How to Be More Productive and Stop Being Lazy

Are you struggling to get going and stop being lazy?

Want to know how to be more productive?

It’s been about two years now since I quit my job and began my crazy adventure to become an entrepreneur. At first, I didn’t see myself becoming who I am today. Entrepreneurship scared me. Simply uttering the word “fail” gave me shivers.

Not only that but I was an individual who wasn’t at all productive. In middle and high school, I procrastinated almost every project I was assigned. Even in college and university, there were a number of times I just couldn’t stop being lazy.

There were so many times I didn’t “feel” like working. I kept pushing things away and doing them later.

And no doubt all of those habits and tendencies rolled into my “business” at the very beginning. I’m using air quotes because, to be honest, I didn’t work all that much. Out of the day, I probably worked a few hours. I was an entrepreneur who needed to stop being lazy.

At the end, I didn’t feel productive nor feel I was making progress.

I didn’t even see what I was doing as a business.

Soon though, something started to change. 

I became passionate about my business. I put in more effort than I did before, and I’m continuing to apply myself and hustle these days. I committed myself to stop being lazy.

In the end, I became highly productive, writing on my blog on a daily basis (not that I wasn’t doing that before, but like I said, it lacked emotion), and also taking time to read other peoples articles and reaching out.

All in all my days have become far more purposeful and I know what I need to do each day in order to have a fulfilled day. Furthermore, I strive to complete it. 

So what changed?

Here’s what I did. How to be more productive and stop being lazy in 5 steps.

5 Easy Steps to Being More Productive

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1. Prepare Your Mind
2. Create a Plan
3. Take Action and Make a Commitment
4. Review Your Plan
5. Apply What You’ve Learned

Step 1: Stop Being Lazy by Preparing Your Mind

I believe mindset is everything. How you think at the core can determine so much about our lives and who we decide to hang out with.

Around in high school, I hung around with people who played a lot of video games. In university and college, I hung around the same folk or even no one at all.

Even though this step may be rather silly for some people, I believe it’s important to know how you actually work.

For that, it comes down to an understanding of yourself. One of the issues is though not a whole lot of people know how they work.

This type of stuff you don’t have to worry about when you are working a 9 to 5 job. Your employer tells you how many hours you work and what you have to do. Everything you need to do your job is already there.

But when you start a business, you don’t have those resources starting out. You only have yourself and your possessions. Which can be a lot, or in my case, hardly anything.

👉🏽 RELATED POST: How To Overcome Your #1 Struggle As An Entrepreneur

My point is when you have a system setting deadlines and fitting you into a pre-existing system, you don’t have to think about this step. But if you want to be more productive in a side-hustle or even starting a business, I think it’s important to be aware of your mind and mindset.

To get this understanding it’s a matter of taking control of your own life. I’ll admit it’s very disorienting when you are told what to do and then left on your own. Again I wasn’t the most productive person.

As an employee, it’s wasn’t my responsibility to stop being lazy, but as an entrepreneur it now is. If you’re going to be successful in business you need to know how to be more productive. 

But during the time I was unproductive, I learned about how I worked. I started to realize the value in reading books and eventually other people’s posts.

What I encourage others to do is to do the same, invest in yourself, learn from your mistakes and experiment boldly. It may take some people longer or less time, but what matters is your own progress. This is your journey and we all do things differently.

👉🏽 RELATED POST: 12 Easy Ways to Spring Clean Your Mind

Step 2: Create a Plan to Be More Productive

“A failure to plan is a plan to failure.” – Benjamin Franklin

There are so many ways to plan.

A plan for me is something simple, quick to execute, and easy to prepare. In fact, the planning step shouldn’t take more than a few hours, hell, even a half hour!

My plan is very simple. In fact, my entire plan is written out in a series of goals and tasks I want to accomplish each week.

Whatever method you want to use to create a plan is entirely up to you, however, I will share you the details of mine.

The first thing with my plan is I’m setting goals. Goals are everything. It assures you are making progress and you know which direction you are going in. You can also see these goals as tasks, however, I feel it’s important to set deadlines for them. Give yourself a week or even a month to accomplish them. 

👉🏽 RELATED POST: How To Set Goals To Escape Your 9 to 5 Life

Regardless of success or failure, take the time to learn what you learned from the experience. Furthermore, continue to refine your goals as you go along.

Ways that you can refine them is by asking specific questions. Questions like:

• Why do you want to accomplish this goal? Are you convinced by your answer?
• Does this goal push you forward? As in do you feel you’re making progress?
• Is this goal challenging you?
• How is this goal helping you succeed? Is it necessary?
• Are your goals overwhelming you? Could setting less help you be more productive?

