Christo: Hi and welcome back to Basic Bananas TV. Today I want to share a tip with you around productivity. Now we got a lot of questions around, “How do I get stuff done? How do I get more done? How can I grow my business without doing my head in, adding more and more to my to-do list over and over. It gets to the point where you just can’t possibly do anymore. Obviously every single day there’s a ceiling on what you can possibly get done. Everybody has a to-do list. There’s only so much you can take off the to-do list every single day before you max out. Before … Or you try and add more hours and you’ll just get to a point of burnout.

Now because we work with people obviously to grow their now because we work with people obviously to grow their businesses. The businesses you’re growing where obviously workload can increase. Now there’s lots of things which we will do around systemizing and how to develop your operations manual, and then basically document everything you do. Then create job descriptions for all of those things that need to be done, so you can start to remove yourself and delegate those things. On today’s tip I wanted to give you some really practical things all around.

We go into more depth on that stuff in other video tips, but just on today’s one, just how to get it done on the day-to-day. Like, what do you even do with your to-do list? The email inbox is a big trap for a lot of people. It can often take away half your day by just opening the inbox basically. For some people you can probably say goodbye to your full day just the moment you open your inbox. A good strategy to do to get cracking in the morning is, before even opening the inbox, you go to your to-do list for and you to prioritize the top few things.

Even if you just have the top five things every single day, or for you it might be the top three things that are going to make the biggest difference for your business. The top three, I like to say mostly, hopefully it’s marketing activities that you need to get done. That will bring your awareness for your business so it’ll force the business to grow. If you prioritize the top three things every single day and you could use a program, our team kind of have a bit of a split view on this.

They either use Trello, Trello as basically there to-do list because with Trello you can make checklist and you can say here’s what I want to do today. Here’s what I want to do tomorrow. Here’s what I want to do this week. Then maybe later kind of list. Then another person part of the team, they like Wunderlist which is Wunder list basically. I’ll put the links to these on the page here on our own BasicBananas.com on the video blog page so you can check them out.

Wunderlist is a great one too where you can create to-do list and you can have different list. I have a list in my Wunderlist which is called, “Scheduled.” I’ll put everything in there which I’ll put for later or schedule a time to do. Then I have at least called, “Get done.” Which is basically just get done whenever I have the time I can go back to that and get it done. Then what I also have is a, “Maybe Later” list. I put things into the Maybe Later that’ll, “Oh that’s a good idea, but I don’t want it cluttering up my mind at the moment”, so I put in the maybe later and that’s just a maybe later ideas.

If at any point in time I want to shift those out, I can just drag it across to a, “Get done” or “Schedule a time.” What you can do with Wunderlist too is, you can look at your “Top Priority” or your, “Get Done.” I might look at the Get Done list and think, what do I wanted to get done? What’s the highest priorities of things I need to do here? You can simply star all those things or you can schedule a time to do them. By starring, it’ll pop them up into a stag list with your top priorities and then simply from that stag list, that’s what you do every single day.

Grab the top three things. Do those things before even opening your emails. Now for some people this is going to sound like horrible, because you need to get your emails down first and it’s very important. I understand that. If you can in the morning a good way to get your priorities done is do them before opening the inbox and cluttering our minds with all of this different stuff. Get the top three priorities done, then go to the emails after. You might check your emails at ten in the morning and you’ve worked from eight till 10 on those top priorities, and you’ll get you be surprised how much you can get done.

When it comes to the emails as a rule of thumb what we like to do is, say if the email is under two minutes to complete, get it done immediately because the goal with emails is try to touch it once and once only, so you’re not looking at the same email over and over and over again. Every time you open your inbox and cluttering your mind. Look at it, try and touch it once get rid of it get it done. If it’s under two minutes to it immediately. If it’s something that’s going to take longer maybe move it to your get down list. That’s a great way to filter through and move through the emails as well so your not rereading the same things over and over and over again.

So there’s some cool productivity tips for you. Most important thing is keep in mind as a general rule, there’s always just getting the little things done. When it comes to marketing it’s about implementation, that’s all that gets results. The result is all that matters so, always getting the little things done and that’s what result in the big things.

People always ask us, “Was the big thing, the one main thing I can do?” It’s all the little things result in the big things basically. I look forward to seeing you on future episodes. Of course, once again feel free to share any of your productivity tips in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you. Bye for now. There’s a call I got to run.