Do you ever find yourself feeling like a robot while at work? It’s hard not to when a large portion of your time is dedicated to manual and tedious tasks. In order to focus on the tasks that challenge and satisfy you, you need to incorporate some development work hacks into your arsenal.

Not too long ago I decided to track everything I did at work. I did this because I was exhausted, I felt like I was getting nothing done and I wasn’t satisfied. What I came to realize was that the majority of my time and energy was spent on things that did not benefit my top priorities, they were labor-intensive and had little to no return on investment.

After reading this post you’ll have 13 ways to make your life a thousand times easier. You’ll understand what red flags look like in an office setting and you’ll have guidance on how to handle them. The goal is to have a job that develops and fulfills you. Not one that makes you feel like a babysitter.

This post is all about the 13 life-changing development work hacks that you need to adopt in order to save time.

Development Work Hacks: Communication

1) Time block when you’ll respond to emails

This happens to everyone. You find yourself in a groove, getting things done, but then an email comes in and you respond. Two hours pass and all you’ve done is respond to emails.

It’s essential to answer your emails in a timely manner but the problem is it’s a black hole that’s difficult to escape. You lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish and instead spend time assisting others.

Blocking off time on your calendar to respond to emails will give you the best of both worlds. You’ll be able to assist and answer others while completing your projects.

2) Put on a do not disturb-status while working

Along with emails, most companies allow their employees to ping and message each other throughout the day. Again this can be quite disturbing to your workflow and now there’s a request you can’t avoid or deny because it’s been made in real-time.

Change your online status to “Busy” or “Do not disturb”. I had to do this recently because I was working on a few projects and I wasn’t able to work on any one of them fully due to the different collaborators that requested my immediate attention. Once you change your status you’re able to protect your time and improve the quality of the work you’re delivering.

3) Reduce the number of meetings you need to attend

People love to have meetings and they can be very enlightening when clear agendas and goals are set beforehand. However, every now and then you’re invited to one that does not follow those two standards. Avoid attending these meetings.

If you do not, you’ll find that people would like to set agendas and goals together, which is fine if you have time for it. Nonetheless, it’s inefficient to have a pre-meeting before the meeting. It only takes one person to set up the guidelines.

4) Pay full attention to the meetings you join

Once you decide to attend a meeting make sure to give it your full attention. Otherwise, you just wasted your time and everyone else’s time.

When you pay attention in meetings, you’re able to ask the right questions and solve problems together as a team. The worse is when an issue keeps getting revisited because people become aware of what was being discussed after the fact.

You need to come prepared with your game face. Ready to question and work through any issues together.

5) Share your takeaways with other attendees

During meetings, people typically take notes for themselves. That is great and highly recommended.

Another action that is highly recommended is to share your takeaways and calls to action. This allows the team to be on the same page and informs everyone of what their responsibility is. Also, it allows you to be corrected in case you misunderstood something.

It’s a huge timesaver and allows you to truly have productive and efficient meetings.

Development Work Hacks: Tasks

6) Spend the first half hour to an hour responding to emails and planning what tasks you’ll tackle

When first starting your day, you surely have a few emails that have come in and a few meetings scheduled for the day.

Go through your schedule for the day and time block or update it based on your goals. Doing this will prevent you from spending hours on one project, it allows you to complete the most urgent items, and scheduling little breaks now, before you start, gives you permission to recharge throughout the day.

It’s all about balance, we want to bring our best selves to our work.

7) Spend your mornings on the difficult tasks

It’s only natural for you to get tired as the day goes on. Usually, people have a coffee first thing in the morning to wake themselves up and by the end of the day, they’re crashing. Use this to your advantage.

Set up your most complex and difficult challenges for the beginning of the day. Confronting these problems first thing in the morning allows you to have the whole day to work through them and it gives you the opportunity to step away and come back to them more freely. Do not procrastinate on your tasks.

