Productivity Hacks from the CEOs of the Fastest Growing Businesses
Coming up with an idea to do something is the easy part. Acting up on that idea and doing it what you’ve sought out to do is the difficult part. It’s pretty much the case with each and every one of us.
To stick to an idea and eventually make it possible, one requires strong motivation & determination.
Without motivation, your hacks and crazy ideas will remain stuck in your head and might trouble you to the point where you start feeling guilty. And all that you can give to yourself are unwanted excuses.
Do you ever wonder why some great entrepreneurs reach pioneering heights of their successes? Whether it’s related to getting out of bed at 4 AM in the morning or eating a particular breakfast, CEOs have their own productivity rituals where they have a deep-rooted faith. To give you a bit of an insight into some of these productivity rituals, here are some interesting productivity hacks which we have cherry-picked just for you.
And they are all coming from some of the best CEOs out there. So without further ado, let’s begin.
1) Choose a No-Meeting Day Every Week
Asana’s CEO Dustin Moskovitz always keep one day free every week from all the meetings. On average, the company holds at least 37 meetings every month which is quite a lot, to be honest.
To keep all the meetings at bay and give his employees a breather, Moskovitz holds every Wednesday as the No-Meeting Wednesday (NMW). On this day, the employees don’t have even a single meeting.
In one of the company blogs, Moskovitz revealed:
“The high-level goal of NMW is to ensure that everyone gets a large block of time each week to do focused, heads-down work, The justification is well articulated in a now famous Paul Graham article: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The gist is that makers suffer greatly from interruptions in their flow time. Managers are generally used to having a schedule-driven day, so it’s easy for them to throw a disruption into somebody else’s calendar. Makers also do this to each other.”
Moskovitz believes that managers should also have space to explore. Hence, to polish up on their productivity, they should have a day when there are no scheduled meetings they should worry about.
2) The Best Ideas Come During the Off-Hours
Do you know that Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx comes up with the best ideas while she is driving around on the roads? That’s pretty much the same case with Gary Vaynerchuk, he comes up with great ideas while he is on the road! It usually happens because your mind is least distracted when you’re driving.
Unless you force yourself to think that you are getting distracted, then that’s a different story. The best ideas definitely come to your mind when you least expect them to click in your head. During off-times!
“I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me,”
Says Sara in a podcast with the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on his podcast Masters of Scale.
At times, Sara did find herself attending some really boring events but even then, she can’t say no to work. Instead, what she does is she takes out her notebook and start working ideas and strategies.
In a way, she is turning her non-productive hours into highly productive ones.
3) Start Your Morning with a Good Workout Session
Eric Garrett of the Garret company which made an alarming revenue of $72 million dollars back in 2017, still believes that morning workouts are more than necessary for having a productive day.
Eric is a successful real estate developer believes that healthy exercising can lift the mood up. It not keeps an individual healthy and smart but also keeps them well motivated to achieve more in life.
He starts his routine every day and without a break. In fact, even on the weekends, you will find him exercising around 5.30 AM in the morning. His motto is simple and he states them to everyone,
“Start your morning with a daily workout”
4) Send Fewer Emails to Completely Avoid Distractions
Jeff Weiner, the man behind LinkedIn, sends a few numbers of emails to his employees. And since he sends less amount of emails he gets significantly less amount of responses which in turn helps avoid distractions. According to Jeff, he felt very light-minded when two very email-friendly individuals left the organization. His stress levels dumbed down to a great extent and his mind achieved inner peace.
“Turns out, it wasn’t just their emails that were generating all of that inbox activity–it was my responses to their emails, the responses of the people who were added to those threads, the responses of the people those people subsequently copied, and so on,”
So when he started working at LinkedIn, he tested this experiment with his own employees. He sought out to personally discussing the problems and resolving them face to face rather than through emails.
He made a rule that he would only email his employees when it is absolutely necessary.
As a result, he saw his productivity increase up tenfolds and he started seeing some great results.
5) Can’t be the Jack of All Trades? Hire Potential Talents
As a leader, you need to be good at everything. However, getting good at everything isn’t humanly achievable. At times like these, it is important that you formulate a team that is good enough.
Hire potential employees who are highly skilled at creating tasks that set them apart from rest.
According to Joshua Conran, senior partner at Deksia,
“I’ve learned to hire people who are better at specific things that I am. I actively work to ensure I’m the dumbest person in the room. As I do this, I become less needed on a day-to-day basis to complete projects, and the company’s talent actually accomplishes more than I ever could.”
Let me ask you what is the end-result of being productive? To churn out some valubale results. And the best way of doing so is by hiring people who are better than you and can produce better results.
6) Do You Keep Forgetting? Maintain a Standard Task List
If there is one guy who knows how to keep his schedule right, it is none other but Brian Chesky. Mr. Chesky who is the CEO of Airbnb starts every month with his own twisted standard to-do list.
On one of his interview with Mr. Hoffman, he said,
“Make a list of everything you want to accomplish that day. Be as exhaustive as possible, Group a few similar tasks together. Ask yourself for each group: What one action takes care of all of these? It’s like a game of leverage.”
You can repeat the same process continuously a number of times until you achieve a few big tasks.
He further illustrates,
“If you have a list of 20 things to do, you end up realizing, ‘I don’t need to do 20 things, If I do these three big things, the other 20 things will kind of happen as outcomes, or outputs, of it.”
Sometimes, creating an exhaustive list of to-do tasks may limit your chances of achieving them all in a single go. However, it does provide you with the opportunity to fulfill tasks that comes in priority.
So, instead of completing all 20 tasks, you can eventually complete a few big ones that are important.
