Success is a learnable skill. It would be terrible for you to be held back in life because you lack one easily learnable skill that could enable you to multiply your results and possibilities. The key to success is effective time management and continuous learning. 

In military parlance they use an expression ‘force multiplier.’ A force multiplier is what enables a smaller force to defeat a larger force. One of the force multipliers that we study are, speed; a smaller force moving with greater speed can take advantage of an opening. Another is intelligence. In business the force multiplier of intelligence means that you learn and you know things about your customers, your markets and your potential that other people don’t, that enable you to get a market advantage.

Become a Self-Made Millionaire With These Leverage Factors

In order to become a self-made millionaire, you must follow these 7 force multipliers or leverage factors so that you can use it in your work to get vastly more done.

1. Work Harder For Business Success

Just simply work harder. It’s amazing how lazy people are, and how little they work and how much time they waste. So if you make a decision to just work hard when you get to work, concentrate on your task, put your whole heart into what you’re doing and just work, work, work, you’ll find that one of the greatest reasons for success in life is that people work harder. Eighty-five percent of self-made millionaires said that the reason they became millionaires starting with nothing was because they worked harder than their competitors. They worked harder than other people. And you can do the same thing.

2. Work Faster

Pick up the pace. Pick up the tempo. Imagine that you’re in a heck of a hurry and just work quickly. Do your jobs quickly and get back to people quickly. A great time management principle I learned was the principle of working in real time. That means that when something comes up, deal with it now. When you get a phone message, phone back immediately. When you have to make a decision, make it immediately. When you have to answer an email that’s important, do it now. Don’t accumulate tasks. If the task can be done in less than 2 minutes, in almost every case you should do it right away, and then get back to your main task.

3. Work Longer

This again is one of the great secrets of success. Start a little earlier, work a little harder, stay a little later. Come in one hour earlier and get your day planned and get your work under way before anybody else gets there. Work through lunchtime. Don’t go out for lunch, just eat quickly and then get back to work, and do more work. Then, work an hour longer. Let everybody go home and crowd all the streets. You just go in behind them in the slipstream, and you’ll get home at pretty much the same time. But, you’ll get twice as much done if you start a little earlier, work a little harder and stay a little later.

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Here’s one of the great secrets for success; always be there when your boss arrives and always be there when your boss leaves. The boss will not mention it or comment on it for a while, but at a certain point in time everything will start to change for you. You will become known as the go-to person. You’ll become known as the person that, “If you want something done, go to him or her.”

So working longer is really important and can literally put you on the side of the angels. And if you combine that with working harder and working faster, you’ll double and triple your productivity, virtually the first day.

4. The Key to Success is Working Together

Work in teams; work with other people. There are some tasks that take an enormous amount of time for a single person to do but with a large group of people, each one specializing and doing part of the task, you can get a tremendous amount done.

I was at a summer fair where a home builder raffled off a new home and they said that whoever won the home they would build if for them in basically 48 hours. And that’s what they did. They used a series of crews and literally built the entire home in two days. Normally it would take at least six to eight weeks to build but they did it in 48 hours with everyone working harder, faster, longer, and specializing in their particular area.

5. Do More Important Things

This is a great leverage factor. The 80/20 rule; 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results. If you have a list of ten things to do, two of those items will be worth more than all the others put together. Discipline yourself to work on those items that are most important because you are producing 5 or 10 times as much working on your top tasks as working on your average tasks.

6. Cluster Similar Tasks For Effective Time Management

This is one of the great time management tools. Do all your reports at once; do all of your proposals at once, all of your prospecting calls at once. Whatever they are, do them all together rather than one here and one there, and one at another time during the day. What happens is that when you do a whole series of similar tasks together you get onto what is called the learning curve. Whereas the first task may take ten minutes, the next one will take nine, the next one eight, and the next one only seven minutes. Pretty soon, you’ll be burning through the tasks at two to three minutes at a time. You’ll save 50 – 80% of the time on each subsequent task. You’ll get more done that you can possibly imagine. So do similar tasks together.

7. Get Better at Your Key Tasks

Get better at the most important and most valuable things you do, and do them faster and do them harder and get them done.

Now here is one of the greatest of all rules, and it comes from a study by Robert Half International who found that 50% of all working time is wasted. Fifty percent of all working time is spent on things of low value or no value. Fifty percent of working time is spent in idle chit-chat with coworkers, checking email, reading the paper, drinking coffee, going for breaks and lunches, coming in late, leaving early, going shopping, and personal business. So here is the way that you overcome this natural, habitual, comfort zone, path of least resistance tendency to waste time and work, and that is to “work all the time you work.”

Thank you for reading this article about how you can achieve business success through excellent time management. Self-made millionaires are willing to put in the extra time and work in order to achieve all of their goals. Please share and comment below!

7 Leverage Factors: Your Key to Business Success is a post from: Brian Tracy's Blog