Dan Martell - How to Stop Wasting Your Life (No More Distractions)

00:00:00.000 You're procrastinating way too freaking much.

00:00:02.640 You know it, and I know it.

00:00:04.340 So today, we're gonna fix that.

00:00:06.400 And look, it's not because you're lazy.

00:00:08.440 It's not because you don't care.

00:00:09.900 It's because procrastination isn't what you think it is.

00:00:12.620 It's actually two separate problems

00:00:14.280 happening at the same time.

00:00:15.800 And nobody teaches you how to solve either.

00:00:17.800 I get it.

00:00:18.440 I have pretty hardcore ADHD,

00:00:20.340 which makes it pretty impossible for me

00:00:22.300 to do anything without getting distracted.

00:00:24.040 But despite all of that,

00:00:25.500 I've been able to build a nine-figure empire

00:00:27.280 and help thousands of other entrepreneurs do the exact same.

00:00:30.360 And I can tell you,

00:00:31.300 you don't just beat procrastination with brute force.

00:00:34.240 There are ways to hack your brain

00:00:35.900 into being 10 times more productive, if not more.

00:00:39.480 So in this video, I'm gonna show you

00:00:41.580 why you keep getting distracted,

00:00:43.200 how to eliminate those distractions,

00:00:45.100 how to stay locked in once you're actually doing the work

00:00:47.620 and how to permanently wire these systems into your brain

00:00:51.080 so they run on autopilot.

00:00:52.680 Starting with point number one,

00:00:54.740 why you actually procrastinate in the first place.

00:00:57.280 See, most people think distractions come from the outside.

00:01:00.080 I'm talking emails and the pinging and the phone buzzing

00:01:02.820 and Slack notifications going off, but that's not true.

00:01:06.300 The real problem is internal triggers.

00:01:09.100 My friend near EL, an author of Indistractable,

00:01:11.440 says that we reach for distractions to escape boredom,

00:01:14.320 loneliness, fear, fatigue, uncertainty.

00:01:17.720 We use these distractions

00:01:19.200 that might make you think you're productive,

00:01:21.240 but you're actually using them to keep yourself busy

00:01:23.780 doing stuff that doesn't do anything.

00:01:25.900 People avoid things that might stress them out.

00:01:28.240 But I remember Jeff Bezos said,

00:01:29.340 he says stress primarily comes from not taking action

00:01:31.940 over something that you can have some control over.

00:01:34.580 So the stress that you created by not doing the thing

00:01:37.620 is where the stress came from versus just saying,

00:01:39.760 I got control over this, let me do something with it.

00:01:41.960 So now that you understand the reasons behind distractions,

00:01:44.140 we need to move forward.

00:01:45.820 We need to figure out what all those distractions

00:01:47.660 actually are so you can attack them,

00:01:50.000 which takes us to the next point.

00:01:51.320 Point number two, signal versus noise.

00:01:54.680 Steve Jobs used to talk about this idea

00:01:56.480 of focusing on what really matters,

00:01:58.420 which is signal versus what really doesn't,

00:02:00.620 which is the noise.

00:02:01.800 Signal in many ways follows the Pareto principle,

00:02:04.140 which is 20% of the work actually drives 80% of the results.

00:02:07.780 The noise is everything else.

00:02:09.860 And it falls into two categories.

00:02:12.340 The busy work, keeping you busy,

00:02:14.140 but doesn't actually do anything.

00:02:15.940 Or the distraction, the vices, the video games,

00:02:19.180 the talking with your friends for hours,

00:02:21.120 reading the news, watching the sports games.

00:02:23.480 These are all things that just keep you distracted

00:02:25.620 from actually getting the work done.

00:02:27.140 I remember I was running my first company.

00:02:28.700 I was busy working 100-hour weeks,

00:02:30.880 and then I hired a coach,

00:02:32.220 and my coach analyzed my calendar.

00:02:34.200 And when he looked at it, he said,

00:02:35.400 hey, did you know you spend 70% of your time

00:02:37.500 in meetings that are just like getting updates?

00:02:40.080 And honestly, you're not producing any results.

00:02:42.440 Sales, which drives revenue,

00:02:44.040 was only 10% of my calendar.

00:02:46.080 See, he could see the signal and all the noise,

00:02:48.280 and I was pretending not to see it,

00:02:49.760 but the truth was is that I was just allowing myself

00:02:52.060 to be distracted because it felt productive.

00:02:54.340 That's why I always go back to a simple premise.

