Hi there.
I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video, I'm going to share with you how
to increase your productivity as an entrepreneur,
even though your weeks are probably getting crazy
and you've got a ton of stuff as you grow your team.
And be sure to stay to the end where
I share with you my perfect week strategy
to allow you to design the perfect week so that you can
start from a strong foundation.
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So recently, I had one of my clients post
in our private Facebook group about dealing with all the work
they had to do.
They have a company that's been growing like crazy.
They've just added a bunch of new team members,
and they just can't seem to find the time to make sure
that every day is productive.
And I've got to tell you, I can totally
relate what they were saying, because when
I was building my company Clarity,
my wife started a new agency.
We found out she was pregnant.
We ended up in a two-year period building two companies.
I raised venture capital.
We had two kids.
Imagine.
They're 11 months apart, Max and Noah.
They're Irish twins.
And we had to keep it all together.
And through that process of just reaching out to my friends
that are incredibly productive, very high output guys
that are efficient, I learned a bunch of different strategies
that I want to share with you guys today to allow
you to increase your productivity,
even if you don't have two kids in a one-year period,
but just want to get more out of your day.
Number 1, perfect week.
As I mentioned, I'm a big fan of designing things.
So the way I look at the perfect week
is understanding all the big rocks,
personal and professional that needs
to get done on a weekly basis.
If I want to get my workouts in, those go in.
If I want to make sure I have team meetings, those go in.
If I want to do one-on-ones with my executive leadership team,
those all have to be part of it.
If I need time for myself on the weekend
or if I need family time, put everything
into your perfect week.
And what I've discovered is when you design it,
there's actually a lot more white space available
that you don't think.
But what happens for the most part is bleed time.
That's the time between meetings where people schedule
a 30-minute meeting, and they let it bleed into 60 minutes.
Or they don't even think efficiently
about their transitions where they're
meeting with people outside of their office,
and they're spending 20, 30 minutes driving
in each direction.
It's like, look.
Do you really need to meet in person
for that specific meeting, or can you
move to a Zoom video call instead?
So designing your perfect week is the first thing
that needs to be present for you to really try to get
as much as you can out of it.
Number 2, block time.
This is something I am the biggest fan of,
which is if something's important to you,
it has to be put in your calendar.
So it's not even about designing kind of a rhythm for your week,
but it's making sure that those elements are
blocked into your calendar.
That your mornings, when you start
work, what work you're going to be doing is already predefined,
already figured out, blocked into your calendar
so that you can just go boom, boom, boom.
Transitions.
All the details, everything you're
going to need to have a conversation,
to review a piece of work, to produce some kind of output,
those are saved in the description of the calendar
entry.
When I go to the airport, I have all of my--
the travel information in the calendar entry for that flight.
You want to create these blocked times, this unit of output,
of productivity of awareness.
And use your calendar to offload that out of your mind
into the calendar, and block it out.
If it's on your calendar, it's not a priority for you.
And again, this includes the personal side of things
as well.
Number 3, theme days.
I believe that the way to get the most out of any week
is to batch your work.
So one idea that I'm going to highly encourage you to do
is consider doing things like money days and management days.
If you're starting off and you feel like you're overwhelmed
and you don't have a big team, well, maybe a money day for you
is everything around marketing and sales,
because that's what's going to really drive the revenue
pipeline.
And then a management day might be product meetings and team
meetings and vendor meetings.
So things that are more management in structure.
If you just took that simple theme--
and I'm not saying you can't even
make it more complicated-- where you went money, management,
money, management, money days, and then you put everything
in there and you batched them because
of the context switching that you don't have
to have happen when you're in that area of work,
it's going to allow you to be way more productive.
That way, if somebody asks you-- for example,
I batch my podcast requests.
When people email me to go on their podcasts,
usually every two months I'll do a podcast day.
And in that day, I think the most I've ever done
are 14 interviews.
But I batch them.
That way, it's me designing block timing
and theming a day for a specific outcome
to allow me to be more productive, because I'm
in that mindset.
I'm in that context, and I don't have to switch out of it.
Number 4, assistant/delegate.
At the end of the day, I think the first hire
most entrepreneurs should be making is an assistant.
And it's not because I think that you
are too cool to be doing certain types of work.
I just think it's pure math.
It's leverage.
If you look at the work you're doing
and you kind of created two buckets, the 5%
that 100% you need to do, this 5% of the activities in a week
if you audit your time, and then you
look at the other list, the 95% of things that are on there,
you could probably find a ton of stuff
like booking travel, responding to emails,
scheduling, buying things, research work,
et cetera that could be done by somebody else
like a virtual assistant.
Or delegate to another team member.
I think that most founders need to just learn how to delegate,
how to say no, and make sure that they clearly
communicate and start looking for leverage in their time.
And the way to do that is first an assistant
is probably the most--
you know, for whatever it costs you, the ROI of cloning
yourself is huge.
So make sure you start there, and then start
learning how to delegate to other team members.
Number 5, project management.
One of the challenges with being focused and productive
in the work you're doing is knowing
that all the other projects are being moved forward
and that if anybody's stuck that they can reach out to you,
and you know what the status is of all those projects.
And to do that, you need one central place.
So I'm not here to tell you what software to use.
There's some incredible tools out there.
And you can leave a comment below to let me know, or ask me
and I'll recommend some of them.
But having a project management process in your company
is pivotal for you to be productive,
because then it allows you to defer the thinking
and worrying of those projects, having one place where
everybody's stuff's listed.
And if you want to dive in and figure out status of things,
you can do it there.
Number 6, the weekly sync.
It's a framework that I'm a big fan of, which really is just
as simple as saying once a week as a team,
we're going to sit down and we're
going to sync on big things like key projects or rocks,
I call them.
Understand the customer headlines.
What's going great in our business?
Let's talk about that.
Let's talk about issues that might have come up that we
need to discuss as a group.
We need to make sure that our scorecard and our metrics
and our progress is on point for where we decided
we want to be at the end of the month
and at the end of the quarter.
And to do that, you need a weekly meeting
to synchronize with your team.
This is a report meeting-- this is not a project meeting--
to review how to solve problems.
This is really just as a team, a place for you
to communicate, collaborate, and report on your progress
so everybody feels like they're pulling on the rope--
because everybody's got a different rope
they're pulling on-- in the same direction.
So six strategies for improving your productivity
as a busy entrepreneur.
Number 1, perfect week.
Design it.
Number 2, block time.
Put it in your calendar.
Number 3, theme your days so that you can batch.
Number 4, assistant/delegate to your team for high leverage.
5, project management so everything
is in one place for you to keep your eye on it.
And number 6, weekly sync so the whole team
can be on the same page.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
I want to share an incredible resource called the Perfect
Week.
In there, I actually teach the seven core pillars
of life for you to measure yourself.
I've been doing this for years every Friday.
So those seven pillars are part of the worksheet,
so you can click the link below to download your copy.
And I also talk about the strategy
for taking all the things you need to get done in a week
and designing your perfect week in a seven-day window,
incorporating Saturdays and Sundays in it,
and putting in the personal and the professional
into that design.
So you can click the link below to download
your copy of the Perfect Week.
And if you like this video, be sure to smash that Like button.
Subscribe to my channel.
And if there's anybody you think this video could serve,
feel free to share it with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge
you to live a bigger week and a bigger business,
and we'll talk next week.
No, it's the bike.
It's me biking while I'm on the phone.
OK.