Escape The 9-5 Lifestyle With These Brilliant Productivity Hacks

Escape The 9-5 Lifestyle With These Brilliant Productivity Hacks:from Silicon Alley Insider by Max Nisen and Aimee Groth

Tim Ferriss is among the most popular writers around on productivity, picking up skills, and escaping the 9-5 lifestyle.
His first bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek, came out of from his own experience of going from working long hours, seven days a week to figuring out how to run a business more efficiently.
But even for people not ready to take that step, Ferriss has some valuable tips for figuring how to get dramatically more done in less time, leaving more room to get ahead, relax, and do the things that make you happy.

If you're spending 12 hours a day at your desk, and still not finishing your work, it's time to make a change.

It's incredibly simple to fall into easy habits, or just do things the way you're trained. Ferriss writes:
"If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are."
For example, Ferriss had huge success making sales calls only at 8:00-8:30 in the morning and from 6:00 to 6:30 at night because he got around "gatekeepers" and directly to executives.
Source: The Four Hour Workweek 

Interest, energy and ability go up and down all the time. Trying to work through it when you're miserable is unproductive.

The way many of our jobs and careers are planned leads to doing the same thing for hours, even years on end. It doesn't account for the fact that people aren't built to work that way.
Your interest and ability to do a particular job or task varies over time. It's more effective to plan for it than to simply try to work through it, or spend unproductive hours staring at a screen. 
Design your work day, and potentially even your career to take that into account.
Source: The Four Hour Workweek 

Doing less is not being lazy. Don't give in to a culture that values personal sacrifice over personal productivity.

Often, our workplace culture places way too much emphasis on face-time, late evenings, early mornings, and eating lunch at the desk as a sign of hard work and dedication.
Long hours show neither. There's a big difference between being productive and being busy. Instead of measuring the amount of work you do, measure results in terms of the amount of time, and eliminate the less important things that take forever.
Eliminate work for work's sake.
Source: The Four Hour Workweek 



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