We get it. Productivity systems are usually disappointments. We’ve been burned by them time and time again.
But, if you’re going to run a million-dollar business in three months per year or less, you need to up your productivity game.
As Leslie and I searched for new ways to grow our income, it became clear that a home-based business was our best bet. But we just didn’t have the time.
So here’s what we did: We scoured the productivity world and found the best-of-the-best advice, systems, and methods. We then combined them and applied them to our own home-based business.
Because of this system, we now run our Amazon storefront in just a few hours per year.
So here it is: the exact productivity system that Leslie and I use. Soon, you too will be a productivity powerhouse.
Our Productivity Philosophy
Just like with our Ultimate Business and Investing Guides, we have an overarching philosophy at the heart of our productivity guide.
And just like with our Business and Investing Guides, we define our terms a bit differently than you might be used to.
We use a very concrete, very objective measure of productivity. Productivity is at the heart of this whole 3MM system and we need to be able to measure it and improve it.
What is this objective concrete measure?
It’s our main objective for the whole business:
Dollars Earned / Hours Worked
Our Goal
We want to fit all of the necessary work required to run a successful business into just a few hours each day (ideally fewer than two).
And we want to maximize the amount of money we get paid for it.
For our 3MM business to be considered successful, it must earn enough money after those two hours input to:
- Pay your expenses (including your cost of living) and
- Have enough left over to invest
We will do this by focusing on what is actually necessary. We will eliminate everything that will not directly move us closer to our goal. If it does not increase dollars earned, decrease hours worked (or do both), then we do not do it.
Simple right?
Simple, but not easy.
Sometimes you simply have to work on things that don’t fit our criteria. Such is life.
The trick (when these inefficient tasks arise) is to work on them in the most sustainable and efficient way possible.
This guide will show you how to identify the profitable, how to spot wasted effort before it happens, and how to focus on what really matters.
When you have finished with this guide, you will be able to create a system that will:
- Capture every idea, responsibility, and action that springs into your head
- Eliminate all the unnecessary ‘stuff’ that usually fills a work day
- Work in a controlled, low-stress way on only the things that matter.
Your creativity will flourish. Your output will increase. Your stress will fall.
In short, follow this system and you will amaze yourself.
Required Reading
Just like with our other Ultimate Guides, this one will mention a few books. You should read all of them eventually (we will put a list at the end) but there are three you must read.
These are the best-of-the-best. The sooner you read them, the better.
Essentialism by Greg Mckeown
Much of our philosophy, not just for productivity but for life, is codified in this book. McKeown helps you shift your mindset to focus only on the things in life that really matter. Do what he says and your life will improve. Full stop.
McKeown speaks in terms of careers and life in general. We have taken those same principles and applied them to our business and our workload. Once you read the book, you will see Essentialism all through this guide (and this website, and our business structure).
Getting Things Done by David Allen
This is the granddaddy of all productivity books. Nothing else comes close.
Your to-do list is out of control. You have a million thoughts bouncing around in your head. You are the average modern person.
Getting Things Done will straighten you out. After you read it you will be extremely well organized. You will have a clearer mind than you ever thought possible. And you will, as the title promises, get things done.
David Allen calls it ‘having a mind like water’ but that grossly undersells the state of lucid, creative mastery you will get from reading this book.
We will take Mr. Allen’s structure and apply it to our working philosophy. We will do this in a way that will work for you, no matter what industry or niche you are in. We use GTD to sort, organize, and file our most profitable projects.
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice as Much in Half the Time by Jeff and J.J. Sutherland
Scrum is one angle of a very complex, very popular philosophy of project and workload management. There are a million resources out there on Scrum and its related systems.
And I had tried to read them all, to no avail. I just didn’t get it.
Until I read this book. I believe this is the clearest, most succinct depiction of Scrum anywhere. It should be the starting point for your Scrum adventures.
This book also does exactly what it promises (more so, actually). After implementing a version of Scrum into our system, we easily do twice the work, often in less than half the time.
We will use the principles from Scrum to create a time-boxed, efficient working environment that will let us burn through the profitable projects we planned using the GTD system.
Key Terms
There are terms you need to know before we get started. These are the concepts that this whole system is built upon, so know them well.
Pareto Principle
Also known as the 80/20 rule. It comes from an economist (named Pareto). Pareto noted that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
People (economists, mathematicians, and business analysts) began finding that same ratio in many aspects of life.
What matters to us is this: You get about 80% of your outcome from about 20% of the effort.
It also means that to get the last 20% of your outcome, you need to put in 80% of the effort.
As a 3MM business, we will focus as much as possible on the 80% outcome you get for 20% effort.
Minimum Viable Product
To that end, as we start to build our businesses, we want to focus on the 20% that will earn 80% of our income.
In software development, they call this the Minimum Viable Product.
What are the simplest, most essential features that a customer will pay for? Get that made first, even though it won’t be perfect. Get it out in the wild as fast as possible.
Take in what income you can. Take in what feedback you can. Then use the income to address the feedback.
From there you build and improve and release over and over again.
As a 3MM business, we want to do exactly the same thing. We want to make our Minimum Viable Product as quickly as possible.
Don’t worry, we have lots of time to polish that remaining 20%.
The Vital Few
An important corollary to the Pareto Principle. If 80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the effort, then it is also true that:
Most of your problems will stem from a vital few sources.
As a 3MM business, we are constantly looking for those vital few sources of headaches. What one thing can we eliminate that will save us hours of time or oodles of stress? Train yourself to look for Obstacles.
Obstacles
Come on, Ben. I know what an obstacle is.
