How to be productive

So am I robot that sits in a chair for 14 hours per day?

No, not even close.

Instead, I manage my time, energy, and creativity so that I get a lot done by working at the right time. And yes, that means getting up early – because that is when I work fastest and most creatively.

I’m going to share my daily schedule with you, and before you start making excuses that you don’t want to get up early to work, listen to what Neil Strauss, author of the NY Times best-seller, “The Game” said about his experiment:

“Instead of staying up all night writing, I decided to do one of my thirty-day experiments: I spent a month going to bed at 9:30 p.m. every night and waking up at 5:30 a.m.

“Though it meant dashing out of dinners early, turning down all nighttime plans, and going to sleep with work still unfinished, I discovered that I was much more productive this way. By the time most of my friends were waking up, I’d already finished much of my work for the day.”

So here’s my daily schedule. Now remember, I’m running not one, not two, but MORE than three internet businesses. If I just wanted to make $100k with minimum work on one business, I could do that in just a few hours per week.

My Daily Schedule

5 – Wake-up, bundle up, hydrate, and head out on a dog walk

6:30 – Daily Readings & II-Email/Blog

(I’ll devote another post in the near future to my “daily readings”.)

7 – Write 500 words on one of my newsletters, reports, or e-books

8 – Workout

9 – Review emails and post to Facebook and blog

9:30 – Dog walk

10 – Focused block of time on a major project

12 – Lunch, news reading and emergency dog walk (if he’s bugging me)

1 – Focused block of time on a major project

2:30 – Break

3 – Focused block of time on a major project OR telephone interviews

4:55 – Plan next day

5 – Reading (financial newsletters, fiction, or marketing)

6 – Dog

7 – Dinner and free time

9:30 – Sleep

That’s an 8-hour work day, plus a workout, plus 2.5 hours with the dog (AND he spends all afternoon with a dog walker!), plus 2.5 hours at night for whatever.

By the way, you should outsource and delegate all menial tasks as soon as you can afford it. That means no running errands, such as groceries or dry cleaning or going to the UPS store.

If you can find someone trustworthy to do that for minimum wage, get it off your plate immediately.

That said, mine is NOT a perfect schedule. I’d probably be better off “outsourcing” more dog walks…and leaving my workout to the end of the day.

But, at least, I’m in control and I get a LOT done.

Take control of your time,

Craig Ballantyne

“Winners habitually face the work of each day with the purpose of discovering what can be done instead of what cannot be done.”
Paul J. Meyer