Perry Marshall: The Uber Productive Zone

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There are three kinds of work that you do:

1. $10/hour work – mailing letters; answering trivial emails; making coffee; filling your gas tank; cleaning your desk and making copies and running errands.

(Yuck. A BAD day is a day spent doing all that and nothing else.)

2. $100/hour work – talking to customers on the phone; answering important email; fixing stuff on your website; researching new products; and delegating.
3. $1000/hour work – strategic planning and prioritizing vital tasks; writing persuasive copy; split testing elements in your Google campaigns and website; refining your Unique Selling Proposition; automating your business; developing customer follow-up; nurturing important relationships; and actively sharpening your gifted skills.

Your first job is to do as little of #1 as humanly possible, finding any way possible to have others do it.

Your next job is to make sure you get at least a few hours of dedicated $1000/hour work finished every single week; that #2 does not cheat #3.

If you act like your time is worth $1000/hour, sooner or later reality will catch up. But you must be ruthless about it. This will offend other people but you must not let their immaturity or petty demands stand in your way.

Back to the Uber-Productive zone: Very, very little of what you do ON THE INTERNET is ever $1000/hour work. At best it’s probably $100/hour and a lot of it is NEGATIVE $10 per hour. You must not let the time vampires get the best of you.

Your most productive time probably starts with a pen and a yellow pad of paper – far away from your computer – where you plan your work before you work your plan.

Once you have habits, structure and technology in place that puts you in the $1000/hour zone at least one day a week, the pressure comes off and the Uber-Productive zone becomes a jet stream of doing your own special magic every day.

It’s not work anymore, it’s a joy.