Time Management Tips That Doubled My Productivity

We've heard that time is our most precious resource, but here's the brutal truth. Most productive people are losing a whole day of a week to things that don't contribute to their happiness or their goals. I used to be one of those people who thought productivity just meant you were checking a million boxes off. Ooh, boy did it hurt when I realized I wasted a lot of time with that thinking. These are the 15 time management secrets I would go back and tell myself when I was first starting my business more than 15 years ago. Secret number one, time audits are necessary, not just once, consistently. Most people think that they're being productive, especially when you come up with a great plan and you start executing on that plan. But as you do, you are introduced to forks in the road and different opportunities, lots of decisions, and suddenly you could be one, two, three months into your plan and things actually look a lot hairier and different than they originally were set out to. You always have to keep track of where you're applying your time. That includes right now, so you can understand what your starting point is. And again, in the future, after you've ventured into something new and really need to assess if you've made the right decisions and if there's still some things you need to pair back on. We talked about this in a recent video about the time audit and how you can actually go through a regular week of your life and figure out what are you doing with all those hours and minutes and are they being applied in a way that's advantageous to you? That audit system breaks everything down into three buckets, essential, growth, and waste. Lots of people fill up that waste bucket and it's not cool. Not because you can't have anything in it, you should be able to waste a little bit of time here and there on things that make you feel good for being able to relax. But when it gets out of control, it's just like anything else. Moderation is key. And a little bit of waste doesn't hurt anyone if you've got the other buckets dialed in. Whether it's your first time or you need to do a bit of a check-in, I've created a free resource for you so that you can do a time audit of your own. Just head over to my Instagram, make sure you're following me and send me the message time audit. This will automatically deploy that resource to you. No strings attached, no email opt-in necessary. This is the time audit revolution that's going to change everything for you, so make sure that you follow all the instructions and answer all the questions if you really want a glimpse into where you can improve the life you have and get after the life you want. Secret number two, make sure you're leveraging calendar blocking. It's really easy for the day to get away from you, even if it's completely scheduled before it begins. You've got meeting invitations in your email, you've got people who want to hop on a call, some others who want to pick your brain, and of course that conference call where everyone needs to convene in order for us to discuss the latest figures. Calendar blocking forces you to do a bit of a block on your time and make sure that you're only engaging in the appointments that are absolutely critical. My biggest recommendation with calendar blocking is that you don't try to block your entire calendar off. Give yourself a little bit of white space. It's important to have breathing room so you don't feel super stressed out when life happens, because it does. But I like to have two, maybe three, on a really crazy day time blocks where I focus on a similar task during that period of time, if not only one task. So if I'm sitting down to write an email newsletter, I might be able to do more than one if that block of time gives me the ability to do it. But worst case scenario, I'm gonna get my one deadline done during my newsletter time block. You might also block off time on the calendar to do really important things that often fall off, like weekly planning or some accounting. Blocking that time, I actually have accounting time on my calendar once a month to make sure that I work with my finance team on what's happening and I know what's going on with my numbers and I know that the bills are paid and I can pay focused attention to it. But it's a consistent block on my calendar where it stays intact and it has my full and undivided attention. The further in advance you block out your time, the better. It actually gives you more flexibility because you can remove blocks when you don't need them. And most importantly, assuming you do and that your most important priority should come first and therefore they need to be blocked out in advance so that when the occasional event invitation comes along or that unnecessary meeting you get invited to, you can easily say, no, that's not going to work for me. Secret number three, time batch your breakthroughs. This is my go-to strategy for creating two weeks worth of content in just a three-hour time block. There's a hidden tax when it comes to task switching. As a matter of fact, every time you switch from one kind of task to another, you lose on average 23 minutes. Oh, tragedy. This is why part of my calendar blocking tactic is to time batch. So if I have blocked time on the calendar to film a video, then I am going to film more than one video. Today, I'm actually doing three, two long form for YouTube and one little bonus one that I wanted to do. Maybe you'll see it in the future. If I need to run errands, then I'm going to collect a list of errands in a similar area like the drug store or the grocery store or the UPS store and say, okay, I'm going to get to those things at some point. They are not urgent, they're barely important, but we'll make them happen when I have a time block for errands. And then we're going to knock them all out at once. That's the batch. What are the like tasks in your world that you can combine into one time block? Can you get every single thing done? No, of course not. But if you are intentional about what you need to do and what tasks are like each other so that you can get them done in the same focus frame, that's what this is about. For