5 Tips from Billionaires to Help Achieve High Productivity

There are a ton of viral articles out there that are about “habits of millionaires” or“habits of successful people.”

Quite frankly, they are a bit plain and overdone.


5 Billionaire’s Tips to Achieve High Productivity

This advice comes directly from dozens of interviews and books by billionaires I have consumed. I decided to get advice from only the best of the best.

Here are 5 tips from billionaires on how to achieve high productivity:

1. Keep Your Calendar Simple

Keep your calendar clear and organized. Rather than having hundreds of complicated tasks on there, simplify it to the most important. Drop the rest.

The average person has many low-priority tasks that distract them on their calendar. It’s not a good idea to stuff your calendar with a thousand, small random tasks.

Warren Buffett has mentioned this many times in interviews.

Bill Gates has remarked about how amazing this is after learning it from Warren. Bill has used it himself since then.


2. Do What’s Most Important First

Your most important task should be done first when you start the day.

Average people fill their day with unimportant tasks. The start of their day is filled with tasks that could have gone undone and had minimal impact.

By the end of the day, their most important tasks are still incomplete and often pushed off until tomorrow. This leads to further procrastination and small results.

They were busy but not effective or impactful. You don’t want to be the person who does busywork to look busy rather than strategic, smart work.

Warren Buffett’s pilot, Mike Flint, learned this lesson after talking to Buffett.


Mike learned that the biggest threat to finishing the #1 most important task on your list is #2, #3, #4, #5, and so on. Throw out the other tasks until you finish #1.


3. Delegate Lower Priority Tasks

If your time is worth $50 an hour, every hour you waste doing tasks that can be outsourced for much less is a waste of time.

Do you know why billionaires don’t shop for groceries or cook themselves?

Part of the reason is because they can afford to. But according to billionaires like Richard Branson, part of the reason is because it’s an inefficient use of their time.

According to the book 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, failing to delegate low cost tasks can cost you tons of money.

If your time is worth $1000 an hour, you shouldn’t spend an hour a week buying groceries because you can get the same result in less time and earn more money.

Pay someone $20 an hour to do it for you and spend that time you bought back working. You have now earned $980 after expenses rather than losing an hour doing it yourself without earning anything.

OK, so you might not be making as much as $1000 an hour. But the same thought process can apply to how you spend your time. If your time is worth $25 an hour, how much time are you wasting at work and at home goofing off? 

4. Find Your Peak Performance Environment

People are different. Your most productive environment may be different from someone else’s.

Look for what time of day and what type of surroundings are you most productive in.
For example, some people find that they do the most creative work in loud, crowded coffee shops. Others prefer complete, isolated silence. Some people are most alert and focused in the mornings, while others do better late at night.

Build your environment and schedule to fit your optimal levels of performance.


5. Plan Out What You Will Do

According to the book, top performing billionaires plan out what they will do next ahead of time.

Plan out what you will do tomorrow and the next week. You can save hours of time by working more efficiently from the plans you made.

Without proper planning, your disorganization will cost you efficient moments of optimal workflow.

You’ll be confused and unsure of what to do. You’ll spend extra time trying to figure out what’s more important. You will be dazzled if you get interrupted and unsure where to resume.


Conclusion

There should be no excuses. Anyone is capable of turning these productivity tips into habits. I think the reasons people don’t are the lack of awareness and laziness.

Remember to keep your calendar simple, do what’s most important first, delegate lower priority tasks, find your best environment, and plan out what you will do next.
Are you as productive as a billionaire? Leave a comment below.

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5 Reasons Why the 9-5 Job No Longer Makes Sense

In five years, none of us will have jobs. At least, those are the findings according to Intuit, which predicts that by 2020, more than 40% of the American workforce will consist of “contingent” workers — that is, freelancers, temps and those with flexible alternative schedules.

Of course, this fact begs the question: why?


Why are companies increasingly relying on contingent workers, and why are workers so eager to make the change? Just what is it about the 9-to-5 workday that isn’t working anymore?

Here are 5 reasons why the 9-5 job no longer makes sense.

1) It’s Misguided

Part of the problem with the 8-hour-day model is that while many employers view it as a floor, it was originally intended to be a ceiling.

The 8-hour day, synonymous with the 40-hour workweek, finds its roots in the American organized labor movement.

That’s right: we only have weekends because of unions. Beginning in the late 1800s, in response to shifts as long as 12 or 14 hours, American workers began demanding a schedule similar to that espoused by Welsh social reformer Robert Owen: 8 hours labor, 8 hours rest and 8 hours recreation.