Also if you spend your afternoons on meetings, you won’t be distracted by the projects you need to work through and you’ll be able to provide an update on your work if needed.

8) Question tasks before you accept them

Once you become a helpful and valuable member of your team, random people will start coming to you with all sorts of requests. You’ve helped them once, so you’ll probably help them again or so they think.

It’s great to be in this position but we also want to be mindful of our time and how things operate. Before accepting requests, question why you’re receiving them in the first place. Are you even the best person to complete it?

This protects your time, your team, and the quality of the work that is being produced.

9) Track your work

We all need to keep track of the items we’re working through. Most likely you’ll be working on multiple projects at once.

Stay on top of all of your responsibilities and deadlines by tracking them. You can use excel or even a word document.

Doing this allows you to revisit the project and know exactly what your next steps and status are. Without it, you can lose a lot of time going through documents and emails to figure out if a project is closed or to define what’s missing.

10) Spend your last hour of work wrapping things up

It’s tempting to spend the last hour of your day getting one more thing done. If you adopt this habit you’ll find yourself working later than scheduled more times than not. It’s easy to underestimate how much time something will take.

The recommendation is to spend your last hour cleaning and organizing the items you completed that day and answering emails.

You don’t want to be rushing against the clock and you don’t want to leave for the day with unanswered emails in your inbox.

Development Work Hacks: Outside of Work

11) Be strategic with where you sit in the office

It’s important to socialize with your coworkers and build strong relationships. Still, you don’t want to find yourself completely distracted. Be strategic with where you sit.

The best thing to do is to sit close enough to your friendly coworkers so that you can visit them throughout the day but not next to them. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in a conversation that lasts the whole day.

Remember you want to protect your time and their time.

12) Make time to be social

With that being said, socializing and networking are incredibly important and beneficial for your career. Schedule time to have catchups and to go out for drinks with your coworkers.

It’s during these conversations that you learn about new opportunities and people that you should connect with. Working in an office environment is very political.

The goal is to be ambitious and hardworking along with being the most popular person in school. Once you’re able to balance those two items, the sky’s the limit for you.

13) Be flexible (The most underrated development work hack)

Give yourself grace. We aren’t always able to meet our deadlines without sacrificing our free time and we may find ourselves in crisis mode as urgent matters pop up. It happens. You may have to once and while forget all of these tips and that’s okay.

Just make sure to reward yourself when you find yourself in these kinds of situations, and make sure they’re the exception not the standard. Meaning – make sure this doesn’t become an everyday thing. Your bosses will appreciate your hard work but remember that this is only temporary.

This post was all about development work hacks that could save your life.

Do you feel so tired that you just want to give up on life? Absolutely nothing is exciting and it’s the complete worst. Well once you develop training and transform your mentality to always want to do more, you’ll become a super robot that won’t stop until you get enough.  This post is all about the activities you need to try in order to reprogram your mind. 

We’ve all been in a rut. I was in a rut for years. I blamed the world for my lack of opportunities. How dare you earth… not give me everything I want.

Well, eventually I got tired of hitting my head against a wall and decided to give up by giving in. I opened myself up to everything around me and now I try to hide from opportunities because I’m having a hard time keeping up.

This post will walk you through the griefing and evolutionary activities you need to adopt in order to become so obsessed with building your empire that nearly every moment of your day is planned. Trust me you’ll love it.

This post is all about develop training and how to get the mindset to always want to do more.

Develop Training

1) Fail

Here’s a huge secret. Once you fail. You don’t die. The world doesn’t crumble and somehow you still exist. It’s such a miracle.

We avoid failing like the plague, but it’s not bad. It’s not bad at all. When you fail you gain this amazing sense of humor. You may even try to fail on purpose just because you’re curious and realize that there are many ways to do things.

I was pursuing acting for years. I’ve failed at hundreds of auditions. Guess what… I am the best interviewee you will ever meet. I have no problem selling myself knowing that I might get rejected. If anything my mentality is more like, “I dare you to reject me”. And then if you do I think, “Ok let’s do it again”.

