It was Elon Musk who said ‘stop being patient and start asking yourself how to accomplish a 10-year plan in 6 months‘.

To be honest, that’s a lot of fat to trim, but if you want to achieve more in less time, and with less energy expended then read on.

Why Is It We Can’t Help But Add More To Our Busy Plates?

If you are anything like me then you arguably do the opposite. You find ways to add more and more, and then some more. You likely don’t mean to but with millions of fresh content being released on a daily basis then it can be very easy these days to lose focus and start adding more ‘todos’ to your list that most likely don’t need to be done at all.

While adding more might be good in the case of writing a book, it’s not so good when you really want to get stuff done. Even when writing a book it can feel a bit overwhelming when you have thousands of notes you somehow have to construct into a finished product.

The creative side of adding more is the fun part, you let your mind wander, and we are generally curious creatures for the best part.

New information is readily available to be devoured and we can be pretty happy in the confines of safety lapping it up like a sponge, but with more and more information added to our attention we only end up with a lot of extra fat to trim, which is, you guessed it, even more work to do.

Add to this the very mountain-top approach to living that modern society almost expects of us and it’s easy to see why we lose our time and energy in constantly creating more work.

What’s A Better Way Of Looking At Things?

This is why it’s ideal to have a balanced divergent and convergent mindset.

It’s very useful to be able to visualize ideas and solutions but to figure out which ones to stick at and which ones to put aside or throw away isn’t always easy, especially for creative minds who just want to create.

So, is it better to be more logical rather than creative when it comes to getting things done?

Most may think that having a more structured schedule and routine work environment would be more helpful in productivity but that might not actually be the case.

Having a good vision helps you more so than having no vision. You can see what you want to achieve. You have a visual goal in your mind. Then you can at least start working back from that goal until today with reverse engineering. Even if you’ve tried before and failed numerous times, as long as that goal remains in your mind, you end up finding a way to get to it.

The vision comes first, so creativity is important to see goals and ideas beyond your current paradigm, but that’s not to say logic isn’t important, as without logic there will be no structure to reel in the reverse engineering to good effect, or no logical sense used in stripping the fat and ensuring you don’t keep making the same mistakes again and again, wasting time and energy in the process.

But even with a well-balanced divergent and convergent mindset in place it still all takes time, right?

Well, any lesson does take time to fully sink in, that’s true, but there are certain techniques that help your mind focus on the divergent side quicker, and which then also help you test your theories quicker, and cut to the chase without spending a ton of time and money working on something that then comes obsolete soon after anyway.

That said, this is not about cutting corners, or thinking life can be cheated in some way. Lifehacks are not about cheapening life and giving an illusion of success, they are in its very essence the success of finding a more efficient way to get a result.

3 Powerful Ways To Achieve More In Less Time

Achieve More In Less Time Method #1 – FIND YOUR IDEAL ENERGY ZONE WITHIN THE DAY

When are you at your most awake and active during the day? Just because society tends you lead you towards particular working hours it DOES NOT mean these hours are best for your natural rhythms. You might not be able to change those hours but you can certainly see where your energy is at a high in the day.

You may also find that you have different high times for different strokes.

For me, if I want to maximize my writing output I’m actually more efficient in the quiet of the night around 3-4am when I’m in somewhat of a trance state (like a mini-fast) and words just come to me in my mind like someone is talking to me and I just transcript what they are saying to me. If I am needing to do team meetings then I find mid-afternoon is my most focused for interactive discussion.

You can’t always dictate your schedule, but you can certainly try to fit as close to your high energy times as possible. Too often we focus on our available ‘time’, which is stripped right down to next to nothing once we consider all our usual daily patterns. Sleep, eat, shower, food, exercise, standard work, looking after others, social time, or a little downtime – the hours are up right?

We often don’t try to match our most efficient energy levels with the times that match them though. This means we can end up doing something at sub-optimal levels throughout the day. The worst part of that is you might be wasting energy, and therefore time, by trying to perform a task at sub-optimal rhythms when you would be better off waiting for an hour or two (or to whenever you’re more optimal for that task) and not only waste less energy, but gain more as you find a better flow at optimal states. Plus, performing certain tasks at sub-optimal levels, for one thing, might well be taking away optimal time for something else.

How do you know when your optimal time and energy zone is? You experiment. You get out of the traditional routine. If that sounds too hard then you simply adjust your sleep patterns very gradually, or your exercise time shortened or lengthened gradually. You adjust until you feel something is working for you better.

But, you don’t just stop when you have found an optimal point, as we aren’t actually suited towards a 24-hour time clock anyway. Most of us work more efficiently when slightly off a typical 24-hour clock. Our sleep efficiency is arguable the most important aspect of giving ourselves peak energy for the next day, so the best place to start would be to figure out what sleep pattern works best for you, not for your job, for you.

You may find that you wake up typically a couple of hours before heading to work. If you adjusted slowly to wake up 4 hours before work you might find your whole outlook on the day ahead shifts. It might just as easily be the opposite for you. You might not have a choice in work time, but what if you came back from work and took a power nap to free up more energy in the evening, or even in the early hours of the night? Is that your killer creative zone when you are distracted less by external noise?

Most people never really figure out their optimal energy time because they are so governed by the same routine, but this can be the difference between you working away your time and you finding peak energy to make your day feel like it’s got so much more time available than before.

If you try to work when sluggish you just waste time. Work at your most effective and rest when you aren’t, go do something else that balances your life out better and keeps your spirits up. We’ve heard the ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (Jill a dull girl)’ saying.

We also don’t get half as much done if we aren’t at least enjoying some part of our life. If we aren’t enjoying any of it then how on earth do we expect to be motivated or promote energy?