me, time batching can be broken out into my four Cs. Communication, creation, consumption, and coordination. Communication is exactly what it sounds like. Anytime I need to communicate with others, whether it's meetings, calls, trainings for my team, I try to batch all of those together. Creation is exactly what it sounds like. What content creation do I need to do, whether it's planning a training for my inner circle coaching program or planning a video here, filming the video here, making different resources that I make available to my audience. All the stuff that I would create from a creative space goes in a creation time batch. Consumption time is another way of thinking of learning time. What am I doing to absorb outside information? Now, I'm gonna be particular. I'm not necessarily gonna turn the news on, but I might attend a coaching call with my business coach or I might read a book. Consumption for me is the opportunity to be a student of everything that I want to become a master in. And coordination is the stuff that just keeps everything operating. How do I make sure that I'm doing my weekly reset to plan for the following week? How am I making sure that all the inner workings of what my family needs to do, where we need to be, and what we need to make sure we have covered is done? That's all stuff in coordination. You will elevate everything about your productivity when you start looking at the most important things you have to do and pairing them with things that are very similar. It will also help you notice very quickly what's holding you back. Secret number four is the decision elimination system. When you give yourself too many decisions to make, you give yourself the ultimate excuse to not succeed. There's a science behind decision fatigue. And it's basically that each decision you have to make depletes your mental energy. So imagine the most important thing that you wanna do for yourself. Your big goal, your project that you want to see through, and all the mental energy that it needs. Do you really want unnecessary decisions depleting you of that resource that is so critical for your success? What I like to do for this is create a decision handbook. I go to my little decision handbook for the most simple of decisions that for whatever reason continue to pop back up and I need to have an answer to so I can move on and not think any harder about it. One of my favorite decision handbooks is my meal plan. I don't need to make a decision about what I'm having for lunch. I already know what it is. It's upstairs, it's prepped and ready. I can't wait to eat it, it's very exciting. You don't have to ask me what's for dinner, it's literally written down. You have an option of A, B, or C. And we can make all of them in an instance notice, no big deal. My team has a decision handbook when it comes to my schedule. They know that if a certain appointment needs to happen, what days it's eligible and what times make the most sense. They don't have to ask me for every single instance because we have that handbook, or in business we call it a standard operating procedure, in place. Think about all of the unnecessary decisions that you have to make throughout a day. I actually encourage you to create a log. All day tomorrow, I want you to write down every single decision that you make yourself make. From waking up in the morning, deciding whether or not you're going to get out of bed or hit the snooze, to what you're going to wear for the day, to what you're going to eat for breakfast. The list is unending. And the more decisions you have to make, the more you're draining that mental energy. But if you realized what decisions happen before they come and you give yourself an instant way of solving for it so you don't have to think about it during your most critical moments, then you have yourself a decision handbook. Standard operation of your life. Secret number five, the good morning, good life method. This is one of my favorite revelations from the last 15 years, is when I realized the power of starting the day on your terms. What you do to begin the day, how you conduct yourself, who you are, the person you step into, indicates how you will be for the rest of the day. During the first 60 minutes of the day, I try to get to my good morning, good life, three morning moments. Movement, mindfulness, and mastery. Movement is moving the body. How can you get started into motion to make yourself move in more areas of your life? You get energy when you spend it on exercise and moving the body. And so the sooner you do that to start the day, the sooner you'll get that back in more energy the rest of the day. Mindfulness is an opportunity to center yourself around your own ideas at the start of a day. It's really tempting to pull up your phone and look at social media or turn the TV on or start talking to somebody and seeing how they're feeling just to start the day. But that's not on your terms. You're literally handing off the responsibility of thinking and feeling and observing and being present on someone else by not having that centered moment first. Do what feels good for you to be mindful. That could be journaling, that could be meditation, and just allow yourself to realize how you feel. And mastery. Mastery is an opportunity for you to do more with your life. So many people don't have enough time to get to their passion project or their side hustle or that thing that they really want. How do you want to be a master? What can you do to put your reps in on it to start the day? If you want to become fluent in a foreign language, are you practicing that language to start? If you want to be a talented pianist, are you practicing your scales? To become a master means doing the basics, having the foundation, and getting that time in. The Good Morning, Good Life method is in my book, Good Morning, Good Life. You can learn more about movement, mindfulness, and mastery there. Secret number six, the win list. Most people have a to-do list. I have a win list. I don't want to be told what to do. I want to be told how to win. Do you see the difference? Every night, I write up to three things. Up to, that's one, two, or three. Not more, not less. Up to