10 Productivity Hacks For Entrepreneurs

Have you ever gotten to the end of the week (or maybe in the middle of the week) and felt overwhelmed, exhausted, or not knowing what to do anymore? These 10 productivity hacks for entrepreneurs are the ultimate guide for how to be more productive.

Learning to eliminate the things that don’t contribute to your big goals is key for how to be more productive as a thinker and a producer.

My 10 productivity hacks will help you develop focus around your targets so that you can achieve them. Here we go.

1. Use Your Morning Formula

Mindset, above all else, is a key factor that produces growth. If you don’t believe that you have what it takes to build something, you’ll never build it. 

If you leave it up to chance, you’re going to find yourself becoming the person you feel like when you wake up every day. To achieve the things you want to achieve, to make the kind of money you want to make, you need to ask yourself: “What kind of person do I need to become?”

The morning formula is the place to calibrate yourself into that person every day by choosing who you are going to be.

Here's my article called Double Your Output with the Morning Formula where I show you how to build your own morning formula.

2. Optimize Your Environment

The second of my 10 productivity hacks for entrepreneurs is: optimize your environment. I always say “A strong person in a bad environment will lose to a weak person in a good environment.” That's why we create the best environments for our clients to get results.

If you’re going out every night with friends who are disempowering and who stress you out with negativity, you’re not going to make it. If you’re always having to defend yourself to jealous people who question you, your bandwidth is going to be drained.

Don’t level down, level up. Cut out jealous people. Surround yourself with things that remind you of success. Buy some books. Buy a trinket (responsibly) to remind yourself how far you’ve come.

3. Consume a Balanced “Study Diet”

Andrew Carnegie said:

“A man’s reading program should be as carefully planned as his daily diet, for that too is food, without which he cannot grow mentally.”

If you can learn how to learn well it’s going to make everything else related to being a high performer easier. Every month select what you want to study and study it.

I organize my study diet in 2 ways: Medium & Category.

Mediums:

• Books (physical + audible) 
• Articles (Journals + blogs)
• Course Material (trainings + events + etc.)
• Podcasts: Pro Tip: If you like listening to podcasts, I highly recommend my Daily Mind Medicine podcast, and The Traffic and Funnels Show.

There are also 4 categories that I’m always reading at the same time:

• Technical / Skillset: Select 1-2 to be learning at a time
• Mindset and Self Development: I’m always in old-school classic mindset material. It’s like food that you’ll never outgrow the need for.
• Biographies: When you think your world is hard, and you read a biography, you realize you’re acting like a child.
• Enjoyment: Studies are linked to a leader's creativity in that the more fiction they read, the more creative they are as a leader.

Make a habit to study well. It’s what will enable you to write well, talk well, teach well, and ultimately become more productive. I dive deeper into this in my Maverick Training on how to become an elite producer and develop profitable intellectual property at record-breaking speeds. 

4. Budget your Calendar

Managing your calendar is key for how to be more productive.

Your calendar is like a budget. The fastest way to be more productive is to know where your time is going and then optimize it by telling it what to do. Balance your time down to a zero budget.

Don’t let any work time in your calendar be unaccounted for. Every hour must have a job. Create a spreadsheet that looks similar to mine below. Use this as a template to follow each week.

Once it’s built, transfer it into your working calendar and customize it each week. Remember, what isn't in your calendar doesn't get managed.

5. Plan Your Monthly, Weekly, and Daily Maps

The fifth of my 10 productivity hacks for entrepreneurs is: Plan your monthly, weekly, and daily maps. I personally use this system, along with all of our high-paying clients and my entire staff. There’s a reason I make my team use it: it gets results.

Don’t skip out on this. If you take a couple of hours to get sharp on the weekends, you’ll move lightning fast throughout the week. Your maps should always include clarity on the following items: (images attached below)

• “To Be Completed” – List out the critical tasks that must be completed to achieve your target goals for the month/week/day.
• “Radar” – List the items that are on your mind, but you aren’t supposed to focus on yet. Your Radar enables you to not think about them while not forgetting about them.
• “Study” – List what you’re going to study this month.
• “Targets” – Your big targets for the month / week / day: i.e: sell 1,000 products, gross $800k in sales… get down to 180 lbs. Your targets must be QUANTIFIABLE.

