20 Productivity Principles to Get More Sh*t Done

I'm going to show you how you can be so productive and get so much done that it actually feels illegal. I'll do this by sharing 20 powerful principles that helped me unlock this illegal level of productivity in my time building three successful software companies and today while building my AI Venture Studio.
These principles haven't only worked for me, but for thousands of my clients that I've taught this to around the world. So they will work for you too.
Starting with principle number one, the 95-5 principle. Most people have heard of the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle, but you can actually take it to another level.
It's essentially that 95% of your results come from 5% of your work. So for yourself, you gotta figure out what is the 5% of the work you do that generates 95% of the value or the results in your life, which leads us to principle number two, the definition of done.
There's this quote by Albert Einstein, a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. Most people don't have clarity around what they need to get done.
Understanding what your success criteria for completion looks like helps everybody get clarity and that creates alignment to the outcome. Which leads us to principle number three, the two-minute rule.
In my early 20s, I read this incredible book called Getting Things Done by David Allen, and he had this simple two-minute rule. If you get a text message, reply to it right away.
If you get an email, reply right away. If you have a dish that needs to get clean, clean it right away.
Don't put something off. Some people spend more time managing their to-do list than doing the thing on the list.

Don't overthink it. Move with a sense of urgency, which leads to principle number four, the domino

effect. The way you want to think about life, it's like dominoes.
And that first domino hits

the second domino and the third domino. And if it's big enough, important enough, the one thing,

then it makes all the other dominoes easier. A simple example is focusing on my breakfast and