three things that if I do them, any of them, I will have won the day. Traditional to-do lists set you up for failure because it's this unending scroll of a text of ways you have not made good in your life. Makes you feel pretty crap about yourself, and really, that's not what being more productive is about. It's about getting the most critical things done so that you make the biggest advancements in your life. So when I think about what am I gonna do tomorrow, it's the things that are going to move the needle the most on my goals. I have to be very focused on what those goals are in order to know what matters most on my win list. And rather than the average person who is allowing all of the fluff and indecision of the day to cloud all of their time and keep them from making any difference in what's important to them, I am looking at how I can plot the wins on my calendar, in my space, first thing in the morning, on the list first thing, and then let everything else work itself out. So instead of getting bogged down by a long to-do list that's just gonna make you feel bad about yourself, pick out the things that if you did them, you could look back on the day and say, wow, I'm so glad that I did that. I feel like I won the day. Secret number seven, the elimination protocol. Success is about subtraction, not addition. The people who perform at the highest level have figured out what to remove from their life, not all the things that they could add. They choose to be a master. They choose to be the best. To be the best, you do a few things really, really, really well, and you get rid of everything else. In a perfect world, I hope you do that, but we don't live in a perfect world. We do the best we can with what we have, but you doing the best you can is not telling yourself a story about how you're supposed to do all these things because everyone else is expecting you to. You get to stop that cycle. So I want you to create something. I had a business mentor say this to me once, and I was like, that's a great idea. I want you to write yourself a not-to-do list. A not-to-do list is things that you do or have done that you never want to do again. It's so cool. It's very liberating. It's as if you quit it, but you're still working on quitting it. It just feels amazing. Open your phone, the Notes app, not-to-do. Something I choose not to do is edit my videos. I did that for such a long time. I'm talking to my editor, Z, all the time on these videos. He gets to see me talk about all kinds of stuff. He gets to see this video before it's cut down into a piece of mastery that he so elegantly stitched together, and I don't miss those days. I don't miss editing my videos. I did it for a very long time, and I got to a point where I was like, okay, I'm done. I am elevating beyond this, and there's nothing wrong with the craft. I'm just not the master at video editing that my video editor is and that other talented video editors are. By having it on my not-to-do list, I get to empower other people who are incredible at it and work in partnership with them. Another thing that I have on my not-to-do list is not business-related at all. It's that I don't go to weddings or events for people who I have not spoken to in a year. Sometimes I get invited to events from people who I've never even met before, which is such a blessing, but you want my presence at your weddings and your parties. I've received so many invitations just from my YouTube community, but also from distant relatives that I just don't have a relationship with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them, and I wanna celebrate them, and I'm happy to send a gift in the mail, but I am not going to spend time at an event when I don't know what's even been on your mind in the last year, much less however long it's been. That's on my not-to-do list. So now, guess what happens? Decision handbook. When something like this comes across my table, oh, we need to edit this video, or hey, do you wanna go to this wedding? No, I don't. What are the other alternatives? I don't care, I'm out. Have an elimination protocol, and it starts by saying, I know what I never wanna do again, and I know what I'd rather do at that time. When you learn to say no, it's powerful, but don't say no just for the heck of it. Say no, because it actually means something to you, and when you say no, you don't feel like you have to make an excuse because you're such a believer as to why you're saying no. Try it, it'll change your life. Secret number eight is the focus environment strategy. Have you ever sat down at your kitchen table to do some work and found that all you did was eat seven different kinds of snacks? That wasn't me an hour ago, I swear. When you have to dedicate a specific amount of time to a specific task, you need to get your head in the game, and part of getting your head in the game is having an environment that supports that task being seen through. I'm not saying you need to have a 17-room house for all the different things that you have to do in your life. I'm saying that wherever that dedicated environment is, what can you do to support yourself to make sure that you see through the thing that's gotta happen in that moment? Do you need to hide the remote from yourself so that you know that you can't turn the TV on? Do you need to have a piping hot cup of coffee exactly the way you like it, fresh, for the moment you sit down and engage on that project you have to get done? What do you do to create your focused environment? Give it more thought, and you are going to be more equipped to feel like you're not in the middle of a lot of different tasks. The worst thing I can do is anything near my kitchen sink, because I will probably, it is absolutely possible with this small family of mine to spend eight hours over that sink with dishes. Choose not to. Get away from it. Give yourself a focused environment for what you gotta do. This is my focused environment for shooting videos. I literally come down here for nothing else. A little bit of planner fulfillment in that corner over there, but it's like a totally separate area. I have no other reason to come down here. I would love to use this standing desk, but