00:02:56.760 If you show me your calendar and your bank account,

00:02:58.880 I will show you what's important to you.

00:03:00.780 So here's what I want you to do right now.

00:03:02.080 Go grab something to write with.

00:03:03.200 It can be a blank piece of paper or pull out your phone

00:03:05.180 and start a new note, but find something to write with.

00:03:07.700 Number one, draw two columns.

00:03:09.400 Just put a direct line down the middle of that page,

00:03:12.440 one labeled signal, the other one labeled noise.

00:03:15.260 The second thing is I want you to think about everything

00:03:17.220 that you did in the last couple of weeks.

00:03:18.880 And I want you to write it down on that piece of paper

00:03:21.360 in those two columns.

00:03:22.600 Is it either noise or it's signal?

00:03:24.620 So what you'll probably notice

00:03:25.880 is you'll have a lot of stuff in the noise column.

00:03:28.480 And what you wanna do is get most of your week

00:03:31.100 to be in the signal column.

00:03:32.800 I know a lot of business owners

00:03:34.200 that are trying to scale past seven figures

00:03:35.900 and they're stuck in the noise.

00:03:37.960 They can't find their way out.

00:03:39.100 That's why I created my Scale Your Business workbook.

00:03:41.420 It teaches you how to buy back your time

00:03:43.240 and get out of the noise.

00:03:44.740 And if you want my step-by-step process,

00:03:46.840 just find me on Instagram

00:03:47.920 and message me the word scale YouTube

00:03:49.940 and I'll send it right over to you.

00:03:51.360 so now you know what you're spending your time on when it comes to single to noise

00:03:55.520 you can see exactly where you're wasting time and you can probably diagnose some

00:03:59.280 of the stuff in the noise column that you need to cut to get rid of so how do you actually do that

00:04:05.200 point number three eliminating distractions the way we become more productive is first we have

00:04:10.880 to make it difficult for you to get distracted and we have to break out the habits of defaulting

00:04:15.760 to devices so here are two ways you can do this i call it the friction rule either we add friction

00:04:21.040 to make it hard or remove friction to make it work. So the first thing is we got to procrastinate

00:04:26.200 the distraction itself. If you're about to go open up Instagram and go doom scroll, I want you to at

00:04:31.860 least make a commitment to yourself. And I know it sounds weird because you're like, well, I was

00:04:34.860 about to do it. How am I going to not do it? I'm telling you, just give yourself 10 minutes. I'll

00:04:40.540 actually allow you to do it. If you can go, hey, I'm going to wait 10 minutes until I go and I

00:04:44.360 doom scroll on Instagram because I really want to right now. But you put it off. I guarantee

00:04:48.880 you're probably not going to want to do it and the truth is you'll usually get back into momentum

00:04:53.100 and you won't even want the distraction anymore you just got to create separation from impulse

00:04:57.640 to reaction if that doesn't work let's add some friction let's make it hard on yourself it's kind

00:05:03.020 of like this fun game where i think about it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it see

00:05:07.400 most people are like i'm going to have food in my house and i'm like well then you're going to want

00:05:10.760 to eat that crap food versus if you take the food and you put it out of the house then you got to

00:05:14.960 get in your car to go buy the food you shouldn't eat that made it hard see how that creates friction 0.99

00:05:19.660 I like to make it easy for me to make good decisions.

00:05:22.140 So I want to go to the gym in the morning.

00:05:24.240 So I prep all my clothes so that when I wake up,

00:05:26.380 it's sitting there, my shoes, my clothes.

00:05:28.880 I pretty much told everybody, including my wife,

00:05:31.420 I'm going to the gym in the morning.

00:05:32.680 So there's no way I'm not gonna do it

00:05:34.380 because everybody would see it.

00:05:35.460 Everybody would know.

00:05:36.420 You have to make it easy to make the right choices.

00:05:38.920 So the cool part is,

00:05:39.740 is now you've made it nearly impossible

00:05:41.420 for you to get distracted or at least added some friction.

00:05:44.240 But here's where most people still get stuck.

00:05:46.460 They sit down to work and nothing happens.

00:05:48.860 because they're waiting for a spark of inspiration,

00:05:52.040 something that might never come to them.

00:05:54.060 Which brings us to point number four, building momentum.

00:05:57.180 This is not what you think it is.

00:05:59.000 See, first gear is usually easy to get into.

00:06:01.980 Second gear is easier because you're already in first gear.