We’re not talking about obstacles as a physical nuisance (like the forgotten toy you trip over in the middle of the night). We’re not talking about obstacles that are not easy to see.
We’re talking about Obstacles.
With a capital ‘O’.
Within this system, you will make greater gains by eliminating Obstacles than by actually crossing things off your to-do list.
What are Obstacles? They are abstract things that are not easy to define. They can be anything.
You want to do [X] but you can’t until you [Y]. [Y] is your Obstacle.
Maybe it’s the knowledge you don’t have. Maybe it’s a tool you lack.
Most of the time, a project that seems hopelessly deadlocked can be completed if you can find the Obstacle that is tying everything up.
Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands to fill the time allowed for it.”
Coined by a naval historian after his time working with the British Civil Service, it was originally a commentary on the inefficiency of bureaucracies.
But, like Pareto’s principle, it has since been applied elsewhere.
If I had to pick just one term from this list for you to learn and know well, it would be this one. Really, truly grasping this concept is crucial to this whole system.
In fact, we’re going to turn this one on its head and force it to work for us, rather than against us.
Hofstadter’s Law
A humorous corollary to Parkison’s Law. It was coined by Douglas Hofstader in his book Godel, Escher, Bach. It states:
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Hofstadter is poking fun at something that is just so fundamentally human…
Our complete inability to estimate how long a given task will take.
Paradoxically, your estimates tend to get worse the more you know about that task.
Most of the time this is just a funny observation about human nature, but when you are trying to design or follow a productivity system, it can be deadly. We get around this (as much as any human can) by doubling our estimation of how long tasks will take, then trying to complete it 25% of that time estimate.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
In economics, ‘Sunk Cost’ refers to anything that has already been done. The Sunk Cost Fallacy arises when we put a value on those past decisions and let them determine our future decisions.
Probably the most famous example of this is the Concorde Jet (some people even call this the Concorde Fallacy). The British and French governments jointly developed an aircraft (the Concorde Jet) even though it became painfully clear that it was a financial disaster (and a literal one in a few cases).
And they kept on throwing money at the situation long after everyone knew it would never be profitable.
Why?
They kept looking at all the money they had already put into the project. They couldn’t let all that money go to waste, right?
Here’s a more realistic example:
You had a business idea. You spent $1,000 developing it. It becomes clear it’s never going to work.
You need to scrap the whole thing. Right now. It’s a huge waste of time and money.
But it almost physically hurts you to say goodbye to that $1,000.
So you keep going. And you waste more time and more money on a project you know full well will never work because you can’t stand to lose the $1,000.
You’ve done this. You are probably doing this right now somewhere in your life.
And that’s ok. It’s all part of being human.
Here’s how we fix it:
Make this your mantra: The only decisions that matter are present and future decisions.
What’s passed is past. Let it go. Mistakes happen. Learn from them and move on. Past you is not current you. And the current you is not as wise or skilled as the future you.
So pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Do better next time.
We do not waste time on dead ends. We focus only on what will yield the best future results.
Understanding the Sunk Cost Fallacy and being ready to spot it in your own life does not directly affect our productivity system. You just need to know when to cut and run. You will wander down dead-end alleys as you build your business. The sooner you realize that you are in one and turn around, the more productive (and profitable) you will be.
Sprints
‘Sprint’ is a term we borrowed from the project management system known as Scrum.
To paraphrase a definition from Scrum.org:
A sprint is a single collection of actions that need to be completed within a set timeframe.
Within the 3MM productivity system, Sprints:
- Are usually one week long
- Contain all actions (to-dos) required to complete an aspect of a project
- Include some objective way to measure progress
Don’t worry, we will cover Sprints in much more detail below. For now, just know that a ‘sprint’ is the basic unit of planning for our productivity system.
By the time you complete this section, you will be adept at thinking in sprints. That is, when an idea pops into your head, you will, almost automatically, break that idea into a series of concrete steps, and organize those steps into groups that can be completed within one week (aka, one sprint).
Sprints also let you assign an objective number value to the amount you accomplished in a given week. This lets you gamify your productivity, which we’ll talk about more in just a moment.
Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique was created in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo. It got its name from the small tomato-shaped timer that Francesco used to manage his time while in college.
It’s simple enough to explain in a single sentence: Set the timer for 25 minutes and work, uninterrupted, until the timer goes off. Then take a five-minute break.
Ok, fine. Two sentences.
How does this fit into the 3MM productivity system?
We use pomodoros within our sprints. We work for two hours each day. That’s four pomodoros.
I should point out that this one is optional. After getting comfortable with the system, you might find yourself just blasting through the full two-hour session anyway.
But try them out to get started.
Gamification
If there is any magical secret to this system, it is this.
Gamification is simply designing your workload to have the qualities of a game.
Specifically, we want objective measures of success (you score points) that can be ‘beaten’ (you aim for a high score) with a small punishment for failure and a small reward for success.
Within our system, we use burndown charts, pomodoros, effort points, and dollars per hour as means to this end.
The Three Cs of the 3MM Productivity System
The goal of this productivity system is not just to spend less time working.
Ok, that’s a lot of it. But there are other benefits, too. We want to have the ‘clear-headed mastery’ of Getting Things Done, the ‘disciplined pursuit of less-but-better’ of Essentialism, and the ‘twice the work in half the time’ of Scrum.
We want a powerful system that makes us more creative, more relaxed, and more in control than we have ever been.
And we do it with the three C’s:
Capture
Curate
Create
Capture
Probably the most undersold aspect of the Getting Things Done system is its ability to capture every little task that comes your way.
People rave about the productivity part of the system (and we do too, it’s brilliant) but the actual improvement to our lives didn’t come from that part.
