In a previous post I talked briefly about the fact that I have boosted my income by nearly two times in a span of two years. So now I am going to dive into that a little bit deeper and kind of speak on the process that I went through and what it actually took in effort.

Two years ago, I started a new job as an hourly production worker at a bottled water company in Oklahoma. My starting pay was $12.00 an hour which equates to a measly $24,960 annually. Obviously, that is not much money even in the great state of Oklahoma where the cost of living is actually one of the best in the nation in my opinion.

Fast forward two years and I am now making $21.00 an hour which equates to $43,680 annually. I believe most people would agree that they would like to see some type of increase in their pay like this. Now I will say that this is still nowhere close to where I want to be, but if you didn’t read any other posts to understand my background then I guess I should put things in context.

First off, two years ago I was homeless and living in a shelter going through a recovery program. I dropped out of High School, but got my GED and also attended college for a short time, but whenever I went to jail and caught a felony, I never went back to finish getting my Associates degree. The most money I had ever made from a job was in the $17/hr. range, so even from that point I am up $4.00 over my best hourly wage ever.

I have worked in many industries, from retail to, real estate, to construction, to mechanic work on big industrial radiators, I mean you name it, I probably tried it. My goal has always been to own my own business and that’s what I was going to school for basically. I was going for a Business Management degree with a general discipline but haven’t yet completed that task.

Now that we have laid a foundation for what I kind of came through to get here. Let’s take a look at the real process and the type of mindset I use to achieve these goals in every industry I have worked in. Well actually let’s state the goal again, which is to level up and become the boss.

To start, whether you want to be the boss or not you have to have that type of motivation to do what I do. If you don’t want to be the boss then this probably isn’t really for you, but I guess if you are at least motivated to make more money than go ahead and stick around, I got something for you to. Like I said to start you have to want to be the best or the boss. Of course, we have all had some bosses that have sucked big ones, but then we have also seen or known those people that should be the boss and they make great money, but they don’t want the headache of being the actual boss even though everyone goes to them and wants their perspective on things.

To use a sports metaphor, your goal should be to become the star player on the team, whether the quarterback in football or the point guard in basketball. The goal is to become the best at whatever endeavor you are a part of. Even if you are just flipping burgers at McDonald’s if you do it to the best of your ability then you can get paid.

Process #1 is you must think of things in order of importance and act quickly. So, a scenario in order of importance would be, you have one hour to do five things, maybe you can maybe you can’t, but your first step has to be to prioritize your tasks. This may seem obvious to some people, but it’s not for all and to help drive this home look at it like this. Look at the amount of time each task might take, but also look at the things that you know are going to be things your boss feels like are a minimum.

For instance, you know that you have to move load 10 pallets in a truck that needs to leave in a hour, but you also have to stage 20 pallets for a truck going out tomorrow, you also have to unload a truck. What do you do? Well, most people pick one task and start there and stick with it until it’s done then move to the next, but what if you can do these nearly at the same time and by yourself no less. Now it depends on the circumstances, but here is the basic idea. Obviously, we want to get the truck loaded and out of the way, but let’s say the pallets we need to unload are close to the area of the pallets we need to load onto the other truck. We start taking a pallet off of truck A and drop it in the area near the pallet that we need to take to truck B and when we drop the pallet in truck B we then go back to truck A grab another pallet and continue the process.

This is the best, most efficient and productive way that we can accomplish this set of tasks. After ten trips, truck B should be loaded, and half of truck A should be emptied. At this point, we switch truck B out for the staging of the pallets for tomorrow, by doing the same basic thing we did with truck A and B. If the stuff you need to stage is near the stuff you are unloading, then you use the same process as above. Another instance of this, would be described by the following situation where I had to turn off two printers that have a two-to-three-minute shutdown process. Start by going to printer A and pressing the stop button so it starts its shutdown and instead of waiting the two minutes to go to the next one, go straight to printer B and start its shutdown process then go back to Printer A to finish, and printer B will basically be ready by the time you get back to it.

The recap for that section is, do not waste time that you could be using more efficiently and productively. By working in a more efficient manner you usually don’t really have to worry about if you are going to get to all of your tasks, but you really have to look at your work and come up with a basic game plan in your head or write it out if you need to, but really take a look at what things are critical to the success of your overall objective and tackle those tasks first. For me, most of this is just habitual because I have had a lot of different jobs that had actual time limits for tasks, and it was either sink or swim. Like I have worked in a 1-hour photo lab when I was younger, and I worked on an assembly line where we had to build parts and then install them in a 20-minute window before the line moved again and you had to start working on the next one because they weren’t stopping for you if you weren’t done or if you messed up.

Doing jobs like that really prepare you mentally to perform at your best under pressure and with very little room for error.

The other part of that was act quickly, which means when a boss especially a big one says to you, we really need to take care of this situation (for example fix this sign, but maybe you need a ladder and maybe it’s not even your job) even if that boss walks off, unless the task you are doing is absolutely critical and needs your full attention, drop what you are doing go get a ladder and fix the situation (Apply that to basically any scenario where your boss suggests that something needs to be done.) When your boss asks you to do something jump on it quickly and attack it with a willingness and an eagerness to meet the challenge as quickly as possible, this goes a long way in getting those raises and promotions quickly.

I am going to break this into parts so that it is a little bit easier to digest and to give you a break to reflect on what we have covered so far. Look for part 2 for more tips and tricks to get ahead in the workplace the right way and level up like a boss.

As always, bear fruit, be blessed, and abundant.