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4 Ways to Max Out the 40-Hour Workweek

Entrepreneur

In today’s 24/7 world, is the 40-hour workweek still possible or is it a pipe dream?

It is absolutely possible; you just need to work smarter, not harder.

In my role as VP of Communications at Porch.com, a home-improvement network, I communicate this philosophy to my team along with the importance of adopting work-life balance principles.

So how can other businesses implement these ideologies? They need to have a plan of action.

To help people crack the code for how to create an efficient and impactful 40-hour workweek, here are four methods to set a course for successfully working smarter, not harder.

1. Ignore the visibility trap.

Over the years I have observed one consistent action that extends their workweek well beyond 40-hours: The never ending quest for visibility. The No. 1 sign you are stuck in the visibility trap is you are going to too many meetings and particularly meetings you don’t really need to go to. Why is this trap so common? I have found that many people may feel left out or left behind if they are not at every meeting with their colleagues. Ignore this trap. I know it can be hard, but if you are in meetings, chances are you are not working.

How do you ignore this? Meetings are expensive so don’t spend valuable minutes in meetings you don’t really need to be in. Do a hardcore audit of your meetings. What is being discussed in the meeting that you can’t get after the fact? Does the meeting really need to be 60 minutes or can it be 30 minutes? What are the goals of the meeting? If a meeting does not have a structured agenda, clear roles for participants and a set of desired outcomes, it is probably not going to be a great use of your time.

2. Outcomes over activities.

Throughout the day you need to ask yourself, are you producing tangible outcomes or are you just participating in activities that you think are important? If you don’t have any goals in mind for the week, you won’t know if you are on track and driving actual value to the business. When this happens you also won’t have clarity, predictability or know if the week was truly a success (and if you spent your time on the right things).

How do you do this? Set up weekly priorities and stick to them. Communicate daily with your manager to ensure you are always on the right track and your week is setup for success. Are you getting the right support and resources? Do things need to change on the priority list? Have a conversation on Monday to set the table for the week. When you get to Friday, how will you know that the week was a success? If you focus on the outcomes over activities you are halfway there.

Only you can truly control the fate of your week. Yes, things come up that you can’t plan for, but if you are focused on working with your manager on the right outcomes, you will have the air cover you need to stay focused on the task at hand. If you allow people to pull you off on the wrong path you will lose focus. Pick your spots, leverage the help of others, and control your day in a way that keeps you in the driver’s seat.

How do you do this? At the beginning of the day take a serious look at the day ahead. What MUST get done? What needs to happen to hit your daily goals? If you feel randomized call a time-out and reassess how you will carve up your time for the rest of the day.

4. Fly above the noise.

When you need to truly get work done nothing matters more than finding a way to fly about the noise. You can easily fall behind if you are spending too much time chatting in the hallways with colleagues, taking extended lunches, getting wrapped up in conversations and other activities that pull you away from the task at hand.

How do you do this? Stay heads down. Stay off Facebook and Twitter. Don’t get wrapped up in the gossip chains. Ignore the shiny objects. If you can do that you are well on your way to maximizing out your workweek to produce great results.

Source: entrepreneur.com ~ By:  ~ Image: Canva Pro

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Warren Buffett Tells You How to Turn $40 Into $10 Million

Long Term Investing

Buffett shows how investors with a little patience and understanding can turn $40 into $10 million over the course of their lifetime.

Warren Buffett is perhaps the greatest investor of all time, and he has a simple solution that could help an individual turn $40 into $10 million.

A few years ago, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A 0.99%) (BRK.B 1.08%) CEO and Chairman Warren Buffett spoke about one of his favorite companies, Coca-Cola (KO 0.71%), and how after dividends, stock splits, and patient reinvestment, someone who bought just $40 worth of the company’s stock when it went public in 1919 would now have more than $5 million.

Yet in April 2012, when the board of directors proposed a stock split of the beloved soft-drink manufacturer, that figure was updated and the company noted that original $40 would now be worth $9.8 million. A little back-of-the-envelope math of the total return of Coke since May 2012 would mean that $9.8 million is now worth about $11.5 million.

The power of patience
I know that $40 in 1919 is very different from $40 today. However, even after factoring for inflation, it turns out to be $542 in today’s dollars. Put differently, would you rather have an Apple Watch, or almost $11 million?

