How to do more in less time

How would you like to work only four-hours per week? or three-hour days? It’s a productivity paradox, but you can do more by doing less.

Any way you parse it, everyone wants to do more in the least amount of time. These days, the preoccupation with accomplishing more in record time is prevalent. The world now works at a fast-paced schedule. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

The need to accomplish more in the space of twenty-four hours is a given for anyone who wants to be more efficient and achieve more. Luckily, a few enterpreneurs have found a system that allows them to do more by doing less, a productivity paradox which I will further explain here.

Work less by outsourcing your tasks

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss is the widely referenced bible for doing more with little time or effort. The gist of the oft-quoted book is to work less by outsourcing your tasks to freelancers. Ferriss recommends outsourcing to workers who live in other countries where the exchange rate is favourable, e.g. in India or the Philippines. The book teaches you to not waste time doing tasks that have a low return on investment (ROI). Outsourcing these specific tasks allows you to do more by doing less.

Focus on the big picture, not the small tasks, to maximize productivity

I was looking for similar books at the local library, and stumbled upon two books published this year which take a similar route as Ferriss’s ideas, 3 Hours A Day by Knolly Williams and 10x is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. All three books claim that the secret to accomplishing more in less time is to maximize productivity by letting go of tasks that will not move your business forward. Rather, you should hire a team or outsource these tasks, enabling you to concentrate on the bigger picture.

Do more by doing less

This system is enticing because it challenges what most of us were taught, which is that the harder you work, the more money you will make. If you stand out among your co-workers by putting in more hours, you will be rewarded with a higher salary and a promotion. I can see the lure of abandoning this model and working less and having a lot of free time to do what matters to you.

A lot of people are sold on this idea. It’s an ideal that most people would trade in their current working life for. Most people would relish the idea of working only 4 hours per week while spending the rest of their time travelling or on vacation.

Change your mindset to make this lifestyle work for you

All three authors of these books claim to work a lot less hours than the average CEO, yet manage to easily rake in millions of dollars in profit a year. This type of system works well with a certain type of personality. Williams says that the people he coaches to use his system are workaholics who wouldn’t know what to do with all that time on their hands.

So it takes a certain personality, mindset, and change in attitude for this type of lifestyle to work. You must have a willingness to trust and invest in your hired staff, as well as good leadership, delegation, and the right people who are good at what they do. There is also the challenge of having a staff made up of mostly remote workers, if you outsource your work globally.

Is it possible to work only three hours a day?

So how can you do more by doing less? The productivity paradox is explained in one method by Williams. Williams manages to shorten his work day to three hours a day by focusing on his priorities and letting his staff do the rest.

However, the book doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how to get the capital in the first place to pay your employees. The system is not really a productivity hack either, as you can still work 4 to 12 hours a day but not get anything productive done. It’s more of a way of life.

Williams says to outsource or hire staff to do things that you don’t like doing, so you can better expend your energy doing things that will move your business forward. You will need to let your team self-govern. You will need to develop leadership skills and know when to step back and when to intervene.

According to Williams, his method has been followed by tons of entrepreneurs who have successfully cut down their work hours while having more time to spend with their families. Once they have this system set up, all they need to do is keep an eye on their remote employees and occasionally do the business development or follow up on sales leads.

It does make sense, by multiplying your workforce you can get more done. But use caution if you want to implement this system in your business. There are several reasons why it might not work for you. For example, you might not like delegating. You don’t want to hire to expand your team. You don’t trust people. You rather do everything yourself, or are a constant micromanager.

Is working at a 10x capacity more efficient?

In the book 10x is Easier Than 2x, working at 10x means you only focus on the essentials of running a business. This frees your mental capacity for innovation and creativity, leaving your team to work on the operational side of your business.

The authors stress that quality rather than quantity is essential to working at 10x. 10x is better than being 2x. 2x means that you’re stuck expending your precious energy doing things that could easily be outsourced.

They also state that it’s easier to reach for the impossible goals because there’s less competition. There’s too much competition for smaller goals. Everyone else is already trying to accomplish the easy goals.

The more specialized your skills, the more narrow your niche is, and the less competition you face. Utilize your individuality, your uniqueness, and you will find that you will never have to compete again. 

Also, because your goals are so far reaching, your way forward is clearer since there are fewer paths that will take you to the bigger, impossible goals.

Dream bigger dreams

The authors state, dream bigger dreams, and do what no one’s done before. Have higher standards. This means choosing only those clients who can afford to pay the fees that you set.

