5 skills (you can start with today) to work less and achieve more

Among the many ways that can help to work less and achieve more, there are 5 skills that I live by. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much information out there! Courses, blogs and advice that offer great value, but what will truly make a difference? Which resources are helpful for you, and what *you* want to achieve today? 

I might not have the perfect answer, (which doesn’t exist anyway) but I do have the experience as a professional coach and Smart Work™ Expert to share that my clients come to me feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, and leave feeling less distracted, more calm and more productive.  

The recurring theme, distilled from more than a thousand coaching hours, is that time management, productivity, and the confidence to achieve a level of success that seems unreachable, are at the heart of working effectively. 

Working less but achieving more means just that: achieving a state where you’re not scattering your energy anywhere and everywhere, all the time. 

It’s about knowing and differentiating between what should receive your energy and attention and what needs to be discarded or stopped. Before you can do that, you must develop a higher level of self-awareness. 

5 Skills to ​Work Less And Achieve More

#1 Seek Clarity

Being crystal clear with yourself requires a level of honesty and transparency that can be challenging. Defense mechanisms can get in the way. “I wasn’t late, the bus was,” or “I can’t invest in my own goals, things are just too busy.”

Be honest with why you want to grow, and if you’re willing to give up outdated habits, and beliefs. Replace them with a crystal clear vision of who you want to be, and what you want to achieve. Ask yourself: why do you want to achieve this, and are you ready to commit to change?

#2 Prioritize

Precise arrival at the right time is quite a different feeling than running late, packing frantically, sweating in the Uber ride and being the last one at the meeting. This might be the feeling you carry with you along every task you undertake. The frantic overwhelm and anxiety. It’s the result of miscommunicating your priorities to yourself. Wanting to get too much done affects this, as does focusing on the wrong things and mistaking them for the right ones.

Track what you’re doing: sleeping and eating habits, people who drain and fuel you, where you’re losing your time – social media? Binge-watching shows? Shopping online? Prioritize the things that are important to your future self and not just the person you are right now. Ask yourself: are you willing to sacrifice short-term gratification for long-term success?

#3 Manage Yourself

Life has peaks and valleys, and you cannot control every external happening. However, you can manage your inner state. Your reactions, emotions, and attitude to what happens day-to-day.

If you have a difficult time with patience, you might be draining yourself of mental energy because you spend more time stressed out than choosing calm as a response (did you know you have that option?!). Ask yourself: are you willing to admit your growth areas, start on a new plan for addressing them, and how to overcome them?

#4 Boundaries

There’s no such thing as #SoulfulProductivity without a focus on boundaries. When was the last time you said “no” confidently? As women we tend to be “yes” people because we’re nurturing and accommodating.

But where do you draw the line? How do you prioritize if you feel you *must* say yes all the time? Ask yourself: are you ready to say “no” and not feel guilty? Are you ready to put yourself first.

#5 Less stuff

Being able to do less and achieve more, means reassessing the mental, emotional, physical and digital landscape that is your life. The ways and spaces you interact with on the day to day. Materialism is making us sick, social media is affecting our mental health, and our sleep. The psychological benefits of tidying up are proving to be great (thank you Marie Kondo!), so take a good look around you.

Start with decluttering where it makes sense to begin. Take a digital detox, Marie Kondo your home, or clean up your computer. Making space actually promotes new energy, less distraction, and stress from the important tasks you do want to accomplish.

When you have a laundry list of to-dos, life or work gets overwhelming. 

Trust me I was there, and I did a lot of trial and error to find tools, tips and tricks that actually work to get you off the hamster wheel of productivity! I left the corporate world to pursue a more soulfully productive way of living. I even teach about it here. I followed my true voice because it grew too loud, too frustrated and – honestly – too exhausted. 

The truth is: you have to clear time to make time! If you want to prioritize yourself AND improve your well-being, you *must* create space so you can invest in yourself. 

