How to Get Massive Loads of Work Done Every Day

To use the technical term, this article is about how to get a butt-load of work done. Now the definition of a standard butt-load has been in dispute for years, but regardless if you are reading this article you probably feel like you have that resting on your shoulders.

So as somebody who went from being an overly involved college student straight into being an overly ideal laden, content creator, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call me; I feel like I always have a lot of work resting on my shoulders, and I tend to get a lot of it done. Which leads to the question I get emailed often, how do you get so much work done?

Well, let's move back a little bit into the perception of how much work we have to do. When people ask us how we are doing what’s the answer we usually give them? That’s right, it's usually just I’m so busy. The word busy is just so commonly uttered from our mouths and I want to challenge you on this assumption. What does busy really mean?

Now for all the crap he gets, Thomas Edison actually said something pretty smart on this subject, “Being busy does not mean real work, the objective of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence and honest purpose, as well as perspiration; seeming to do is not doing.” That’s something you should really take to heart. How much of your time is seeming to do and how much of it is actually spent doing and actually getting real things accomplished; producing real work of real value?

For the past few months it seems like I’ve actually been able to produce a lot more work than I used to in the past, and if I look through the archives of my time management system it seems like for a couple of years I was only putting out maybe five things a month at most. Now I’m writing articles almost every week, I’m able to comfortably balance my school life as well as show my A-game every day at work, plus for the last one month I’ve been writing a book too which has been going really well and according to schedule, which will be out in a few weeks’ time.

So how was able to increase my output and go from being busy all the time and feeling sorry for myself about how much work I had on my shoulders to actually get things done? Well, to be honest, I could attribute this to a lot of factors; Motivation, habits, planning, time management, task management, efficiency, delegation, hiring people. There are all sorts of things that go into getting work done on top of just the simple discipline of sitting down and working. I could devote articles on every single one of this topics, and many of them will get articles in the future, but the topic I want to focus on in this article is the act of planning. Specifically daily planning.

What we want to get away from here is this feeling of being busy and not actually getting a whole lot done. Not really focusing on any specific task you have to do, and you’re probably familiar with some of the common cases where this happens. For example, you’re in the library, you’ve got all your material out in front of you, but you don’t really know which thing you should study so no you are on Facebook. Daily planning alleviates this problem because if you do it right you know exactly what you should be doing at any given time. For instance, my daily routine is a form of a daily plan. The moment I wake up in the morning I know exactly what I need to do. I need to come into my apartment, I need to turn off my wake up alarm, and then I need to immediately meditate, go into my seven-minute workout, go for a walk, make breakfast, read books etc. I know exactly what I need to do and as a result, I do it.

So morning routines are really important but I want to focus more on the actual daily plan that encompasses the specific tasks that you need to get done. Whenever I get a new task that needs to be done, at some point in time it goes straight into To Do List. To Do List is the preferred app of choice that I use. There are a lot others out there, but it’s the first point of contact for any task I have. It is not the only place where tasks end up living in my system. On Sundays, I create a weekly plan in a paper notebook; really simple, and write down exactly what I want to accomplish that week. Then when I wake up in the morning and go through my morning routine, I have a habit which is to simply create a daily plan.

So on a whiteboard in my apartment, I write a daily plan every single morning put the day of the week at the top and then I write down the six to seven, maybe eight if I’m feeling really productive that day, things that I need to get done. But I don’t stop there though.

I try to estimate when each task should be done by, so I’ll put a dash and then I’ll put the time. When I estimate these times I try to put into account a fudge ratio. This is a concept I am writing about in my book and basically it’s taking the time I estimate to get things done, and applying a little bit of a buffer to it because we are very bad at planning for things that go wrong or very bad at planning for inefficiencies, and we tend to take the best case scenario a guess for when we estimate times.

Now that I have got this daily plan, I have a list of tasks in the order that I need to do them. I have an estimate for the time that each one should be done, and now I know at any given time what I should be doing. Once I’m done with my morning routine I jump right into my first one and try as best as I can to get it done by the time I estimated. Seeing it right on the board next to me reminds me that, that’s what I should be working on. I don’t let myself get distracted by other things.

It's not to say that I’m absolutely perfect in getting the list done every day, but combined with other productivity techniques that I apply to my life like habit tracking and commitment devices; it’s actually really effective and my output has gone on a steeply rising curve.

So the lesson is clear here, if you want to get a lot of things done you need to plan your day out in advance and then stick to that plan. Doing so will help you know what to focus on at any given moment and you will spend a lot less time feeling busy but not getting much work done.

Thanks for reading this article and I will see you in the next one.
Cheers everyone and have a lovely day.