I have a confession.
I’m Type B. I’m laid back. Some might say I’mlazy.
But I’m also committed to living a big life — I want to achieve challenging, worthwhile goals.
Can both of these coexist?
The answer is yes.
You just have to find ways to be productive that “give you bang for your buck.”
You just have to use productivity tactics that give you 80% of the results for only 20% of the effort.
So here are 14 productivity hacks that you can use to work smarter, not harder.
1. Don’t Rely on Self-Control
I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
-Tim Ferriss
Research shows that high self-control isassociated with about every positive outcomewe want: income, academic achievement, relationship success, happiness — you name it.
But self-control is terrible fuel — especially for Type B folks.
Self-control, or willpower, is highly unreliable. It’s here one minute, gone the next. It fluctuates with your hunger, stress level, sleep deficit, time of day, and more.
So how do people achieve these great outcomes if they’re not relying on self-control?
They use their limited self-control to make changes that require using less self-control lateraccording to researchers.
High achievers simply reduce how often they face temptations. Which brings us to our second hack…
2. Make Bad Choices Hard
The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
-James Clear
When you make it harder to do things you want to stop doing, success often follows.
Don’t want to eat junk food? Take it out of the house. Want to watch less television? Unplug the cables to the TV so it takes a few minutes to set up before watching.
When ateam of researchersmoved unhealthy salad bar items less than a foot further from salad bar visitors, the consumption of those items dropped as much as 16%. For changing the distance by less than one foot!
So do what I call “using laziness to your advantage.”
Rather than let laziness get in the way of your goals, use it to get in the way of your vices!
Examples of making bad choices hard:
- Remove junk food from your line of sight when you open the refrigerator or pantry and from your countertop
- Take the candy jar off your desk
- Avoid walking down the street with the irresistible ice cream shop
- Tell the waiter not to bring bread to the table
- Delete unnecessary phone apps
- Put your phone in another room or on airplane mode
- Remove shortcuts for distracting apps from your phone’s home screen
- Unplug your TV during the week
- Put liquor or wine bottles out of sight
- Take down posters, magnets, or other visuals that have unhelpful messages or tempt you (for instance, alcohol paraphernalia, “humorous” items that joke about laziness or other).
Challenge:Identify 1 thing you can do today to make a bad choice harder.
3. Use Habits in Place of Self-Control
Even though we don’t always realize it, as the day goes on, we have increased difficulty exerting self-control and focusing on our work. As self-control wears out, we feel tired and find tasks to be more difficult, and our mood sours.
-Travis Bradberry
Why do people with high self-control achieve more? Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania set out to answer this question.
Across six studies, they found that individuals with high self-control also had strong habits. The correlation was so large that it was unclear whether self-control led to good habits, or whether good habits led to strong self-control!
So, for us Type B folks who don’t have a ton of natural discipline, we need to rely on habits instead.
Habits create the same outcomes as self-control. Whether you brush your teeth out of habit or out of effortful self-control doesn’t matter. The world doesn’t care if it took you a lot of effort or a little.
All that matters is whether or not you do something.
So, instead of relying on self-control, focus on building a new habit. Habits take minimal effort and let you go with the flow, so they’re perfect for Type B folks.
Challenge:Identify one new habit that you can do in only two minutes per day. Maybe it is to do ten pushups, read one page, or meditate for two minutes. Create a calendar reminder to do it.
4. Decide on the 3 Most Important Things to Get Done Each Day
I have a production company, I have a marketing company, I have different things that I have going on and different interests and there’s nothing wrong with having different interests as long as you prioritize the things that you need to do first. And I do. -P.K. Subban
The three Most Important Things (or MITs) is a productivity strategy that is gold. It’s deceptively simple but extremely powerful.
- The strategy makes you identify the key actions that will move your goals forward.
- It gives you a yardstick for success, so you know what makes today a success.
If you don’t identify your 3 MITs, your day probably goes like this: you work your butt off, achieve a lot, but it’s not everything you hoped to do.
So you get upset, say mean things to yourself, and feel disempowered.
Then you wake up and try to motivate yourself to do it all again tomorrow — YUCK!
Identifying your 3 MITs solves that by creating a clear and achievable target for success each day. How to do it is simple:
- Just ask yourself: “If I only got 3 things done today, what three things would push my goals forward most?”