But the thing is, it isn’t even as though an investment in Coca-Cola was a no-brainer at that point, or in the near century since then.

Sugar prices were rising. World War I had just ended a year prior. The Great Depression happened a few years later. World War II resulted in sugar rationing. And there have been countless other things over the past 100 years that would cause someone to question whether their money should be in stocks, much less the stock of a consumer-goods company like Coca-Cola.

The dangers of timing
Yet as Buffett has noted continually, it’s terribly dangerous to attempt to time the market:

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can’t figure out when it will happen. You don’t want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you’re right about what, you don’t have to worry about when”

So often investors are told they must attempt to time the market — to start investing when the market is on the rise and sell when the market peaks.

This type of technical analysis — watching stock movements and buying based on short-term and often arbitrary price fluctuations — often receives a lot of media attention, but it has proven no more effective than random chance.

Investing for the long term
Individuals need to see that investing is not like placing a wager on the 49ers to cover the spread against the Panthers, but instead it’s buying a tangible piece of a business.

It is absolutely important to understand the relative price you are paying for that business, but what isn’t important is attempting to understand whether you’re buying in at the “right time,” as that is so often just an arbitrary imagination.

In Buffett’s own words, “If you’re right about the business, you’ll make a lot of money,” so don’t bother about attempting to buy stocks based on how their stock charts have looked over the past 200 days. Instead always remember that “it’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price,” and, much like Buffett, hope to hold it forever.

Source: fool.com ~ By Patrick Morris ~ Image: Canva Pro

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How To Stay Motivated and Accomplish Anything

How To Stay Motivated

Sustaining motivation can be tough under the best of circumstances. So how can you stay motivated when your to-do list runs to four pages, you just got another rejection letter, your adult child announced his plans to move back home, the car and washing machine went on the fritz at the same time and you can’t find time in the day to work on your own personal projects?

We know those pop-psych directives to put a photo of you at your most fit on the fridge or write yourself a check for $1 million and tape it to your computer monitor or plaster your mirrors with affirmations, like “I attract my perfect soul mate.”

Motivation is not magic. It does not come in a bottle. There is no little blue pill for it. But it’s something you can tap into by design then harness. Every inspirational author, speaker and life coach has his own tips (and DVDs and seminars), but over my decades of observing super-successful, high-achieving people, I’ve come up with a list of seven things that are fundamental to sustaining motivation, whether you’re trying to finish a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle or climb Kilimanjaro.

Seven Steps to Staying Motivated

1. Set a goal and visualize it down to the most minute detail. See it, feel it, hear the sounds that accompany the end result (wind rushing through your hair, applause). Elite athletes visualize their performance ahead of time — right down to the smell of the sweat dripping down their face as they cross the finish line.

2. Make a list of the reasons you want to accomplish the goal. In our busy, distracting world, it’s easy to get blown off course. This is why you need to ground yourself in your goal. For extra “success insurance,” write your list with a pen. Studies show that when we write by hand and connect the letters manually, we engage the brain more actively in the process. Because typing is an automatic function that involves merely selecting letters, there’s less of a mental connection.

3. Break the goal down into smaller pieces and set intermediary targets — and rewards. I’ve called this “chunking” long before there was a Wikipedia to explain that there are eight variations of the concept. To me it’s the best non-pharmaceutical antidote to ADHD. Tony Robbins, arguably the foremost motivational speaker and personal development coach, says: “A major source of stress in our lives comes from the feeling that we have an impossible number of things to do. If you take on a project and try to do the whole thing all at once, you’re going to be overwhelmed.”

Enter chunking. My system involves chipping away at a project. Break it down into the smallest realistic steps and only do one at a time. Neuroscience tells us that each small success triggers the brain’s reward center, releasing feel-good chemical dopamine. This helps focus our concentration and inspires us to take another similar step. Try this with your bête noire, whether organizing your papers and bills or setting out to find a new job.

4. Have a strategy, but be prepared to change course. Let Thomas Edison inspire you in this department: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.” “The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

5. Get the help you need. It doesn’t necessarily take a village, but even if you could theoretically accomplish your objective alone, there’s inherent value in sharing your plan. It’s why people get married in front of witnesses. Announcing your intentions sends a strong message to the world and, more important, to your unconscious mind, which can sometimes sabotage our best efforts. Also, we often overestimate our abilities. The flip side is being highly selective about whom you tell and ask for help. It’s akin to the builder’s rule to always get “the right tool for the right job.”

