Productivity Tips For Entrepreneurs From Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy shares his tips for entrepreneurs on how to be more productive with Evan Carmichel. Use the information below to take your life to a whole new level. Implementation of knowledge is key to developing yourself and your life.

“One of the most common questions is around productivity, how do I manage my time? How do I focus on the right things? What are some of the tips that you would give on being productive?”

“Well, I often ask my entrepreneurs why do you go to work in the morning? Why do you get out of bed? They think about it and I tell them the answer is MMM, to make more money. You don’t go to work to make less money or the same money, you go to work to make more money. So I said, how do you make more money, well it’s called SMS, and that means to sell more stuff. So you MMM by SMSing.”

“What are the three keys to selling more stuff, they are prospecting, presenting, and closing. Prospecting means finding new people who can and will buy and pay in a short period of time and then present to them that your product or service and why it is the very best choice for them now and then closing them and getting to make a decision today, this minute, so, therefore, all come together, is prospecting, presenting, and closing is how you sell more stuff.”

“The interesting point is after researchers interviewed entrepreneurs, they asked, how important are sales to your business? And the entrepreneurs say it’s the most important thing of all, and then they asked, how much of your time in the course of your day do you spend selling more stuff? And they said all day long, that’s all I do, that’s all I think about all day. So the researchers said, do you mind if we follow you around with a camera and stopwatch for 30days and see how you actually use your time? They said ok, the researchers found out that the average entrepreneur spends 11% of their time prospecting, presenting, and closing. The other 89% is spent fooling around.”

“50% of working time today is wasted, checking emails or chatting with friends, chatting with their buddies and they’re drinking coffee, having lunch, and going around feeling like big shots because they’ve got their own business, but the fact of the matter is, if you’re not prospecting, presenting, and closing, you might as well go home to bed.”

“According to Harvard University email is killing entrepreneurs because they can’t stop, they have this irresistible, almost like an addiction to electronic interruptions. The key is to turn it off, check it every two to three hours and turn it off. When you check your emails it triggers the release of dopamine in your brain. The average adult is checking their phone and email between 95-145 times a day. If you can do that you’ll double and triple your productivity and that will help you be more successful in selling more stuff because you’re not wasting your time on emails.”

“A piece of paper and a pen will make you rich. Make a list of everything that you have to do tomorrow, the best time to make your list is the night before, if you make the list for the whole day tomorrow your subconscious will work on your list overnight, and you’ll wake up in the morning with ideas and insights that are sometimes quite amazing.”

“You make the list and ask, if I could do only one thing on this list before I was called out of town for a month, which one task would I want to be sure to get completed, put a circle around that.”

“When you get up in the morning, whatever time you start, and that’s a very interesting point, wealthy people get up in the morning by 6:00am, poor people get up at 7:00am or afterwards. Wealthy people get up earlier, poor people get up later. Real simple. So if you’re always getting up around 7 o’clock you’re always going to be poor.”

“Get up at 6 o’clock and you develop a ritual, get up, exercise, then sit and plan your day, get organized, and start to hit it at 8 o’clock. And the first thing you do is you start on your most important task and then you concentrate single mindedly on that task, you do not turn on your email, you do not turn on your telephone, you don’t do anything except that one task, and you just do this one task until it’s completed.”

“You’ve already agreed with yourself and the world that there is nothing more valuable in the world than you could do than this one task, so do this, and if you develop a habit of getting up in the morning and starting and completing your most important task it will transform your life. It’s one of the most incredibly productive habits ever discovered. And every person who discovers it they see their income, their productivity, their tension, and their satisfaction just explode.”

“It’s very simple, do you have the discipline, do you have the self-control, the willpower to start and complete your most important task. If you don’t have it you can develop it with practice, if you develop it with practice it soon becomes easy and automatic, and if you just do this your productivity will double the first day.”

“Plan your work in advance, never start working without a list, and never start work without prioritizing your list.”

“All success in life comes from task completion. The key to success in life is task completion. If you don’t complete tasks you have no future. And so if task completion is the key then what you do is complete more and more important tasks. And if you start every day by completing the most important task your brain actually releases endorphins. Endorphins is another chemical and it’s only released when you do something that is life enhancing. When you do something that enhances your life that furthers you it makes you happy, it releases energy, it raises your self-esteem.”

“How do you be a winner? You win. Winning means you cross the finish line, so if you start and complete a task you’re actually winning, and you get a feeling of being a winner. And it gives you energy and inspiration and it drives you and motivates you to want to get that feeling again.”

“The way you become rich is you deliver results that people will pay you for.”

“One of the greatest results tools in the world is called a checklist. And a checklist is very simply a list of every step in the process from step one to step two to step three and so on, much like a recipe that is organized.”

“I spoke to this entrepreneur who was kind of just drifting through his career for a few years and then suddenly it just took off. His personality was just different, he was starting early, working harder, staying later, he was up, he was positive, his income had gone over $200,000 dollars in a few years, and so I asked him, what was the turning point in your life? And he said, I finally decided to get serious, I finally decided to quit screwing around.”

“No successful entrepreneurs works less than 6 days a week, no entrepreneur works less than 60 hours a week. Anybody who thinks that they can have balance and work eight hour days and spend you know time in their personal life and so on that’s good, get a job working for wages and worry about money all your life, drive a used car, have holes in your shoes, and eat macaroni and cheese because that’s what people do who work 8-5.”

“Every single person who is wealthy hits it all the time. They get up earlier, they start earlier and they hit, and they work longer hours but here’s the great payoff, they’re happy all the time.”

“If you’re doing something you enjoy and you’re getting better and better at it, you love your work. Successful entrepreneurs love what they do, and they want to do more of it.”

“You’ve got to get better and better at what you do. Successful people spend an hour a day reading in their field.”

“Many people have become rich as a result of a single book.”

“Each one of us has turning points in our lives. A book, a person, a piece of advice, a course, a video, a single choice can be a turning point in your life.”

“I’m sitting there in my little home in the kitchen when I was starting out, it’s cold, I got no money, no television, and then suddenly like a light bulb flashing in my face I realized that this is my life, this is my life and I am responsible, no one is going to come to the rescue, nothing is going to change for me unless I change, nobody cares. So this was my life and it dawned on me I am responsible, I am responsible, I am responsible, and that changed my life forever, that was a turning point.”

“The second major turning point was when I discovered goals. I wrote down my first list of goals and 30 days later my life had transformed.”

“The third turning point was when I discovered continuous learning, personal development, that you could learn any you needed to learn to develop any skill you needed to achieve any goal you could set for yourself.”

“Those three turning points made my life.”

“Once you take full responsibility for your life your future is unlimited.”

“Get a piece of paper and put a line down the middle and write A on one side and b on the other. A is important tasks that will help you, B is unimportant tasks that will hinder you. If you want to be successful focus on A tasks, the tasks that move you toward your goals and stop engaging in B tasks, the tasks that take you away from your goals. Work on A tasks all day long every day. This one-liner will make you rich, ask yourself this question before engaging in an activity, is this task moving me toward my most important goal or is it merely a distraction and a waste of time? Don’t do things that are not moving you toward your most important goal.”

“Your most important goal is to double your income, how do you double your income, you get more results, how do you get more results, you do your most important tasks and complete them, this is not a mystery. Stop doing useless things, so only do those things that are moving you toward achieving the most important goal you have.”

“Do only A tasks.”