Myth #2: High Achievers Work 100 Hours a Week – And The Productivity Blueprint

Welcome back to the Myths of Personals Productivity series.

On Tuesday, we talked about the myth of natural motivation. We discussed that motivation is not always a natural thing – in fact it rarely is. Often times it has to be manufactured and coaxed out of your daily life.

You learned some ways to do this to make sure you’re constantly motivated to do better things.

If you missed that, you can check it out on the blog.

In today’s lesson, I want to talk about another myth of high achieving individuals. This is one that is highly misunderstood. Again, almost everyone I run into has this misunderstanding about high output individuals.

Myth: High Achievers Never Stop Working

It’s a common misconception that all high achievers work their asses off, 80-100 hours a week, and have no time whatsoever in their lives for fun or recreation.

Well, that might be true for some high achievers. They’ll likely run themselves into the ground at an early age because they are workaholics (Steve Jobs anyone? If you read his biographies, you’ll know he never stopped working, even while on bed rest).

These kinds of folks usually tend to have serious stress-related health problems. As you can imagine, this is a really hard lesson to learn first hand.

Well… that’s not my school of thought at all.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer not to be a giant ball of stress all the time, and I enjoy a good beer and football game now and again.

Being able to find time to relax while still achieving a high level of output means possessing the skill of managing time very effectively.

High Output With Less Input

The smart achievers of the world obtain a very high level of productivity with the same, or less amount of work than the rest of us. Tweet this

They can do this because they’ve learned how to:

• Streamline their lives to eliminate unnecessary or low value tasks
• Automate things using technology and systems
• Outsource things that others can do better than them, or at a lower net cost (think business owners)

This allows this highly productive individual (will this be your future self?) a large amount of time to focus on high return on investment items, as well as recreation when needed, because they’re not continually wasting time on low value tasks.

Check out the high productivity blueprint below (also a free download if you click on it in the blog).

This simple process allows you to free up otherwise wasted production capacity to let you focus on high return items, drastically increasing your output, with the same level of input, or even less.

Simply do a bit of self-observation, run your daily tasks through this process, and crush it with your new found time.

The High Productivity Blueprint

Pretty simple to follow, but I’ll explain.

The process starts with a simple return on time invested analysis. If you deem something you are currently spending your time on to have a low ROTI, then you attempt to eliminate it from your life.

• If you cannot eliminate it, automate it.
• If you cannot automate it, outsource it.
• Then repeat for every item on your list, and make sure to be aggressive with yourself.

Everything that makes it through, you use the productivity techniques you’ve learned on Academy Success to accomplish.

With this simple process, which I’ve been using for years every day, you can free up several extra hours per week, sometimes even hours per day.

And that means a lot more time to focus on high impact projects and tasks.

So you see. You don’t have to work yourself to death in order to achieve large goals. You just have to be smart about what you spend your time on, and focus on efficiency.

Boom! Myth number two busted. One more to go.

Myth Number Three Comes in Two Days

I have another lesson for you soon, which focuses on the third myth of productivity and high achievers in this series. It has to do with discipline, and how highly productive people SEEM to have an incredible amount of it.

You’ll find out the shocking (seriously) truth in a couple of days in that lesson, and how you can being to operate more like them.

If you have any desire to be a high achieving individual, you won’t want to miss that.

Until then, keep an eye out for a special email from me tomorrow where I’ll spill my heart wide open (kind of like a crying little school girl) and let you in on something that is very special to me.

See you then.

Cody

PS: I’ve heard from a lot of you already, but I always love hearing from my students. Let me know what ONE GOAL you’re going to accomplish when you streamline your life to have more time to get things done. Just toss me a reply.