Failing gets you out of the habit of needing people’s approvals. It is so incredibly freeing. If you want to develop training you got to let yourself fail, like a million times.

2) Share with others what you’re naturally good at

We’re all good at something. Please don’t be hard on yourself. It’s true. We all have that one thing that we’re a complete natural at.

Just as important as it is to fail, we also need to give ourselves the opportunity to flourish. Get some of that sexy confidence we all need to survive in this world.

Also please note that most of the time we don’t like what we’re good at. Sometimes we avoid doing it. We avoid it like the plague. Stop avoiding plagues. They’re necessary to our evolution.

It’s important to work through what we’re good at not only to build confidence but because you can’t be selfish. People need your help. And eventually helping them will be worth it. Also, you might grow to like what you’re good at.

3) Videos in your free time

Trashy tv is so awesome to watch. You don’t need to think and you can numb your mind with meaningless content.

But you shouldn’t do it. You shouldn’t partake in this ritual. It only steals away your hours and offers you nothing in return. Think about how much tv or videos you watch online. Those are opportunities to better understand or learn about something. And it can be hard to always be focusing on something but what you watch impacts you.

People underestimate how much the content they absorb impacts them. You’re literally feeding yourself with ideas that contribute to your habits, skills, and level of happiness. For example, do you think someone who watches murder mysteries 24/7 isn’t a bit more cautious and possibly nervous than the average Joe?

If you watch things that both educate and entertain you then you’ll be bettering and enjoying yourself.

4) Talk about it

There’s a lot of encouragement for people to be silent as they work through things. I think there’s a study that states once people talk about something they’re planning to do then they’re less likely to do it because they feel like they already achieved it.

Well, I disagree with that sentiment. Ben Affleck had Matt Damon and most artists or inventors or great thinkers do not work in silos.

Why shouldn’t we talk about what we’re dedicating our lives to? Do we want to have any impact on others? Could we use support each other as we go through something new? Shouldn’t we be proud of what we care about?

Having an open dialogue with your friends about what’s on your mind allows you to better explore your own thought processes as you share information. It allows you to realize how many details are needed in order to flush out an idea or how you’re feeling.

If you’re not in a place where you feel like taking on something new, then talk about it with people who are working on something and see what inspires them.

5) Pick brains

I’ve been guilty in this regard. Every now and then you come across someone who is absolutely brilliant. You’d love to analyze their brain and know everything they know. But you’re also extremely tired and could care less about what they had to say.

Don’t be that person. Care about this brilliant mind and see if some of it rubs off. Ask questions and try to make sense of what they have to say. Allow yourself to go down the rabbit hole. Learn a little.

It’ll be painful at first but eventually, you’ll be walking around knowing all of these awesome facts that come quite handy during dinner parties. Also, you’ll eventually marvel at your own level of intellect and think, “Wow I am some specimen. Really, absolutely ridiculously brilliant”.

6) Capture your Growth

So up to this moment you’ve failed, you’ve excelled, you’re talking about it, asked questions, and watched super awesome things. Now track it, baby.

Get some sort of diary or journal and tell that book everything you think about in this world. It doesn’t matter how good you’re friends are, no one will be able to give you all the attention you need when you’re reflecting on your life. You will discover so much about yourself through these passages.

Also, it is amazing to read your old diaries and think OMG I’m still not over that. Let me do something about it.

7) Take a Class

Classes are way more entertaining to me than socializing. When you’re in a class, a knowledgeable human being is guiding you through a task or conversation while you’re trying or learning something new.

You get entertainment, education, and an activity all in one. The hardest part with classes is usually just showing up but once you do, you just have to go with the flow. Obviously, the flow slowly intensifies with time but so do your muscles.

Challenge yourself periodically with a class. It’s training you to become accustomed to wanting to improve yourself.

8) Read/Watch Bios

There are a lot of amazing people who have walked through this world. They all have some sort of biography sharing how they were able to “make it” and get through their lives.