6. Pre-determine how you will deal with flagging motivation. This is not defeatist thinking. On the contrary! It’s (almost) inevitable that at some point along the way, whether because of temporary setbacks or sheer exhaustion, you will need a little boost. When that happens, I think of what others have endured to reach their targets and to quash even the beginning of a pity party, I invoke the most hard-core endurance models I can think of: friends fighting serious diseases and Holocaust survivors.

Winston Churchill is particularly inspirational on this front. After London endured 57 consecutive bombings by the Germans during World War II (the Blitzkrieg), he was invited to address a group of students. In that speech, he uttered his immortal line “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up.”

7. Continually check in with your reasons for carrying on. Despite his all-too-human flaws, Steve Jobs embodied this brilliantly. He once told an interviewer: “I think most people that are able to make a sustained contribution over time — rather than just a peak — are very internally driven. You have to be. Because, in the ebb and tide of people’s opinions and of fads, there are going to be times when you are criticized, and criticism’s very difficult. And so when you’re criticized, you learn to pull back a little and listen to your own drummer. And to some extent, that isolates you from the praise, if you eventually get it, too. The praise becomes a little less important to you and the criticism becomes a little less important to you, in the same measure. And you become more internally driven.”

See the Big Picture

There’s also a more meta, “Why are we here?” way to think about motivation. The great Jewish Rabbi Hillel (alive around the time of Jesus), famously said, “If not you, then who? If not now, when?” If you truly let those words sink in, it’s hard to be slacker.

But perhaps my favorite “put it all in perspective” commentary comes from the Dalai Lama. When asked what surprised him most about humanity, he answered, “Man.” Why?

“Because,” said His Holiness, “he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

So what keeps you motivated? We’d love to hear from you.

Source: forbes.com ~ By: Suzanne Gerber ~ Image: Canva Pro

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The Advantage Of Being A Female Entrepreneur

Female Entrepreneur

The tech and business worlds aren’t always seen as female-friendly places — just 37 percent of entrepreneurs are women — but female business leaders may actually have a surprising advantage over their male colleagues.

According to recent data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, entrepreneurs in the U.S. feel a greater sense of purpose than the average worker (51 percent vs. 44 percent), which contributes to greater fulfillment from their work and lives.

Among female entrepreneurs, “purpose thriving” is especially strong. Fifty-six percent of female entrepreneurs say they have a strong sense of purpose, compared to 47 percent of male entrepreneurs, 48 percent of non-entrepreneurial female workers, and 41 percent of non-entrepreneurial male workers.

Separately, the study found that female entrepreneurs are also more likely to report greater physical well-being than male entrepreneurs and male and female non-entrepreneurial workers, the study found.

The findings ring true across age, race, and socioeconomic demographics, and also account for factors like martial status, income and weekly hours worked, the researchers found.

“Demographic factors alone don’t account for entrepreneurs’ higher purpose well-being,” a Gallup press release notes. “Rather, there is something else about being an entrepreneur that relates to liking what they do each day and being motivated to achieve their goals.”

According to a recent global ranking from Gender-GEDI, the United States is the best country in the world for female entrepreneurs to prosper, followed by Australia, Sweden and Germany.

To be sure, women face a number of challenges in starting businesses — including work-life balance concerns, fear of failure, and lack of female role models in business — but they still seem to be happier than their male and non-entrepreneurial counterparts. According to the 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report, female entrepreneurs who become established business owners ranked their well-being more than twice as high as non-entrepreneurs and non-business owners.

Source: huffingtonpost.com ~ By: Carolyn Gregoire ~ Image: Canva Pro

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Women Connections Make Us Strong And Successful

Women’s connections are a powerful asset that we as females should learn to hold onto. Women naturally have strong hearts, souls, and intuitions and our connections stem deeper than we think. Have you ever felt the need to connect with a female you know? But she might not be somebody you’ve seen or connected with for a long time. Well, for us girls it doesn’t have to be because we are all born connected. At least that’s what I believe.

In fact, studies are saying that this connection in women can make us stronger and more successful in many aspects of our lives. Instead of competing against each other, we can help build one another. There’s so much power in it and when one does it, another will follow – just like the butterfly effect. Even a simple phone call with somebody you might’ve worked with previously, or a friend you once knew, can do absolute wonders for your life.

