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Successful Habits Of Billionaires

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Successful habits of billionaires, olympians, and entrepreneurs
Learn how to be productive from incredibly successful people.

Learning a few successful habits can improve the quality of your life. Interviews with more than 200 highly successful people, conducted by Kevin Kruse, revealed several repeating themes that might be guides for others aiming for success. He talked with billionaires, Olympians and a selection of entrepreneurs. The question was simple: “What is your number one secret to productivity?” The most consistent answers included the following:

Successful Habits

Many people look to their family, friends or mentors to learn successful habits. It’s better to learn from the experts.

Time Management

There are 1,440 minutes in a day and nothing is more valuable than time. Time spent can never be reclaimed. Most people block out one-and-a-half hour segments of time. Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller told Kruse that her schedule is almost minute-by-minute. Mastering minutes means mastering life.

Focus On One Thing At A Time

Identify the most important task ahead of you, the one that will have the greatest impact on reaching your goal, and work on it without interruption. Dedicate your morning, when you are most productive, to that objective.

To-Do List

Only 41 percent of what’s on the to-do list actually gets done, according to research. Those unfinished talks lead to stress and insomnia and occupy your mind until they’re done. Put items on your calendar and then work by the calendar in the order that is most feasible.

Predicting Future Success

You can’t trust your future self. Most of us are time inconsistent. For instance, we load up on fresh veggies anticipating salads for a week, then throw away the rotting mush before the week is up. Do what you can do right now to. Look ahead and see what you can do now to defeat your future self.

Family Time

Successful people include family time, exercise and health time and time for giving back. There is always at least one more thing to do, so know where you can draw the line. Think about where your priorities lie and allocate time to what you think is most important. Don’t allow work to nudge out the more important things.

Journaling

Richard Branson, who built Virgin, says a simple notebook goes with him everywhere. That’s a “million dollar lesson” they don’t teach in business school, said Aristotle Onassis, Greek shipping executive. Writing down things as they occur to you leaves your mind free to think of other things.

Manage Emails

Process emails a few times a day. Don’t feel obligated to respond to every vibration that ends up in your inbox. Schedule time to respond to emails quickly and efficiently and then leave them to the next session.

Protect Your Time

The advice of Mark Cuban is “Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check.” Meetings tend to start late, have the wrong mix of people, meander around topics and run long. Avoid them if possible. If it is necessary and you can influence the proceedings, made them short and to the point.

Learn To Say “No”

Remember that old 1,440 minutes thing. Trying to respond to every request for your time will use them up in a hurry. Screen your time and protect the minutes.

Pareto Principle

The reality that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of activities. Those who succeed best learn which activities drive the greatest results and stick with them, ignoring the rest.

Delegate

Take the “I” out of the equation whenever you can. The question should be “How can I get this task done?” not “How can I perform this task?” The successful don’t get bound up in control issues and they don’t micro-manage.

Touch Things Once

Picking up a bill then setting it aside without handling it means you have given twice the time to the same objective. Try the “touch it once” approach. Deal with everything when it arises, if possible. You can then free your mind from that particular chore.

Use A Morning Routine

Many of the people Kevin interviewed shared a consistent morning routine. The successful habits varied, but repeat suggestions included a good breakfast, light exercise and mind soothers such as meditation, prayer, inspirational reading or journaling. Over the day, maintain your energy level. Don’t skip meals, sleep or breaks in an effort to fill more time with productive work. Food is fuel, sleep an opportunity for recovery and breaks the way to recharge periodically.

The Best Work-At-Home Opportunities

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What you can expect working from home.
What you can expect working from home.
How to find a job that will pad your family’s income while you remain at home? There has never been more opportunity, but also there have never been the number of scams. Used to be the best chances lay with stuffing envelopes, now there are dozens of at-home jobs that are just a mouse click away.

Legitimate Or Scam

How do you sort out the legitimate opportunities from those that will end in disaster? With 4,500 to 5,000 ads for in-home jobs screened weekly, The Rate Race Rebellion, which tracks such things, found that there were 30 scams for every legitimate opportunity.

Competition For Job

Who’s your likely competition for the jobs that are available? Durst, whose company Staffcentric LLC develops home-based and virtual career training programs, identifies them as: Parents with small children, military spouses who face moving every few years, retirees and people with disabilities.

Disadvantages

Work-at-home is not particularly an ideal option for parents with small children who are likely to create diversions during the day. Consider deadline-oriented jobs rather than those that demand schedule-oriented work.

Who It Benefits

Social introverts may do very well with at-home work. They prefer interacting with others at a remove, working through email or on the phone, to being obligated to work with a lot of other people directly.