There really are no secrets to succeeding. The problem is we become so fixated on results that we forget a process is what gets you there in the first place. Exposing yourself to other people’s stories acts as a positive reminder. You remember life is very hard for everyone. And that some people don’t care how hard things are going to be, they still want to do something about it.

Be that person that wants to do something about it. I mean you’re existing and you get to pick if your existence should mean anything. Like honestly you decide that, no one else.

9) Reward Yourself

We all need an incentive. We all need some sort of reason for working so hard. Sometimes we need a reward just for existing during difficult times in our lives. So reward yourself with something great. Something you’ve always wanted and something that means something special to you and your life.

Only you know what that treasure should look like and it doesn’t have to be something huge or out of this world. Sometimes giving yourself a silent morning to daydream may be all that you need.

10) Dream up what’s next for you

There are two extreme ways you could live your life. One is thinking that you’ll never have anything and you have to work like an animal till your dying day. Another is that you can have everything and there’s no need to try because it will magically come to you.

The third way is the balanced way. You can have everything you want but you have to work like an animal. It’s not delusional and it’s not depressing. It’s the perfect in-between.

Find this balance for yourself by creating a vision board and giving yourself the opportunity to think about what you want in life.

11) Where do you need to train?

Now it’s time to actually execute what this whole post was about. It’s time to select what you’d like to receive training in – in order to develop yourself.

Where and how can you start? This literally is the hardest part, because it’s the first official step you’re taking with some clear direction and level of enthusiasm. I hope. And unlike a class. You’re looking to train for the long haul. Until you get to your desired life.

This post was all about develop training and how to brainwash yourself into liking work.

We’ve all heard about business plans and how they’re integral to one’s success as a business owner, entrepreneur, or even an employee. However, they tend to quickly become larger-than-life complex documents that can be pretty overwhelming. So why not focus on creating a business development plan that is concentrated on tangible actions you can start today? Well, this post is going to walk you through what that looks like. 

One reason people do not like business and do not take the time to create a “business-like” plan of action is because of all the jargon and unknowns that come their way. Big words are thrown around and resources are incredibly abstract in nature.

Well, I’m someone who loves planning and breaking down big concepts while taking responsibility for the things that involve me. I mean joy really comes from having some accountability for the things that occur in your life and influencing it in the way you deem necessary.

This business development plan will give you permission to take the driver’s seat in your life by telling your internal GPS how to get to where you want to be.

This post is all about business development and how to put together a plan.

Business Development Plan

1) Business Development Research

Before you start creating a list of the items you’d like to accomplish you first need to do some research. And researching is not a one-stop shop. There are a few different avenues you need to explore before creating your path. 

First, you want to learn about the trade. You want to understand the business you’d like to get into. What do daily, weekly, and monthly tasks look like? Think about the overall goals that people within this field are striving for. What are the good parts and what are the bad parts? 

Ultimately how does this business operate and what does your role entail?

Next, you want to learn about your competitors. Who are the people that are doing amazing in this line of work? Who is up and coming? And who gets to decide how everyone is ranked?

Then, you want to enroll in some courses, or seminars, or go back to school. Having an understanding of how things are done is not the same as doing it. Before you take the leap in creating your own business, learn how to do things the right way in someone else’s space. In learning environments, you’ll be guided and mistakes won’t hurt as much.

Lastly, this is a plan so you need to have a direction. Learn about the opportunities that are available within the industry you’re researching and think about how they can be leveraged. You’re not working on those opportunities now. But it’s best to start operating in a way that aligns with an opportunity in the future.

2) Infrastructure

Most businesses are so quick to make a profit that they don’t stop to think about defining how they should operate in order to achieve sustainable success. They release an amazing product but never think about how they can scale and meet customer demand once the opportunity presents itself.

Whether your business is online or a brick-and-mortar establishment you need to think about building things brick by brick and that all starts with creating a strong infrastructure to support the business’s needs. 

