Dan Martell - March 07, 2023


5 Steps to Be More Productive


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

198.94962

Word Count

2,235

Sentence Count

35


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 If you want to learn the secrets behind how I'm able to run two eight-figure companies as the CEO
00:00:05.220 and stop my day at 5 p.m. so I could be present with my kids and on top of that train for Ironman
00:00:11.960 and just stay active and be somebody that shows up for their friends and go on date nights with
00:00:17.580 my wife I want to share with you some productivity strategies okay they're not even hacks they're
00:00:23.740 literally different ways to think about manufacturing time and designing your calendar
00:00:29.620 and looking at your week that nobody's ever taught you in business because it's taken me
00:00:35.620 literally 25 years of iterating and iterating and iterating to understand the way I think about my
00:00:41.940 energy and my time and leverage so that you can take this information and apply it to your business
00:00:47.820 today. Let's get into it. The number one thing, if you got to look at my life that you would
00:00:54.580 notice is completely different for most people it's by design not by default here's what I mean
00:00:59.840 by that I literally am intentional of not only my day my week my month but my year and I'll even
00:01:09.100 look at like the next 10 years and figure out where am I going and how do I backfill this because I
00:01:14.940 learned a long time ago I don't know if you've ever heard of the big rock analogy but if you take a
00:01:20.140 container and you start filling it up with the little things, the sand, you put all the water
00:01:26.080 in there that, you know, you might need. This is like the day to day, the got a second meetings,
00:01:30.740 the pulling on your time. And then you try to put, you know, the pebbles in there, the smaller type
00:01:35.240 projects. And then eventually you have like all these big rock type things, these meaningful things
00:01:39.740 you want to accomplish in your life and get healthy and be a better relationship and grow your
00:01:43.860 business. There's just not enough room in that container. The sequence of the stuff and how you
00:01:49.400 put it in matters tremendously if you take that same container and instead by design start with
00:01:56.240 the big rocks then sprinkle in the pebbles then the sand you fill it all in and then finally the
00:02:03.300 water the the serendipitous moments throughout your week in your day that's where you can literally
00:02:09.920 get it all put in the same container doing it in the reverse way doesn't work so that's why
00:02:15.160 when people see that I'm able to accomplish so much
00:02:18.940 with my time, it's because it is so designed.
00:02:22.800 It is so intentional that I don't just let life happen
00:02:27.720 to me, I go out and I create my outcomes by design.
00:02:32.820 The second most important thing that I do
00:02:35.400 to get things done is I package up the details.
00:02:39.760 Here's what I mean by that.
00:02:41.020 You know, it's kind of like when I go on my snowboard trip,
00:02:42.960 I bought this snowboard bag that is so cool because it will fit not only my board and
00:02:49.240 my boots and all my equipment, it even has a place for all my clothes, my gloves, my
00:02:55.260 multiple goggles, and my lodge slippers.
00:02:58.520 Everything I need to go on my trip is packaged up into this snowboard bag.
00:03:02.940 Why is that important?
00:03:04.300 Because I can sit down and get packed up and know that there's one place where everything
00:03:11.080 i need for my trip is gonna be in this special bag not in two or three bags not all over the place
00:03:17.240 literally one bag and then when i show up to go on my trip easy peasy i don't forget anything i show
00:03:23.320 up i got my gear and i have a great time that's how i look at my life i've literally taken every
00:03:29.400 project everything i need to get done and i use my calendar to package up the details everything
00:03:35.640 all the context that i need for a conversation in my calendar to do an activity in my calendar
00:03:41.880 it is all in the calendar some of you guys like okay what if somebody invites you to a meeting
00:03:47.240 and you show up but you have like stuff that you know you need to look at before that meeting or
00:03:51.800 in that meeting what i do is i create a separate calendar invite that's called notes for the
