How I Get More Done In 3 Hours Than I Used To In An Entire Day

If hard work were all it took to succeed, donkeys would rule the world.

Society tends to be attracted to people with relentless work ethics.

I don’t know what it is, but it just seems to be impossible to not gain some kind of respect for successful individuals who grind long hours for days on end to achieve incredible things.

Working hard is a favourable characteristic.

Because of this, growing up I always prided myself on my work ethic.

I loved the satisfaction that came with working long hours and having others see the hard work I was putting in.

I always prided myself on being “the guy who worked the hardest” in my friend group.

I prided myself on being the guy with the esoteric contrarian mindset on “the system”. Mocking my friends who were content with seeking a traditional 9-5, working for somebody else, building their dream.

I was the one who always said I wanted to start my own business.

The one who would binge YouTube videos on different kinds of side hustles.

The one scrolling “Money Twitter” for hours getting so hyped up by the ambitious role models I’d find, and the future I’d create similar to theirs.

I’d listen to all the podcasts from all the prominent figures in finance, investing and startups.

I had adopted that persona.

Yet still, one day I recall stepping back and looking at myself. There I was at 26 years old, with nothing to show for myself.

Where was this business I’d so badly said I wanted to start?

My current reality was stuck in a corporate job where it didn’t matter how hard I worked, I’d always be getting paid the same.

I was trading my time for money on a 1:1 scale.

There was a quote from Naval Ravikant that seriously made me question myself when I read it.

“If you’re so f*ing intelligent, why aren’t you rich?” - Naval

I couldn’t believe it.

All the years I’d been the guy preaching about hard work, grinding, and starting your own business instead of working for someone else – yet here I was, no better off than everyone I’d been warning and urging to change for years prior.

Where was I going wrong?

In frustration, I sat down and looked at my situation, trying to find where I’d failed which had led me to not getting to where I wanted.

I looked at my evenings, the hours after work when I’d get home.

I analysed my morning routine before work.

I was already pouring time and effort into working on projects and acquiring knowledge outside of work.

What more could I do?

When I actually audited my daily routines, it became clear how much time was actually slipping through the cracks without me noticing.

With the right structure, I could reclaim this time, and use it more wisely by putting it toward more personal development.

So I did.

I created time in my evenings where I could work for consecutive hours on side projects and learning new skills.

I carved out as much time in my mornings before work as I could.

I even dedicated time on Saturdays toward the pursuit of my dreams.

More Means Less:

After weeks of pushing myself harder than I ever had before, I stepped back to take a look at the progress I’d made.

To my disbelief, I realised that despite working harder than ever, I was actually making less progress overall than I had been before.

The more time I gave myself to sit at a desk and work, the less productive I found myself becoming.

I started to dread the long grind sessions in my evenings.

I’d plan to get a ton done on Saturday mornings, but when the time came, all I could think about was being anywhere else.

The more time I poured in, the less I was getting out.

How could I ever escape my 9–5, chase what I actually cared about, and build something meaningful if I couldn’t even make progress after allocating so much time toward it?

The Time Paradox:

I had to learn it the hard way, but I finally saw it.

Working longer doesn’t automatically mean achieving more.

“Time spent has nothing to do with job done.” - Naval

But my question still remained – if pouring in more time wasn’t getting me closer, then what would?

Surely I wasn’t the only one facing this problem.

I thought of all the successful people I looked up to in my life.

What were they doing?

Perhaps studying the routines of those who had already figured it out might point me in the right direction.

Here are the common patterns I uncovered when I started paying attention to what these individuals were doing:

Hunt Like a Lion:

One recurring theme kept showing up across a lot of the role models I studied.

They all carved out a single main block of time to knock out their most important work.

It amazed me.

These guys weren’t working relentless 10-12 hour days like I’d expected.

Many of them credited their progress to a daily morning window of 4-6 hours dedicated to deep, undistracted work.

“The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is to sprint as hard as they can while they feel inspired to work, and then rest. They take long breaks.

It’s more like a lion hunting and less like a marathoner running. You sprint and then you rest. You reassess and then you try again. You end up building a marathon of sprints.

Don’t work like a cow grazing on the field all day.” - Naval Ravikant

This concept of working in shorter, more intentional sprints changed the game for me.

It made me realise exactly where I’d been going wrong by thinking that allocating more time toward work was the solution.

First of all, was the beauty of this idea that by compressing the time you were allowed to work, it created this sense of urgency that I needed to complete the task I set out to achieve before my limited time ran out.

There was also an incredibly beneficial side effect of limiting the amount of time worked, which was the intentional downtime away from work that came from it.

They treated recovery with the same level of purpose as their work, knowing it directly fueled their next deep work block.

The Toolbelt of the 2020s:

Working in short bursts rather than long marathon stretches of work wasn’t the only characteristic I saw in those that were successful.