Prioritize the big picture goals and don’t waste time on small goals that will only get you 2x farther than where you are right now. After a 10x jump to your goal, reset your goal every time you accomplish your previous goal.

The authors of these books are hugely successful entrepreneurs with unimaginable wealth. They recommend that by doing less, you are doing more, which may sound like a paradox.

A caveat to this method is that you could still follow their method, work only a few hours a week, but still waste time. But if you go about it the right way, better opportunities will find their way to you. They say that doing the impossible is achievable with their methods. The only way to find out is to try it yourself.

Further reading:

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-Hour Workweek. (2009).
Williams, Knolly. 3 Hours a Day. (2023).
Sullivan, Dan and Hardy, Benjamin. 10x is Easier Than 2x. (2023).

The rise of today’s knowledge economy has replaced traditional educators. Experts have gained popularity without needing a single credential to their name. They’re “do-it-yourself” experts who flout the old-fashioned rules of getting an academic degree to be granted the status of “expert.”

In the book Millionaire Messenger, Brendon Burchard argues that anyone can be an expert. It takes time and effort, but with the right tools and resources, and motivation for learning, you can call yourself an expert on just about anything. If you’re willing to take on the challenge, you can build your knowledge and master any subject.

However, you might be doubtful as to why anyone would trust you as an expert. After all, why would anyone want to listen to you? There’s too much noise. How can you be heard?

Being an expert means being unique

Yes, your voice can be lost in the sea of experts who are just as equally knowledgeable. That’s why you have to differentiate yourself by being unique. There’s a lot of experts, but there’s only one you. What do you have that no one else does? This is the question that you should be asking yourself to get started.

After all, everybody knows something and has something to say about it. It’s no longer necessary to go to school to be an expert. But an expert still has to be credible. There are many ways to obtain that credibility. If you’re someone who wants to develop your expertise into a profitable career, read on.

What do we mean by expert?

Let’s examine what it means to be an expert. Synonymous with “expert” is “guru”, “know-it-all”, or the person you go to for information and advice. An expert has to know what they are talking about in the subject or topic that they specialize in.

However, it doesn’t mean that you need to know absolutely everything about the topic, but just enough so that you’re more knowledgeable than the average lay person. It works to stay one step ahead of the lay person and predict what information that they are after.

The traditional ways to become an expert

Formerly, to become an expert, you would have to go to school, get a degree, and do well in your career. It would’ve taken several years to reach the status of “expert”.

But these days, people are rewriting the rules and conventions of what it means to be an expert. The fast track to becoming an expert no longer requires you to sit in a classroom. You no longer need to toil away studying for exams to obtain a degree.

How can you become an expert?

The secret to becoming an expert is that an expert doesn’t need to know everything, or at least, not from the start, because everything can be learned.

Sure, certifications and degrees lend credibility to your claim of being an expert. However, many people are successful experts without a single expensive credential to their name.

Now, with the world wide web, you have free resources, ones that won’t break the bank, at your fingertips. You can tap into a well of knowledge that used to be available to only a few people.

In addition, you can get free access to many courses on websites such as Coursera or Linkedin Learning through the public library. All you need is a library card.

Build your expertise by taking action

Do your research and read everything you can get your hands on about the topic you want to build your expertise on.

Also, learn how to speak and write eloquently. Learn how to present yourself like an expert. Examine how an expert speaks. Study their body language and their vocabulary.  Take a few courses on public speaking or on how to craft a written piece with a compelling message.

Evidently, learning is in itself a skill. You have to have a hunger for knowledge and seek it in unexpected places. You don’t even have to like book learning. You can learn from other experts in your network just by having a conversation with them. But you must enjoy absorbing information and synthesizing, or creating something new from the information you’ve learned.

Your message must be persuasive

Your audience may trust you more if you’ve gone through some sort of training or certification. It’s your choice if you want to add those credentials to your name, but this is not always the case.

This is because you can be persuasive at selling your message. Your marketing strategy can make up for the fact that you don’t have the education or qualification. But if you are skilled at knowing your subject inside out, you stand a fairly good chance at making it as an expert.

Why would anyone want to be an expert?

There’s a lot you can do with all of that free knowledge. It’s useful to be an expert if you want to be trusted and listened to.

In fact, being an expert opens many doors to aspiring entrepreneurs. It can give you the chance to start a business based on your area of expertise. Many opportunities can be open to you if you are trustworthy and credible.

What to do with your knowledge

An expert is also a creator and a writer. In the knowledge economy, the business of capitalizing on knowledge, whether it be esoteric or common, gives you the opportunity to monetize education, and there’s a lot of wealth to spread around if you know how to go about it.