00:03:57.160 meeting for example like today i did a bunch of podcast interviews for my book promotion and in
00:04:04.040 the calendar next to it i had notes and it was all the information around the interviewer the
00:04:10.680 questions they sent me ahead of time that was in my inbox um any specific context that i need to
00:04:16.120 know about the podcast you know uh reminders of like letting people know when the release dates
00:04:21.480 etc it was all in there and why is that valuable is it allows me to go from meeting to meeting to
00:04:27.560 meeting to activity to literally live my life if i've got to go run errands all the errands that i
00:04:32.600 need to execute are in the calendar they're not in a separate document they're not in my inbox
00:04:37.720 they're not written down on some piece of paper i literally package up all the details to get
00:04:42.120 things done in one place it's in my calendar in that calendar spot with all the information so
00:04:47.720 that i can't forget it it makes it easy and allows me to just move very quick through my day number
00:04:53.160 three is block time easily one of the most important things that you need to be doing
00:04:57.560 in your day to get more done and here's a quick exercise to prove to you how important it is to
00:05:03.320 not only block similar tasks uh that you're working on but batch them together so like
00:05:08.760 when i do anything from you know interviews for team members that i'm hiring or onboarding training
00:05:14.440 or one-on-one meetings or coaching calls or whatever it is that i'm doing looking at deals
00:05:19.000 in my life i'm batching them together because i know that the headspace the context that i built
00:05:23.880 and the energy that I'm bringing to that batch of work
00:05:27.000 needs to be similar.
00:05:28.740 Here's a great exercise to explain to you how this works.
00:05:32.160 If I asked you to recite the alphabet,
00:05:35.900 A, B, C, D, E, F, D, you can go all the way to the end
00:05:37.920 and then ask you to recite one to 26, okay?
00:05:41.080 So one, two, three, four, five, six, back to back.
00:05:43.600 Most people would do it fairly quickly
00:05:45.500 in about 25 seconds to 30 seconds
00:05:48.420 where they could do the whole alphabet
00:05:49.800 and they could do one to 26, okay?
00:05:52.160 now if i ask you instead to go a one b two and kind of follow that sequence all the way till the
00:06:01.840 end until you're like z 26 most people on average will take three to four times more time a minute
00:06:09.520 two minutes to accomplish the same task so this is just proof that when you think you're multitasking
00:06:16.000 When you think it's okay to like schedule an interview
00:06:19.360 with an employee to a leadership team meeting
00:06:22.260 to outlining some videos for your social media
00:06:25.800 to having a conversation with your partner
00:06:29.380 about something in your home,
00:06:30.960 like that's actually not efficient.
00:06:33.860 It takes more mental cognitive overhead
00:06:36.400 to manage that different stuff.
00:06:38.260 And the truth is people think they can multitask
00:06:40.080 and they just can't.
00:06:41.020 It is way better to batch and block time your work
00:06:44.120 to execute, to move through that as fast as humanly possible
00:06:47.280 so that you can keep your mind primed on the activity at hand
00:06:50.840 and not get distracted by a bunch of different things
00:06:53.300 thinking that you're being more productive
00:06:54.920 because multitasking does not work.
00:06:57.640 Number four is theming your days.
00:06:59.540 It's very important because this is how our mind works
00:07:02.120 to have places for things that come into our lives.
00:07:06.260 And what I like to do is theme my days.
00:07:08.580 For example, Friday is a money day.
00:07:10.460 money day means anything around you know meeting with my finance team to my wealth management team
00:07:17.840 to um doing any type of financial analysis or reporting or whatever those happen on friday
00:07:24.560 because that way when people come to me with like challenges or questions i don't like put that on
00:07:30.980 tuesday or wednesday or thursday i put them on friday because there's a lot of um overhead to
00:07:36.920 kind of being in the headspace of like focusing on numbers for me i don't know about you but like i
00:07:41.640 have pretty serious adhd i've done two videos on this probably some of my most popular videos on