Check out my monthly, weekly, and daily map templates below:

I teach exactly how to plan using these templates inside my Productivity Pack Training course.

Oh, and use a good old fashion pen and paper (or our official Productivity Pack executive planner when planning your maps. The physical act of writing helps embed your goals into your central nervous system.

6. Keep your “Targets” Top of Mind

People do not fail because of circumstance. They fail because of a lack of clarity. How often do you find yourself doing work that doesn’t contribute to your big goals? In every one of my monthly, weekly, and daily maps, I list my targets.

Keeping targets top of mind will filter everything you should be thinking about. If what you’re working on doesn’t serve your targets, stop doing it. Doing this keeps you in an uplifted state of energy. When you’re focusing on who you want to become and what your goals are, it always makes you feel better.

7. Eliminate Context Switching (Block and Tackle)

Your bandwidth is a filter. It will take you longer at the end of the day to answer “what is 7 + 7?” than it would at the beginning of the day.

If you have too much stuff clogging up your filter throughout the day, you won’t be able to think properly.

Context switching is what clogs your filter and destroys your ability to be productive.

Don’t switch from task to task all day long. Do the most important things that drive your goals to be more productive.

8. Take a lag day each week.

Think of a lag day as your mid-week recharge. Take a morning in the middle of the week to do whatever you want.

Maybe it’s scrolling through social media. Maybe it’s listening to a podcast.

It’s meant to anticipate a natural dip in your energy mid-week, and give your body time to recover. Energy cycles naturally ebb and flow.

The key for how to be more productive is being able to regain control quickly.

9. Manage Proper Expectations 

Managing your own expectations is key for sustained growth and momentum. Life is 50% about your expectations. If you expect that you’re going to get EVERYTHING done ALL the time, you’re going to be disappointed.

You can’t do the right thing one time and expect the result you’re after to appear. It’s about consistency and the long game. Doing the right things over the long game is the only way to get what you want. 

Focus on the process and the actions. Disconnect from the results. When you stay focused on the process, the results will eventually happen. Allow yourself to get into a rhythm, make a couple of mistakes, and get going.

Don’t compare yourself to people who are ahead of you. Keep your head down and play the game. The results will catch up. Stay the course, and do things in the proper sequence.

10. Do Your Weekly Review

Of all my 10 productivity hacks for entrepreneurs, weekly reviews are one of the most important and best things you can do for yourself. They are designed to make you think about what you did well, where you messed up, and where you can improve so that you can harvest the learning lessons.

If you are aware of it, you can optimize it. If you’re just coasting without learning, you’ll end up in the same place 5 years from now.

Here is a list of questions I write down and answer at the end of every week:

• A few great things that happened last week
• My main struggles last week were:
• If I mentored someone dealing with the same things, I’d tell them to….
• What did I learn last week? (about myself, about others, or my progress in life)
• List one decision that you could have made differently last week (to move my life forward or handle difficulty better.
• How would I rate myself (scale of 1-10 in the following areas: (This helps develop pattern recognition. If you notice you’ve been low in an area for the past several weeks, you can change your behavior.
  • Health
  • Mental / Emotional
  • Spiritual
  • Financial
  • Learning / Growing
  • Relationships
• A few favorite quotes from books, courses, or things I studied
• What big projects or dream outcomes did I move forward this week? (and what do I want to move forward next week?)
• Misc (Lessons, Notes, Etc.)

Closing Thoughts

Our clients get results from these productivity hacks every day. The goal of these 10 productivity hacks for entrepreneurs is holistic growth. You have failed if you have become more productive but end up less happy. When the tide rises, it lifts everything in the tide. When you’re happier you work better. Always prioritize health over growth. I hope these hacks help you in your journey of growth and success ahead so that you can become the person you need to become to hit your goals and dreams.

P.S. Check out our Productivity Pack Training System to go deeper into this and accelerate your results. It is one of the highest-rated systems that we teach our clients and teams. 

In your service,
– T