not unrealistic. It is the only way to reach the next level. We have to push beyond our current place to get to our next one. To take the stairs takes more energy than walking a straightaway. Same thing with our goals. Set your sites on your next level.
Some people say that their expectations of themselves—perfectionism—are so high that they never start. However, there’s another side of that coin. It’s the side that says expecting more expands your capacity of what’s possible.
Don’t let “perfectionism” get in your way. It’s not about perfection, it is about progress.
Friends
Don’t let your well intended friends and family soothe you into complacency. Your growth may be a threat to them, and can cause them to unconsciously help you settle for less.
Expect more, set your goals, get it done, then rest and recreate.
A balance of exercise, recreation, growth, contribution and free time is essential to health and wellbeing. It’s that white space in life that clears the mind and helps to center your being.
So don’t neglect the space you need to recharge with recreation, family and friends. Just be careful to choose more time associating with the family and friends who encourage your growth and aspirations, and avoid the people, places and things that zap your energy and resolve.
To craft a life of shared vision and the privilege of working with family and friends is to create a life by design.
~LeAura Alderson, Cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
Must You Do Just One Thing at a Time to Succeed?
Many sage gurus and successful entrepreneurs admonish to only focus on one thing at a time. Because, well, logistically, that’s all your conscious brain can do, and focus is of course a conscious process. It’s also true that by focusing on one project at a time, you will go further faster with that project.
We did a podcast interview with The One Thing CEO, Geoff Woods, and have also written an article on goal setting around your “one thing”. Focus is an essential principle, especially if you have a hard time achieving your goals. When you divide your attention between projects it inevitably diminishes your focus on any one of them because division is always a smaller number.
However, there is a way to do more in the same or less time, and a way to multiply your focus rather than divide it. Multiply your capacity through leverage instead of dividing your time and attention and you will multiply your assets.
Leverage everything you do and you will multiply your capacity, and your work will compound over time to create a vast asset to sustain your future.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
Multiply Instead of Divide
In this digital age of rapid proliferation and infinite ideation, it’s more about multiplication than division. You can do more and get more done in less time. How to do more simultaneously, (or almost)? By expanding your definition of your “one thing”.
Walk with us through this process of beginning at the end, then reverse engineering your way there from where you are now.
Start at the End — Visioning
To expand your ‘how to be more productive’ thinking, let’s fast forward by imagining that you’ve already accomplished your current goal.
WHEN YOU’VE ARRIVED AT YOUR GOAL… THEN WHAT?
- What will be your next goal?
- And the next after that?
- What if you had already arrived at your dream vision for your life? What’s beyond that?
LET YOUR IMAGINATION SOAR
Imagine that you’re now free to spend your days doing what you love most, with those whom you love and enjoy sharing time and space. What would that look like? Paint that picture… draw it out… create a vision board around it.
YOUR PERFECT AVERAGE DAY
- Write about your “perfect average day”. (How you will be living each day in the life of your dreams).
- Create a visionboard on your preferred medium, such as drawing, painting, scrapbooking, magnetic whiteboard and clippings, slide show software, etc.
- Meditate and vision on it daily.
*NOTE: “The perfect average day” is a phrase that’s been around for awhile, widely used and origins unknown. This <10 minute video clip by Frank Kerns, explains the concept well.
To do more is to first vision more, and then bring that vision to life through the choices you make and the actions you take.
As an owner, your job is visionary of your company, guiding it according to your ever evolving vision for it.
~LeAura Alderson, Cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
Uh-Oh! If You’re Already Feeling Overwhelmed… Don’t Despair!
If this scenario feels too far removed from reality for where you are now, that’s okay, give it a try anyway. Not as a task to be done or an impossible goal to reach, but rather as imagination at play.
Imagination is an essential part of expanding your capacity as it helps to expand your thinking which will help you to achieve the next goal on your horizon.
THE PROBLEM WITH GENERALIZED ADVICE
Any advice from anyone has to be meted through your personal proclivities and circumstances. Each advisor—even personal ones direct to you—can only offer you guidelines based on what they know has worked for them and others. It may or may not be the right thing for you at the time.
In fact, advice from coaches and gurus and articles like this, can sometimes make you feel worse, which is of course, the opposite intent here. If your vision feels too far away to be real or possible, that can be daunting.
