How To Achieve More in 3 Months Than Most People Do In A Year

Working 9-5 and trying to start a business on the side has been really hard.

I’ve been struggling to make meaningful progress towards my goals.

It’s tough trying to build a well rounded life while working 9-5 and starting a business.

There’s so many habits that I felt I “should be doing”:

1. Living a healthy lifestyle

2. Continuously reading and learning

3. Going out and having an abundant social life

I realized that by trying to accomplish everything I’ve essentially made minimal progress in all those areas.

That’s the hard part about focus no one tells you about.

People associate focus with our ability to concentrate on a single task, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s also the ability to allow certain areas of your life to suffer so that you can allocate more attention and energy to the most important area of your life right now.

That’s been a struggle for me as someone who wants to have every area optimized to the max.

Maybe this is something that’s been ingrained in me since school where we’re all expected to get an A in every single subject. As children we derived our status by trying to be good at everything.

But the real world doesn’t work that way. We must accept that we all have strengths and weaknesses. That we have limited time to make meaningful progress towards our goals.

Coming to terms with this allowed me to be okay with letting certain areas of my life be less optimal for the sake of having more time to focus on my business.

I realized that the things that I thought were “productive” was actually holding me back from achieving the goals that I want.

My goal is to make more progress in my business in the next 3 months than I did in all of 2024 and this is my plan.

Time Blocking

The most important habit I need to be consistent with is having all my tasks in my calendar every single day.

The goal here isn’t to pack every single minute with work. It’s about designing a day that allows me to get a lot of work done while also scheduling time to enjoy myself guilt free.

In atomic habits James Clear says that using an implementation intention increases the likelihood of you following through with a habit.

An implementation intention helps you follow through on your goals with an if then plan.

For example: “If it’s 7am I will workout at the gym.”

Timeblocking your days increases the likelihood that you follow through on what you said you were going to do.

If you don’t have a plan for your day, you’re going to end up second guessing what you should be working on and will likely default to some sort of distraction.

Ruthless Elimination

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb talks about the concept of Via Negativa. Which means to understand God by knowing what God is not.

Via negativa is about improving outcomes through subtraction rather than addition.

For example, you’ll likely achieve better health outcomes by removing processed sugar and alcohol from your diet vs. trying to eat more vegetables.

The same applies for productivity. You’ll get more done by removing distractions rather than trying to find the perfect productivity system.

The biggest distraction for me is my phone. If I have my phone within arms reach, I find myself getting sucked into watching random YouTube videos and doomscrolling social media.

By leaving my phone in the living room, especially when working, I can likely save hours in my day.

Outside of the obvious distractions, we all deal with hidden distractions that we aren’t conscious about. Activities that drain our time and energy without us even realizing it.

For me it’s cooking. Trying to stick to a perfect diet and save money with groceries have been a big time commitment for me. It’s also been a big energy drain for me because I hate cooking and cleaning every day.

I realized that my office offers meals that costs about the same as buying groceries and is only 10-20% less healthy than what I make at home. This is a tradeoff that will save me more time but will also free up mental energy that can be used towards my work.

Information Diet

As part of my ruthless elimination protocol, I will be doing an information diet.

I think we could all benefit from an information diet.

Our minds are constantly bombarded by people trying to steal our attention and energy away from us.

For me that’s significantly reducing podcasts and non fiction books.

Most people see it as productive and so did I. But my thirst for knowledge has done more harm than good.

I can’t build a business if I spend more time consuming than creating. I still plan on reading fiction and biographies when I need a break/escape.

For non fiction books I found that using Chat GPT deep research for summaries allows me learn 80% of the information in 20% of the time.

This allows me to still scratch my curiosity itch while also freeing up time that I can allocate to writing and building my personal brand.

I want to focus on learning specific and actionable advice that I can apply right instead of learning things that I think would be useful in the future.

Get out the house

As someone who works remotely, I spent a lot of time at my desk which is literally right beside my bed.

I want to create two different environments. One for working and one for disconnecting and relaxing.

Thankfully my work has an office that’s a 20 minute walk away from me. I’m going to start going in every day. This allows me to be more productive and get my steps in.

I think I could also benefit from going to a coffee shop after work to work on my writing before coming home.

I still need to figure that part out. Essentially I want to spend more time in the real world vs. staying cooped up in my apartment all day long.

Well that’s my plan. I hope you all found this helpful.

I can share an update in 3 months to share what worked and what didn’t.

Would love to hear from you, what are the hidden distractions in your life that you haven’t been fully aware about?

I’ll see you all next week.

Cheers,

Ashvin

P.S

If you want to talk 1:1 for personalized advice on how you can start implementing these changes, I’m offering FREE coaching for a limited time. You can click the link here to book a call with me.