What is the Secret to Insane Productivity?

Productivity is truly an advantage.  Imagine if you had boundless energy and could tackle your challenges with all that you are capable of.

What if you could double, triple or maybe even 10X your productivity?

Maybe you can.

But how do you take your productivity to the next level?

In What is the Secret to Insane Productivity, I walk through what it takes to achieve high levels of performance, but I want to summarize some of the key insights here.

One of the most overlooked challenges to your personal productivity is your energy level.  You can chase a bunch of mental tricks, and you can try to organize the heck out of everything you do, and you can apply extreme prioritization, and you can add in some extreme motivation, but if you don’t have the energy you need, you won’t get very far.

The key is that you have multiple sources of energy.  Start with your body.   If you start to move more, you generate more energy.  Energy isn’t something you just have.  It’s something you create.  But you have to kick start your energy factory and the key to that is to move more often.  It could be as simple as parking a little further away, getting up for quick walks, or adding a 20 or 30 minute workout in the morning.

Even Richard Branson says the secret of his extreme productivity is working out.

You can also draw energy from your mind, emotions, and spirit.  So if your body is primed and ready for action, but you have a way of knocking yourself down with negative self-talk, that’s not going to help.  The easiest way to deal with negative self-talk is to talk about to your negative thoughts.  That’s right, challenge them.  This is not a new idea.  In fact, this is a proven practice used by many of the world’s best counselors and coaches to help people get out of depression, defeat limiting beliefs, and find new levels of motivation, inspiration, and boundless energy.

Creating better energy for high performance is a a matter of both reducing negative energy drains, and adding rituals and routines that make you come alive.  A quick way to do this is to stop or limit doing the things that drain you and spend more time in your strengths.  Spend much more time in the things that you could do all day.  And then use your strengths as your creative twist to add more value in everything you do.  This is how you become unstoppable.

Energy is truly the secret of insane productivity because you can’t get more hours in a day, but you can add more energy to everything you do.

But like anything, there is no silver bullet.

So what else really makes the difference when it comes to high performance and insane productivity?

Your strategies.  Your techniques.  There are ways to do things better, faster and cheaper.  And experts around the world know them.  And they tend to share them.  They write them in books.  They share them in videos.  They are all around you.  They might be the unsung hero down the hall.  How do you find them?  You start to look for them.  You ask.  You will soon find the people that will help you take your game to the next level, as they share their best strategies and techniques with you.

OK, now.

So you have this boundless energy.  You are spending time in your strengths.  You have these super strategies and techniques for high performance.  

Have you nailed it?

Are you now super productive?

Well, there is another key you need in your arsenal of insane productivity.   There is one more true secret that is underlies exponential productivity.

The answer is this:

Value is the ultimate short cut.

And value is in the eye of the beholder or stakeholder.

When you know what is truly valued, you can trim away all the waste and want not.

So now then, how do you figure out what’s actually valued?  What is really valued by the system you are in, by your customers, by your team, by your partner, by your friends, by whoever?

Well, one way is to ask.  (Yeah, it sounds simple, but you’d be surprised by how many people don’t actually do this.   Did you ever get a gift somebody swore you would love?)

But people don’t always know.  If Ford asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

And value changes.  Time changes what’s important.  And ultimately the value is in the change.  So if you aren’t changing, you aren’t creating new value.

So then, how do you pursuit value?

You treat value like a verb.

Act on it.  Test it.  Learn it.

Create rapid learning loops where failure is OK and learning is valued.

Learn your way forward.

The value you create in your wake will fill a void in the world that will be your unique dent in the universe.