Spend 15 to 30 minutes with yourself every morning. If you want, meditate and quiet your mind. This gives you clarity for the day and allows you to prioritize your day ahead of time.

4. Hire the Best
Hiring people who are better than I am with knowledge of specific areas of the business is a necessity. As a leader, to grow the business to the next level, my goal is to become less needed on a day-to-day basis. If I hire the right people, they can actually accomplish more than I ever could.

It is tempting as a leader to handle things on your own. You can empower your employees by allowing them to make decisions, and mentor them to get the outcomes that you expect. 

5. This one is hard. Don’t check email first thing.
Don’t get sucked into hours of back and forth replies. Use your time for more creative tasks. Some successful CEOs reduce their time on handling emails to one to two days per week. You may not have to be involved for problems to get solved. I am not there but I am working on this one.

6. Listen to Yourself
Choose those types of productivity tools that help you most. If you react better to constant reminders from your phone or desktop pop-ups — install some handy apps! If you like to write down things and physically tick them off, buy a big planner and a fancy pen. Don’t follow trends, self-reflect and use what suits you most.

7. Set Up a “No Distractions” Zone
You can insulate yourself from distractions by giving yourself “Do not disturb” time for part of the day in the office. Your focus and ability to get something done with fewer errors will improve. Focus on dealing with the top three high-priority tasks from your list.

8. Use the Two-Minute Rule
If it takes less than two minutes to finish the task do it right now. Yes, as simple as that, but believe me this small habit can drastically increase your productivity if you use it.

9. Always Have the Decision Matrix at Hand
Going back to prioritizing, if you have a lot of urgent things to do or a small crisis going around, use this simple, yet highly effective decision-making matrix.

 

Everything that is easy to do and will have a big impact should be labeled as a “do it now” priority. Smaller impact and easy-to-do items should be delegated. The big impact and hard-to-do items get put into the mix for prioritization against other initiatives.

10. Learn to Say No
Learn to refuse invitations to multiple conferences and meetings; you will never have time to focus on what’s truly important while trying to chase some possible opportunities out there, even if they seem useful or interesting. Networking should be limited to a necessary amount.