Dan Martell - How To Improve Your Productivity As a Busy Entrepreneur

00:00:00.160 Hi there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,

00:00:02.340 and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.880 In this video, I'm gonna share with you how to increase your

00:00:07.000 productivity as an entrepreneur even though your weeks are

00:00:09.640 probably getting crazy and you've got a ton of stuff as you grow

00:00:12.800 your team.

00:00:13.560 Be sure to stay at the end where I share with you my perfect week

00:00:16.300 strategy to allow you to design the perfect week so that you can

00:00:20.560 start from a strong foundation.

00:00:30.000 So recently I had one of my clients post in our private

00:00:39.080 Facebook group about dealing with all the work they had to do.

00:00:42.580 They have a company that's been growing like crazy.

00:00:45.380 They've just added a bunch of new team members and they just

00:00:47.520 can't seem to find the time to make sure that every day is

00:00:50.560 productive and I got to tell you I can totally relate what they

00:00:53.660 were saying because when I was building my company Clarity,

00:00:56.620 my wife started a new agency.

00:00:58.760 We found out she was pregnant.

00:01:00.160 We ended up in a two-year period building two companies.

00:01:03.300 I raised venture capital.

00:01:04.300 We had two kids.

00:01:05.400 Imagine they're 11 months apart, Max and Noah.

00:01:07.440 They're Irish twins and we had to keep it all together.

00:01:10.440 And through that process of just reaching out to my friends

00:01:13.800 that are incredibly productive,

00:01:15.280 very high output guys that are efficient,

00:01:18.380 I learned a bunch of different strategies

00:01:19.920 that I wanna share with you guys today

00:01:21.640 to allow you to increase your productivity

00:01:23.720 even if you don't have two kids in a one-year period

00:01:26.860 but just want to get more out of your day.

00:01:29.560 Number one, perfect week.

00:01:31.300 As I mentioned, I'm a big fan of designing things.

00:01:34.660 So the way I look at the perfect week

00:01:36.940 is understanding all the big rocks, personal and professional,

00:01:40.180 that needs to get done in a weekly basis.

00:01:42.180 If I want to get my workouts in, those go in.

00:01:44.140 If I want to make sure I have team meetings, those go in.

00:01:46.540 If I want to do one-on-ones with my executive leadership team,

00:01:49.240 those all have to be part of it.

00:01:50.820 If I need time for myself on the weekend

00:01:52.920 or if I need family time, put everything

00:01:55.520 into your perfect week.

00:01:56.620 And what I've discovered is when you design it,

00:01:59.320 there's actually a lot more white space available

00:02:02.660 that you don't think.

00:02:03.500 But what happens for the most part is bleed time.

00:02:06.660 That's the time between meetings,

00:02:08.200 where people schedule a 30-minute meeting

00:02:10.140 and they let it bleed into 60 minutes.

00:02:11.600 Or they don't even think efficiently about their transitions

00:02:15.000 where they're meeting with people outside of their office

00:02:17.440 and they're spending 20, 30 minutes

00:02:18.840 driving in each direction.

00:02:20.740 It's like, look, do you really need to meet in person

00:02:22.480 for that specific meeting or can you move

00:02:24.080 to a Zoom video call instead?

00:02:26.280 So designing your perfect week is the first thing that needs

00:02:29.620 to be present for you to really try to get as much as you can

00:02:32.020 out of it.

00:02:32.720 Number two, block time.

00:02:35.020 This is something I am the biggest fan of which is if

00:02:38.660 something's important to you, it has to be put in your calendar.

00:02:41.560 So it's not even about designing a kind of a rhythm for your week

00:02:45.960 but it's making sure that those elements are blocked into your

00:02:49.200 calendar, that your mornings, when you start work, what work

00:02:51.940 you're going to be doing is already predefined, already

00:02:55.340 figured out blocked into your calendar so that you can just go

00:02:58.680 boom, boom, boom, transitions.

00:03:00.780 All the details, everything you're going to need to have a

00:03:03.340 conversation, to review a piece of work, to produce some kind of

00:03:07.160 output, those are saved in the description of the calendar

00:03:10.820 entry.

00:03:11.820 When I go to the airport, I have all of the travel information

00:03:16.100 in the calendar entry for that flight.

00:03:18.940 You want to create these block times, these unit of output of

00:03:22.540 productivity, of awareness, and use your calendar to offload

00:03:25.680 that out of your mind into the calendar and block it out.

00:03:28.640 If it's on your calendar, it's not a priority for you.

00:03:30.980 And again, this includes the personal side of things as well.

00:03:33.520 Number three, theme days.

00:03:35.860 I believe that the way to get the most out of any week is to

00:03:40.220 batch your work.

00:03:41.520 So one idea that I'm going to highly encourage you to do is

00:03:44.920 consider doing things like money days and management days.

00:03:47.960 If you're starting off and you feel like you're overwhelmed

00:03:50.600 and you don't have a big team, well maybe a money day for you

00:03:53.800 is everything around marketing and sales

00:03:56.000 because that's what's gonna really drive the revenue pipeline.

00:03:59.200 And then a management day might be product meetings

00:04:01.520 and team meetings and vendor meetings.

00:04:03.640 So things that are more management and structure.

00:04:05.280 If you just took that simple theme,

00:04:06.920 and I'm not saying you can't even make it more complicated,

00:04:09.380 where you went money, management, money, management, money,

00:04:12.320 days and then you put everything in there

00:04:14.160 and you batch them because of the context switching

00:04:16.360 that you don't have to have happen

00:04:17.660 when you're in that area of work,

00:04:19.800 is gonna allow you to be way more productive.

00:04:21.600 That way, if somebody asks you, for example,

00:04:23.300 I batch my podcast requests.