- Or you can use Tim Ferriss’s question: “Which of these things, if completed, would make everything else easier or not important?”
Challenge:Identify your 3 most important tasks for tomorrow, right now.
5. Laugh in the Face of Discomfort
I wish for a world where everyone understands that discomfort is the price of legendary. And fear is just growth coming to get you.
-Robin S. Sharma
To achieve big things, you have to go outside of your comfort zone. This is — by its very definition — uncomfortable.
So how do you laugh in the face of discomfort?
Use the most consistent tool that Tim Ferriss found among the top performers he interviewed inTools of Titans.
80% of them had some form of mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness is like weightlifting for your mind.
It lets you build up your concentration muscle by focusing on your breath. You learn how to watch your thoughts without acting on them. You observe feelings without getting lost in them — you get tohavefeelings rather thanbe had by them.
In dealing with the discomfort of achieving big things, developing this power over your mind is a critical tool.
Challenge:Think you can focus on your breathing for 1 minute? Simple enough. And it will get you started on building this critical tool. So take the challenge to do 1 minute of mindful breathing daily for 1 week. Let me know how it goes.
6. Reframe Sticks and Stones
A thoughtful piece of criticism by somebody who understands the context of what you are doing is a tremendous gift and honor to read, even if they don’t completely embrace your work. -Jon Favreau
Criticism, rejection, judgment, jealousy, self-doubt: these are just a few of the painful experiences we face when we try to do bigger things.
How powerful you would be if you could experience these things and not be thrown off?
The trick is to understand that the physical feeling you are experiencing is different than our mental story about the feeling.
Have you ever seen a kid scrape his knee? He’s fine until he sees a little blood appear. Then he suddenly starts wailing. That’s the difference between an actual feeling and when the mind gets involved. Your mind completely changes your perspective, which changes your reality.
To stop the cycle you need to use “reframing.”
I used to HATE being criticized. My defensiveness would flare up like an angry cobra, ready to strike down my attacker.
And then someone helped me reframe criticism.
She pointed out that people rarely say their criticisms directly to people. They might think them in their heads and say them behind the person’s back, but not tell them directly because that’s uncomfortable.
So when someone goes out of their way togive youtheir criticism, they do so because of a shared goal. They want you to be more successful at what you’re doing and are going out of their way to tell you their recommendation.
Does that mean their recommendation is right? Or that you will listen to it? Of course not! But that perspective helped me reframe criticism as someone “giving me the gift” of their input because they want me to succeed on some mutual goal.
Challenge:Select one emotion you struggle with (fear, jealousy, etc). Think of a friend who doesn’t struggle with that same emotion and ask them how they would view (aka frame) a situation you’d find difficult. Keep asking why so you can understand their perspective and see holes in your own.
7. Learn Your Cycles of Energy and Focus
Manage your energy, not your time.
-Tony Schwartz
If you don’t like to “force productivity” when things get hard, then learn to harvest your energy when you are at your peak.
The trick is to prioritize important and mentally demanding activities during your peak time. And schedule activities that are less or important or need less mental energy (ahem… meetings) for the other times.
What are your peak times? Just make an educated guess based on your past and try it out for a week. Your experience will be your best teacher.
If you are stuck and want to use a plug-and-play solution, start with the morning hours. Many people do their best thinking during the morning hours. They get another hour or so of high-quality focus in the afternoon, once the post-lunch energy dip passes.
Try using 7–11 am and 2–3 pm as your peak work windows — and then adjust based on what you notice.
Challenge:Block off two hours during your hypothesized peak work window and do your three most important tasks then (3 MITs from above). No email, no meetings, just you and your brain at your best.
8. Pay Yourself First
One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.
-Michelle Obama
Highly successful people invest time on their highest priorities at the start of the day.
In the 19th century, a postal worked by the name of Anthony Trollope worked a full-time job, just like the rest of us. However, unlike the rest of us, he also managed to publish 49 books.
So how did a postal worker manage to write 49 books on the side?
As Mason Currey outlines inDaily Rituals: How Artists Work, Anthony Trollope wrote every day at 5:30 am — before heading out to his postal service job.
