If you want to
learn the secrets behind
how I'm able to run two 8 figure
companies as the CEO,
and stop my day at 5 p.m.
so I could be present with my kids
and on top of that train for Ironman
and just stay active
and be
somebody that shows up
for their friends
and go on date nights with my wife.
I want to share with you
some productivity strategies, okay.
They're not even hacks.
They're literally different ways
to think about manufacturing time
and designing your calendar
and looking at your week
that nobody's ever taught you
in business.
Because it's taken me
literally 25 years
of iterating and iterating
and iterating to understand
the way
I think about my energy
and my time and leverage
so that you can take this information
and apply it to your business today.
Let's get into it.
The number one thing, if you
got to look at my life
that you would notice
is completely different
from most people, it's
by design, not by default.
Here's what I mean by that.
I literally am intentional
of not only my day,
my week, my month, but my year.
And I'll even
look at like the next ten years
and figure out
where am I going
and how do I backfill this?
Because I learned a long time ago,
I don't know
if you've ever heard
of the big rock analogy,
but if you take a container
and you start filling it up
with the little things, the sand,
you put all the water in there
that you know you might need,
this is like the day to day, the ‘got
a second?’ meetings,
the pulling on your time.
And then you try to put,
you know,
the pebbles in there,
the smaller type projects,
and then eventually
you have like all these big
rock type things,
these meaningful things
you want to accomplish in your life
and get healthy
and be in a better relationship
and grow your business.
There's just not enough room
in that container.
The sequence of the stuff
and how you put it
in matters tremendously.
If you take that same container
and instead by design, start
with the big rocks,
then sprinkle in the pebbles,
then the sand, you fill it all in
and then finally the water,
the serendipitous moments
throughout your week and your day.
That's where you can literally
get it all put in the same container.
Doing it in
the reverse way doesn't work.
So that's why
when people see
that I'm able to accomplish
so much with my time, it's
because it is so designed,
it is so intentional
that I don't just let life happen
to me.
I go out and I create my outcomes
by design.
The second most important thing
that I do to get things done is
I package up the details.
Here's what I mean by that.
You know, it's
kind of like
when I go on my snowboard
trip, I bought this snowboard bag
that is so cool because it will fit
not only my board and my boots
and all my equipment.
It even has a place
for all my clothes, my gloves,
my multiple goggles
and my lodge slippers.
Everything I need to go on
my trip is packaged up into this
snowboard bag.
Why is that important?
Because I can sit down
and get packed up
and know that there's one place
where everything I need for
my trip is going to be
in this special bag.
Not in two or three bags,
not all over the place,
literally one bag.
And then when I show up
to go on my trip,
easy peasy, I don't forget anything.
I show up,
I got my gear and I have a great time.
That's how I look at my life.
I've literally taken every project,
everything I need to get done,
and I use my calendar to package up
the details.
Everything, all the context that I need
for a conversation in my calendar
to do an activity in my calendar.
It is all in the calendar.
Some of you guys like,
okay, well,
what if somebody
invites you to a meeting
and you show up but you have like stuff
that you know,
you need to look at before that meeting
or in that meeting?
What I do is
I create a separate calendar invite
that's called notes for the meeting.
For example, like today,
I did a bunch of podcast interviews
for my book promotion
and in the calendar next to it,
I had notes
and it was
all of the information around
the interviewer, the questions
they sent me ahead of time
that was in my inbox.
Any specific context
that I need to know about the podcast?
You know, reminders
of like letting people know
when the release dates, etc.
it was all in there.
And why is that valuable?
Is it allows me to go from meeting
to meeting to meeting to activity,
to literally live my life.
If I've got to go run errands,
all the errands that I need to
execute are in the calendar.
They're not in a separate document.
They're not in my inbox.
They're not
written down on some piece of paper.
I literally package up all the details
to get things done in one place.
It's in my calendar
in that calendar spot
with all the information.
So that I can't forget it.
It makes it easy
and allows me
to just move very quick through my day.
Number three is block time, easily
one of the most important things
that you need to be doing in your day
to get more done.
And here's a quick exercise
to prove to you
how important it is
to not only block similar tasks
that you're working on,
but batch them together.
So like when I do anything from,
you know,
interviews for team members
that I'm hiring or onboarding
training or one on one meetings
or coaching calls or whatever it is
that I'm doing,
looking at deals in my life,
I'm batching them together
because I know that the headspace,
the context that I built
and the energy that I'm
bringing to that
batch of work needs to be similar.
Here's
a great exercise
to explain to you how this works.
If I asked you to,
you know,
recite the alphabet ABCDEFG...
and can go all the way to the end
and then ask you to recite 1
to 26, okay.
So one, two, three, four, five, six
back to back.
Most people would do it fairly quickly
in about 25 seconds to 30 seconds,
where they could do the whole alphabet
and they could do 1 to 26, okay.
