5 Productivity Hacks of Successful Founders That ACTUALLY Work 💯

0:00during my decade or two as an entrepreneur I have read all the books about productivity hacks and I've read all the blog posts and listened to the podcast and what I found is for the most part productivity hacks don't make a huge difference but during that time I've cobbled together my own list it's a short list of things that actually work so in this video I'm going to cover five productivity hacks of successful Founders that will actually help you get more done let's Dive Right into my first productivity hack first one is something that I waited way too long to do and it's something that pretty much every

0:32successful founder I know does which is to hire help it's not to try to do everything yourself back 15 17 years ago I was running these small software products and I was writing the code I was doing the support I was doing all the admin work running AdWords doing everything myself because I didn't realize that it's not that hard to find people who you can hire to help you get things done and adding a great team member to your team whether they're the first or the 10th hire can be game changing for your journey as an entrepreneur our partner with today's video can help you do just that Wing

1:05assistant can provide your business with reliable remote talent to help you take recurring work off your plate so you can focus on growing your business for our microcomp subscribers Wing assistant is offering up to a 200 credit to help you hopefully 10x your productivity get more details at wingassistant.com microconf my second hack is to work on the right things this is a mistake I see most Founders who aren't succeeding make and I have a framework around deciding what to work on it's risk versus certainty you might think about it as uncertainty versus certainty but I like the idea of risk so in your business there are areas of larger risk there are

1:43things that are not certain what you should do next so examples of these are which marketing approach should we try next I don't know there's risk there right there's a risk that you'll make a mistake and put a bunch of time in it's uncertain or how should we sell this product how do we build a deck how do we demo this product in a way that resonates with to our prospects or sometimes in the really early days how do we build something that people want and are willing to pay for then in your company there are areas of certainty it's areas where you know if a support

2:10request comes in you probably know how to answer it support is most likely a certainty even writing code as much as makers and developers like myself really want to Value code highly developing and building features is a certainty I'm pretty sure we can build almost any feature we want into a SAS app the hard part is figuring out what to build to find product Market fit to build something people want and are willing to pay for and so my framework is as the founder you need to work on the areas of greatest risk there's not a big risk and can we build the software the risk is

2:41can we build software that people want and are willing to pay for and so as the founder focus on the areas of risk now the hard part is the areas of certainty are usually going to be those that are most comfortable to you it's often writing code responding to support requests maybe doing busy work because you feel like you're accomplishing something but these aren't the things that you should be working on usually if a Founder has any type of Revenue or budget I advise take the areas of certainty and find someone else to do those because if they are a certainty you can document them you can put

3:10together standard operating procedures a knowledge base and hand them off to someone and that gives you more time to get more done working in your areas of most risk my third tip is when I use all the time and it's to time box your tasks so usually if I'm procrastinating and I don't want to do certain things oftentimes it's going through my Trello board or going through my email inbox I will set 30 or 60 Minutes on the calendar and when that starts I start grinding and I go in order no excuses can't skip anything so if it's my Trello board I go top to bottom if it's my

3:43email inbox I go bottom to top because I want to start with the oldest and I respond to or file or delete or delegate everything in that list and I do it for that set amount of time and you might not be shocked to know that a lot of us procrastinate for days or weeks on things that really take less than an hour to get done so for me I've found time boxing to be an amazing way of setting a set amount of time and forcing myself to do things that aren't really that hard they're not really going to take that long but in my own head I feel

4:15like they are my fourth productivity hack is something I discovered several years ago where I wanted to keep a to-do list that wasn't in my inbox and that I could add items to it while I was out and about sometimes even via voice dictation I would have an idea I would hear something on a podcast or I would realize that I needed to get something done and so I personally use Trello for my to-do list you can use any tool you want the tool doesn't matter the important thing is that you can email a to-do to that list so for me I went into Trello enabled this feature and I have

4:45an email address that when I send to that address it adds it to the top of the list now I'm careful not to make this a Dumping Ground this can easily become something where you're adding 5-10 items a day and you will soon find that you're wallowing into dues you have to to have a filter around to Do's if you have some things that hey maybe someday down the road I might want to do that have a separate Trello list for that maybe call it to do long term brainstorm ideas I had while driving you don't want those to go into the list of things that you know that you need to

5:18work on that are higher priority and that you know are the areas that you want to execute on in the business I've seen some folks with 300 items on their to-do list that's a problem no one should ever have that when my to-do list hits 30 items I realize I think I have a problem I've added too much to the list that should be in a longer term or a brainstorm or a delegate pile that shouldn't be on my list because otherwise you spend the whole time just scanning through trying to figure out what to do next but the hack of being able to email into a trelloboard means

5:49it's very very rare that a to-do item gets missed by me that it falls off my list and I drop the ball my fifth productivity hack is one that I started using a few years ago and it it has been invaluable and it's to set up a label or a folder in your email that is a low priority folder that you spend one hour a week going through so for me I use Gmail and I have a label it's underscore this week and the reason it has an underscore is it sorts alphabetically and so it's at the top of the list and doesn't get lost with my 50 other labels

6:20but anytime I have something in my inbox that I don't need to handle right now but I think I do need to handle within the next week or two I instantly move it to the this week label and then I have a Time boxed one hour coming back to hack number three it's on my calendar it's recurring it's once a week there's one hour and I go through the this week Tab and again I grind it out it forces me to go in order and to delegate or delete or respond or forward or do something with that item as someone who gets I don't know around 100 emails a day it's

6:51important to me that I'm able to delete and prioritize and delegate effectively and the ability to have a this week label as well as for me I get a lot of updates from my Founders monthly updates from startups that I've invested in you can imagine getting a hundred and something of those in the first week of each month you would just be overwhelmed it fills your inbox and so I have an underscore updates label in Gmail that similarly I have an hour each week set aside to go through them and I can focus and get in the mindset of going through founder updates and it's so much better

7:23than if I try to put this in with all my other tasks some of which need to get done in the next hour or the next day in order to keep my team going to keep me from being a bottleneck so I found that using labels like this along with time boxing is an invaluable way to get through a lot of email in a second I'm going to tell you another video on this channel that you should check out if you're into improving yourself and being a more effective founder but before I do that over here next to my gelatinous cube is the SAS Playbook that's my book

7:51about building multi-million dollar SAS companies without Venture Capital it's at sasplaybook.com and I have paperback copies an audible version as well as a Kindle version and PDF if you had to sasplaybook.com you'll find out all about it and everything that I included all the things I know including mindset and how to Market your startup how to decide from the 20 B2B SAS marketing approaches which you should try first and which make the most sense for your product sasplaybook.com if you're interested so you've made it through these five productivity hacks but if you're a startup founder you're always looking to improve yourself and I put together a list of 12 books that are a

8:26must read for entrepreneurs these books cover leadership productivity self-development marketing and more click on this video that's highlighted on the screen to find out which books I selected thanks for joining me subscribe to the channel if you haven't already obviously this channel is putting out all types of content for entrepreneurs specifically focused on SAS but really most entrepreneurs can get some value out of this I'll see you next week