My 6 Favorite Productivity Hacks

So how do I keep myself from getting overwhelmed? And how do I make sure that I'm hitting deadlines, driving growth for my company, and making sure that everything is getting done? Well, I try to explore so many ways to increase my productivity, and here are some of my favorite productivity hacks.

00:00 Intro
00:44 Schedule Shorter Meetings
01:16 Delegating
02:08 Understand the Power of “No”
02:39 Tame Your Inbox
03:07 Batch Creation
03:44 Automate When You Can

RESOURCES & LINKS:
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Ubersuggest: neilpatel.com/ubersuggest
AnswerThePublic: answerthepublic.com
Marketing School Podcast: marketingschool.io
UiPath: uipath.com
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Hack number one, schedule shorter meetings. Look, the longer your meetings go, the less likely you are to be efficient. I block off 30 minutes for meetings max and when I'm doing phone calls, I try to keep my phone calls to 15 minutes. Not 30-minute phone calls, none one-hour phone calls, I try to keep 'em short. Because what happens is when you have your meetings or phone calls too long, people ramble and they waste time and they don't actually prepare in advance. When they're short, people know that they don't have as much time, so they prepare before they join the phone call.

Hack number two, delegating. When it comes to running my ad agency NP Digital, my goal is this: be more essential, but less involved. Now that doesn't mean I'm spending less time. I'm actually spending probably 60-plus hours a week on my ad agency, but I'm trying to get other people to continually do well so that way they not reliant on me. I try to focus more of my time on strategic directions, setting priorities, and providing helpful feedback versus acting as a bottleneck. When you hire smarter people and you continually grow, we have roughly 750 people, things can't be reliant on me, or else we're not going to perform well. And that's why I built a system in which people don't necessarily need me. Sure, I'm still there. They're not reliant on me, but I'm still there and I'm still cranking away and I'm energized each and every single day, but I'm not the bottleneck now.

Hack number three, understand the power of no. I say no to certain kinds of speaking engagements all the time. Not because I don't want to do them, not because they don't have the money, not because it won't help me grow, it's just there's certain ones that are better for the business versus others, and you can't do them all. So I look for the right type of speaking engagements. Before, I used to just go and speak based on whoever could pay me the most amount of money, now I speak whatever is best for the business. And I chooses less engagements, but better engagements with more people in the audience that are my ideal customer.

Hack four, tame your inbox. I spend at least 30 minutes in the morning answering emails, and that's the first thing I do when I wake up. Look, I don't want to go to sleep with a ton of emails that I got to answer the next day, so I try to keep my inbox clean and I spend five, 10 minutes here and there whenever I'm free or in the car, not doing much, or going to a business meeting, so that way I don't have a full inbox when I go home, and I can spend more time with my family.

Hack five, batch creation. When I create content like this, I shoot a little bit more than a month's worth of content in three to four hours. When I write a blog post, I write a blog post every Sunday, sometimes Saturday, depending on my schedule, and that way, I know that hey, my blog post that I publish is coming up on Tuesday. I write it in advance, and if I have time, I try to do two or three of them. When I record my podcast with my co-host Eric Siu for my podcast Marketing School, if you haven't checked it out, make sure you subscribe, with Marketing School, we record 10 episodes at once. It takes us less than an hour to record 10 episodes.

Hack six, automate when you can. Automation for content creation is real easy. There's a lot of tools, like Ubersuggest, AI tool. There's a lot of tools out there when it just comes to AI that marketers are releasing. And what you want to do is automate as much as possible. Even using simple tools like UiPath, you can get a lot more done in the same amount of time each and every single day because it'll automate a lot of those mundane tasks that you're used to.

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