00:07:47.080 like how it's a superpower and how i deal with it without medication and i need to use theme days
00:07:53.400 to essentially prime and focus on a bunch of activities very similar to batching and block
00:07:59.400 time but i use the theme days a lot of my clients that i coach that have multiple business they do
00:08:04.360 the same thing with their companies they'll do monday wednesday friday is one company and then
00:08:09.000 tuesdays and thursdays is maybe the new upstart right because it has less time in the week and
00:08:13.080 then that way they can build a rhythm they can build momentum they can take requests on their
00:08:17.480 time and sort them into the specific times of the week those theme days so that they can focus on
00:08:23.800 that stuff and they know hey this is when i'm going to do that this one i'm going to do it
00:08:27.080 the ability to know when requests come to you and where it goes in your calendar to keep it clean
00:08:31.720 and focus theming days will make sure that you don't accidentally fill up your week with just
00:08:37.080 one type of activity which takes the steam and the momentum you're building on another project
00:08:41.400 and it gets lost because you keep punting it forward to a week from now two weeks from now
00:08:45.960 a month from now and then by the time you get back to it and you're like oh we've lost so much
00:08:50.280 momentum and it's just like flywheel that has to be started all over again because you aren't using
00:08:55.720 theme days in your week number five is fill it weekly so the way i do my planning is sunday
00:09:01.640 nights usually eight o'clock before i go to bed because i go to bed fairly early because i wake
00:09:05.720 up early i will sit down and look at my week look at my goals look at my projects and any open spots
00:09:12.760 i'm going to allocate it it's either creative work it's meetings i need to get requested etc
00:09:17.640 now i have the privilege of having executive assistant that supports me in all this but the
00:09:21.480 idea is i want to stress test my week on sunday to see if it aligns with the goals and the outcomes
00:09:27.640 and the the quarterly kind of projects that i want to accomplish in that period because if not i got
00:09:33.480 to retweak it but the way i think about it it's kind of like ag1 have you heard of athletic greens
00:09:39.320 like if i do this i have everything i need to be successful in my week i fill it once and then i
00:09:46.440 execute just like ag1 has all the minerals and vitamins and everything you literally need for
00:09:51.400 the day so i work out in the morning i have my protein shake i throw a scoop of ag1 and i know
00:09:56.200 i got my green juice i got all the stuff that i need for the day and i can move it forward if you
00:10:00.600 fill your calendar weekly sunday then you'll know that it's full of all the big rocks the initiative
00:10:07.000 the projects the things that you need to execute to achieve your goals and you won't be trying to
00:10:11.720 to do catch-up work on Saturday or Sunday morning
00:10:14.260 because you didn't create space
00:10:16.180 and you filled it with stuff that didn't matter.
00:10:18.140 So be sure to plan on Sundays to fill your week
00:10:21.100 so that it's all in there,
00:10:22.640 just like a powerful green juice.
00:10:24.740 Being productive requires intentionality,
00:10:27.560 design by default, block time,
00:10:29.960 focusing on filling your week
00:10:31.340 and putting all that into a package.
00:10:33.340 And it's why I wrote this book called Buy Back Your Time.
00:10:36.500 If you're interested, click the link below
00:10:38.080 to go grab a copy for yourself, download the audio book.
00:10:40.680 I read the book myself and I added bonus chapters
00:10:43.400 because I wanted to create the book
00:10:46.600 that unpacks not only how to be more productive,
00:10:49.640 but how to actually scale and grow your time
00:10:53.220 because there's only four ways to create leverage.
00:10:55.360 I cover them in the book and I teach you the buyback loop.
00:10:58.060 So anytime you hit an upper ceiling,
00:11:00.040 I give you the strategy to overcome
00:11:01.960 and bust through that roadblock
00:11:04.120 for you to find your next level of outcomes and productivity.
00:11:07.700 So be sure to click the link to go buy a copy for yourself
00:11:10.240 or somebody you care about
00:11:11.220 and I hope this finds you awesome
00:11:12.940 and I'll see you next week.