It came from what David Allen calls ‘ubiquitous capture’.
Every fleeting thought of everything you need to do is quickly captured and entered into his system. Every “We need milk” or “Was that check deposited” goes into the system and is dealt with appropriately.
In the 3MM system, we are going to take that one step further and really open up the possibilities.
We don’t want to just capture our to-dos, we want to capture our ideas.
Remember, we want to keep expanding our business (offering new products, reaching new customers). We have a goal for how much we want to grow each year (for Leslie and me it is 15% per year). Every idea that pops into our heads could move us to that goal.
So everything is captured.
Here’s how we do it.
We have two basic ‘modes’ of capture. Active and Passive.
Active Capture
Active capture is the more difficult of the two (even though neither is hard). It should be done first, as the very first step in your productivity system.
Here’s what you do:
Grab a notebook and a pen, and sit somewhere quiet where you won’t be disturbed for a while. For your first session, this could take a while (plan for an hour) but it will get much faster after this first round.
Now brain dump. Every to-do. Every idea. Every worry. Write it down. Get it out of your mind and onto the page.
Then (and here’s the really important part) set the notebook aside and promptly forget what you wrote down.
Why?
The whole point of this exercise is to get ideas out of your head. David Allen’s brilliant insight here is this:
When you hold a thought in your head (I can’t forget to take out the trash, I can’t forget, I can’t forget) you waste energy. Literally. Thinking burns calories.
Unfortunately, cognitive energy can’t be restored as easily as muscle energy. To restore cognitive energy, you need to sleep.
And if your cognitive energy is low and you can’t just pop off for a nap, you are left in a foggy-headed zombie trance.
Once it’s all out of your head you will feel…
Well, probably nothing. You’ve already burned up a good chunk of your cognitive energy getting everything on paper. Also, you really haven’t let go of those ideas yet, even if you think you have.
You just don’t have enough trust in the system.
Yet. Give it time. Once you’ve gone through the whole system for a few days and really see it in action, your trust will grow.
And your mind will clear. And you will sleep better.
A quick personal story: I used to suffer from brain fog. Severe brain fog. I searched high and low for a cure. I think I tried every supplement on the planet and did weird experiments with sleep rhythms. And in the end, it was David Allen and Getting Things Done that cured me. Trying to keep all my ‘stuff’ in my head was burning through all of my cognitive energy within an hour of waking up. I cannot recommend Getting Things Done enough.
Hats
Ok, now you have the basic idea of the brain dump David Allen describes. But, to really get the most out of that idea for your 3MM business, we need to change things just a bit. We need to put on our hats.
Hats?
In the 3MM Business Guide, we talked about The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. In it, Gerber recommends separating your actions into three roles (metaphorically described as three different hats that you wear).
They are:
- The Doer
- The Planner
- The Dreamer
We want to do an Active Capture while wearing each of these hats.
The Doer is concrete. What do I need to do between now and my next Active Capture? What do I need to get done to survive another day? What meetings, emails, calls, and paperwork must be attended/completed before the day is done?
The Planner is farsighted. What do I need to schedule for tomorrow, next week, or next year? What do I need to outline, brainstorm, sketch, plan, or organize? Have your calendar handy. Have scratch paper handy for mind mapping or flowcharting.
The Dreamer lets it all go. Ignore all obstacles or doubts or reservations. Assume the world is a perfect place full of optimism and opportunity. Every idea will work out. There are no limits and nothing is stupid or impractical. Let’s make an online course. Let’s flip a house. Let’s open a coffeeshop. Do not limit your dreamer.
Hat-by-hat, empty that head of yours.
How often should I Actively Capture?
In the beginning, probably every day or so. Do it as frequently as it takes to feel clear-headed. As you gain experience with the system, the time between captures will increase. We now only do this a few times per year.
One last thing: Active Capture should feel good. Like real good. When it really clicks for you, you might feel a floating feeling in your chest, a peace of mind. It’s pretty close to a runner’s high.
I know that sounds very new-age whimsical, but it isn’t anything mystical. You’ve been walking around with a cognitive back spasm, and Active Capture will get that to finally relax.
Passive Capture
The easier of the two. This is also the more productive in a business-growth sense (for us anyway).
Here’s what you do:
Get a small stack of 3×5 index cards. Maybe 20 of them.
Now clip them all together with a small binder clip.
Congratulations, you’ve made a hipster PDA. Put it in your pocket along with a pen or pencil and go live your life.
As you live said life (working, running errands, playing with the kids, whatever) random ideas will pop into your head.
Some of these will be to-dos (Did I update that post? I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment) and some of these will be business ideas (You know what would be awesome? An automatic banana peeler).
Pull out those notecards and jot those thoughts down.
With Active Capture, the goal was to get your mind empty. With Passive Capture, the goal is to not let a single idea escape.
Why is it called Passive Capture? Because you are not forcing any of these thoughts. You are relaxing and letting them roll through your mind. This is where your most brilliant insights, inventions, and solutions will come from.
There is a bit of an inverse relationship between Active and Passive Capture. In the beginning, you will probably have way more Active Captures than Passive. The more Active Captures you have, the less Passive Captures you will have.
This makes sense. Your brain has been all tied up with those Active Capture thoughts and there just isn’t enough cognitive energy left to support the eureka moments that are percolating in the background.
Once you get your system underway, you will use less and less Active Capture (but never zero!) and you will have more and more eureka moments.
Hats
Again, we need to talk about hats. You will still ‘wear’ the different hats just like you did for Active Capture, but it will happen naturally without any active input by you.
You’ll be walking along and poof, a to-do (The Doer) pops into your head. Or you’ll be sitting down to eat and poof you remember an appointment you need to schedule (The Planner).