I noticed that every one of them was taking advantage of something powerful I’d completely overlooked until I saw a pattern.

They were all heavily reliant on using modern-day leverage to support their daily operations.

What do I mean by that?

There is a set of opportunities and tools that have only been accessible to the average person in the last 10 or so years.

These are all incredibly new concepts for humans to discover and start taking advantage of – yet every person who does get the hang of them is able to benefit from the exponential value they provide.

Let me break down the 3 main ones I identified.

Content & Code

Think of what reality was like 100 years ago.

Anyone who wanted to make a name for themselves basically had

- Word of mouth

- Local newspapers

- At best a television, but to make it on TV you’d need to be in the absolute top 1%

Likewise, if you wanted to outsource your work, your only option was to hire another person. That’s an incredibly high barrier to entry.

In today’s world, we have tools at our disposal that allow us to achieve exponentially more than this with a far lower barrier to begin.

Social media gives us the power to share our ideas at scale – from a small town’s worth of people to an entire nation.

Software allows us to create products and services in such a way that we can have them hosted on the internet running 24/7.

Websites and apps can run and still sell products to customers while we sleep.

YouTube videos and blog articles can remain ready for someone to search and view at any time, even months or years into the future.

These may seem like basic everyday amenities that we all know and are well used to – but I encourage you if you’re not currently consistently creating any form of content or code to look at them from a new perspective.

Because we use these every day, we forget how valuable they actually are as a tool.

If you aren’t currently creating any form of content or code, you’re ignoring the two single most powerful tools for multiplying reach and cutting down manual work.

Learn how to build things with code. YouTube and Cursor are all you need to create anything you want.

Learn how to create consistent content on select social platforms so that you can share what you’ve built with the world.

Master them both, and you’re unstoppable.

Exchanging Capital for Value

One of the biggest misconceptions we’ve been conditioned to believe is that keeping expenses low and saving money is always the smart move, rather than using that money to invest in tools, services, or experiences that meaningfully improve your life.

I genuinely think that this mindset is the single thing that keeps the majority of people from achieving their potential.

You need to realise that exchanging capital for value is how you win the game the quickest.

Every problem you’ve ever encountered has a solution for it in the form of an online tool, a coach, a course, or a talented human on the other side of the world who can help you solve it.

You’re going to be able to achieve your aspirations faster if you’re willing to trade money to remove the roadblocks standing in your way.

Think about it.

There are solutions for every aspect of your life:

Physical - Buying a custom workout plan, hiring a personal trainer, investing in online courses from trusted people

Financial - Business coaches for any field you can think of, advertising agencies creating ads personally for you, ghostwriters creating social media content, video editors, software developers building your ideas

Psychological - Buying books from some of the greatest minds on the planet giving you their advice after decades worth of study, courses and online resources from world-class thinkers, 1 on 1 calls with professionals from anywhere in the world

Relationships, spirituality, fulfilment with life – the list goes on.

For any area of your life you can put a name to, you can be assured that there is already some form of product or service that exists which can solve problems in that given area.

All it takes is an exchange of money in order to obtain the solutions to those problems.

That’s the beauty of mankind.

We see problems, we create ways of solving them for others and offer our services in exchange for money in order to survive for ourselves.

It’s a foolproof ecosystem that thrives off of itself.

All you need to do is get your mind to accept that spending money on solutions gets you further than holding onto it.

The moment you stop clinging to money out of scarcity and start viewing it as a tool to trade for value, the quicker you’ll start seeing real progress.

Exploiting Delegation & Automation

It isn’t just tools, education and coaches that we have unrestricted access to in this modern age.

We now have the ability to delegate and automate tasks exponentially more than any generation in human history.

Almost every successful individual I have come across is leveraging this power to their advantage.

This is yet another mindset that is incredibly new for humans to adopt.

Naturally, humans are creatures optimised for survival. Our first priority is always food, shelter, relationships – all the primary requirements for our long-term survival.

It’s natural for us to want to store up our resources (including money)

It’s natural for us to be untrusting to allow strangers into our lives (outsourcing tasks to somebody else)

This being a counterintuitive perspective for us to grasp shouldn’t be a surprise.

Yet, we live in modern times. We need to make modern adaptations to go alongside this.

Never before have we had the ability to go on sites like Fiverr or UpWork – able to search for any task we could possibly think of automating or outsourcing – and have the ability to exchange money for them to do it for us.

Do you understand how valuable that is?

That means that so long as we have the financial means to do so, we can free our lives of any repetitive or monotonous tasks. Freeing ourselves up to allocate our time toward more lever-moving activities.

AI tools allow us to automate workflows and strenuous tasks on our computers.

We are at a stage in human evolution now where you should never be wasting a day of your life on brainless admin again.