Based on those answers, adjust your goals as such.

Secondly, I tie that goal with a why. I put that in the first bullet for a reason. It’s the most important question to ask yourself.

Why?

Why are you setting this goal? By answering that question, you’re prompting yourself to tie that goal with something that you value as a person. In the end, you learn about yourself and understand your values.

It’ll also be a great motivator too.

I believe this simple strategy works well because you don’t need to spend a lot of time motivating yourself. When you understand yourself and know what drives you, you’ll set goals that associate those values and the objectives you want to achieve in life.

👉🏽 RELATED POST: 8 Motivation Killers You Need to Know About

For myself, I struggled with this concept. I set goals all over the place and they weren’t at all meaningful. So I can’t stress enough how important it is to set a why and setting meaningful goals.

From my experience, setting small weekly goals works best when starting out. Your chances of success but also getting feedback can help a lot early on. 

Step 3: Take Action and Make a Commitment to Stop Being Lazy

This step to be more productive is a big one and is no doubt the hardest one people will have to take. There are many people pumped to take action but they stop short.

That or they take action but lack motivation when they hit a brick wall. Or perhaps they don’t have a plan in mind and they fumble.

Regardless, it’s important to take action, but also to know your direction and have a map. Clearing your mind and setting your goals and tasks is your direction, setting the course. The finished plan is your map towards success and your desires.

👉🏽 RELATED POST:  How Do I Slay My Goals?

But even on the road, when you are heading your direction, towards your goals, there will be difficulties. Either roadblocks or straight up distractions that can be hard to resist.

In those cases it’s challenging. I know for myself the main source for my unproductive tendencies was because of distractions. Furthermore, that bled into my work so even when I did work it wasn’t quality work.

I believe the best way to get out of that is to make your work a commitment. To find that passion. Again when you find why you are working or going about it this way to reach your goals you’ll have more a reason to stay on the track you are going.

By having a why you are setting your own direction and more in control.

But as much as being productive is great, always keep in mind to take breaks. Even taking vacations here and there.

We are far from robots and constantly working, even if it seems manageable, can take a toll on us. 

Step 4: Review Your Plan to Be More Productive

While hustling and taking action is great, one of the big things you can do is review your work and plan. 

Not just the content that I was putting out, but also in my case, my goals and tasks.

This is something that I do on the regular and is very important. Before I publish I ensure my message gets across and I’ve said everything I want to say.

It’s also a time where those refining goal questions come in too. Check to see if you succeeded and failed. Talk about what worked and what didn’t. In particular, I asked why I succeeded or failed.

I was able to stop being lazy because I slowly started to realize I was setting the wrong goals. I didn’t have reasons for setting them, and whenever I did accomplish them, I didn’t feel like I worked hard for them.

Overall the success was underwhelming as opposed to an achievement.

So after your deadline is done, review your work. Look at the finished product and ask yourself more questions. Here are some good ones to ask:

• Are you happy with how things went?
• Did you learn anything from this experience?
• Did this goal make you strategize and plan? Did it challenge you?
• What can you do next time that’ll ensure your eventual or continued success in this goal?
• Do you feel like you’ve grown or made progress towards your ultimate goal?

👉🏽 RELATED POST: Why You Need to Review Your Year

Step 5: Apply What You’ve Learned to Be More Productive

Lastly is applying what you’ve learned.

This goes without saying, however, it’s still important to mention this.

There are so many cases where people attend a talk or a webinar that can truly help people, yet they don’t apply what they learned.

Furthermore, there are countless individuals who read self-help books but never apply what they learn.

My point is from those questions above, write out the answers and if you can get a lesson from it, start using it. Experiment boldly, it’s your life after all.

I was able to stop being lazy slowly because of the key things that I realized from setting goals month to month. I had a plan and as I grew more I learned what I want to do and how to be more productive. I learned what drove me, and how I plan to get there.

From there, I made adjustments to my plans. I went from setting monthly goals to weekly goals. I started to share my goals less with the internet and talked to only a few people about them. I asked myself why I’m setting these specific goals.

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All the changes I made stemmed from the experiences I had and what I learned from them over the past few years.

From that, I created a system that continues to be refined as I progress and grow.

This wasn’t an overnight thing either! Again, it took me a few years to be at this point, however by following these steps, I believe you can be more productive in life and business, and of course, stop being lazy.

To your growth!

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