Being an entrepreneur sounds like a lot of fun. You get to set your schedule. You get to do what you love. You get to decide how much you want to get paid. Hell, you get to decide when, or IF, you want to get out of bed, right?
Well, if you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you and I both know that’s a bunch of bullshit!
Being an entrepreneur takes a lot of work. It takes dedication. It takes the determination to know what you have to do and how to get it done in the best possible way. If there is one challenge that most entrepreneurs that I have worked with have—aside from getting consistent high-paying clients—it’s finding the time to do what they have to do.
To be truly successful, you have to develop a few essential habits that will transform your focus and maximize your energy for consistent, long-term results. In order to do that you have to know if you have fallen for these three myths and eliminate them from your life as soon as possible.
Here are 3 Myths That Devour Your Time and Destroy Your Effectiveness:
Multitasking Allows Me to Get More Done
Multitasking, my friend, is not your friend. A recent study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London found that multitasking can lower your IQ by more than 10 points. That is double the effect of smoking marijuana. Seriously, it makes you process less than smoking a fat spliff. That should get you thinking. Another study at Stanford University by Dr. Clifford Nass found that multitasking results in poor focus, poor working memory and difficulty switching between tasks. To add to this list, research at various universities has found that multitasking increases stress, lowers productivity, and lowers creativity. All in all it is a lose-lose situation.
I Have to Do This Now!
Many of us think that getting things done is an intuitive process. We simply focus on what is most urgent then get on to the next urgent thing. This will not only consume every last second of your day, it will eliminate the amount of time you can dedicate to larger projects that can actually lead to higher income and bigger opportunities. When you focus on what appears to be urgent, you function from a place of reactivity instead of proactivity. Stress reactivity, or being in a reactive state, significantly lowers your ability to think rationally and to maintain productivity. A 2010 study by the U.S. Institute of Health demonstrated that workers that had higher levels of perceived reactivity had a significant decline in productivity. Basically, urgency means you get less done. The vast majority of things that seem urgent are the result of a lack of planning, not actual urgency. They can be dealt with proactively in a way that eliminates your stress and maximizes your productivity.
If I Power Through I Get More Done
Your body goes through natural cycles of peak energy and energy depletion. These are smaller rhythms within your physiology that determine your peak states for creativity and focus, called ultradian rhythms. Research by psycho-physiotherapist Peretz Lavie from the Technion School of Medicine in Israel, has found that these rhythms dominate our ability to have maximum focus for peak performance throughout the day. The ultradian rhythm consists of a cycle of 90-120 minutes of consistent energy followed by a 20-30 minute cycle of energetic depletion. If you learn to maximize these rhythms and apply them to undisturbed, focused action, you will drastically improve your creativity and your productivity. Powering through causes excessive depletion in your mental and physical capacities that ultimately leads to lower concentration, less creativity, and significantly impaired critical functioning.
So, you might be asking yourself “what do I do about this?”
Here are a few tips:
First, get absolutely crystal clear on what your important tasks are and what your urgent tasks are. I help my clients develop a system to organize their tasks proactively so they can drastically minimize the things that seem “urgent.” It is a matter of being proactive in your thinking and in developing simple and reproducible habits that automatically take care of the things that distract you and take up your time but ultimately aren’t that important. This frees up the majority of your creative functioning so that it can be focused on the projects that most matter: the ones that will give you the highest long-term results.
Live now for then. Set up the systems that simplify your time use now so that the can produce the greatest possible rewards in the future. This means developing some discipline in your actions in the short-term so that you will reap massive rewards in the long-term. Learn to prioritize the projects that will allow you to generate consistent income with little effort in the future. These are the things that will provide you with residual income. Everyone has the skills and opportunities to find these, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look and focused action.
Learn to take care of your body’s natural rhythms. To be at the top of your game you need to take excellent control of your body. Exercise, nutrition, and high-quality rest are all essential for the optimal physiological functioning of your body. In Alchemy your body is your vessel, and your ideas are the lead that you will turn into gold if you treat your body right and follow the proven practices that transform ideas into tangible services and products that will provide you with lucrative recurring income.
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