Billionaires show how you are wasting time Every Day.
Animated Summary by OnePercentBetter
Key Takeaways
If you don’t understand the lessons in this video, then you’ll waste hours of your time without even realizing it.
SECRET 1: Procrastination Is Not About Laziness
Procrastination is not about laziness. It’s about pain and pleasure. If something is easier or more fun than what you are meant to do, then you’ll continue doing it.
Video games hijack your dopamine and are engineered to reward you every second. Your work projects may only give you a reward after a week or months of work, so eliminate anything that gives you quick dopamine hits from your environment.
- That means video games, junk food, social media, cat videos, etc…
SECRET 2: Plan Tomorrow Today
Planning for tomorrow today puts your mind at ease before going to sleep. You’ll wake up feeling more refreshed and you won’t have to decide what to do in the morning.
Consider using tmetric to plan your day. Tmetric is a simple and accurate work time tracker for your business, with over 64 thousand users, seamless integration with your favorite apps, measure the profitability of your projects, track the time of your remote and on-site employees, invoice your customers promptly—all in one app click.
SECRET 3: Michael Phelps' Weird To Do List
1. Wake up number
2. Get in the pool.
That’s it. What a great use of energy.
SECRET 4: Energy Is Everything
Energy is everything. Ask yourself this—does it help you to have more time, if you have no energy? Of course not, so energy matters.
Here is a mind blowing simple lesson which explains why Phelps’s to-do list works:
- If you have nine inches of energy to give and you put it into nine different things, you’re gonna make one inch of progress in each thing, but if you put nine inches of energy into one thing, you’re gonna make nine inches of progress. It is just as plain and as simple as that.
Energy starts with health and health starts with good food, regular exercise, hydration and quality sleep.
SECRET 5: Sleep
Sleep is a massively underrated contributor to your health and performance.
- Jeff Bezos on Sleep: so then on sleep, I get eight hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I’m traveling in different time zones, sometimes it’s impossible, but I am very focused on it and for me I need a dose of sleep—I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better all these things.
Better sleep equals more energy, more energy creates more quality time. and therefore more productive output.
SECRET 6: Mark Cuban Still Does His Laundry
Now I know what you’re asking, doing laundry is a low-value task, so why the heck would Cuban not hire a housekeeper to do it for him? Well because, in Cubans own words, parenting is my first value and I don’t want a non-family member living in my house. I do it consciously knowing that it’s costing me potential income and career advancement.
SECRET 7: Social Media
It’s not uncommon for the average person to spend at least three hours a day on their phone. If your aim is productivity, then social media on your phone or altogether must be out of sight during your workday. If you are sitting there saying you need your phone for work think again.
SECRET 8: Never Take Meetings Unless Someone Is Writing a Cheque
- That’s what my Cuban says.
- Dustin Moskovitz has no meeting Wednesday’s.
- Richard Branson does stand-up meetings.
A study by psychologists showed that sit-down meetings were 34% longer than stand-up meetings but they produced no better decisions than stand-up meetings.
SECRET 9: Trash. Transfer. Trim.
Evaluate all regular tasks you do, if it’s not important trash it. If it’s important, but taking much of your personal time, transfer it to someone else. Otherwise trim the task by finding a more efficient way to do it.
SECRET 10: Death by 1,000 Cuts
It’s rarely a big event that will take your time away. It’s the small things that pile up and it goes deeper.
Here is an important explanation on why randomly choosing what to eat each day is a bigger waste of time than you realize.
If you have to think about it, it’s using mental bandwidth and that means that when you come back from lunch, you’ve got less mental bandwidth to commit to your work, so it’s draining that.
More than that, if you’ve got these small things that pop up during the day—it doesn’t matter if it just takes one minute to go and get like a charger and then come back—if you’re in the middle of some task where you were deep in the zone and focused and concentrated on something then it doesn’t matter if the thing only takes one minute to do, it’s going to take you half an hour to get back into that same state of mind and into that same depth of zone that you were in.
One of the biggest things that is just so tragic for most people is just food and eating. To think about what am I gonna have for breakfast and then have to go out and get that, and then to think oh where am I gonna get a coffee, to have to look that up and then go and get a coffee, and then maybe wait in line or whatever and then to think about what am I gonna have for lunch, going out and getting lunch, probably waiting in line again coming home eating it, and then dinner it happens all over again.
Food is one of the biggest like things that crushes productivity. It’s because we need to eat constantly throughout the day. We need to have like breakfast, lunch and then dinner. Alright and that’s three things that happen every single day, and if every single time one of these things you know you need a meal, you have to think what am I going to have to eat and then go out and get something and then bring it back and then eat it. Before you know it, you’ve got no time left in the day.