Don’t force yourself to wear different hats. Just let it happen. This will help your subconscious work through the most stressful thoughts first.
So where’s The Dreamer?
At first, probably nowhere. The Planner and The Doer have had too much power for too long. So let them burn themselves out. Soon, between your Active and Passive sessions, they will exhaust themselves.
Then you will start to hear The Dreamer.
And The Dreamer is where the money is.
Once you get this system underway, The Dreamer will make up a good 90% of the spontaneous thoughts that pop into your head. But you need to nurture The Dreamer.
Just remember:
- Never judge (sometimes the dumbest ideas are actually the best)
- Capture it all (even if it seems like the most ridiculously outlandish idea ever)
Do these two things and you will soon have a big list of potential ideas. You will generate more ideas than you could ever accomplish in one lifetime.
Now, whichever Capture we are using, we want to lump our ‘stuff’ into two distinct categories:
- Tiny To-Dos
- Big Ideas
Tiny To Dos
These are single-step actions. They are usually dull and the fact that you have to do it makes you want to pull your hair out.
Such is life.
They come from The Doer and The Planner and are tasks that can be described as either maintenance or mundane (or both). Renew a license. Submit some paperwork. Return a call.
The key feature of a tiny to-do, though, is that it is tiny. It’s just one thing more or less in isolation.
But there’s a cruel irony here:
These tend to be the things that derail you from your workflow or your productivity routine.
Man, I can plan and outline a new class for hours (a complicated and brain-frying project, I assure you). But when I need to do something like schedule an oil change…
I’ll put it off for weeks.
The tiny to-dos seem less important because they are small. But they are insidious.
So all of our tiny to-dos get their own private list. Normally we do them ASAP.
If you don’t, those little jerks will sneak up on you and stab you in the back.
But for right now, just leave them alone. We’ll come back to them in our Curate phase.
Big Ideas
Big Ideas come from The Dreamer. They are multi-step projects that will require outlining, brainstorming, and planning.
In short, you can’t just do these. They will take a serious time commitment.
These, too, get their own list. But don’t go planning and brainstorming yet. Just write down enough that you won’t forget the key aspects of the project. We will get to planning in a bit.
For now, leave your Big Ideas on their own list. We’ll get to them soon.
Curate
This is the step that separates the 3MM productivity system from the pack. If your goal, like ours, is to work three months a year or less, this is the number one skill you want to master.
I told you before that much of the philosophy behind this productivity system (and this whole website, and our lives) is codified in Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Now you will see that philosophy in action.
Alright. We come to the Curate phase after we have emptied our minds of every single to-do, calendar entry, worry, and dream. We now have two lists: our Tiny To-dos and our Big Ideas (we did this with our Active Capture phase. We are also constantly adding to them via Passive Capture).
Now if we just went and did all of the to-dos and planned out all of our Big Ideas, we wouldn’t be Three Month Millionaires. We would be “Twelve Month Never Accomplished Anything”s.
We must curate. We must trim those lists down.
Remember, you will soon be generating more creative ideas than any one person could do in a lifetime. If we don’t establish some kind of system for choosing only the best, we will drown in our own creativity.
In Essentialism, Greg Mckeown advocates the “disciplined pursuit of less” and that is exactly what we are about to do.
Our goal is to delete as many items as possible. For each list (Tiny To-dos and Big Ideas) we ask a set of questions. We must ask these questions with disciplined, almost ruthless intent.
Why do we need to be ruthless? Because if you give even an inch, you will start making exceptions and before you know it you’re bending over backward to complete everything while accomplishing nothing.
The Boundary Rules
Why do we need to be disciplined? Because when you are actually in the trenches of running this productivity system, you can easily be tempted down distracting alleyways. So each time we face a new decision (or to-do or Big Idea) we ask the same two questions
Will this increase our dollars per hour?
And…
Will this protect our work-hours limit?
Why these two specific questions?
These are examples of what Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt call “Boundary Rules”. In their book Simple Rules, Sull and Eisenhardt explain that clear simple rules often create better outcomes in decision-making than complex theories or algorithms.
“Boundary rules” help you make a decision by quickly, clearly (and in this case ruthlessly) eliminating anything that does not fit specific criteria.
In the case of our 3MM business, our first criterion is tied directly to our main focus metric: dollars per hour.
“Will this increase our dollars-per-hour?”
When we ask “Will this increase our dollars-per-hour”, we are usually looking at our Big Ideas list and considering a new project. We are evaluating a new product, investment, or opportunity for our business. But it still applies to our Tiny To-Dos as well.
This simple rule is actually testing a few different things:
One, is this highly likely to be profitable?
And I mean highly likely. No one can predict the future and you will never be certain that a new idea will make money. But you should be reasonably sure that you will make money.
AND you should have a reasonable estimate of how much money it will make.
Why all the emphasis all being reasonable?
Because it is extremely easy to get carried away here.
Listen, it’s great to be hopeful and optimistic, but you need to really ground yourself when making this decision. It is much better to err on the side of pessimism.
Two, how much time will this add to my workload?
Ok, we are reasonably sure that this Big Idea will be profitable. That means it will increase the ‘dollars’ portion of our ratio.
But what will it do to the ‘hours’ portion?
Let’s do a quick thought experiment:
Your 3MM business is rolling along. You are currently making $200 per hour. You work 200 hours per year (for a total of $40,000 per year). You are reasonably sure your Big Idea will earn you an additional $3,000 per year. Great!
But, how many hours per year will this Big Idea require? Again, be brutally honest and err on the side of pessimism. Don’t forget up-front time costs (designing, building, planning, whatever) as well as ongoing time costs (maintenance, customer support, marketing).