The benefits of doing your most critical work first are:
- Assuming your “peak time” is in the morning, you are spending your peak time on your most critical work.
- The inevitable ‘fire drills’ of the day cannot interfere with getting the most important work done. You aren’t worried about finding time later.
- You start the day off winning — this positive momentum translates to getting more done and being in a better, less stressed mood.
Challenge:Get up 30 minutes earlier and spend that half-hour on your top personal goal: working out, reading, working on a side project, meditating, whatever.
Watch how you can make progress with it despite a demanding and unpredictable day job.
9. Acknowledge the Limits of Your Vantage Point
To excel at the highest level — or any level, really — you need to believe in yourself, and hands down, one of the biggest contributors to my self-confidence has been private coaching.
-Stephen Curry
What do Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, and LeBron James have in common?
Despite being the best in the world, they all have coaches who instruct them on how to improve.
Why do they need that?
Because no one can see their own blind spots.
We humans can’t notice trends in our excuses or the things we avoid.
Coaches or mentors can stand back and see the forest, while we can only see the trees. They aren’t as emotionally invested in our excuses as we are, so they can see obvious solutions that are clouded from our view.
So how can you get coaching, mentoring, or support? Here are some free and cheap options:
- Ask someone in your company to mentor you.
- Find a newly trained life coach who needs some practice clients.
- Use Coach.me or other platforms with discount coaching and social accountability.
- Use your health insurance to see an affordable therapist. You don’t have to be mentally unhealthy to talk with them — you can simply have problem-solving conversations about how to tackle your goals and how to overcome any fear you encounter along the way.
- Use your company’s Employee Assistance Program to talk to a therapist for free.
If you have money to invest in a mentoring or coaching relationship, that’s okay. As Ben Hardy explains inWillpower Doesn’t Work, the financial investment will make you that much more committed to the goal.
Because coaches help you get out of your own way, you get outsized results for minimal effort.
Challenge:Do one of the actions listed above to get free or cheap coaching.
10. Set Goals That Put You in Control
If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
-Scott Adams, Dilbert creator
Not all goals are created equal. There are outcome goals, and there are process goals, or what Scott Adams and James Clear call “systems.”
An outcome goal is to achieve an outcome: make a million dollars, run a marathon, or publish a book. This is the type of goal most of us have been taught to set.
A process goal, or system, focuses on the key actions to take (which will produce the outcome eventually). For instance: write for 30 minutes minimum every day or make 20 sales calls each week.
Studies have demonstratedthe benefits of systems including:
- They put goal success completely in your control. You can’t 100% control whether you make a million dollars, but you can 100% control whether or not you make 20 sales calls.
- Better resultscompared to outcome goals — especially in the crucial early-to-middle stage of goal achievement.
- Greater intrinsic interest in the goal (key for sustained motivation) and greater confidence in achieving the goal.
Challenge:For one of your outcome goals, what is a process goal or system you can set that will get you there?
11. Surround Yourself With Positive Influences
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
-Jim Rohn
The best life hack according to Jim Rohn, Tim Ferriss, and other leading thinkers is to spend time with people who will positively influence you.
For individuals that struggle to stay motivated, surrounding yourselves with positive influences is critical.
When I was in high school, I wasn’t very motivated.
However, my friend group was full of people who were motivated toward academic success.
They invited me to study with them and to work on projects together. I brought my analytical smarts and helped them where I could.
We made each other more successful than we would have been on our own. As a result, we filled out six of the Top 20 graduation spots in our class of 650+ students.
So how can you start spending time with people that will positively influence you? Look for groups of like-minded individuals. Some potential places to search:
- Mastermind groups
- Local events or classes related to your goal
- Local interest groups on Meetup.com
- Online groups (Coach.me, Facebook, and so on)
- “Spend time” with role models by reading their books, watching their videos and interviews, and listening to their podcasts.
You’ll begin to see the mindsets, behaviors, and skills they use to achieve what you hope to do too.
Challenge:Find one event you can attend this month — IRL or online — where you can spend time around people who are aligned to your loftiest goals.
12. Leverage Strengths
Think strengths, not weaknesses. What do you consistently do well? What gives you energy rather than drains it?
-Dan Pink
When you use your strengths, tasks are easier for you, they take less time, and the results you produce are better than others.