what I eat versus how hard I'm going to train at gym. I can't out-work out a bad diet.
That's why food is always a leading domino to getting fit. Productivity starts by choosing that one thing to focus on that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.
So before you get into the work, stop and say, what's the first thing that if I do, makes everything else work? Which leads us to principle number five, Parkinson's law. This one annoys me, but I see it happen all the time.
Work will expand to the time you give it. To get more things done, be unreasonable with your timelines.
Stop saying, can you get this to me by the end of the week and start asking, how about Wednesday? What about Tuesday? By just pulling timelines forward, you'll be way more productive. Which leads to principle number six, the Pomodoro technique.
I have massive ADHD and I can't work unless I make it a game. So a Pomodoro technique is breaking up your work into 25 minute intervals with a five minute break or a reset.
And then I put on headphones and I play either binaural beats or songs without lyrics. And I focus for those 25 minutes.
That makes me massively productive because I can hyper-focus. Which leads us to principle number seven, don't repeat yourself.
If there's one thing I hate doing, it's repeating myself. So I have three steps that I do to make sure I never have to do it.
The first is to systematize it, to create a checklist, a process, an SOP to get it done. Number two is automate it so I can take people out of the process so then I don't have somebody I'm dependent on that might be sick or on vacation to get it done.
And the third is enhance it with AI. Look at ways to automate it using AI and that way I never have to address it ever again.
Which brings us to principle number eight, connect to triggers. I believe if you want to be more productive, then you have to connect your best practices, your habits to triggers in your life.
If you want to take creatine as a supplement every day, then put it next to your coffee, because I guarantee you're not going to skip coffee. And if the creatine and the coffee are next to each other, grab that scoop of creatine and put it in your body.
By connecting something I need to do to something I do every day, then I wire my brain to never forget, which leads us to principle number nine, the carrot effect. Have something that you want to do on the backside of doing something hard and the cheat code is to actually tie it to people that also be affected so that they support you because they know that if you accomplish one thing then they all get to benefit when i was training for my iron man i put my family vacation on the backside of me training because i knew the vacation was something that everybody else wanted which meant that they didn't ask me why i was skipping dessert or I was getting up early to train because they knew that the Ironman was tied to their family vacation.
Which leads us to principle number 10, the loss aversion effect. You'll do more to avoid pain than to gain.
That's why I'm a big fan of engineering stakes or downside in you not doing something. If you have a goal of doing a certain amount of revenue, if you don't hit it, there needs to be a downside.
The downside is the stakes. It might be selling something you love or giving somebody you don't like some money.
It has to be painful. The more painful it is, the harder you're going to work to get your goal, which leads us to principle number 11, positive peer pressure.
The interesting part of human psychology is you'll do more for other people than you'll ever do for yourself. For example, if your dog's sick and you go to the vet and he gives you medication, every dog owner will make sure that dog has 100% of that medication all the way till the very end.
You get sick, go to the hospital or your doctor because you get the flu, they give you medication. Most people stop at about 70%.
As soon as they start feeling good, honestly, that's why having an accountability circle, other people that you've shared your goals with, the things you wanna get done with your day, your week, your month, will hold you more accountable because you don't wanna lose face with those people than you just having those goals that you say to yourself and you write them down in private. Which leads us to principle number 12, big rocks first.
If you want to get a result in your life, start the first two hours of your day, focus on that result. That's why the morning routine is so powerful.
It's not necessarily what you do, it's that you allocated that time for you, for your goals. You got to do the big thing first in the morning to build momentum so you can be more productive.
Which leads us to principle number 13, batch work. Most people think they can multitask, but they can't.
Multitasking means screwing up multiple things at once. Taking similar type work that's sprinkled out throughout your week and then grouping it all together and sitting down for three hours, four hours and getting it all done is way more productive because you've ramped up your brain with all the different variables in the context to understand what you're trying to work on.
Financials, creative work, sales follow-ups, batch them together so that you get in that energy of doing that specific work. Which leads us to principle number 14, gamify progress.
If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. Take your milestones and treat them like a game.
One of my favorite ways to do this is take your goals and put it in a ladder and then give yourself a reward for each one of those goals. And I call it the aligned goal ladder.
You don't get the reward of the top level goal without getting the bottom ones first. It's a really cool way to get separate teams connected and accountable to each other.
If some other team is accountable for that first level goal and you're at the top and if they don't get theirs, you don't get yours and you're going to be asking them how they're doing, which is a very neat way to be more productive in a gamified strategy, which leads us to principle number 15, create a not to do list. Steve Jobs used to say, deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.
When kids see me out in public and I'm driving one of my supercars, they always ask me, what do you do? And my answer is always the same. It's not what I do, it's what I don't do.
I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't gamble, I don't play video games, I don't scream at people. I don't get into fights.
It's all the things that take away from your life that actually stops you from being productive. Which leads us to principle number 16, upgrade your environment.
I believe that your environment communicates your priorities. If you're serious about your work, that workstation should be a major investment.
If you're creating content, you should invest in your creative space, creating content. If you're trying to be a top salesperson, then invest in the tools to be the top salesperson, invest in the training.
Your environment affects your energy that affects your productivity. So if you need to upgrade your office space, get a new desk, maybe invest in that killer chair so you don't have back pains, but pretending like your environment doesn't impact your productivity is silly, which leads us to principle number 17, involved unattached.
You need to put your heart into your work, but not your worth. The goal is to give it everything you've got, but don't beat yourself up if it doesn't happen.
Be incredibly involved in creation and pushing things forward and being productive, but be unattached to the outcomes because you don't control those all the time. Suffering and feelingctive just makes you more unproductive so disconnect from the need to feel more productive to get more done which leads us to principle number 18 add a zero 10x focus is easier than 2x ben hardy wrote a great book on this concept you're gonna wake up and you're gonna work so if you decide to build a hundred thousand dollar a year business then that's what you'll build but the same effort the same getting up the same work to build that versus a million dollar a year business is the same you just focus on different things so you can 2x sure but you could also 10x and it's going to change the series of activities you're going to do and that makes you way more productive which leads us to principle number 19 ask for help if you want to go fast go alone but if wanna go far, go together.
I'd never ask for advice from anybody, any help, until I launched my book, Buy Back Your Time. Once I wrote that book and I realized the amount of effort and heart I put into it, I was willing to ask for people that I've supported over the years to help me, promoting it and going on their podcasts and creating content with me.
I can't tell you how powerful it is to get more done by having other people that you can co-create, collaborate with, get feedback, ask for support to not only be more successful, but make the whole process fun. The ultimate level of productivity is having other people that are helping you get the things done for you, which leads us to principle number 20, define your why.
If you have a big enough why, it will help you overcome any how. Most people are stuck in the, what do I do next? But they don't even know why they're doing it in the first place.
Your why will help you skip from A to Z, where a lot of people want to go A, then B, then C, then D, then E. They think there's a step to do it.
The thing is, if you think big enough, then you just have to skip to the end. I wanted to inspire a bunch of youth in my community.
And I thought that I'm just to start with a few people in my office and that's how it started. There was five kids.
We called it King's Club and it was super fun and interesting. Now, last event yesterday, there was 115 kids standing room only because it only fits 100 and we're looking now to fill out a whole arena.
What shifted is that I changed my why. I made my why big enough and it took care of all the hows.
But productivity is

only the first step in your success journey. So if you want to learn the seven high income skills

of the top 1% people in the world, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.