it's part of my set, so I don't use it unless I'm talking to you, and I get my videos done fairly efficiently, although I think my video editor would be like, you talk for a really long period of time, so maybe you are focused, but you're taking a little long. Speaking of videos, we are trying to hit a goal on this YouTube channel of 500,000 subscribers, so if you haven't done it already, it would mean the world to me if you would click that button. Secret number nine, the weekly reset ritual. The bills stack up in the mail drawer. The birthday parties and the events that you gotta buy gifts for, they sneak up on you on the calendar. If you never stop to assess what is coming up and how to stay on time with all the things that you have to show up for in your life, you'll never catch up. I have a weekly reset every single week. I do it on Fridays, because I'm not silly enough to think I will do it over the weekend when I'm busy with my kids. On Friday, when I have that time to myself, I go over everything I did that week and everything I need to do the following week. I go over all the mail I need to address, I need to pay the bills I gotta pay, whatever the case may be that's appropriate for that weekly reset, I handle it, so that by the time everyone's home and it's the weekend, it's time to be all on for the family, I'm ready to go, especially when I gotta go to a party and bring somebody a gift, it's done. I have a video dedicated to this if you need help with doing a weekly reset for your life that includes a little bit of help on the business side. Check out that video so you can get a full assessment of what it means to sit down and power through a weekly reset so you know you've got everything in your life covered. Secret number 10, don't mistake time management for energy management. One of the most important lessons that I have learned is that you can't manage time. I know, can you believe she didn't wait until secret number 10 to say this? Forgive. You can't manage time. Time is passing, is gone, there it goes. It happens constantly, minute by minute, second by second, hour by hour, day by day, and all of a sudden, it's Christmas again, and you're like, what? The better thing to do is manage your energy. A lot of the advice I have given in this video so far is meant to help you with that. Rather than figuring out how to cram everything in, which does not at all account for what you're up for and how much energy you have, you should be looking at what are the things you want to do that give you energy so that you can also do the things you have to do that are probably going to pull energy from you. You have to have some give with the take, not all take. It's not sustainable. So rather than looking at everything that we're talking about today and in your life as time management, you are not time managing. You are managing your energy in the way that you are utilizing your time. How you use your time is directly associated to how well you're managing your energy. Where energy is desired, focus must go. If you keep saying, I don't have enough energy for this thing I want to do, I don't have ideas, I am too sleepy, I have too much going on. If you want the energy there, you have to figure out where you're gonna get it from and focus on that thing, moving it forward and saying, I want to care about this so much that I refuse to fail, I refuse to ignore the truth about how I get more time and energy to put toward it. That's everything. Successful people just refuse to lose focus on the things that matter to them so that they have no choice but to find and move that energy toward it. Secret number 11, rest is required. I set a bedtime alarm every night. The most important part of my morning routine is my bedtime alarm. My morning does not start at 8 a.m., it starts at 8 p.m. What do I do to shut down, help my family shut down and end their day, end my day, go to sleep on time, get the seven to eight hours I am required for energy management so that I can even have a possibility of a dream of waking up early in the morning and having some quiet time to myself so I can hit the gym. Rest is required in everything that you do. If you don't allocate the time for that, literally look at your calendar and say, when are my sleep hours, when is my rest time, when am I not activated, when am I not stressed, when am I not pushing? The people who observe that and they get that, they make even more out of the time that they need energy to spend to get things done. Here's your mini challenge. I want you to strategically schedule three rest moments for your upcoming week and it can't be sleep time. The sleep time is a given. You have to make sure you're getting enough sleep, period. The three rest moments are just for you. Whatever it means to you. If you like to nap, nap. If getting a massage is basically like getting a nap for you, that's what I would pick, personally. Find a way to get the rest in intentionally and realize how much you love it and how much it makes you better. Secret number 12, the victory protocol. Everybody always talks about setting a goal and you, every once in a while, will hear about getting the reward. But how seriously do you take that reward? For every goal that you have, you should connect a victory protocol. What is the protocol when you reach the goal? Where do the streamers and confetti pop out? What's the prize? What's the deadline that would make that victory even more sweet? You can set a goal, that's great. But if you don't hold yourself accountable, then it may not happen. And everyone is held accountable differently. You might be held accountable by accountability partners, that's one way. But you might also be held accountable because you really, really, really want something and you intend to allow yourself to have it if you achieve something great. I have a goal of hitting 500,000 subscribers on this channel and I have my eye on a really nice set of leather loafers I've been wanting when I hit that goal. I know that sounds ridiculous. We also have victory protocol within the business to actually celebrate that milestone here. But I really wanna buy this pair of shoes. I could buy them right now if I wanted