Energy is a far bigger motivator to people than the likes of money as a reward, despite being wired to seek it by society and our survival instincts. We do so, ironically, to preserve energy, but we could gain so much more if we focused our attention on building energy at optimal times rather than just preserving it through non-threatening ways.

Achieve More In Less Time Method #2 – BE RUTHLESS AND TRUSTING AT THE SAME TIME

No one is able to do everything in the world. You didn’t build a bridge by yourself. No one did. Not even Brunel. He may have envisioned such masterful engineering structures such as bridges and tunnels, but it certainly wasn’t him alone who made it happen. A movie takes 1000’s of people’s work.

One of my biggest problems was thinking I had to do everything. I still have that problem from time to time as I tend to get lost at certain times where I want to be fully involved in the whole process, but it’s arguably not a good idea.

Trusting means not to worry so much about what the world will think. Analysis paralysis can set you back years. By the time you are finally assured of your plan, you are 5 years older and your real desires for that time of your life have likely changed anyway.

Analysis paralysis also seeps into our day. Instead of just doing something and feeding our creativity, we question whether we should and end up not getting anything beyond typical day routines done.

We have to trust ourselves more but it also means delegating and trusting others to get involved and be a part of something you are creating. They will have ideas you didn’t see and collectively two heads can always do more than one.

But what you don’t have a partner, or you fear you can’t afford the help?

This is where the word ‘community’ comes in.

Find a community that fits your goal, even if you are a total beginner.

You will be amazed at what asking for advice or mentorship does to people. It gives people life, they feel on cloud nine when regarded in such light.

While some people may be genuinely too busy to help you, you will be sure to find some who can within the vast pool of nearly 8 billion people out there. You absolutely don’t have to be alone in your journey to feel like a success, you can share the success, and it actually feels more like a success when you do.

If on your own all the time you can feel like you will never have enough hours to do everything you want to, and you likely won’t. We need other people to build and achieve with.

So why be ruthless as well as trusting?

As much as you will benefit from having others around you, efficiency is created when you don’t fall into that analysis paralysis and when you don’t get distracted by others. The more people you have around you the more opportunity for distraction, so when delegating you have to be ruthless at times to the limited time for getting things done, but the most important thing is always to make others feel like they are a part of the journey you are on together, or you won’t have any help around you at all and will get nowhere fast.

Find a mentor today.

Achieve More In Less Time Method #3 – THINK YOU ONLY HAVE A SHORT TIME LEFT TO LIVE, X10 EVERYTHING, THEN RETURN BACK TO NORMAL

The last method is arguably the most impacting in both a motivating and provoking way.

If you did only have one week left to live what do you think would be on your mind?

Most likely spending quality time with loved ones, but this is not a tactic to scare you into a frozen panic but to make you realize that time and energy are the only things we have in terms of getting things done while we can.

If we can find a way to make more in less time, and with less energy, then people will usually want a piece of that.

Make things hard so they appear easier on return to normal

Have you ever played something with a bigger table like snooker and then went back to playing pool / 8 ball? Or maybe played the guitar and then moved to bass? It likely felt far easier (no disrespect to bass players out there who rock).

The point is, you can make life ‘appear’ easier by following the first two steps and then giving yourself a kick up the arse to ensure you do what you do well, only quicker. When you push yourself into overdrive (but not into burnout) you then feel that life is easier when back at a normal pace again.

It’s like sprinting and then jogging. Jogging feels easy in comparison, but if you only walk everywhere and suddenly jog then jogging takes your breath away a bit.

x10ing everything has another importance though. It’s not just about creating a time or difficulty illusion. It can also help us become more proficient as well as efficient.

We watch movies and feel like a whole life has gone by in 2-3 hours. Movies are sped-up like that, and they make life feel more interesting.

When we are stuck in the day-to-day grind time can feel like it’s doing the opposite, slowing down. Time slowing down might feel like it’s good for us, we have more time now right?

But really it just means that we have more time ticking by slowly whilst we are stuck doing something we really don’t want to do, or which isn’t bringing our mind into action.

Speed up time and it also speeds up our mind to think quicker, to solve problems quicker.

Have all the time in the day to come up with a decision on which product to go with and you dilly-dally, and likely still don’t make your mind up by the end of the day.

Now, of course, making a quick decision isn’t always the right decision, and sometimes you can waste time making decisions that you would be best not considering at all, but when you attach a time frame to a decision you likely make it quicker.

It’s all just a simple psychological mind trick that has got people to do so much more in a day than if left to their own devices.

We may be used to setting deadlines but how often do we attach real-life consequences to them? When we x10 our life not only do we feel like we should act quickly because there’s suddenly less time available to get it done, but we also change the very fabric of how we think about what it is we are doing with our time.

Life is not about just working fast for time’s sake. The x10 technique certainly doesn’t mean that. You don’t want to just waste time doing something you don’t even need to do.

You are always best using this final technique after the other two, as you should find your best work style, visualize your goal, and be ready to cut through the mustard before speeding up the process, and then once you do you may find you have the tools in place to achieve a lot more in a lot less time.

Going Further

While this article focuses on the power of achieving more in less, there’s also the argument that you can achieve more by simply doing and having less in life.

The 3 methods above should absolutely help you achieve more in less time when you apply them right, and part of that is building up a toolkit of techniques to use for certain situations.

This can be from going deeper into implementing these techniques into your daily life or matching them to other techniques such as visualisation, whitespacing, deliberate practice, varied repetition, and quick adaption techniques.

Through Richly’s ‘Get-Out-The-Box’ training program you can learn to apply these techniques and more into your life as you learn to flex your adaptable, creative, and future-thinking superpowers. Start with the FREE 3-day program today!