My 7 New Favourite Productivity Hacks for My Personal Brand Goals
To power your personal brand to a new level, try these productivity tips and tricks.
I was once discussing a course I was interested in with a former boss. I was in my early 20s and remember him commenting that if there was anything I wanted to do, I should consider doing it as early in life as I could because life only gets busier and harder as you get older and your responsibilities grow. Years later, it’s still a consideration in almost all my personal goal planning.
As I plan for all things 2025, it got me thinking about my approach to productivity and my personal brand goals for the year ahead.
To get this out of the way first, hyper-productivity and hustle culture obviously have toxic elements. There is value in slow productivity. But in reality, this is often something toted by major personal brands using a luxury that comes usually only after years of toiling in hyper-productivity first. I personally believe everything has a season.
Right now, it feels like soaring prices at the grocery store is making it harder for people to put food on the table. It’s partially why so many people have side hustles. But, it’s not all doom and gloom that motivates people's productivity. There has also never been more opportunity available in the world for your personal brand’s success than there is today - and that’s exciting!
For me, personally, I want to do more - to have the most productive year ever for my personal brand. If that’s you, too, then here are some of my new favourite productivity habits for some inspiration so we can power our personal brands through 2025 together. Most of these are micro habits - tiny techniques with big impact.
1. Be a Chain Smoker
To give you a behind-the-scenes peak at my personal brand blog, YouTube channel and podcast, like many who create content, I’ve well and truly moved on from this week’s topics by the time it goes live. I usually have more personal branding videos ready to roll out and blog written weeks, even months, in advance. I’m deep in my next personal branding projects, while my other ones are just going live. It’s what makes pressing publish for my personal brand a humbling non-event.
In his book Show Your Work, Austin Kleon describes the value of being a chain smoker. Stick with me. It’s his mindset to never lose momentum between projects. Don’t stall waiting for feedback and worrying about what’s next. Instead, use the end of a project to light up another. Personal branding can often come down to resilience, so chain smoke your way to your next personal brand milestone.
Jerry Seinfeld is one of the most successful comedians and personal brands of all time. When a young comedian once asked him for tips, he said that the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.
Seinfeld suggested having a big wall calendar with the whole year on one page. He then said to get a big red marker, and for every day you write, to put an X over that day. After a few days, you’ll have a chain. The chain grows every day, and you’ll like seeing it. Your job is to not break the chain.
So, ask yourself, what is the most important action you can take for your personal brand success? Now, work at it every day and don’t break your chain.
2. Eat That Frog
While Mark Twain may have coined the popular concept, Brian Tracy’s book, Eat that Frog, helped make it everyone’s favourite productivity hack.
Twain first described that if you have to ‘eat a live frog’, then do it first thing in the morning because nothing you do after that will seem as bad. This mindset became the mantra to relentlessly prioritise the most difficult task first. Then, steadfastly resist any temptation to clear up small tasks for quick wins. Not only does it ensure the most important task is done first, but the motivation from the accomplishment powers you up with endorphins for the rest of your day. You develop a positive addiction to the sense of achievement!
Doing the hardest task first daily isn’t even the most pivotal part of your personal brand’s success. Picking the most important task is what Tracy says is the defining factor of your career:
“Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth: the ability to concentrate singlemindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life.”
3. Think on Paper
Concentrating singlemindedly on the most important action for your personal brand is often easier said than done. That’s where thinking on paper comes in.
‘Think on paper’ is another concept Tracy shares in Eat That Frog. I love the packaging and recallability of his popular catch cry. Before you think that’s an obvious solution, think again. He highlights that research shows only 3% of adults are said to write down their goals. Yet, he believes it’s the number one reason why people get more work done faster. They are clear about their objectives - and they don’t deviate from them. Imagine - it’s that easy for your personal brand to join the top 3%.
Thinking on paper transcends the usual checklist most corporates arm themselves with. Tracy suggests using boxes, circles, lines and arrows and showing the relationship between each task. My checklists have now evolved into what resembles flow charts.
Writing down your personal brand goals, even for the day, creates what is described as ‘psychological ownership’. It increases the sense of responsibility you feel toward the task and, therefore, your motivation toward doing that thing.