Personal Characteristics

The characteristics that usually are demonstrated by good at-home employees are self-motivation, discipline, well-developed job skills and independence.

Check Your Credit

If you apply for work at home, a prospective employer may check your credit. Check yourself at myBankrate.

Reduces Overhead

From the employer’s perspective, hiring workers who don’t come regularly into the office has some advantages. It reduces overhead and provides access to talented workers who are not available locally but make great telecommuters.

Opportunities Available

Ten job opportunities that now are available to at-home workers include virtual assistants, medical transcriptionists, translators, web developer/designer, call center representatives, tech support, travel agents, teachers, writer/editors or franchise owners. Look at the possibilities, but check with the oversight agencies to be certain you aren’t involving yourself with a scam.

Increase Productivity At Work

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Why kill time when you can make it work for you?
Why kill time when you can make it work for you?

What makes some people more productive at work than others? Here are some suggestions from people who are highly productive in business.

Time Management

Learning how to manage your time is the first thing to do. Focus on minutes, not hours. There are 24 hours in a day, but 1,440 minutes. Time spent can never be regained, it is gone forever. Some of the successful people plan their time in minutes, rather than blocking out half hours or hours in their time budgets. The experts say that if you master minutes, you master your life.

One Goal At A Time

It is easy to get distracted during the day. So many things come up that can take you away from your main goals. Try focusing on one thing at a time. Settle on your Most Important Task and work on it without interruption each morning. In other words, invest the most productive time of your day in addressing what is currently most important. To identify the “Most Important Task,” ask yourself what will have the greatest impact on reaching your goals or getting you up the ladder where you work.

Ditch The Lists

Don’t make to-do lists. Studies show that only 41 percent of the items placed on to-do lists actually get done. The undone items can haunt you and lead to stress. Highly productive people have a calendar and work from that calendar, setting aside 15-minute blocks for various tasks. Using such an approach will put you in the 95th percentile, production-wise, the experts say.

Use Resources Wisely

People tend to be time-inconsistent. Defeating your future self is one of the challenges. For instance, we buy bags full of healthy vegetables to get on a better regimen, then let them sit in the refrigerator until they rot. Or we buy exercise equipment that is still in the box a year later. Anticipate ahead of time the areas in which you are likely to self-sabotage and act accordingly.

Cherish Family Time

Make it home for dinner. There’s no such thing as being finished with your work. There’s always more. Even though your work is one of your values, there are others that do or should have equal standing. Each individual chooses his own “most valuable” list, but for many, it includes family time, exercise and giving back to one’s community. Consciously allocate time to your own personal value areas and stick to it. Put time for these things into your calendar and don’t let them be crowded out by work.

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Overworked? Take Back Your Down Time

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overworkingThe old adage that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is still true. Especially in today’s work format that often keeps an employee on the job long after the clock says, “Go home.”

Work can tend to overwhelm those who continue working when the have left the office. Keeping the technology at bay for a break now and then may have to become a conscious effort to avoid being drowned in the process.

Working a 40-hour per week traditional schedule is becoming more and more an anachronism. Data from the 2013 and 2014 Gallup Work and Education surveys showed that American workers put in an average 47 hours in a typical week. That’s almost an extra work day in the standard period. A lot of the activity takes place outside the usual work site.

Employees find themselves checking work emails at home or taking business calls after they have left the office. There are some ways to minimize the extra-office work time, including these:

baseball-recreationSchedule off-work activities for times when you are not expected to be at the office. Exercise classes or free gym time, for instance, can be set at early morning times. Paying a trainer to help you stay in trim may be incentive to adhere to a schedule. Make arrangements with a family member or friend to enhance the chances you will take the time. Set up activities one or two nights a week. Make it an objective to leave the office on time no less than 20 percent of the time.

Involve your co-workers in off-site activities. Set up a company softball or bowling team or other inclusive activity, for instance. That will strengthen bonds and offset the tendency to go on working when the workday ends. Talking shop is inevitable, but keep it at a minimum.

Turn off the devices. Smartphones and Tablets. They’re wonderful for keeping tabs on work-related things, but take a break! They keep you connected to the office and can impinge on family and relaxation time. In 2013, Opinion Matters conducted a study that showed 39 percent of workers checked their work emails outside of their regular work hours, and 81 percent said they do it on weekends. If you are serious about cutting the cord and giving yourself that respite from work that you really need, turn them off.

The job is important. We all know that. But the job will go better if you mix in some non-work activity. Try it. You’ll like it.

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