That demand was met with heated debate by both politicians and industrialists.

Over the next several decades, union workers sweated (and bled) in an effort to turn the tide. In 1869, those efforts bore fruit, when President Ulysses Grant passed theNational Eight Hour Law Proclamation, granting the 8-hour day to all government employees.

Then in 1898, United Mine Workers made private-sector history, when they won the battle for an 8-hour day in a series of back-to-back strikes. Finally, in 1914, Henry Ford — recognising the productivity gains to be made — voluntarily instituted the 8-hour day for all workers at his company, and the rest of the world followed suit.

(Though it should be noted that Henry Ford was otherwise no friend to organised labour. In 1932, he would oversee one of the worst acts of anti-union violence in American history, ordering his security officers to open fire on a crowd of striking workers in an event known today as the Ford Massacre.)

The point of this history lesson is that the 8-hour day wasn’t established because it was the most efficient length for a shift. It was established as an upper limit, like a reverse version of the minimum wage.

It was an agreed-upon threshold that said, “If you cross this line, you’re exploiting your workers.”

But here’s the key point: most workers are paid more than the minimum wage, because most companies are sane enough to realize that stopping just shy of exploitation is a terrible way to go about business. So why should the length of a shift be any different?



2) It’s Inefficient

Have you ever reached 3 in the afternoon and felt like you’re no longer getting anything done? There’s a reason for that. Studies show that worker productivity starts to decline above 30 hours a week, slows to a crawl at 40, and stops dead at 55.

They also show that the most efficient amount of time to work is just under an hour, accompanied by 20-minute breaks.

The 9-to-5 does not encourage these habits. It wrongly conflates butt-in-chair time with getting things done — something we all know isn’t actually true.

3) It Punishes Workers for Sincere Effort

It is a statistical fact that workers today create more profits for their companies on an individual basis than the workers of yesteryear. Thanks in part to advancing technology, worker productivity has risen almost 80% since 1973.

Yet employees haven’t been given a piece of that increasingly-large pie. Instead, they’ve been treated to stagnant wages, decreased benefits and slashed retirement plans.

Why, then, should a salaried worker on a 9-to-5 schedule bother to go the extra mile?

If they’ll be paid either way, and know their extra efforts won’t be rewarded, what incentive do they have to give anything more than the absolute minimum?

In today’s economy, an inflexible schedule decouples pay from performance. Rather than creating an environment that fosters the smartest, most efficient efforts, it encourages doing the least amount of work for the most amount of time. It punishes those who strive to do better, and rewards those who run out the clock.



4) It Treats All Work as Equal

I once knew someone who worked as a ride operator at an amusement park, and was surprised to learn that park policy mandated employees switch between rides once every 45 minutes, take breaks every 2 hours and not work more than 8 hours in a day.

Why? Because the park had run studies and discovered these were the optimal intervals for maximum employee attentiveness, and therefore guest safety.

What they knew, and what more businesses are learning every day, is that not all forms of work are created equal. Operating a roller-coaster is a much different exercise than sweating in a coal mine, flipping burgers or collating spreadsheets.

They’re all vastly different activities, require varying levels of physical and mental effort and produce different levels of fatigue over time.

That’s probably why more companies like Best Buy are exploring goal-based scheduling, which stipulates that salaried employees can come and go whenever they like, so long as they get the job done. These companies recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and a rigid 9-to-5 simply doesn’t make sense.



5) It’s Not Flexible Enough

Numerous surveys have shown that flexibility and a proper work-life balance are consistently ranked among employees’ top desires. This is particularly true of millennials, who report they’ll even take less pay or relocate to achieve it.

The benefits of a reasonable flex-time policy are well known: workers with increased freedom are happier, healthier and more productive. As a result, more workplaces are adopting such policies every year. Companies like VRM also place importance on a healthy work-life balance that feels rewarding for their employees.

Keeping employees engaged through volunteer work not only allows employees to switch up the pace from the grueling 9-5 office time – but also fosters positive team spirit. As modern life grows increasingly busy and the needs of business expand beyond daytime hours, the 9-to-5 just isn’t agile enough to keep up.



The Workday Isn’t Working Anymore

For these reasons and more, a growing number of employers and employees have simply realised that a monotonous, inflexible daytime slab of a schedule is detrimental to everyone involved. It’s no surprise, then, that the strict 9-to-5 schedule is on the way out — and frankly, good riddance.

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