If you improve your weaknesses, you rarely will achieve the results you can achieve with your strengths.
How do you find your strengths?
The best method I’ve found for identifying strengths comes from the bestselling career book,What Color is Your Parachute.
The 7 Stories exercise is a gold-mine for discovering your strengths. Here’s a quick summary of how to do it:
- Think of times when you were productive or effective AND enjoying what you were doing. When I did the exercise, I had recently been apartment hunting. I found I enjoyed searching for various apartments online, so I used that as one of my stories.
- Write out each of the 7 stories. What were you doing? Then what did you do?
- Finally, analyze each story and identify the skills you were using in them. So, in my apartment searching example, I was using the skill of researching. It turns out that I’m a geek and that I love to research and learn new things.
In the end, you look for patterns that show up in several of the 7 stories.
For me, researching/learning came up consistently. So did coaching others and doing strategic problem solving (like finding ways to make things more efficient). Ahem… see this article.
When you usestrengthsthat youenjoy using,you suddenly become powerful. Things thatfeel like workto other people arefun and easy foryou. So, you start achieving more, while feeling like you’re working less hard.
Challenge:Identify one of your strengths and figure out one way to use it in your job this week.
13. Don’t Wonder — Ask
“Ask, Ask, Ask. Good things come to those who ask.”
-Jack Canfield
Successful people ask for more things than average people. They ask for opportunities, they ask if they can work remotely, they ask if someone will mentor them, and they ask for the sale.
As Type B individuals, we tend to be more laid back. We take opportunities when they show up, but by default, we don’t create those opportunities.
Why?
To avoid the discomfort of being told no, we make predictions of how others will respond, and then use those predictions asvalid reasonsnot to act. What!?
I assure you — you can handle being told no.
To adopt this successful trait, start by asking for small, inconsequential things. It could be to ask your friend to change the radio station, a server to bring an extra serving of sauce on the side, or to borrow $5 from a colleague.
Once you get in the habit of asking, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how often people say yes.
And you’ll find momentum as you start to get results, which will propel you to be able to ask for bigger things.
Challenge:Make it a game to ask for 1 thing every day that you wouldn’t normally ask for. Ask if your friend or significant other for something easy. Ask a cashier for the time. Just get in the habit of asking and start building that muscle.
14. Never Stop Learning
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
-George S. Patton
Successful people are constantly learning.
Learning is a superpower because it lets you:
- Build new skills.This one is obvious
- Be more creative.Charles Duhigg in the NYT bestsellerSmarter, Faster, Betterexplains that creativity can be achieved repeatedly by simply combining two ideas from separate fields.
- Adopt new perspectives.Learning broadens your worldview.
You can only get those benefits by constantly taking in new information. Here are a few simple ways to do that:
- The biggest obstacle to learning is mindless TV. When choosing between the two after a long day, TV is simply too enticing. To work around this, decide to only allow TV watching on weekends. If that’s too scary, make just Monday and Tuesday TV-free nights. Or at a minimum: make 10 minutes of reading the “entry fee” to start watching TV each night.
- To read more, I recommend signing up for the free emails fromBookBub.com. This is my favorite recent discovery. They send you $1.99 daily book deals that fit your preferences. It lowers the decision hurdle on buying a book, and once you own it, reading it is much easier.
- If reading isn’t your thing, you can get audiobooks for $15. Or as I recently discovered, the library also has some good selections. And most importantly for my Type B-ness, these audiobooks are available electronically so I don’t need to go to the library. :-).
- Finally, YouTube has some awesome educational content. If you are going to watch TV, try making it a cool documentary on Artificial Intelligence, an RSA animated video about a new book, or a fascinating TED talk.
Challenge:Commit to doing 10 minutes of learning each day. Decide when and where you’ll do those 10 minutes, and create a calendar event now.
Conclusion
If you want to “work smarter not harder,” you need to be strategic about your productivity approach. Start doing these behaviors and you will find that it’s possible to be both lazy AND successful.
Call To Action
If you want to eliminate resistance and put great behaviors on autopilot,I highly recommend doing the short exercises in my free Action Guide aboutAtomic Habits, James Clear’s #1 New York Times Bestseller.