You come up with a conservative estimate of 50 hours per year.
That means, if you implement this Big Idea, you can reasonably expect to make $43,000 next year after working 250 hours!
But, your dollars-per-hour has decreased by 14%.
We don’t want this Big Idea. Look for one that either earns more or involves less time.
Maybe there’s a rental property that will yield the same $3,000 per year but will require about 10 hours per year to maintain.
In that case, you will make $43,000 and work 210 hours for a new ratio of $204 per hour!
Well, what about that Tiny To-do list?
Same song, different verse. Here, you won’t be considering ways to add dollars to your business, but ways to subtract hours.
The effect on our metric (dollars-per-hour) is the same, though. Here’s a real-life example:
Leslie and I schedule one day per quarter to try to tighten our spending. We just look at our expenses and see what we actually need. (“Disciplined pursuit of less,” remember?)
A few months ago we realized that we were paying $100 per month for internet service. Could we get it cheaper? (This thought was generated through Passive Capture, written down on our notecard, then transferred to the Tiny To-Do list).
When it came time to curate, we looked at this entry and thought:
“Will reducing our internet bill increase our dollars per hour?”
Our provider’s website stated that we could switch to a plan that was not much slower but costs $40 per month (instead of $100). We figured we’d sink 3 hours into switching (our provider has notoriously bad customer service).
For 3 hours of work, we would ‘make’ $720 per year ($60 savings x 12 months).
That’s a win!
“Will this protect our work-hours limit?”
We have a hard cap on the total amount of hours we will work each year. We embarked on this whole philosophy because we wanted to build and run small businesses in three months per year or less.
So any idea that will put us past that limit is crossed off the list. Yes, even really really good ones.
As your business matures (as you gain experience, streamline processes and delegate) the time commitment begins to shrink. What took you three months to run in the beginning may take you just three days once you get everything in place. (This is what happened with our Amazon store).
When this happens, or when we come up with ideas that save us time, we will go back and reexamine anything that would have put us over our limit.
Some entries from your lists will save you time in the future but make no money at all. Technically, this would fail our profitability test, but decreasing hours worked while maintaining dollars earned still improves our ratio, so these ideas get to stay. Everything else goes.
By the way, when we cross things off these lists, we are not throwing them away forever. We file these items (especially Big Ideas) for later use. You never know when a situation will change and something that seemed way off the radar is suddenly right in your wheelhouse.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen calls this a Someday/Maybe folder. We go through this every now and then looking for our next thing. We usually do this after a new project has matured and its workload has shrunk.
The Wildcards
Ok, I have to admit it: some things need to be done that don’t fit into our two criteria.
Real-world example: At this very moment, ‘pay state sales tax’ is sitting on our list. This won’t increase our dollars per hour and the only way it ‘protects’ us is by keeping us out of jail.
These things happen. They need to be done to continue operating. Think rent. Think utilities. Think of replenishing supplies.
It’s the cost of doing business and the easiest way to handle it is to do it as quickly as you can.
The Priority Rules
So we have gone through both lists and crossed off everything that will not increase our dollars per hour and everything that will put us past our work-hour limit.
We now have a handful of things. Some are Tiny To-Dos. Some are Big Ideas.
But now what?
Now we need to prioritize.
We want to only work on the absolute essentials. These are the biggest, the best, or just the most fun ideas.
Again we’re going to borrow from Simple Rules for this one. Prioritizing Rules allows us to put our list of potentials into some kind of operational order.
We want to be able to rank our lists by
- The increase in dollars-per-hour
- The number of hours we reasonably expect the project or action to take
- How long it will take before the cash makes it to our bank account
What’s with that last one? Money earned today is worth more to us than money earned tomorrow (or next year).
Why?
Because we invest heavily and leverage the power of compounding. We want to get every possible dollar working for us as soon as possible.
Here’s an example: Let’s say we have two options to consider. Building a new affiliate website from scratch or adding a new brand to our Amazon storefront.
I reasonably expect the affiliate site to take a total of 100 hours of work and yield $10,000 per year in income. BUT, it will take a solid year for the pages to rank and for the cash to start rolling in.
I reasonably expect the new brand to add about $3,000 per year to our storefront’s income. It will take 30 hours to set everything up. BUT I will see the first dollars in my bank account in two weeks.
Both of these pass our Boundary Rules, they make the same number of dollars per hour. The only difference is that adding the new brand to our lineup will get us less money sooner.
We would choose to add the new brand. That way we would get $3,000 invested and compounding a full year before the website. Besides, we can always come back to that website idea later (and use the new Amazon income to fund it).
In short, we use our Prioritizing Rules to choose the tasks that will make us the most money over the life of our business and that best fit into the time we have available.
Create
So now we have our list of Tiny To-Dos and our List of Big Ideas. We’ve trimmed each of them down using our Boundary Rules. We’ve put them in a rational order using our Prioritizing Rules.
Now what?
That depends on which list you’re looking at.
For those Tiny To-Dos
Most of the items on your Tiny To-Do list are probably single-step actions. Call that person back. Finish that report. Contact that brand owner.
These single-step actions are nice and easy to handle. You just do them. Cross them off. Move on.
I do have a recommendation though. Set aside specific blocks of time to burn through these. Maybe you want to dedicate 30 minutes every other day and then race the clock. See how many you can do, then try to beat your score.
It’s simple gamification, but it works.
For those Big Ideas
Now, this is where things get fun. When you get the hang of the process in this section, you are going to feel powerful.