Women’s connections lead to great things and in a world like this, we need to hone in on its incredible powers.

Women’s Connections Change The Game

Back in the day, competition between women became more prominent because things were fewer and harder to come by. These things included jobs, money, security, quality of life, husbands, and even friends. As a result, women began to compete in an effort to stand out, when they should have been rooting for each other all along. Thankfully, we’ve realized this power and the world of women is starting to become more compact.

It is so silly that women would feel the need to compete because it’s pretty obvious that this method doesn’t get you anywhere. Instead, there’s extreme power in building each other up and learning to collaborate. I think the old stereotype of women up against one another must fall away. These days, our sisterhood is too strong for that. We are meant to collaborate because this is a sustainable strategy that in turn benefits us all.

It’s kind of like a club where we all have a safe place and feel like we belong. The funny thing that you realize when working closely together with other ladies is just how much stronger it makes you feel.

Strength in Connections

Sometimes the road to life can go haywire. When this happens, things can get lonely and seem very dark very quickly. Don’t let yourself enter this place. Remember that you are not alone and no matter how far away you are from each other, in your hearts, you’ve got so much company. You see, once women’s connections are made, they tend to last.

Recent research in the Harvard Business Review found that men and women both benefit from having a network of well-connected peers across different groups. That makes sense. Interestingly, these women with an inner circle of close female contacts happen to hold executive positions with greater authority and higher pay. But when the study looked at men, it didn’t find a link between connections and men’s success. It’s really amazing because it just proves that there could be some kind of spiritual power behind womanhood. If we all believed this, imagine the power we could have.

There are a few reasons why women’s connections are so powerful. However, a lot of it is due to something called unconscious bias. We place this on ourselves without even realizing it. If you’ve got a group of women to support you, then you forget about that negative self-talk and get on with it.

These perceptions are quite a lot for women to overcome, and we’re born into it. That’s the trickiest part. Hopefully, the more we stick together the easier it will become to get rid of such bias.  And because of this, we feel the need to connect with other women and share our experiences with each other. It’s sort of like a ‘been there, done that’ kind of thing. We must all know our worth and own it by bringing our unique abilities to the table and support systems can help us do this.

Build Your Circle

I know that nothing gives me more confidence than knowing I’ve got my girls and that they have my back. And vice versa. This alone is strong and can carry through the most troublesome times.

We should create this support structure and implement it into our personal lives, as well as our business endeavors. Because your female connections are not only your friends, they’re your mentors and even sponsors.

Any successful female leader should have a wide circle of closely connected women to spur her on. Besides, talking comes naturally to women. Well, it does for me! It’s an amazing asset right there because you are designed to connect. Get out there and embrace those skills to talk! Share your interests and passions. You never know when it might bring you good fortune. Remember, people want to work with people that they like and aspire to be alike – so don’t be afraid to state your goals, either.

Networking Is Natural for Us

Sometimes when I hear that word, it scares me. This is because it feels like work as soon as you say it. However, women’s connections are built-in us, and we can create them naturally. We can enjoy making them instead of stressing about speaking to people.  If anything, don’t be afraid to reach out and put yourself out there. What have you got to lose? It is your time to establish forever relationships with meaning, integrity, and strength.

I think the most important aspect is to remember that establishing any kind of connection isn’t just a one-time thing. You must take the time to follow up and leave your mark. Imprint on the other person’s life if you must. Because they are going to imprint on you too. Reach out to those that inspire you and ask them for advice. You never know, they might be looking to share their experience with you too.

Create Your Team And Own It

The most important quality of women’s connections is building each other’s confidence and acting as a constant booster.

Start thinking of the kind of ladies you want to attract in your life and the kinds of ones you admire. Start connecting with them and learn from what they are doing to help you with your journey. Don’t struggle through life alone, because there is power in this.

This is an incredible way to bounce ideas off of each other, seek advice, or get a boost. Not only can you improve your career, but you will boost your mental well-being too! By seeking support, you are also building long-lasting connections and creating limitless opportunities for yourself. And as soon as you get an idea, you know the first place you can go and share it! There’s no better feeling than being part of a women’s group that wants nothing else other than for you to be your best and succeed.

Everything falls into place when we start working together.

Source: longevitylive.com ~ By: Skye Mallon ~ Image: Canva Pro

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