Focus 60% of Your Day on the Thing That Moves the Needle
Reclaim your time.
Whether you want to write the Great American Novel, create an online course, or get into the best shape of your life, spending the first 60% of your day focused on your essential goal will propel you toward your dream faster.
High-performance achievers decide what is important to them, what dreams they want to actualize, and then spend the first 60% of their day moving the needle on their goals — doing the work.
Focus on the thing that moves the needle forward
Your gratitude for life is demonstrated in your time management skills. When you have reverence for life, you have reverence for your time.
Time is the great equalizer; we all have the same amount.
You have the same 24 hours a day Bill Gates has; it is a non-renewable source, and how you use it defines the quality of your life.
When you focus on your goals in the first part of the day, it drives your afternoons and your life so that it isn’t as crucial to be productive the last part of the day, because you got your essential goal finished in the morning.
If you use time wisely, you forward your goals more quickly.
One signal that you’re on the right path — advancing your dreams with increased productivity — is your time has more flow to it. You proceed more swiftly when you have concentrated focus at the beginning of the day.
Four ways to get more time
Practice the 60/40 rule
Spend 60% of the day on Prolific Quality Output — your purpose goals.
Purpose driven tasks are those things that move the needle on what is essential to you — your career, your writing, your business, your product.
Quality output is the output that drives revenue and impact — setting up a course, creating content, creating a funnel, writing blog posts.
How many of us would like to do less? Count me in!
When you’re organized and disciplined with your time, you can do more of what matters and less of what doesn’t matter.
Forty percent of what you do each week is busy work — work that is not moving the needle toward your purpose. Busy work should come after the 60% of dedicated time to purpose goals.
Spend the last 40% of your day on building relationships (emails, texts, responding and making connections with people) this is when you allow other people to infringe on your time and your schedule.
Take back your time. Netflix or your mission — Consumption vs. fulfilling your purpose
Reclaim your schedule, wrestle your time back from the world and take control.
One way to do this is not to answer an email, look at social media, reply to a text or a phone call before 1 or 2 pm. Have the courage to say, “answering that text is not the best use of my time.”
When you live your life by other people’s agenda, when the world comes calling for you and you answer, you end up doing minimal tasks (busy work) and not purpose-driven things — activities that move the things forward. Nearly all of us have a computer the size of a deck of cards on us, which makes it even more challenging to keep our time sacred. The average person picks up their iPhone once every 12 minutes, burying their heads in their phones 80 times a day according to the latest research.
Screen time is an energy taker.
More people care about what other people are doing on Instagram and Facebook than they care about their goals.
I’m using social media here, but the same applies to bingeing Netflix and other streaming apps.
The average person consumes 30 minutes of Facebook per day. These people are straight-up browsers giving their thumbs a workout.
- Thirty minutes a day equals 22 8-hour workdays per year.
- Sixty minutes a day equals 44 8-hour workdays per year.
- Ninety minutes a day equal 66 8-hour workdays a year.
Think about how much you can move the needle toward your dream if you let go of time spent on other people’s lives. When you are scrolling, you’re not present; you are consuming. It’s like eating empty calories. Scrolling equals inactivity; it drains your energy.
Life is short; it goes by in the blink of an eye. Have reverence for life and your time.
Make a Battle Board
A Battle Board is a board with 12 squares on it, as large as you can make it.
Each box represents a month of the year.
Write your monthly projects in the boxes and the activities you’ll take to achieve said plans in a calendar.
Your Battle Board goes on your wall, not in your closet, gathering dust. It is out in the open where you can see it every day and tap into your dream.
Schedule out every moment to make a capable impact.
Making a Battle Board and then writing what steps to take each day in your calendar may take time, but in the end, it will add time to your life.
Organize your to-do list into projects on your Battle Board instead of busywork. If you are busy — you may have crossed off items on your to-do list — but most busywork doesn’t forward your primary purpose or dream; none of it mattered because none of it counted toward getting you closer to your goals.
Being busy, but not productive, might be a signal that you don’t have clarity on what your dreams are or control over your time.
Plan by the project
On the first of the month, figure out what you want to achieve by the 30th of the month — mark projects in each block on your Battle Board. On the first of every month, review the goals you’ve outlined in your calendar.
Each day, set your intention, and dedicate the first 60% of your day to the strategies you’ve described.
By the end of this month, I will have [project] finished.
A project could be: 12 blog posts, my newsletter written and automated, my course outlined, my blog design complete, or an outline for an ebook.
By the end of this month, I will get this goal accomplished, and so on.
Visit your dreams on the first day of every month. The first of the month is the demarcation line. You decide what will happen in the next 30 days.
Write the strategy down on your Battle Board if it fits. If not, use a calendar in tandem. On the first of the month, here’s what happens…
Every Sunday night for 20 minutes, look at the week ahead, decide what matters, and set the intention to follow it during the first 60% of the day. During your 20 minute Sunday review session, ask yourself if anything needs to be changed, removed, automated, or delegated.
Happiness at a foundation level requires us to know how much we are activating our potential. . If you appreciate life — use your time wisely so you can spend more time with those you love.
Disciplined and organized time give you freedom.
Having a defined schedule gives you more time. If you get your act together at the beginning of the month, you just added more time to the next month, and the next and so one.
When you use your time well and efficiently, you add more value to your life for the things you love and give you joy, whether that is spending time with family or visiting the best spa in the world.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