to, but I'm gonna make myself wait and I'm gonna really, really love ordering them and wearing them when I look at them and I see that I got this nice little treat for myself because of such great work that we did. That's a feeling you can't get from binge spending or just reaching goals and then being like, it's not enough, time to move on. Who cares about managing time if you don't strategically work toward a goal? And if you really wanna make sure you move fast, attach a victory to making that goal happen. And if that doesn't work, try secret number 13, the penalty protocol. It's pretty amazing how a lot of us don't feel worthy of a victory or a gift or a prize or even the goal we're working toward that we actually probably even achieved. But you could definitely get us to run away from something bad fast. Imagine if you know what your goal is and you know that if you make it happen, you get this victory. But if you don't, you get this penalty. One example could be, let's say you have a revenue goal in your business. Okay, I'm gonna hit that revenue goal. If I do it, I'm gonna get this nice little treat for myself. I have to do it by this date. But if I don't hit that deadline, I have to donate money to a cause I hate. And you need to write it out too. I promise that if I don't reach my goal, I will donate $500 to this political campaign or this cause for a belief system I am not of. There's a psychological power of loss aversion. It's twice as motivating as rewards. Yeah, I like to run away from things I hate too. This works. If you wanna manage your time well, run away from something you hate. Your energy will be well spent. The average person is more likely to run away from pain than they are to run toward something cool. Imagine if the penalty for not reaching your goal by the deadline is to give your hard-earned money to a cause you don't believe in. Yeah, I would definitely rather have my goal too. Secret number 14, do a digital detox. It's amazing how if you don't use it, you lose it. We have such instant gratification with digital tools. From AI to smartphones, all the things that make our world go round and make us not ever bored ever because we always have something to read or look at. Imagine if you were alone with your thoughts for an extended period of time. Or if you're not alone, at least not with your device. Or if you're not totally alone because you live with people in your home, you are still separated from your other half, the phone. For starters, technology completely hijacks your attention. These things were dialed in, literally, to grab your attention at a moment's notice. A notification shows up and you are hooked. The dopamine rush of what is supposed to happen from that point forward depends on what that notification says and how important it is to you. But even if it's not important, you still gave it your attention. Scrolling social media, you can learn a lot. If you're smart, you turn your social feed into something you wanna become a master of and get smart and learn a lot and use these free resources to your great advantage. But you can also end up down a lot of rabbit holes for things that do not matter. And if it's not a moment for a chuckle and yet you're going down a comedy rabbit hole, even though you have three videos to shoot today, not good. Assign yourself with a digital detox. You can do a full-blown one where it's like 24, 48 hours, maybe even a week without your device. That's a lot. And I think it's amazing when people do that. But what's even more incredible to me is when you can have a device but not let it run your life, which is why my phone sleeps in a different room than me. So it's not next to me on the nightstand for a quick check at 2 a.m. when the baby starts crying and wakes me up. That phone's gonna keep me awake for a lot longer. Or if you have to sit down and work on that project or write that essay or plan some content and you do not need the phone for it, it shouldn't even be in that space with you. Set a little clock for yourself. Let it run and get the work done in the right amount of time. A little bit of detox, a little bit of being one with your own ideas and not looking for someone else's will go a long way for you. And secret number 15 that I wish I could go back and tell myself because it's very hard to have faith in the early stages when you have so little to measure. And that is the consistency compound effect. I wish I could go back and tell young, green, excited Amy that whatever she posted to her YouTube channel was just a blip on the radar that day but would go on to be one of the most important things she ever did. Every single one of the videos I've ever uploaded has equated to much of my success and time leverage that I have today. I'm able to charge more money because of my experience. I'm able to get bigger paying speaking gigs because of the videos I made way back when. Even little old me in a separate bedroom just setting up an old camera to get a message out. When you stick with something for a very long period of time you prove you have staying power. And staying power is what so few people have because of the instant gratification that we're so used to when we don't get it consistently, we don't stay consistent. If you want to be leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world, just agree to have faith in what you're doing and keep at it. And every time you post or every time you show up or every time you get a new project, do it a little bit better than the last one and you will be well on your way to becoming a master even if you're only on number one, number 10 and maybe even someday number 1,000. If you want more energy on it, focus on it, fixate, believe that it's the thing because if you step fully into the energy of it your consistency will compound and it will become exactly what you set out for. Be careful how much you are right in the end because the best case scenario is that you are wrong and that because you showed up it's bigger and better than you ever could have dreamed. Those are the 15 time management secrets I would go back and tell myself 15 years ago. If you want some help doing a time audit click here and I'll see you there.