You will be able to break even very complicated ideas into fundamental parts, organizing them into an objective, visual system that you can burn through or delegate. You’ll know what to expect in profits, expenses, timelines, and workloads…
And you’ll be able to do it in an extremely short amount of time.
Let’s do this.
Projects
Most of the items on your Big Ideas list should be projects.
That is:
- They should require multiple steps to complete.
- They should have a concrete definition of ‘done’
- They should accomplish a concrete benefit for you, your business, or your customers (hopefully all three!)
Compare this with the Tiny To-Do list and you see the difference: Tiny To-Dos are one-and-done, single-step actions. They might be part of a project, but if one of those Tiny To-Dos is actually two or more steps pretending to be one step, move it to the Big Ideas list.
Projects are your chance to make. This is where you flex your creative muscle. This is where you put your strengths and skills to use. They are gratification. They are fulfillment.
Let’s work through a real project example. A big example.
Let’s start a business:
Plan
So I’ve decided that I want to create a business that will sell handmade jewelry online. The idea has already passed our Boundary Rules and was at the top of my prioritized Big Idea lists.
Now we plan.
I grab a notebook and pen and I just start listing as many things as I can. I want to try to capture each individual thing that we will need to do in order to reach our concrete goal of ‘sell jewelry online’.
A quick brain dump yields:
- Decide what kind of jewelry I will make
- Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc.
- Make an Etsy account
- Buy the tools I will need
- Find experts and similar stores to follow
- Find video guides
- Legally form a business LLC
- Get a sales tax license/number
- Learn how to take good pictures for the Etsy store
- (The list goes on, but you get the idea)
Now go through that list and look for any Tiny To-Do you have generated. Remember, Tiny To-Dos are single-step actions. So things like:
- Make an Etsy account
- Buy the tools I will need
- Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc.
- Find video guides
Add these to the Tiny To-Do list.
But Ben, I don’t know what tools I will need!
Then add ‘research which tools I will need’ instead. ‘Research’ is always a useful step to take.
By the way, when you research and learn new things, write them down somewhere. It’s easy to forget this in all the excitement, but you want to build a repository of everything you learn along the way.
Each time we start a new project, Leslie and I also start a new notebook. We want a single self-contained place to keep all the stuff we learn.
Ok, you may have noticed that some of these entries are going to take more than one step.
They are projects in and of themselves.
Things like: “Decide what jewelry to make”
Might have substeps like:
- Research what is selling on Etsy
- Research what materials cost for each design
- Find out if I can even make these designs
What should we do with the sub-projects? Flip to a new page and give them the same treatment as the Big Ideas.
You are trying to uncover every single-step action that needs to be completed to bring your project to life.
Ideally, you will end up with a continuous, logical progression of actions that will take you from start to finish.
How often does that happen?
Never.
There will always be things you didn’t anticipate. And there will always be items you didn’t think of.
Just plan in pencil and be ready to add and subtract as necessary.
Do
Alright, it’s showtime.
We now have a To-Do list loaded with individual concrete steps that will each move our Big Idea one step closer to ‘done’.
You could just go and do all that stuff. And it would work out fine.
But…
If we apply a few interesting tricks of human psychology, we can supercharge the whole process.
Remember, we want to make sure that we confine our work to a specific block of time. For Leslie and I, the sweet spot is two hours per day. We don’t want any work spilling out of that window, ever.
Scrum
Our third and final must-read book for this section is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and J.J. Sutherland.
I know, I know, that title, right? Scrum is ugly. ‘Twice the work in half the time’ sounds like pure clickbait…
But this book delivers. It does exactly what it promises. In fact, in our personal experience, we do more than twice the work of our typically-employed friends in one-fourth of the time.
(‘Scrum’ still sounds gross, though.)
How is this possible?
Scrum is a project management system that was developed within the software industry. It is widely used today and is at the heart of other workflow systems you might have heard of (Agile, Lean, etc).
It builds on previous advancements made in the hard manufacturing industries and it applies them to software development.
Well, we are about to apply them to running a million-dollar business in two hours a day.
The Sprint
First, we need to start thinking in ‘Sprints’.
A Sprint is a set collection of tasks (taken from our To-Do List) that we focus on completing within a given timeframe. The tasks chosen should attempt to complete a project or a sub-project.
Our time frame is one week. You can change this when you get more experience with the system, but we never have. One week works perfectly for us. (Tip: If we try to plan more than a week ahead, surprises and changes usually make us redo the whole sprint anyway).
We want to complete our tasks according to our Prioritizing Rules. We want to focus on the easiest task that will bring us the closest to our goal.
So on the first day of our week, we decide which tasks we will accomplish this week. As a reminder, the To-Do list for our jewelry-making business looks like this:
- Decide what kind of jewelry I will make
- Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc.
- Make an Etsy account
- Buy the tools I will need
- Find experts and similar stores to follow
- Find video guides
- Legally form a business LLC
- Get a sales tax license/number
- Learn how to take good pictures for the Etsy store
Now, we have a limited amount of time to get as many of these things done as possible. We have 10 total hours (five blocks of 2 hours each).
We start by assigning a time estimate to each task.
BUT remember Parkinson and Hofstadter’s Laws! If you think it will take you fifteen minutes to make an Etsy account, plan for thirty.
Here is our revised list with time estimates in bold. Don’t worry too much about how accurate these estimates are. You will get better and better at estimating as you gain experience with the system.
(For the sake of demonstration I am using even 30-minute increments. You don’t need to do this, its just keep this guide as clear as possible)
- Decide what kind of jewelry I will make (120 minutes)
- Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc. (120 minutes)
- Make an Etsy account (30 minutes)
- Buy the tools I will need (60 minutes)
- Find experts and similar stores to follow (60 minutes)
- Find video guides (30 minutes)
- Legally form a business LLC (120 minutes)
- Get a sales tax license/number (60 minutes)
- Learn how to take good pictures for the Etsy store (120 minutes)
We have more to do than I can fit into my one-week sprint. And that’s fine. That’s almost always the case. This is why those Prioritizing Rules are so important.