Now if I ask you instead to go
A, 1,
B, 2 and kind of follow that sequence
all the way till the end,
until you're like Z 26,
most people on average
will take 3 to 4 times more
time, a minute, 2 minutes
to accomplish the same task.
So this is just proof
that when you think
you're multitasking,
when you think it's okay
to like, schedule an interview
with an employee,
to leadership team meeting
to outlining some videos
for your social media to,
you know, having a conversation
with your partner
about something in your home
like that's actually not efficient.
It takes more mental cognitive
overhead to manage
that different stuff.
And the truth is
people think they can multitask
and they just can't.
It is way
better to batch and block time
your work to execute, to move
through that
as fast as humanly possible
so that you can keep
your mind
primed on the activity at hand
and not get distracted
by a bunch of different things
thinking that you're
being more productive
because multitasking does not work.
Number four is theming your days.
It's very important
because this is how our mind
works, to have places
for things that come into our lives.
And what I like to do is theme my days.
For example, Friday is a money day.
Money Day means anything around,
you know, meeting
with my finance team
to my wealth management team,
to doing any type of financial analysis
or reporting or whatever,
those happen on Friday.
Because that way when people come to me
with like challenges or questions,
I don't like put that on Tuesday
or Wednesday or Thursday,
I put them on Friday
because there's a lot of overhead
to kind of being in the headspace
of like focusing on numbers for me.
I don't know about you, but
like I have pretty serious ADHD.
I've done
two videos on this,
probably some of my most popular videos
and like how it's a superpower
and how I deal with it
without medication
and I need to use theme days
to essentially prime
and focus on a bunch of activities
very similar
to batching and block time.
But I use the theme days.
A lot of my clients that I coach
that have multiple business,
they do the same thing
with their companies.
They'll do
Monday, Wednesday,
Friday is one company and then Tuesdays
and Thursdays is
maybe the new upstart, right?
Because it has less time in the week.
And then that way
they can build a rhythm,
they can build momentum,
they can take requests on their time
and sort them into the specific
times of the week, those theme days,
so that they can focus on that stuff
and they know, hey,
this is when I'm going to do that,
this is when I'm going to do it.
The ability to know
when requests come to you
and where it goes in your calendar
to keep it
clean and focused, theming days
will make sure
that you don't accidentally
fill up your week
with just one type of activity
which takes the steam
and the momentum
you're building on another project
and it gets lost
because you keep punting it forward
to a week from now,
two weeks from now, a month from now,
and then by the time
you get back to it, you're like,
ugh, we've lost so much momentum.
And it's this like flywheel
that has to be started all over again
because you aren't using theme days
in your week.
Number five is fill it weekly.
So the way I do
my planning
is Sunday nights, usually 20:00
before I go to bed,
because I go to bed fairly early
because I wake up early,
I will sit down and look at my week,
look at my goals, look at my projects
and any open spots
I'm going to allocate it.
It's either
creative work,
it's meetings
I need to get requested, etc.
Now I have the privilege
of having an executive assistant
that supports me in all this,
but the idea is I want to stress test
my week on Sunday
to see if it aligns with the goals
and the outcomes,
and the quarterly kind of projects
that I want to accomplish
in that period.
Because if not, I got to re-tweak it.
But the way I think about it,
it's kind of like AG1,
if you’ve
heard of Athletic Greens,
like if I do this, I have everything
I need to be successful in my week.
I fill it once and then I execute,
just like AG1 has all the minerals
and vitamins
and everything
you literally need for the day.
So I work out in the morning,
I have my protein shake,
I throw a scoop of AG1
and I know I got my green juice,
I got all the stuff that I need
for the day and I can move it forward.
If you fill your calendar
weekly, Sunday, then you'll know
that it's full of all the big rocks,
the initiative, the projects,
the things that you need to execute
to achieve your goals.
And you won't be trying to do catch up
work on Saturday or Sunday morning
because you didn't create space
and you filled it with stuff
that didn't matter.
So be sure to plan on Sundays
to fill your week.
So that's all in there.
Just like a powerful green juice.
Being productive
requires intentionality
designed by default, block time,
focusing on filling your week
and putting all that into a package.
And it's why I wrote this book
called Buy Back Your Time.
If you're interested,
click the link below
to go grab a copy for yourself,
Download the audiobook.
I read the book myself
and I added bonus chapters
because I wanted to create the book
that unpacks
not only how to be more productive,
but how to actually scale
and grow your time.
Because there's only four ways
to create leverage.
I cover them in the book
and I teach you the buyback loop.
So any time you hit an upper ceiling,
I give you the strategy to overcome
and bust
through that roadblock
for you
to find your next level
of outcomes and productivity.
So be sure to click the link
to go buy a copy for yourself,
or somebody you care about,
and I hope this finds you awesome.
And I'll see you next week.