If you are, the problem is no longer in the difficulty of the work – it’s in our inability to capitalise on the modern tools we have at our disposal.

We are in a new paradigm.

The concept of doing everything yourself like in the good old days is a thing of the past.

A human will have more success now by adopting the mentality that they’re simply an orchestrator – a connector of dots – than they are a workhorse designed to grind a single task.

We live in a time of copious abundance.

All it takes is exchanging our money intentionally. Leveraging the plethora of services at our disposal to create meaningful results and bring real value into your life.

Learn to become a conductor, not a factory worker.

Achieve Twice As Much In Half The Time

The ideas I’ve mentioned above are pivotal in leveraging modern day technology to our advantage in order to optimise what we achieve in the time we work.

However, there are a few timeless principles you can start weaving into your daily routine right now that’ll help you achieve more in a shorter period of time.

The following are a series of habits and mindsets I picked up in the process of studying successful individuals:

The Power of Planning in Advance

Never underestimate the power that comes from sitting down and explicitly planning exactly what you intend to do in your next work block.

Planning what you’re going to do tomorrow the night before is a serious productivity hack.

The friction of beginning work in the morning and also having the overhead of planning what exactly you’re going to do within that work block is a larger hindrance than people give credit for.

There’s also something incredibly valuable about knowing what you’re going to start on the next day, and being able to prime your mind in advance for the moment you sit down.

Always optimise by planning your days, weeks, and long-term roadmap in advance.

Capitalise On Your Einstein Window

Everybody has a time of day that they can lock in and perform at their best.

Find yours. Capitalise on it.

Find whether you work best in the early morning or in the late hour of the night.

Religiously protect that time. Rid yourself of all distractions. Do anything in your power to make sure you’re in the best shape possible to get as much done in that window as you can.

The Power Of The Deadline

There’s no form of motivation quite like an immovable deadline.

This works well in college assignments or work environments with go-live dates for large projects, but for personal projects or your own business, it becomes more difficult.

This doesn’t mean you can’t form artificial deadlines for yourself, though.

As Parkinson’s law states – the time taken to achieve a task expands to the time given for its completion.

Give yourself clear roadmaps, due dates, and timelines for anything you’re working on.

You’ll notice procrastination start to fade, and realise that – even when it feels impossible – there’s always a way to get it done on time.

Accountability / Skin In The Game

Find yourself another like-minded ambitious human who is also on the pursuit of achieving something great.

Form an agreement with them that if they ever find you making excuses or operating at a level that isn’t your best – they’ll call you out for it. Tell them you’ll keep them in check as well.

Telling yourself you’ll do something is one thing. Having someone else know your plans and hold you to them is a whole different game.

Find a way to put skin in the game, so that if you don’t follow through with what you said you were going to do, there are tangible consequences.

Intentional Rest

The opposite end of the spectrum to each of the previous points above – yet equally (if not more) important.

Earlier we mentioned the concept of performing shorter, intentional bursts of work rather than long constant grind sessions.

When you look at the bigger picture, downtime holds just as much value as doing the work itself.

No matter how busy your week gets, be intentional about investing time into doing something that allows you to wind down or recharge your batteries.

What may seem like a waste of time in the short term, will end up being of net benefit to your overall health in the long run.

Final Revelations

Breaking down the common habits of successful creators and founders completely shattered the way I used to think about working efficiently.

The fact that so many top performers relied on short, intense deep work sessions over long hours genuinely changed the way I thought about approaching work.

Making the mental shift to see money as a tool that can be exchanged for solving problems and obtaining value back in other ways was also a vital concept in helping me become more efficient with how I use my time.

Shifting my mindset to view money as a tool to solve problems and create value elsewhere has also been a pivotal catalyst in optimising the time it takes me to achieve goals.

From a holistic perspective, it all comes back to changing your perspective of the world to operate out of abundance, rather than scarcity.

The landscape of humankind and what we have the potential to achieve is changing at such a rapid rate.

We need to come to the realisation that our mindsets need to change at a rate that keeps up with this.

You are capable of so much more than you may have previously anticipated.

The tools that are at our disposal and are still getting created on a daily basis are blowing what was previously possible out of the water.

There are 16-year-old kids out there building apps and deploying them to the app store in a weekend.

All because they adapted their mentality to capitalise upon and leverage the modern tools we have to their advantage.

We live in a time where you no longer need to be specialised in any given field in order to achieve something great.

Become a conductor.

Simply just move the lego pieces (valuable modern-day tools) in such an arrangement that they solve a problem for somebody, and exchange the solution for money.

That’s all there is to it.

Good luck out there.

- Cole

If you’re interested in escaping from a traditional 9-5, leveraging AI to build a future of your own, and capitalising on the digital renaissance, subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

You can also follow me on twitter @cole_mccon