What is it that distinguishes the truly successful and wealthy from the rest? How is it that they seem to magically get so much done?
The answer? TIME.
We all have the same 24 hours a day, but the truly successful have an almost magical ability to stretch time and even manufacture more time out of thin air.
You’ve probably started dozens of projects before and decided to commit 100 per cent to getting them done, only to find yourself losing momentum halfway through the task. Now that’s what I call frustration; wanting to get it done, but somehow shooting yourself in the foot and getting side-tracked without even knowing it.
This is a big problem for most people. They dabble in multiple projects without truly getting any off the ground. This can be summed up with Newton’s first law:
- An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an external force acts upon it.
- An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an external force acts upon it.
A project needs to reach a certain stage before it can sustain itself or bear fruit ─ so you must spend focused time on it to launch it off the ground and into motion, so it’s much easier to sustain.
So how do you do this? Here are some suggestions that you can try.
Step 1: Self-Impose Tight Deadlines
There’s an interesting phenomenon called the “Parkinson’s Law” which says that the task you’re working on will expand, so as to fill the time available for its completion. It means that if you give yourself a week to start a blog, you’ll take the entire week to do something you may have been able to do in a day; if you had set that as a deadline.
The more you wait to complete a project, the bigger it gets in complexity and the more stuff gets in the way of wrapping it up. People always choose what they have to do over what they want to do. So if you set a super-tight deadline for your task, your brain will start to block out anything else that’s unrelated and help you get in the “zone” to finish it within the self-imposed deadline.
If you plan to work on a new project, start with a 90-day deadline for the project and only focus on one thing during that time (i.e. setting up the project). The first 90 days are critical to launching the project and putting all your energy into a single aspect of your project. Then you can select a different part to focus on (i.e. it may be getting a product to market or it may be promotion, setting sales systems and processes or recruiting).
You can further split each 90-day period into three 30-day sprints. Each month can be assigned a specific task where you apply compression to get it done. By working entirely on a specific area of your business, you can accomplish more in a shorter period of time than others would in a year. The key takeaway is compressing the time and focusing on one part ─ so that the project gets launched and can then be sustained with very little effort.
To take this to another level, you can use the “Pomodoro” technique in your daily routine and work in 25-minute sprints, followed by a 5-minute break. You will become instantly more productive and focused, knowing that there’s a stopwatch counting down the minutes to completion.
We’ve been trained to believe that stress is bad for us, and though it can be, if you manage it correctly then it’s the other way around. Stress and pressure squeeze out the best in us and help us grow. Yes, we’ve been created to thrive on stress and use it as fuel for amazing accomplishments. So the next time you’re preparing to work on a task within your project, do it with a timer. You’ll feel the difference.
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