4. Visualise your Day
Don’t just write down your personal brand goals. Visualise yourself, achieving exactly what you want from your day. Elite performers, from world-class athletes to sales sensations, understand the importance of mental rehearsal for the success of their personal brand.
Visualisation in Neuro-linguistics Programming (NLP) suggests the mind can’t distinguish the difference between vividly imagined and real experience. So, detailed visualisation for desired outcomes becomes a form of mental rehearsal. By consistently visualising, you rewire your subconscious to align your thoughts, emotions and behaviours with your goals. So, where do you see your personal brand?
Quantum physics agrees. In his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Dr Joe Dispenza highlights that everything in the universe is made up of sub-atomic particles. They are both everywhere and nowhere until they are observed. Therefore, everything in our physical reality exists as pure potential. Mind and matter are entirely entangled:
“That quantum field contains a reality in which you are healthy, wealthy, and happy, and possess all of the qualities and capabilities of the idealised self that you hold in your thoughts.”
From a quantum perspective, you have to match the potential reality that exists only as an electromagnetic potential. This broadcast will pull you toward the reality you want, or it will find you. I don’t just visualise my dream life for my personal brand; I reverse engineer that into a visualisation for the day and specifically what I need today to get there.
5. Have Minutes of Power
From school to the times we set work meetings, we’ve been conditioned to think of time in round, clean numbers or numbers that are easily divisible - 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, etc. In productivity sprints, we think in hours of power. Meanwhile, we waste precious minutes procrastinating until the clock strikes convenient temporal landmarks. As a result, we waste our days away, minutes at a time.
I’m a big fan of time blocking for productivity, but what happens when you’re ahead of schedule? What do you do with the gift of time? I’ve started to think in ‘minutes of power’ now, too. What is everything I can achieve within the next five minutes? Usually, I’m amazed at the number of small things that can be included. As I’ve shared in my previous blogs on productivity, Parkison’s Law suggests work expands to the amount of time you have allocated for it.
We often marvel at how the successful have the same 24 hours a day. How does Elon Musk, for example, own six companies in six industries and still have time to be the biggest personal brand on X? Perhaps, while we scroll Instagram, the winners are making the most of their minutes in other ways.
6. End With the Start in Mind
By now, most of us have heard the call in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to start with the end in mind. It’s one of my favourite concepts to consider the long-term end game of your personal brand and how you want to be remembered. But I recently heard someone say to end with the start in mind. It’s a tiny micro habit for more day-to-day momentum in your motivation.
Now, before I break for lunch, I pull up the next documents I need for my post-lunch time blocks. At the end of the day, I’ll do the same. I clear up my files and desktop at the end of the day, too.
The idea of ending with the start in mind is more than just the usual checklist for tomorrow that most people advocate for. It’s setting the table for the first thing on the checklist (which will of course be you eating that frog), so you’re ready to dive into the most important tasks for your personal brand success.
7. Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
Perhaps, you’re reading this one and wondering why it’s made the list. If you’re all into keyboard shortcuts, keep doing what you’re doing. For me personally, I’ve always considered myself pretty efficient around a keyboard. And yes, I did all the usual copy and paste, plus a few more. But, earlier this year, I realised how much productivity I was missing by not learning keyboard shortcuts.
I was watching a world-class designer on YouTube explain to his employees the importance of learning keyboard shortcuts. He said it would give you an enhanced ability to move closer to the speed of your thought. He described it with such passion I knew there was something I must be missing. I started to pay attention to what I was doing most on my computer. I learned the shortcuts instead. I learned shortcuts for things I didn’t even know there would be shortcuts for.
The seconds I spent learning keyboard shortcuts have saved me hours, even days. For example, my video editing took not minutes but several hours off my editing time. Hours I’ve quickly allocated to other goals.
Don’t underestimate the power of shortcuts or micro habits on the long game of your personal brand productivity goals.
For more productivity tips, check out my previous blog on 9 Life-changing Productivity Time Management Habits.
I wish you all the best for your most productive year yet.