The 5 skills you must practice to work less and achieve more is not a quick fix, nor is it a gimmick. It’s also not an easy road – at first. Once you’ve mastered those 5 though, you’ll get more focused time to tackle some of life’s bigger challenges that are getting in the way of being soulfully productive. 

Once you have mastered those 5 skills, everything else will flow naturally and easily into place. 

Until then, practice them as often as you can. Start small, start today, and let me know how it goes!

How to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset

You are a multi-passion woman. You have many interests, and you want to achieve and learn so many things. It sometimes seems as if you have too many interests. And you feel you need to choose. But you don’t know what to choose, let alone how to do it. So you do nothing. You contemplate all that you want to be and do, but you do nothing. You procrastinate. Sound familiar?

I’ve been there, and I’ve looked at that mountain of things I wanted to achieve for many, many years.

Languages I wanted to learn, courses I wanted to take, things I wanted to build with my hands, creative endeavors I wanted to start, books I wanted to write, places I wanted to visit, experiences I wanted to have….  All the while, I was doing nothing, or at least not enough. And I kept putting things off based on small and insignificant excuses that I kept on telling myself to make myself feel better.

It was as if I was living two lives. The one I was in, where not a lot was happening and I felt I was out of place. And the life I was dreaming about in my mind – the one where I was doing all the things I knew I wanted to do, and where I was living all these amazing adventures and being who I really wanted to be. Until one day I decided that I could no longer just think about what it was I wanted, but needed to actually go get it, too.

And what a paradox that was. On the outside, I was very successful. I was an accomplished business woman, running large projects and esteemed by my peers. But on the inside I was called to do so many others things, always telling myself later, one day, when I grow up. But then one day I grew up. I was 35, and I realized I could keep waiting like this forever, or I could actually go out and start living. But to do that, I had to learn to beat the procrastination habit. Because that habit had been with me for so long that I didn’t know any other way.

Every time I looked at what I wanted to achieve and become, that mountain became bigger and bigger. And every time I gave it even only a tiny little glimpse, I feared climbing it more and more. But that was before. That was when I hadn’t taken any action yet. Once I did that, once I decided just to do one thing – anything, really – I set something in motion that led me to where I am today. For me, it was the day I decided to stop doing things the way I knew wasn’t working. I woke up, and that day for the first time I told someone that I wasn’t happy and that I was going to stir things up. That little step, just expressing that thought, was enough of an action to propel me towards change.

The day I did that, I started to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset. And although it seemed like an almost impossible task then, now that I’m here, it sounds so easy. To cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset you have to do things and express thoughts. Because expressing a thought is as much doing something as lifting a box, writing in your journal or cooking dinner. You have to stop thinking about things too much, you have to avoid putting too many things on top of each other in your mind, and instead, you have to act out and express. Action drives change. Yes. But it kills procrastination too.

And yes, I hear you. You’re thinking: “Now, that sounds easy; if I knew how to get into action, I wouldn’t be procrastinating all the time”. And you are right. But you see, the secret to taking and being in action is simply, well… to start. And the secret to starting anything is to do it. And what I have found to be the secret of doing things – and I promise this is the last secret I’ll share today – is to take it one small step at a time. Because when you take enough of those steps, you go really, really far.

So the easiest way to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset is to choose the tiniest of things to do on your dream to-do list, and to take action on that immediately.Procrastination hates it when you don’t wait to do things, but tackle them right away instead.

Another way to look at this is to tell yourself that whatever it is you’re going to do, you only have to do 5 minutes of it at a time. That’s all. After 5 minutes, you’re free to do whatever it is your procrastinating self wants to do. I guarantee you there is no better way to get you into action and working towards your dreams.

Now, of course there is much more to staying in action and keeping procrastination at bay. What do you do, for instance, when you feel paralyzed by too many choices? Or when there isn’t a small step to take, but only what looks like giant steps instead? I have developed techniques and systems to help with that and much more and I’m sharing all of it in my 3-week self-paced Dream Bigger Course. Feel free to check it out!