8 Tips To Improve Productivity From The Business Experts


Here's a familiar scene: You step into your airplane cabin, take your cramped seat, and turn on your workstation just to see a lengthy list of tasks waiting for you. Technology has allowed us all to work harder, longer, and from literally anywhere with a WiFi or cell signal. When you closely analyze the list of tasks, you see some of the tasks from yesterday that you failed to complete and some new ones added to your daily tasks. You start thinking how I can finish both old and new tasks before the workday ends. The answer lies in efficient time management. Remember, everyone has 24 hours per day. It usually boils down to how you use these 24 hours that makes all the difference. Have you ever wondered how the most successful entrepreneurs spend their 24 hours? How they manage their time and which time management tactics do they use? After reading this article, you will get the answers to these questions. 

1. Make The Most Of Every Minute 

Author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins asks his readers, viewers, and listeners to consider time as money. Do you waste money? No, so why do you waste time? Time is a finite resource and you should never waste it in non-productive activities. Try to eliminate waste and try to make up for the lost time by doing two things at once. For instance, you can listen to audio books on your commute or watch news when you are exercising. 

2. Focus On What's Really Important

Most successful people are great at focusing on what is important and leave the rest. Warren Buffet’s pilot asked him about career advice and Warren Buffet said he should make a list of 25 goals to achieve by the end of the year. He did that. Warren Buffet asked him to choose top five of the most important goals and cancel out the 20 goals. You can use the same approach to stay focused on the most important tasks. As the 80-20 rule points out, you can achieve 80% results with 20% effort. That is where task management software can come in handy. 

3. Book Up Your Calendar

Most successful people do not dedicate hours to tasks. They dedicate minutes. Unlike all of us who divide their days into blocks of hours, successful entrepreneur schedule tasks in every minute of their day and don’t leave anything blank on their schedule. Bill Gates follows this approach and thinks that there should be no dead zones in your planner. He thinks that filling up dead zones will give you the flexibility to change according to the situation. Warren Buffet summed it up brilliantly when he said, “I can buy anything I want, but I can not buy more time.” When you wake up in the morning get ready to perform! 

4. Rise & Shine!

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, wakes up at 3:45 am and he is not alone. The infamous billionaire playboy thrill-seeker Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group also wakes up early at 5:00 am. The list goes on and on. When you wake up early in the morning, you can get precious time when the whole world is snoozing and you can make the most of it by being most productive. It gives you competitive edge over others and gets you off to a flying start to the day. As the saying goes, “Early Bird catches the worm.” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.” 

5. Start Your Day Off On The Right Foot

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the founder and CEO of Real Life E Time Coaching & Speaking is the time management coach, speaker and bestselling author. She believes that the first hour of the day lays the foundation for the rest of your day. She suggests that you should complete most important tasks in the first hour as your productivity is at its peak in the morning. Elizabeth Grace Saunders shares her valuable experience here: 

“I find that it helps immensely to not have meetings to start my day. During this first hour, I take time to organize myself, including completing my daily plan, getting an email in order and taking care of other small, time-sensitive tasks. This allows me to come at the rest of the day from a place of clarity and strength. I feel prepared for my meetings and know which larger tasks are most important for the day.” 

6. Batch Process Your Emails 

Emails are the biggest time wasters at work. Author Kevin Kruse interviewed 200 of the world’s most successful people in business for his book “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management”. The author found an interesting correlation. All the interviewees managed their inbox efficiently and did not reacted to incoming email messages as most of us do. They only checked their inbox twice throughout the day and batch processed all the emails instead of checking emails every hour. Most successful people treated email like any other tasks and have dedicated a time for checking their inbox. They made sure that they don’t waste too much time on emails. 

7. Keep High Energy Times Available

Sallie Krawcheck, founder and CEO of Ellevest, a goal-based investing platform for women says this:

"I have spent a lot of time figuring out how I work best and when I’m most productive. I organize my day around that. I am most creative first thing in the morning and, somehow bizarrely, after I turn out the light at night. I really try to leave time open in the morning because, many days, I wake up with a rush of ideas and I don’t want to lose them. The team here knows they’re going to get the 4 a.m. Slack from me. The rule is they don’t have to answer until they get in later. Also, I can sit all night trying to think, but as I’m going to sleep, then the ideas come. I keep the iPhone next to the bed, and will often have five or six things come to mind. That way, I can just jot them down and not lose them."

8. Take A Much Needed Vacation 

Are you surprised to see going on a vacation on a time management hack list? Unbelievably, most successful entrepreneur thinks that way. According to CNBC, Richard Branson, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and many other CEOs consider vacation as a time management hack. Even some scientific studies prove that going on a periodic vacation can actually boost your productivity. A study conducted by project showed that employee who goes on to vacations has lower stress and higher productivity. 

Final Words

After reading this article, you might have understood the difference between how we manage our time and how most successful people manage their time. Use some of these aforementioned time management hacks and do more in less time like the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Start by experimenting with some of these hacks and then take it from there.


I hope you enjoyed this article about how to improve productivity from the best business minds in the world.

Interested in more articles about how to improve productivity?

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