First, you need to have a complete understanding of the operational costs. Every business has daily costs but they fluctuate based on where your company is in its life cycle.  At first, you need to decide how much money you need to invest and be specific on how they will assist you in building your business. Then you need to revisit those costs and continuously adjust your plans as the company grows.

Not a very sexy topic but operating legally is incredibly important. Think about what permissions you need to acquire and get those done immediately. This should be the very first action you take. 

Last, think about what makes up your business profile. The most obvious is your company’s name. Decide what it is, test it to see if it’ll work with your target audience, and then take the necessary steps to own it.

After you have a name you need a mission. What is the purpose of your business? How does it exist and operate? Think about the different categories of products and services and outline them for yourself.

3) Strategy

Strategy is not planning. It’s deciding what you want to accomplish and how you intend to accomplish it. It’s not nailing down specific tasks because ultimately tasks will adjust depending on the distance between you and your goals.

Think of strategy as your business objective. For example, I have a blog and obviously, I want it to do well. More specifically I’m working towards eventually having a media production company. That’s the ultimate goal.

And in order to get there, I need this blog to be profitable and have a lot of exposure but it’ll only get there if there’s a lot of traffic.

My strategy is to use Pinterest to get traffic to my page. And how I use Pinterest is consistently changing because I’m testing different things (styles, descriptions, images) to see what works best. This strategy is tied to the goal of receiving 10k views a month to start off. If I can do that then it’s all about scaling what I’ve done to get more people.

When you think of strategy think about your blueprint. You can do this by deciding what success looks like to you and then working your way backward to figure out the steps you need to take.

Also, feel free to take inspiration from the competitive landscape to see what works for others. You may not function exactly like them but you can adopt their practices or tasks for your business.

The most obvious example is influencers. A ton of them now have their own companies and businesses and it started with their use of social media platforms.

4) Process

All the brainstorming in the world wouldn’t help you if you do not take one step. Outside of setting up your company and outlining your goals and paths you need to work on it every day.

Now not every day is the same, there are different activities that need to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.

Think of fortune 500 companies that release an earnings report every quarter. You need to take the time outside of your daily schedule to measure how your business is doing financially, structurally, and strategy-wise or you’ll never be able to expand beyond your original plan. You also won’t be able to adjust to any new competitors or opportunities available.

Think of brick-and-mortar stores that do not have an online presence or that didn’t switch fast enough to e-commerce. There was a lot of financial loss there and some companies even closed down.

You want to have a process for check-ins. Checking in on how you’re doing financially, and structurally and how you’re s strategy is doing while working daily on tasks in order to reach “success”.

Think of the process as two plans. You’ll need one for now and one for later. Both will take place and both are incredibly important to the maintenance and growth of your business.

Also please note that the process means just showing up and following the plans you’ve set for yourself.

5) Execution Points

Okay great! So we have a process that will allow us to check in on our progress. So what do we do with the information we find?

We need to record and document it. This information needs to be organized in a way that allows you to see your inputs vs outputs and how it all aligns with your goals.

For example, most companies have a five-year plan and you should apply this information to a five-year blueprint. Well after year one, you need to see if what you’re producing and bringing in matches what you had outlined. If it doesn’t then you need to course correct.

That’s the beauty of metrics and measurements, it tells you if you’re actually achieving your goals and lets you know where you are not.

Define what this review process looks like and how often you’d like to do it. Think of this as auditing. Unlike setting up your process, your execution points are when you come to the table ready to make a decision. Where you decide if your strategy is working and if you’ll need to look for outside investors in order to keep your business afloat.

A business development plan is all about getting all the pieces of starting and running a business together and making sure they all play their parts. Without a plan, in place, people quickly lose control of their businesses and they lose funds in order to cover the mistakes that are being made. Having a business development plan allows you to operate efficiently and effectively.

This post was all about the 5 Methodical Ways to get your Business Development Plan on Point.