So we want to choose the tasks that will get us the closest to our goal (selling Jewelry online). Let’s go with:
- Decide what kind of jewelry I will make (120 minutes)
- Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc. (120 minutes)
- Buy the tools I will need (60 minutes)
- Find experts and similar stores to follow (60 minutes)
- Find video guides (30 minutes)
- Legally form a business LLC (120 minutes)
- Get a sales tax license/number (60 minutes)
We removed all of the Etsy stuff. Why? We won’t be selling anything this week anyway. So we just put those items on the back burner. Maybe we’ll get to them next week.
Why did we choose to keep the LLC and Sales Tax applications if we won’t be selling anything? Because both of those steps will probably require waiting for someone else to do their job. We don’t want to get tied up while the task is out of our hands.
Now, some of your steps will have a logical progression. It makes logical sense that we need to decide what kind of jewelry to make before we go looking for suppliers. (We want to make sure they have the supplies we need and can handle any questions we might have).
Often, though, the actual tasks can be done in any order. Sometimes they can even overlap. Experience has taught us that the Sales tax license in our state will involve a few days of snail-mail transit, so let’s get that rolling first, then we can work on other things while it’s being shipped.
The Burndown Chart
One of the most brilliant tricks offered in Scrum is the use of what J.J. and Jeff Sutherland call a “Burndown Chart”
A burndown chart is simply a visual representation of the work planned for the current sprint.
We use a simplified version that fits well with our system.
We can make one simply and easily. Don’t bother with rulers or anything, these can be sketched free hand into the page of a notebook (where I often keep mine).
Draw a line horizontally across the bottom of a page. Put a tick mark more each day of the week (Monday, Tuesday…) evenly spaced along that line.
Then make a vertical axis coming out of the tick mark you made for Monday. Divide this one evenly by hours (zero at the bottom, 10 at the top).
Then draw a diagonal line from 10 hours (on Monday) to zero hours (on Friday).
That is your goal line.
You now have a visual, gamified tool for keeping focused. Here’s how to use it:
At the end of each day, put a dot for how many hours you have left for your sprint. Say it’s Monday and we crossed off 120 minutes of tasks. We put a mark above Monday at the 8 hours level.
Our goal is to keep below the sloped goal line. It’s now a race to zero hours.
Keep this thing somewhere you can see it each and every day. When I go to work, it’s the first thing I look at. When I leave work, It’s the last thing I do. I always have an image in my head of where my burndown chart is.
Bottlenecks and Obstacles
The absolute most brilliant idea in Scrum (and The Goal, and Agile, and just about every other modern workflow system) is this:
You will be more productive if you focus on removing bottlenecks and obstacles than if you focus on doing more things.
Remember The Vital Few? Most of your problems will actually come from just a few obstacles or bottlenecks.
You won’t be able to predict them, and you often won’t see them coming but bottlenecks and obstacles will crop up, probably on day one.
Your job is to eliminate obstacles and bottlenecks above all else.
Let’s say we are working on “Find a supplier for beads, wire, gems, etc.”
Everything is going great at first. We’re looking at our burndown chart and we are certain to be below our goal line at the end of the day.
But thirty minutes later we have found so many suppliers, each with different prices, policies, and minimum order quantities, that our brain is fried.
We can’t figure out who will be the best to order from. We feel discouraged. We feel lost and overwhelmed.
We have hit our first obstacle. And it is a “Vital Few” obstacle. If we don’t completely solve this problem it will stall the whole business.
The search for a supplier has gotten too complex.
Our gut reaction to this is probably to say “Let’s put a pin in that” and come back tomorrow when our brain is fresher. I mean, we can still cross off a few of those 30-minute tasks today, right?
But if we do this we will just be sacrificing tomorrow instead of today.
Instead, we drop everything and remove the obstacle.
In this case, maybe we spend the rest of the day making a chart so we can easily see all the relevant information between our choices.
Even if we don’t finish this chart today (which means we have fallen behind on our burndown chart) we have set ourselves up for a fantastic start to tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I will have all the information ready to analyze and we’ll have a fresh brain to analyze with. Tomorrow, I’ll make my decision within 10 minutes of starting. Trust me, crossing off a big 120-minute task first thing in the morning is an excellent way to start your day.
So what’s a bottleneck?
As you work through the system, you see that your ability to get things done is often (and repeatedly) hindered by the same… thing.
The bottleneck might be another person. (To complete X you need Y and only Bobby Bottleneck can do Y. If you work in the corporate world, you almost certainly deal with this constantly).
Or the bottleneck might be equipment that needs updating or a process you need to refine.
Bottlenecks are inevitable. In the case of this jewelry shop, there will almost certainly be one hiding within those suppliers we were choosing from.
So let’s fast forward a few weeks. We have chosen our supplier. All things considered, they were the cheapest option.
We placed an order for everything we would need to make our first batch of 30 bracelets.
The shipment came, but there were only enough gems to make 20 bracelets. The rest are on backorder.
This is a very common bottleneck. In this case, we could make the 20 bracelets, put them up on Etsy and then keep ourselves busy with other To-Dos until the backorder arrives.
But that doesn’t address the bottleneck problem. This is likely to be something this supplier struggles with. It’s likely something that will keep coming back to bite us.
This is another one of those “Vital Few” problems. We need to completely address this or else it will be a constant thorn in our side.
