Quick And Easy Entrepreneur Productivity Hacks

I've been thinking about entrepreneur productivity hacks since listening to Seth Godin talking about"writers block" on his new podcast, Akimbo.me.

For business bloggers, there's always a ton of stuff that needs to be done and things like writer's block (which Seth says doesn't really exist) can badly affect our output.

Seth argues that writer's block was invented by the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (left), and that it is really a fear of not being good enough.

So Seth offers a nice productivity hack to get us writing again:

Don't try and write good stuff. Just write. Write lots of bad stuff if necessary. Just keep writing. It takes discipline, not talent, to keep on writing.

But... And... So...

A nice entrepreneur productivity hack is to reframe the idea that "I want to write BUT I'm stuck" into something more like this:

"I want to write AND I don't have any good ideas SO I'll write badly until the good ideas come."

Whenever you're stuck with a "but," turn the "but" into an "and" and add a "so" with a positive spin on the action you're going to take.

Trick Your Brain

As an experienced English language teacher, I am often asked, what's a good way to STUDY English. The problem is that most of us do not like the idea of "STUDYING" for two or three hours a day.

So we need to trick our brains.

So I tell my students NOT to study.

Instead, just COPY English for 5 minutes. Anybody can do that.

Then, after five minutes you might allow yourself to keep going for another five minutes... and so on.

Pretty soon, you'll realize that you've been happily engaged in studying for the last thirty or forty minutes.

The key is to trick yourself into getting started.

Just 100 Words

To apply that to business blogging, a quick and easy entrepreneur productivity hack would be:

Just aim to write 100 words of a blog post. See how you feel when it's done. If you want to stop, that's okay, you achieved your goal.

But more than likely, you'll be in the flow, even if you're only good for another 150 words or so. 250 words a day is one 1,000 word blog post every four days, or about seven blog posts a month.

Not too shabby.

All you have to do is to trick yourself into getting started.

Race The Clock

The problem is not only how we think about time, but how we handle it. So another useful productivity hack is to use a countdown timer or a kitchen timer and set a time limit for every job you do. Now try and beat the timer.

Suddenly, it's game on... The gamification of productivity is one of the best entrepreneur productivity hacks out there!

Do you have any good productivity hacks? If so, post them in the comments below. I'd love to know what they are.

All the best,

David Hurley

#InspiredFocus