OVERWHELMED?
If you feel overwhelmed by the gap in where you are versus where you want to be, the way out of that overwhelm is simple:
THE WAY OUT OF OVERWHELM IN 3 SIMPLE STEPS:
- Focus on the gains: reflect on what you’ve achieved thus far.
- Express gratitude for all the many good things in your life; write or speak them.
- What’s the ONE NEXT THING that will move you closer to your ONE NEXT GOAL?
- Do that!
Okay! With overwhelm out of the way, you’re now more free to dream and vision.
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, English poet, playwright, 1564-1616
Living Your Dream
Okay, now that we’ve shushed the “doubt traitors”, dream raiders, naysayers and overwhelm, let’s get back to VISIONING.
In fact, at any point in any day, your focus on your vision could be—will inevitably be—disrupted by any one or more of the detractors to dreams. So when that happens to you…
Whenever you get off track with your goals, you’re only one step away—your next step—from getting back on track.
~LeAura Alderson, iCreateDaily.com®
Guided by Purpose
We all know that many retired people end up getting involved in more things in retirement than they did prior, simply because now they’re doing the things they enjoy.
One of the reasons for that is that they also quickly discover that “you can only play so much golf” as the saying goes, before you start to look for more meaningful engagement in life.
So what about you?
What will you be doing when you’re living your dream?
~iCreateDaily.com®
Let’s say that you’ve arrived at that place where you’re living the life of your dreams. What will you be doing then? Ponder your vision of that life… and your perfect average day.
Reflect on your most authentic proclivity… the highest and deepest impulse that compels you… that’s always been with you, before it got covered up (if it did). Head in that direction.
“All living organisms are guided by purpose.
When we are in alignment, there, lives joy.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily®
Full Circle to Productivity
What does visioning and purpose have to do with productivity? Everything. We we work in our zone of genius, we are naturally, fluidly—and often effortlessly—more productive.
Why? Because when you’re on track with your purpose, you’re aligned with your soul. Alignment with purpose means an open pathway to the incredible power of your indomitable soul.
All the productivity hacks in the world will never be as effective as a soul on fire with unfettered purpose.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
Your Dream and Your Business
When you’re living your dream will you work in your business or on it?
Let’s say you decide that you still want to own your company, even though you could sell it and retire early. Instead of owning a business that has created a job for you, or instead of being slave to your craft and trying to make ends meet, you get to be the creative director and visionary.
Many creators and hobbyists who haven’t turned pro with their art say that for it to become their work would take the joy out of it. However, the more you succeed in growing a business around your art, the more you will be freed to do more of what you enjoy and less of what you do not.
As a business owner, you can grow into working on your business more than in it. Better to be an owner rather than a manager or worker.
Better to own your business than to be owned by it… to be slave to it.
Once again… reflections are invaluable, so continue to orient yourself to this question and refine it as you go. This should become a frequent process… at least once a quarter as you set your quarterly goals, if not monthly and weekly.
- When you’re free to do whatever you enjoy most, what will you be doing?
- What do you want to do most?
- How do you wish to spend this time in your life?
“When I am free to live the life of my dreams, I will…“
What do your dreams have to do with how to be more productive?
Everything.
When we have a vision pulling us forward into our future,
we can sustain any present.
~LeAura Alderson, iCreateDaily.com®
Will You Replace Yourself?
What will you choose to do with your time? What aspects—if any—of your business will involve you?
Remember, your life is more simplified now because in this visioning exercise, you can easily afford to hire people to run your business. Allow others to do the things you don’t care to do, and the things that aren’t as essential to your role as visionary leader of your company.
As the owner of your company, you can afford to hire a manager and replace yourself in the everyday running of your business if you choose to. You may have employees or a composite freelance team to keep everything running smoothly. If you’re a hands-on creator, you will have to decide what works for you to continue doing yourself and what’s best to outsource.
It’s easier to feel whole and complete when you’re living and working in your zone. The more you can work in your zone of genius, the more complete you will feel. And guess what..?
The more you can work in your zone of genius, the more naturally productive you will be.
Outsourcing multiplies your strengths so you’re no longer divided into so many roles. Multiply your strengths and divide your weaknesses.
~LeAura Alderson, Cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
