Productivity

We live in a world that is incessantly and incremental trying to completely overwhelm us. Half the battle of productivity is hacking away the superfluous To-Dos from our existence. No Response Required (NRR) is a super concise way to give the gift of freedom to those you communicate with.

How it works

Unless you need a specific decision from the recipient, add No Response Required or NRR (linked to this article or video) as the very first line of your emails or digital communications. NRR takes literally about 1 second (or less!) to add to the beginnings of your digital communications.

Being a salesperson is one of the most cognitively challenging vocations.

From the neocortex to the croc brain, being an effective salesperson requires vigorously exercising a wide spectrum of cognitive functions.

• Doctors, attorneys, and engineers are highly analytical but their verbal intelligence or presentation skills are often lackluster.
• Graphic designers need a high degree of spatial intelligence but their social intelligence is unused all day.
• Customer service agents are usually good communicators but they don't need to establish deep rapport and psychoanalyze their customers' needs to persuade them to buy big-ticket items.

For over a decade now, I've increased my sales revenues and opportunities while simultaneously decreasing my stress levels and achieving true freedom with my time by applying historical memory systems, cutting-edge applied neuroscience, and even a little chemistry to biohack my mind to its maximum potential as a sales tool. This article will outline the short-term and long-term strategies from these disciplines I utilize to maximize my performance as a salesman and entrepreneur.

In the first episode of the Limitless Mindset podcast, we gave this definition to lifehacking:

A strategy for leveraging your time, money, resources, or relationships for accomplishing bigger goals faster.

To that definition, I'll add what Bruce Lee had to say...

We discuss 7 little-known lifehacks for salespeople, these are applications of memory systems and biohacks for being more productive as a sales rockstar.

In 2012, I couchsurfed with my friend Chuc Mason of Unleash Your Geek in Nosara, Costa Rica, we took a break from our geekery, dropped some Nootropics, and recorded this cheeky podcast - which you can listen to on the go here on Castbox.

I'm finding that for me to really have a productive, happy day I need to do two State Resets.

About halfway through the day, my mind will be kind of like a web browser with too many tabs open; I'll be more susceptible to distractions and I'm more likely to get stuck in the weeds of some menial task. If I do a State Reset about halfway through the day I return to more high-level thinking and am able to more clearly prioritize my efforts and often reach a productive, focused, and creative flowstate as opposed to slumping into mid-afternoon doldrums.

There are a couple of serious information consumption problems with reading blogs and online articles, no matter how informative, engaging, or actionable the content is...

• You will be working online and stumble upon an article that you know is going to be worth reading, but you don't want to stop working on your current task.
• Distraction factors are huge; the temptation to check email or social media accounts.
• A lot of times you will read half an article, get distracted by something, and never return to finish the article.
• If you want to reference information in that article later, you have to go back and find it.
• If you're like me you have a million bookmarks in your web browser, if you bookmark yet another blog or article to read, all that does is ensure it's going to be lost in the avalanche of bookmarks.
• If you're a hustler-geek like me, a lot of times you like to read work or business-related articles at the end of the day to let the knowledge marinate into your mind as you relax.
• Reading on your computer screen is bad for your eyes, especially at night, which is when you are probably doing most of your reading if you follow proper information consumption practices.

This article will reveal an effortless shift you can make in your communication habits, along with 7 life hacks, that will make others perceive you as a highly consistent, reliable, and dependable person.

Also, you'll learn what Bruce Lee had to say about being consistent and reliable...

Commuting is a notorious time-waster for even the most notoriously productive people.

Time is always the most valuable resource of those who live Limitlessly and unfortunately, commuting robs many of us of between 4-10 hours weekly. To worsen the offense, it robs us of hours of what could be our very most productive times; early mornings and late afternoons before dinner. These are time slots that could be much better served...

Recently, I've trialed some different time-tracking apps and Toggl has really impressed me!

• It has intuitive, sharply-designed apps for smartphones, PC, and Mac.
  
• It takes just a click to start time tracking or you can take advantage of its automatic tracking features.
  
• It makes it super easy to break my working day up into 90-minute blocks - for me, this is about the amount of time I can spend working on a project before getting bored.
• It does a pretty great job of detecting when I'm not working on the computer. Sometimes I'm interrupted while working - have to run an errand or whatever - and I don't want to be billing clients for the time I'm not actually spending working for them (even if it's just a trip to the bathroom!)
• It produces reports about what I'm spending time on - which sometimes reveals weaknesses in my time management and priorities.
  
• And it's free (also ad-free) - the free version has met all my needs thus far!

Time tracking has been good for my productivity as a struggle self-employed entrepreneurs like me face is deciding what to work on. With Toggl I'm presented with a list of what I've been working on lately so I just pull up the little app on my Macbook and dive into a project that needs to be completed instead of being distracted by some shiny object on the internet or drawn into some new project or curiosity.