As an expert, research and write books, articles, blog posts, or host podcasts, seminars, conferences, and events. Whole businesses are built upon knowledge sharing. Build up your knowledge. If you want to market yourself as an expert and don’t have any experience, create a portfolio of work that you can show your audience. It takes some effort and persistence. Get out there and practice your craft. Give a webinar or start a blog.

How to deal with imposter syndrome

You might think that there are a lot of frauds calling themselves experts. You might even feel like you have imposter syndrome. But take heart. The public is shrewd enough to be able to discern what is real and what is fake. They can immediately spot a fraud from a mile away. If you are authentic, and don’t pretend to know more than you actually do, your audience will know this and appreciate it.

In summary, to do is to know. So, act on your knowledge. Go out and gather a community of learners, and teach them what you know. Only then will you be an expert.

Further reading

Burchard, Brendon. Millionaire Messenger. (2011)

Selling, when done the wrong way, can feel manipulative, like you’re preying on someone’s emotions, needs and desires. How can one be more authentic? And most of all, how can you get your audience to care about you? The answer to that is empathy. Empathy makes you more relatable. Empathy makes you a winner.

1. Persuade your audience by being more relatable because empathy wins their trust

There are a lot of examples where you might be trying to get your audience to care. It could be because you’re trying to launch a product in your business, or you’ve written a blog post and are releasing it out on the web. You encounter resistance from your audience, who have caught onto all the marketing tricks and are more perceptive than you think.

But these days, people aren’t just indifferent, they’re apathetic.

2. Apathy versus indifference

What’s the difference?

It’s subtle, and you might say that it’s just semantics, but when people are indifferent, they don’t care about whether the result of an event goes one way or another. Like choosing a flavour of ice cream, they could just as easily choose chocolate or vanilla if both are available. When they’re apathetic, they don’t care because it takes too much effort to make a conscious choice between two different things. So using the ice cream example, they choose to have nothing at all because they’re fine with being without it.

3. It takes even more effort to make people care

There are reasons why people are apathetic. They have to survive with what little resources that they have, and that means looking after themselves before they look out for other people. It’s not that they don’t have any empathy, it’s because they don’t have a lot of time to spend serving the needs of people who are outside of their immediate circle of acquaintances such as their family members, friends, and co-workers.

4. Have a unique and compelling message that is relatable

That’s why you have to work hard at changing their minds, to make them see the world as you do. People can be stubborn. There’s too much noise and your voice can get lost easily in the racket. The challenge of being heard can be conquered if you have a voice that is unique and if your message is compelling.

This is where the power of persuasion enters the picture. You have to convince people to part with their hard earned money, their precious and rare nuggets of free time, to pay attention to you and what you have to say when there are a million different things they would rather be doing.

5. Empathy is the key to winning your audience’s attention

Truly understand what you are saying, or the message that you are trying to get across to your audience. Does it have emotional, physical, or monetary benefits? Are you phrasing your message so that it resonates with their emotional centres?

Know your audience inside out. What annoys them? What excites them, makes them angry? What motivates them? How can you inspire them to achieve their goals?

6.  Sell by not selling

Don’t sell your audience anything. First, offer them those nuggets of useful information at no charge. Be friendly and giving. Let them know that your priority is to help them, not sell them something; the selling should be second in terms of priority. There are lots of media that can be given for free, such as blog posts or videos.

Second, your audience wants to know that there is a real person behind the product that you’re trying to sell.

7. Tell your audience the truth and have your words be relatable

Don’t dress it up or embellish it. The audience is smart enough to see through a gimmick.

Third, be relatable. Unless your selling point is exclusivity or a luxury that no one can afford (in which case you’ll have to think of another strategy), your audience is much more likely to be convinced that you’re worth their time if they can understand your experience and have gone through the same thing. Build upon your why, your purpose, the reason why they should listen to you.

Asking for something in return then becomes much easier. There should be an exchange of information. The conversation can be centred around how you can help your audience, but also ask for feedback on how you can help each other and how to improve on your product.

8. Understand their pain and empathize with it

It doesn’t take a lot of empathy to understand why people worry, are troubled, or anxious about something. You’re human too, so there must be a point of commonality with your audience, and it’s better if you share this commonality than ignore it.

So why does your audience still not care? They don’t care because they can’t understand you. Ever heard someone speak in a language you don’t understand? You start to tune out and wonder if there’s something better you can do with your time. They don’t get why they should buy your product or why they should listen to you. You might as well be speaking gibberish.