00:04:25.540 When people email me to go on their podcast,

00:04:28.140 I put them, usually every two months,

00:04:30.180 I'll do a podcast day, and in that day,

00:04:32.240 I think the most I've ever done are 14 interviews,

00:04:35.420 but I batch them.

00:04:36.380 That way, it's me designing, block timing,

00:04:39.720 and theming a day for a specific outcome

00:04:42.560 to allow me to be more productive

00:04:44.120 because I'm in that mindset, I'm in that context,

00:04:46.960 and I don't have to switch out of it.

00:04:48.460 Number four, assistant slash delegate.

00:04:52.340 At the end of the day, I think the first hire

00:04:54.540 most entrepreneurs should be making is an assistant.

00:04:57.720 And it's not because I think that you are too cool

00:05:00.800 to be doing certain types of work.

00:05:02.080 I just think it's pure math.

00:05:03.320 It's leverage.

00:05:04.120 At the end of, if you look at the work you're doing

00:05:06.920 and you kind of created two buckets,

00:05:08.680 the 5% that 100% you need to do,

00:05:11.100 this 5% of the activities in a week,

00:05:12.860 if you audit your time,

00:05:14.340 and then you look at the other list,

00:05:15.400 the 95% of things that are on there.

00:05:19.000 You could probably find a ton of stuff like booking travel,

00:05:22.600 responding to emails, scheduling, buying things,

00:05:26.920 research work, et cetera that could be done by somebody else

00:05:29.620 like a virtual assistant or delegate to another team member.

00:05:32.960 I think that most founders need to just learn how to delegate,

00:05:36.060 how to say no and make sure that they clearly communicate and

00:05:39.360 start looking for leverage in their time and the way to do

00:05:42.020 that is first an assistant is probably the most, you know,

00:05:45.060 for whatever it costs you, the ROI of cloning yourself is huge.

00:05:49.660 So make sure you start there and then start learning how to

00:05:51.940 delegate to other team members.

00:05:53.660 Number five, project management.

00:05:56.340 One of the challenges with being focused and productive in the

00:06:00.140 work you're doing is knowing that all the other projects are

00:06:03.580 being moved forward and that if anybody's stuck that they can

00:06:06.820 reach out to you and you know what the status is of all those

00:06:09.280 projects and to do that you need one central place.

00:06:11.960 So I'm not here to tell you what software to use.

00:06:14.160 There's some incredible tools out there and you can leave a

00:06:17.300 comment below to let me know or ask me and I'll recommend some

00:06:20.000 of them but having a project management process in your

00:06:23.960 company is pivotal for you to be productive because then it

00:06:26.840 allows you to defer the thinking and worrying of those projects.

00:06:31.080 Having one place where everybody's stuff's listed and

00:06:33.580 if you want to dive in and figure out status of things,

00:06:35.840 you can do it there.

00:06:37.020 Number six, the weekly sync.

00:06:39.580 It's a framework that I'm a big fan of which really is just as

00:06:42.720 simple as saying that once a week as a team we're gonna sit

00:06:46.160 down and we're gonna sync on big things like key projects or

00:06:50.260 rocks I call them, understand the customer headlines,

00:06:53.360 what's going great in our business.

00:06:54.960 Let's talk about that.

00:06:55.860 Let's talk about issues that might have come up that we need

00:06:58.040 to discuss as a group.

00:06:59.540 We need to make sure that our scorecard and our metrics and

00:07:02.640 our progress is on point for where we decided we want to be

00:07:05.840 at the end of the month, at the end of the quarter and to do

00:07:08.480 that you need a weekly meeting to synchronize with your team.

00:07:11.780 This is a report meeting, this is not a project meeting to

00:07:14.280 review how to solve problems.

00:07:16.220 This is really just as a team a place for you to communicate,

00:07:19.880 collaborate and report on your progress so everybody feels like

00:07:23.460 they're pulling on the rope because everybody's got a

00:07:26.120 different rope they're pulling on in the same direction.

00:07:29.500 So six strategies for improving your productivity as a busy

00:07:31.940 entrepreneur, number one, perfect week, design it.

00:07:35.240 Number two, block time, put it in your calendar.

00:07:38.140 Number three, theme your days so that you can batch.

00:07:41.540 Number four, assistant slash delegate to your team for high

00:07:45.720 leverage.

00:07:46.320 Five, project management so everything is in one place for

00:07:49.780 you to keep your eye on it.

00:07:51.380 And number six, weekly sync so the whole team can be on the

00:07:54.380 same page.

00:07:55.920 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I want

00:07:57.420 to share an incredible resource called The Perfect Week.

00:08:00.060 In there, I actually teach the seven core pillars of life for

00:08:03.800 you to measure yourself.

00:08:04.800 I've been doing this for years every Friday so those seven

00:08:08.400 pillars are part of the worksheet so you can click the

00:08:10.040 below to download your copy and I also talk about the strategy

00:08:15.380 for taking all the things you need to get done in a week and

00:08:17.920 designing your perfect week in a seven-day window,

00:08:20.760 incorporating Saturdays and Sundays in it and putting in

00:08:23.920 the personal and the professional into that design.

00:08:27.220 So you can click the link below to download your copy of the

00:08:30.100 perfect week and if you like this video,

00:08:32.600 be sure to smash that like button, subscribe to my channel

00:08:35.740 and if there's anybody you think this video could serve,

00:08:37.400 feel free to share it with them directly.

00:08:39.560 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger week

00:08:42.060 and a bigger business.

00:08:43.040 We'll talk next week.

00:08:45.100 No, it's the bike.

00:08:46.500 It's me biking while I'm on the phone.

00:08:48.580 Okay.

Dan Martell - March 25, 2019

How To Improve Your Productivity As a Busy Entrepreneur

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript