Often we’re told that we need to make massive changes in our life or business to see better results. Case in point; Warren Buffet regularly attributes his success to the vast amount of reading he does in a day. However, as much as we’d like to earn Buffet-level dollar, we don’t really have the time to read for eight hours a day.

Thankfully, there are a number of small changes that we can make to our working day to see positive change. This month we’re focussing on how you can be one per cent better each day, so here are a list of five micro-changes we can make that will give us massive results.

Micro-change #01: Spend 5 minutes planning your day

There are a number of effective time management tools out there and we suggest researching a few of them in your leisure time. However, none of the tools will be effective if you don’t know what you’ll be doing that day.

Spend the first five minutes of your working day writing down all the tasks that you need to complete that day. Once you can no longer think of any more tasks that you’d like to complete, start going down your list. You may want to get a bit more advanced and sort the list in terms of priority, but let’s keep it simple for now.

By writing down all the things that you need to do at the beginning of the day, you free-up mental space to focus on the task that you’re currently doing. Similarly, you’ll procrastinate less because you won’t get distracted thinking about what task you need to do next once the current task is complete.

Micro-change #02: Work 30 minutes later/earlier than everyone else

It’s incredible what you can achieve in 30 minutes. To most of us, 30 minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time and during the day it isn’t. There are simply too many distractions to operate at 100 per cent efficiency.

However, 30 minutes of pure focused attention is a huge amount of time in which you can get a lot of work completed or work on something important to you. By staying 30 minutes after everyone else leaves or by coming in 30 minutes earlier, you’ll start to see incredible changes in the amount of progress you’ll make.

Micro-Change #03: Change the snacks

Food, and more specifically nutrition, is one of the overlooked factors of productivity. We don’t have enough space to go into the research in this article, but here are the takeaways:

• Replace the biscuits and chocolate with healthier alternatives and stay energised and alert
• Eat small light meals
• Focus on snacking on whole grains
• Drink more water and less soft-drinks/tea/coffee

Micro Change #04: Make one extra sales call per day/ Do one extra action

For those of you that haven’t, I’d highly recommend reading the Slight Edge by Jeff Olsen or the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. In those books, they talk about how our actions compound over time to have a massive impact on our lives.

For example, eating a single chocolate bar doesn’t seem like it’d affect you much. However, if you eat a chocolate bar that has 200 calories in it every day, over the year that’s 73,000 calories or the RDA of five weeks worth of food!

In the same way, making an extra sales call per day adds up over the year. Assuming you work five days a week, an extra sales call per day totals at 253. Think about how much more commission that is!

Small changes that you turn into habits compound to give you a huge return on your investment. Life changing decisions are never as big as we think.

How to Explode Your Productivity

How productive you want to rely's on your habits and if you're willing to change the way you work. What I wanted to give you in this article are four techniques that have worked for me and my team. You don't need to massively change your life to get massive results, all you have to do is:

1. Plan your day so that you focus on the tasks you need to do
2. Find 30 minutes when you're not going to get distracted by anything or anyone
3. Eat healthy snacks that regulate and maintain consistent energy levels
4. Take one extra action and see how the results stack up

It's these micro-changes that make the big differences. In our workshops, we teach recruiters how they can massively increase the number of potential candidates they find, interview, and hire. If you're looking to enable your recruiters or HR team to be the best in your industry, send me a message to see how we can work together.

What Micro-changes have I missed? Let me know in the comments!