9. Use emotions that anyone can relate to

Your life may be very different from everyone else’s, but the marvelous thing about the human experience is that there are, without a doubt, commonalities and themes that are repeated everyday in your life and your audience’s. Everyone feels emotions such as happiness, anger, and excitement. That’s why emotions are such a deep, endless well to draw from when crafting your message.

Sure, you want your audience to aspire to have the product you are selling, but there has to be a balance between desirability (the hope to attain something they don’t have) and being relatable just enough (they already have something in common with you).

Instantly you’ve given them something they can relate to, which leads them to empathize with you, and better understand why you are selling what you are selling.

Introduction

Every entrepreneur will tell you that a business succeeds because it solves a problem. Usually, what they mean is that a business is profitable because it helps people by making their lives easier and more efficient. Any good business idea will have at least one of five key principles that makes life easy.

But if you’re a new or aspiring entrepreneur, you may be at a loss for how to think of a new business idea that actually helps people.

In this blog post, I will go through these five principles of finding easy business ideas that work. These five principles can be used for coming up with a business idea, a product or service. It can also help with finding new ways of working and doing your job. Because they can be applied to a wide range of problems, the solutions that you can find by applying these principles are limitless.

Below is a list of five principles to jump start your business ideas.

1. Simplify

Simplify means to make something that is difficult to understand, easy.

Ever felt like if there was a choice to make something simple or make something overcomplicated, people would choose the more complicated route?

This is where you can come up with a solution that explains things without the need to over-complicate and resort to jargon.

For example, creating an educational class, tutorial or webinar is a type of product that sells because it simplifies learning. Knowledge is easier to come by if you make it easy to understand and implement actions. Bonus points if your buyer can achieve results faster and learn what you are trying to teach in just a few simple steps.

If you choose to simply, make sure that you uncomplicate matters. A potential buyer won’t use a product because it’s too complicated or time consuming to understand how to use.

2. Streamline

Streamline means shortening a process into fewer steps, and breaking down large steps  into smaller, shorter steps.

Streamlining things can make a process more efficient. Most people are looking for products that save them time and money, and have a greater return on investment.

Products or services that streamline a process are useful because they reduce the time and money spent trying to accomplish something.

By reducing the number of steps, you are creating a “lean” process. What are the advantages of a lean process?

The major advantage is that you don’t have time to waste on doing extra work, so the more the process is reduced to a few key steps, the better. When designing a product look for ways to eliminate any unnecessary steps, which will help getting it done faster and more efficiently.

3. Aggregate

Aggregate means putting things together all in one place so it is easier to find. Aggregating gives structure and order to messy, disparate elements.

When it’s all in one place, you don’t need to go to many different sources to locate the information. Because it’s your one stop shop for information, your audience will spend more time with your product, such as a website.

If you make it easy for your customer to retrieve information, they will thank you for it. It’s even better if the way you aggregate information is organized and easily indexed.

4. Synthesize

Synthesize means summarizing, or creating something new out of disparate elements. Along the same lines of aggregating, by synthesizing you combine elements together to organize the information. By finding similarities between dissimilar objects, you bring together their commonalities so that the information is easier to understand.

Another way to think about synthesizing is that if there are different moving parts to a business, uniting the parts into a whole will make the structure more cohesive.

Synthesizing also draws out new insights and new ways of thinking about the problem, and hence leads the way to better solutions.

5. Automate

Automate means making repetitive tasks automatic. If it’s done automatically, it’s done without having to spend time thinking about it.

Technology has given us a lot of opportunities to automate, which frees up your time to concentrate on the other things that matter. It also makes things go faster so you can get more done.

With things like AI and software, you won’t need to waste your time and energy doing something when a machine can do it for you.

Also, you don’t have to pay a robot to do these tasks whereas you have to pay a human for their work.

Mistakes can be costly. If your machine is reliable and in good working order, it reduces human error. For example, scanning by the human eye is less reliable than scanning using a machine.

Conclusion

By keeping in mind these five principles, designing your product or service to solve your customer’s problem should be easy.

These principles break down the different ways that you can make life easier for your potential buyer. Your offering should fit into one of these five categories for its value to be clear and obvious.

If you are stuck at thinking of a good idea, the best way to brainstorm is to make a list of ways that your product or service accomplishes one or more of these five principles. Think of it as having a call to action already built into your system and why your buyer should act now.

Finally, these five principles are ideas that guide you on how to add value to your product or service.