Six Ways to Do Less and Achieve More

In her book, “Do Less, Achieve More”, Chin-Ning Chu explains that effort and ease are not in opposition, instead, they complement each other. In order to ensure maximum performance you need to strike a balance between “the effort of striving and the ease of fluid action”.

In addition, accomplishing more by doing less is about cutting out extraneous, unnecessary effort. Below you will find six examples on how to do less and achieve more applied to the activity of blogging. However, these same lessons can be applied to anything that you do to help you become more productive while seeking out the rhythm of ease.

1. Do What Works - Do Less and Achieve more by Imitating the Success of Others

While it’s true that one of the best things you can do to get your blog noticed is to provide interesting and unique content, you shouldn’t try to be unique in everything that you do when it comes to blogging. For most things, you should imitate the success of others. That is, find what’s working for successful bloggers and then model their success.

Seth Godin explains in his post “What Does This Remind You Of?” that if you’re writing a book, your purpose probably isn’t to reinvent what a book is. Instead, you’re trying to come up with some new ideas to share with your readers. But when it comes to things such as the jacket, the type, and other basic things, he advises that you should steal relentlessly.

Many successful bloggers have written excellent posts explaining how to create a successful blog based on their own experience, so all you need to do is follow their advice. Here are some of the best:

• 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project (Problogger)
• Blogging Tips for Beginners Guide (Problogger)
• Building a Better Blog Series (The Simple Dollar)
• Blogger’s Watch and Learn (Skelliewag)
• How to Make Money From Your Blog (Steve Pavlina)

This same concept applies to all areas of life: to become effective in any skill, study those who are already highly accomplished in that skill. You can shorten your learning curve considerably in everything that you do, and therefore get more done in less time, by finding what has worked for others and then doing it.

2. Do Less and Achieve More by Automating as Much as You Can

Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, and they can help you automate boring, repetitive blogging tasks, as well as create shortcuts. I use Photo Dropper to help me easily select and then insert Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr into my blog posts; I also use Wordpress Automatic Upgrade and Wordpress Database Backup.  Some bloggers use the Comment Relish plugin to send automatic e-mail messages to new commentators encouraging them to susbscribe to their blog.  In addition, you’ll find a blog post that lists five wordpress plugins that can help you save time here.

For examples from outside the world of blogging, you can automate your bill payments and have a portion of your earnings deposited directly into the investment vehicle of your choice each month.

3. Do Less and Achieve More by Leveraging Your Time and Money

Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the equivalent of taking the time to learn how to invest your money so that it accrues interest and creates a passive stream of income for you.  Although blogging is far from being passive–in fact, blogging takes a lot of work–blogger extraordinaire Steve Pavlina argues that your blog’s archives are a source of passive income.  By applying an effective SEO strategy to your blog posts you’re ensuring that your old posts will continue to be found; at the same time, if you add passive sources of income to these blog posts, such as adsense and affiliate links, your old posts can become an interesting source of passive income.  That is, learning SEO will help you do less and achieve more by allowing you to leverage your time and money.

4. Do Less and Achieve More - Leverage Your Knowledge

Finding ways to leverage your knowledge is one of the best ways to do less and achieve more.  For example, if you have a core idea you can find ways to turn that idea into a book, an affiliate program, a seminar, an audio program, and even videos.  Each idea is repackaged several times to get as much usage out of it as possible.  There are three ways I can think of for you to leverage your blog posts:

Create a Squidoo Page from Your Blog Posts

I’ve written about squidoo before, here and here.  If you’ve created a comprehensive blog post, and you can expand on a bit more, you can turn that blog post into a squidoo lens.  Furthermore, you can install the Mozilla Firefox add-on for Squidoo and whenever you’re browsing the net and come across more information on the subject you’ve created a squidoo lens about, the add-on takes you right to your squidoo dashboard so that you can easily include the information in your lens.

Creating a squidoo lens can help drive traffic to your blog, it can be a place to collect even more information on a topic which you can use for future blog posts, and it can even make you some money.

Submit Your Posts to Ezines

Make modifications to your blog posts and submit them to reputable e-zines such as Ezine Articles. Their web site gets enormous amounts of traffic from publishers looking to publish high quality articles on their blogs and newsletters–giving you more exposure–as well as people looking for information.  In addition, the articles that you publish on Ezine Articles will get a high ranking for your keywords, thus making it more likely that people will find your blog.

Twitter Parts of Your Posts

Instead of simply sending out a tweet that says: New post on my blog “Six Ways to Do Less and Achieve More”, twitter two or three interesting ideas from your post and add: “want to know more, come read my new post”.  This technique utilizes a common marketing ploy: pique people’s curiosity by giving them some information and then leaving them wanting more.

5. Create Checklists and Standard Operating Procedures

Create checklists or standard operating procedures (SOP) for any repetitive actions that you perform on a regular basis. For an example of a checklist, read my post, Blogger’s Checklist. Outside the world of blogging, you should write down the steps you follow to complete each task you perform on a regular basis and find a way to streamline and simplify the process. For example, you can implement a basic cleaning schedule, as well as an easy-to-follow cooking schedule.

6. Outsource Anything You Don’t Enjoy Doing or Are Not Good At

When it comes to blogging, you can consider outsourcing tasks you’re not good at–such as customizing your blog or creating a logo–, tasks you don’t enjoy, and noncreative, repetitive tasks. You can hire a virtual assistant to do research for you, answer e-mails, edit your posts, and so on.

This same concept can easily be applied to anything else: you could hire a cleaning company to come in twice a month and clean your house; pay a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn; do your grocery shopping online and have the supermarket deliver your food items; hire a caterer to prepare the food for the party you’re hosting instead of cooking it yourself; hire a handyman to put up the bookshelves; and so on. Outsourcing frees up your time so that  you can accomplish higher priority tasks and/or tasks you enjoy.

Conclusion

Western culture teaches us that in order to succeed we must exert an enormous amount of effort and be constantly busy, always rushing, and in a never-ending state of “doing”.  However, the most successful people do not necessarily work harder than everyone else, they work smarter and are often more at ease than others around them.  By incorporating the six lessons above to all areas or your life you’ll be moving toward the state of being where you do less and achieve more.

photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg

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Tagged as: do less and achieve more, Productivity