How to accomplish more in less time?

The only difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they use their time.   

~ Robert Kiyosaki (Author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad)

After reading many books from biographies of some really successful people to books especially dedicated to the topic of time management, I've noticed that there seven strategies that are common amongst most successful people regarding how they manage their time, and here I am with all those strategies which you can apply in your life and make the most out of your day and at the same time enjoy your life even more.

Since this post is about saving time, I've also done something to save your time. I've summarised the entire post in quick points so that you can jump straight to the portion of your interest:

1. The most common reason for time waste is the lack of motivation. And the greatest tools to avoid this lack of motivation are goal setting and deadlines. But the more important thing is, these are also demotivators if not used properly. I've written a different post on this topic alone, on using goals and deadlines for your benefit, reading that and using these greatest tools of success alone might change your life.
2. Prepare every day in advance. Writing down your tasks and schedule for the next day before sleeping really helps in managing your day effectively.
3. Technology is a terrible master, but a great servant. Easy ways to control your unproductive screen time.
4. Do hard things first thing in the day. This activity alone has innumerable benefits.
5. Remember that the human brain is fond of rewards, and rewarding yourself can help you increase productivity! (MUST READ)
6. Building productive habits, without disturbing your daily schedule.
7. Analyze how you spent your day in the end and think how you could've avoided the mistakes you made today, and make every day better than yesterday.

Just in case you want to know more about any of the above-written points, you can read about them below:

1) Setting Goals and Deadlines:

No doubt the greatest reason behind time waste is the lack of motivation, most people get motivated through some video or some post but that motivation doesn't last long, the permanent solution to this problem is just writing down your goals and setting deadlines PROPERLY! I won't write much about it because I've already written a post completely on this topic, you can click here to read that.

2) Plan every day in advance:

Remember 6P formula - Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. Make the list of things that you want to do the next day, and then sort them according to their priority. Make the hourly schedule of the day and fix the things in the list you made into the daily schedule. If you plan your day in advance, it will make your day much more productive.

3) How to stay away from tech traps?

Technology is a great servant, but a terrible master. Some ways to get rid of the unproductive screen-time are:

• Our brain is adapted to respond on strange unknown sounds, and that's exactly why notification sounds are made in such a way that it catches our attention. The simple solution is to turn off all the notifications or make them silent, the sound of notifications is attractive enough to draw away all our attention from anything we were doing.
• Have proper & defined chunks of time to use social media.
• Prefer using social media on laptop or computer, social media and mobile phone is a deadly trap!
• Install applications to track your time on mobile, my personal favorite is "Savemytime", every time I pick up my phone, it asks me before unlocking what I was doing in the time since I put down the phone last time. In just one click I get my time tracked without much effort!

4) Eat that frog:

There is an international bestseller book just on this topic, the name of the book is "Eat that Frog!". The crux idea behind it is that let's suppose you have to eat a frog every day, what would be the best time to do it? The answer is we should eat frog first thing in the morning, it will make our day much better. If you have 2 frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first. The frogs here are an analogy of the tasks, and it signifies that one must work on the hardest task first in order to succeed.

5) Rewards vs Burnouts:

Avoiding burnouts and using rewards is also a great technique that successful people use. The human brain is fond of rewards, and if we don't reward it often, it is most likely to burn out someday or the other soon. Rewarding yourself, even if the rewards are small, is really helpful in achieving further, but nothing comes without a drawback - if you reward yourself more during success, you're going to find yourself miserable in the bad times! So take care of the rewards, 

A simple way to avoid burnouts is - just don't try to be a perfectionist, if you think you are motivated enough to work for long hours without breaks, that's great, you may be right, but if you work like this one time will come, maybe after 1 week, or 1 month or maybe few months, when you'll burn out. We're humans, if we don't take good care of ourselves, our body, and our mind, then we'll lose productivity someday or the other, even if we don't feel anything like that now. Remember, this is not me who's putting up these thoughts, who am I to say such big things, these are just read and understood by me from the amazing books about this topic. So, take breaks often, at least one long break every day, most suitably during the evening, before sunset. Get your body to work, be it walking or any kind of sports. It can improve your life so much that you can't imagine!

Here's another way to reward yourself and avoid burnout. We're humans, we learn much better when taught through drama right from childhood, and many of us forget about this as we grow up. Movies can teach us a lot, that no other thing ever can, but only and only if you have got control what and when you're watching.

Now you might be thinking that this post is about time management and this dude claiming that he's read several books and attended seminars about this topics is asking us to watch movies! Let me clarify, I'm asking you to watch movies about the field you're thinking of going into, say if your goal is to be an entrepreneur, there are plenty of movies that can teach you more about this field than any case study or any book, watch movies like jobs (About Steve Jobs), social networks (About Mark Zukerberg), founder(About McDonald's journey), and a lot more that I can't even list. If going towards the financial sector, watch movies like The Big Short (about the '08 US recession), Other People's money, etc. All that matters is the research and the right choice of movies. Movies can teach us a lot, that no other thing ever can, and guess what, we all like watching movies, and if it increases our knowledge along with giving us a reward of watching a movie, what's wrong with it?

Again, there is a drawback attached - if you think you don't have discipline and patience to plan accordingly such that it becomes productive for you rather than being a bad habit, then please ignore my advice. Personally, I watch movies on the weekend nights to keep myself inspired to work for the next whole week, and believe me it really helps.

 Sorry for the long content on this topic, but I can write a whole article on this topic alone because the power of desire is so big and so powerful that it can't be put into one paragraph! If you direct your desires towards your good, then you're most likely to enjoy your life and at the same time grow at a much greater pace than any other person out there!

6) The five-minute rule:

Our habits define who we're going to be, but the real thing is to turn activities into habits first! Not everyone is willing to do everything every single day. Let's for example say, I want to make reading my daily habit, the truth is, I won't be willing enough in my early days to read every single day, so naturally, I start skipping days without reading at all and that's how reading can never become a habit. But if I tell myself that I have to read only 1 page every day, will it still be that much mental resistance doing that every day? That's the right approach, to do the thing for "JUST FIVE MINUTES" and then leave it. It will help you fight the resistance of getting started on an activity and you'll sometimes end up reading 15-20 minutes once you start doing it. And even if you leave after five minutes, it is still better than not reading at all. This is how we can build any habit without disturbing much of our daily schedule.

7) Analyse your day: 

Analyzing your day in the end, right before sleeping helps us to find out the mistakes that we did during that day. Write down what you can do to make sure that these mistakes will not be repeated tomorrow, just make your today better than yesterday using this method and your days will become more and more productive every day!

For example, let's say I realized that I spent more than the allotted time on the phone during the day, now I know that tomorrow when I'll sit for work, the phone should not be within my sight or reach. But what if I didn't analyzed at night? - The mistake will be repeated over and over again and eventually become a bad habit!!

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Find out how you can apply these strategies in your own life, every single strategy of them has the potential to change the way you spend your time tremendously. Also, please tell me in the comments if I missed some amazing strategies that you know.

Thanks for reading, hope it helped!