Do This to Skyrocket Your Productivity
Think fast, set goals, then switch gears.
Thinking is great in many situations. It can get you through tough experiences, manifest stellar plans, or even win you more sales. You would think that thoughts and the thought processes would be great all the time.
It’s actually not, though.
It’s only important to do the thinking at the very beginning, during the planning and research stage. Once you have everything planned and your goals set, you really need to switch gears and execute. At that point, thinking only slows you down.
Let’s see what you can do to become successful faster.
Imagine These Scenarios
In most things we do, we only really need to do heavy thinking at the beginning of the activity. This is particularly true for times when the activity has a high learning curve. You’d need to drop everything else and learn the material to get through it quickly. Here are some examples.
Math Class
When you first start learning arithmetic, you need to become familiar with the symbols and equation setup. You need to know the numbers and how they go together to form larger numbers. You need to learn everything from the ground up.
Once you get all of the fundamentals correct, you can finally put it all together and start playing around with the math. Addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication all become your play things. You can literally solve any math problem with your foundational knowledge and skills.
Job Training
When you’re first hired for a job, the employer will send a trainer your way to teach you the ropes. This can take anywhere from a day or two to several weeks. There is a dedicated trainer or team of trainers to make sure you learn everything correctly.
You’ll be asked to perform the duties as they watch at first, but once you’re confident enough, they’ll set you loose to do the work on your own efforts. You’ll get to do the work without supervision, and they’ll get around to training more new recruits.
Hobbies
Board games, gardening, dog training, arts and crafts. Every hobby you become interested in has its own set of rules and way of doing things. You’ll need to learn the basics in order to get started.
Once you become proficient with the material, you’ll be able to craft on your own terms. This goes for any hobby you can think of. While some hobbies have higher learning curves than others, all will still require you to pay full attention from the start.
Think During Research and Planning
When I write these articles, I’m referring to success and wealth. When I write about research and planning, I’m also referring to work and income. That’s where we’re steering this ship today, as well.
Let’s say you want to build a brand. You know some things about branding, and other things need to be learned. It all starts from an idea in your head that becomes too big to ignore.
When opportunity knocks, answer the door.
You want to start a brand based around personal fitness, for example. You do a lot of research on what people want, what you can do to help them, and what programs or services you can create to solve their problems. This all takes a lot of time, research, and planning.
You decide that you want to upload videos to YouTube around workouts and building lean muscle. You want to sell courses on Udemy to teach your audience all of your workout secrets. You will create an email list to keep in touch with your fans. You want to have social media to keep engagement going.
Exhausted yet? This is only the start.
Think for Goal Setting
Goals are another part of strategic thinking. You won’t make any money from the act of thinking about this, but it greatly helps in the long run to get it all done as early as possible.
Your new fitness brand needs performance markers to gauge success. You decide that getting 100 new subscribers or followers per month is a good place to start. You want ten or more email subscribers per month. You want 500 views on each video you upload.
For all of your hard work, you are expecting 5% of your audience to purchase your Udemy course on fitness training for lean muscle mass. The more followers, the better.
These are all solid goals. Your brain got you this far, so lets be grateful.
Think for Budgeting
We need to dive deeper into our fitness brand and work on budgeting. You decide that you’ll spend money from your own pocket to fund the brand. This includes purchases such as professional video equipment, hiring a videographer/editor, web hosting for your website, and more.
Budgeting is an important step in the entire branding process, and takes a lot of time to plan out.
Think for Optimizing
Once you start getting traffic, followers, and sales, you’ll need to optimize for efficiency. How can you get more sales and satisfied customers? There are so many things you’ll need to optimize, and it all takes time to think about.
You decide that you can optimize video view rate, to keep viewers watching for as long as possible for during each video. This turns out to be a great strategy because your brand surges in popularity. You keep getting more sales, more views, and more success.
Think for Unexpected Issues
Setbacks always happen in everything we do in life, maybe especially in business. You’ll need to anticipate these things as much as you can, and then just adapt to the rest.
Let’s say that some of your videos were taken down by YouTube because they contained copyrighted music. You get things straightened out with them, and are able to re-upload your videos using different music. Great job!
Let’s say that someone leaves a nasty review of your video course on Udemy. You find out that the person is a competitor and may have been paid to leave a nasty review. Your 5-star rating drops to 4.9. In this situation, you wouldn’t need to break a sweat, but do keep your eyes out for things like this in the future.
More things will come up that will make you lose sleep. Just trust in the universe and you’ll get through it.
Don’t Think Anymore
Once you have everything set up and the cash flow is positive, then there’s really not much left to do but the work itself. Thinking is no longer required, and your brain can rest.
This can be hard at first because you’re so used to thinking, but it can be done. You can get into a solid routine and just pump out good work without having to use your brain. The more work you do, the more successful you can become.
Be Proud of Your Work
It’s very important to find some sort of motivation to keep working. This is why people will always tell you to “follow your passion”. I’m not too much into conventional wisdom, but I vibe with this one because it actually works.
At the end of the day, the only thing keeping your work going is you. If, for some reason, you are uninterested in your new line of work, everything will fall apart because you’re the only thing holding it together.
Take some time at the end of the day to sit back and admire your work. Go through your statistics and marvel at just how far along you’ve come. Learn to love the journey because with consistent effort, you’ll eventually become successful.
Keep up the good work, and remember to take breaks while staying hydrated.