So we place an order with our second choice supplier. We might even place an order with our third choice. We want to hedge as much backorder risk as possible.
We then make the 20 bracelets while those new shipments are inbound. Hopefully, they will arrive just as we use up the supplies we have on hand and our productivity never wavers.
We have to pay more for these second and third-choice suppliers, but if they can ease the bottleneck of the first supplier, they are worth it.
Post Sprint Roundup
So each day we follow the same routine. We sit down to work for two hours. Maybe we use pomodoros to focus, maybe we don’t.
We continue crossing things off our list, racing our burndown line, and dropping everything to clear obstacles and bottlenecks.
We’ve done this for five consecutive days. It’s now Friday and we’re feeling good, and we’ve completed everything on our list.
What do we do now?
It’s time for the post-sprint Roundup.
The Roundup is nothing more than a routine that:
- Allows us to learn from the week that has just passed
- Plan for the upcoming week.
It should not take long. In the beginning, you should put a hard limit on it. No more than fifteen minutes.
With experience, it will shrink to near-nothingness. For me personally, this lasts no longer than the time it takes to copy my next tasks from my to-do list to the smaller list I keep handy on my computer.
So what do we do?
To Learn From This Past Week
We take a look at what we have accomplished this week and we ask ourselves a few questions:
- What went right?
- What went wrong?
- Was everything I did absolutely essential?
- What can I do to prevent those obstacles or bottlenecks from returning?
- What can I do to complete this task faster in the future?
This is our opportunity to really improve our system. Each week and each new task is a sort of trial run. We get a feel for how certain processes work.
And that means you get an opportunity to improve them. Figure out how to make them easier, faster, or eliminate them all together.
To Plan for the Upcoming Week
Simply reload your backlog with new tasks. Make new tasks and estimate the time it will take to complete them, just like you did before, but with this one extremely important difference…
If you are adding a task to your backlog that you have successfully done before, cut your time estimate for it in half.
Why?
Remember Parkinson’s Law? Work expands to fill the time allowed for it. Well…
Now we have experience with this particular task. We know what we’re doing. Now it’s time to challenge ourselves to get really efficient at it.
Let’s look at an example:
During Week #1 I spent 30 minutes watching video guides so I could learn techniques, tips, tricks, what have you.
During Week #2, I limit myself to 15 minutes.
It’s not that I want to watch half as many videos or learn half as much stuff. It’s that I want to absorb the same amount of information in half the time.
So I set my play speed to 2x, or I skip forward through the videos, or I am more picky about which videos I watch.
I can do this because I already have experience. Many of the videos I watch have repeat actions in them that I now know enough to skip.
“Ok, so then I do that twist six times, which means there will be a loop at the end so…” and I can skip ahead because I already understand that part.
This not only helps you get more done (by spending less time on tasks you’ve already done) but it also speeds up your path to mastery.
It forces you to focus on the principles that matter most.
And the week after, when you’ve done that task two times? Cut the time limit again. See how far you can push it. As your mastery of that task increases, you want to make sure your time commitment for it decreases.
You will eventually hit a wall, and that’s ok. Because now you have found the most time efficient method for that particular task.
Some tasks will take longer than others. Some tasks will disappear entirely. And others will sort of melt into related tasks.
It’s all good because it lets you accomplish more in less time.
To Supercharge the Whole Process
Take a look at how many minutes you worked this week. In our example we completed everything on time which means we worked 570 minutes.
Write that number down!
Why? Because that’s your current high score. Next week you want to beat it.
Be careful, though! I am not suggesting you work more than your two hours per day! I am suggesting that you can add more than two hours worth of work, but complete it in less than two hours.
An optional variation (and one Leslie and I are personally using as of this writing) is to assign difficulty points to each task rather than minutes. It works out to the same result but might be easier for you to keep track of.
You are already well on your way to this because you are already trimming down repeat tasks. But it also lets you apply Parkinson’s Law and Gamification in a more general way.
And you don’t have to beat your score by much. Even shaving a single minute per week will shave nearly an hour off your workload by the end of the year.
The result? Leslie and I have gotten our hands-on time running our Amazon business down to a few hours per year. We do only the bare essential tasks. Everything that is repeatable has been trimmed and systematized to the point where we just ‘check-in’ once a quarter.
And there’s a bonus benefit as well: because we focus only on the most essential processes, our overhead has fallen to the point where we now earn 50% on our invested capital per year. We have been able to greatly improve our profits without adding to our overhead.
Our time commitment has decreased, and our return on investment has increased.
Rewards and Punishments
When you beat your high score, reward yourself. Keep it small, but keep it epicurean as well. It should be the type of reward you can totally live without, but love getting.
I don’t have scientific data to back this up but: consumables seem to work well. Anything that creates a fleeting joy, but then is gone entirely. (I used to reward myself with new books, but when I failed I didn’t mind because I could just pick up an old book I hadn’t read for a while. Movie rentals work much better.)
If you fail to meet or beat your high score, pick a punishment.
Again, keep it small. Boredom works well. So do certain chores. (For the movie rental example above: you get used to having movie nights every Friday. But then you fail to meet your goal. The boredom of missing your movie might be enough, but missing your movie and scrubbing the toilet really does the trick.)
Productivity Guide Conclusion
There you have it. By leveraging a little psychology and a few organizational tricks, you can dramatically increase your efficiency. You can get more done in less time than you ever thought possible. But even more importantly…
You can do it with a clear, stress free mind.
Required Reading
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Scrum by Jeff and J.J. Sunderland
Recommended Reading
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Simple Rules by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
See Also…
The Ultimate 3MM Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business
The Ultimate 3MM Guide to Investing