00:06:04.420 And then third gear is easier

00:06:05.720 because now you're in second gear and you have momentum.

00:06:07.940 The higher you go, the smoother the shifts.

00:06:10.960 Let me explain.

00:06:12.020 When you're driving a car and you gotta put it into gear,

00:06:15.160 there's actually a lot of mechanical friction

00:06:16.880 to do that, right?

00:06:17.940 The first gear is always the hardest.

00:06:19.660 Then you get going, the engine revs up.

00:06:21.660 Second gear, smoother, keep going.

00:06:23.960 The higher you go, the smoother the shifts.

00:06:25.780 By the time you're in third, fourth is way easier.

00:06:28.180 If you go from zero to fourth, it doesn't work.

00:06:31.080 And then once you're going, fourth to fifth,

00:06:32.780 you'll barely notice because you're already in momentum.

00:06:35.200 And as a guy that literally drives his cars every day

00:06:38.020 doing donuts, I know the power of mechanical momentum.

00:06:41.520 And most people will wait until they're motivated

00:06:44.120 and inspired and feeling good about their situation

00:06:46.640 before they even start and shift into first.

00:06:49.340 You don't need motivation.

00:06:50.880 You don't need inspiration.

00:06:52.080 You don't need to feel it.

00:06:53.460 I say oftentimes it's feel the feelings, fly the plane.

00:06:56.380 What you need is to start.

00:06:58.520 And if you have the privilege of starting

00:07:00.560 and being in momentum and you know when you're in it,

00:07:03.400 stay in it, fight to be in it.

00:07:05.600 I think too many people give up their power of momentum

00:07:09.000 to anybody that's willing to distract them.

00:07:11.160 They sell their dreams for cheap, cheap prices

00:07:13.980 because they'd rather be distracted

00:07:15.600 and then be consistent.

00:07:17.300 If you're staring at a blank page, do anything.

00:07:20.380 If you're staring at yourself in the mirror

00:07:21.940 and you don't like what you see, go for a walk.

00:07:24.500 You can start a diet halfway through a bag of chips

00:07:27.140 and then you can build momentum.

00:07:29.100 You can decide to start the business

00:07:30.560 by calling anybody and ask them to buy something.

00:07:32.820 That first sale means you're now in business.

00:07:35.140 Momentum is the key.

00:07:36.600 The thing that stops people from winning in general

00:07:39.220 is they don't have clarity around what they wanna do.

00:07:41.620 So step one, write down just the steps

00:07:45.320 of doing what you know you've been avoiding,

00:07:47.180 even if you don't make a commitment to doing it.

00:07:49.460 Try that.

00:07:50.340 Then step two, pick anything that is a small task

00:07:54.040 that you could do that takes less than two minutes.

00:07:56.100 That's called the mins, most important next step.

00:07:58.700 Then if that felt good, do another one

00:08:01.340 and then do another one and just start and build momentum

00:08:05.060 and go from first gear to second gear to third gear.

00:08:08.380 See, once you have clarity

00:08:09.940 and you know what you could be doing

00:08:11.420 and you take action and you get some results,

00:08:13.820 then you feel good and you start to build.

00:08:16.280 And that is how we create and stay in momentum.

00:08:18.660 So oftentimes, I won't even make a commitment

00:08:20.920 to doing the project.

00:08:22.420 I'll just be like, I'll make a commitment

00:08:23.860 to making a list of things I know that I gotta do

00:08:26.140 if I started the project.

00:08:27.400 Then once I got the list, I'm like, ooh, okay,

00:08:29.600 maybe I can do one of those.

00:08:30.580 And then I do it.

00:08:31.480 And next day I know, I'm like, I'll do another one

00:08:32.940 because that felt good.

00:08:33.560 And then I do another one.

00:08:34.260 And then I'm like, ooh, I'm getting some feedback.

00:08:35.860 It's feeling good.

00:08:36.580 I can see where the finish line's gonna come from.

00:08:39.000 And then I'm just like, oh my gosh,

00:08:40.140 I can't believe I thought it had to be motivated to even start. So now we got momentum. You're in

00:08:44.800 motion, but we got to make sure that you're not just staying busy. We actually have to be efficient

00:08:49.280 in what we're doing, which takes us to point number five, doing the work efficiently. That's

00:08:54.320 where I use Parkinson's law, which states the work expands to fill the time you give it. I can't tell

00:09:00.220 you how often people say to me, Hey man, I'll give that to you by the end of the week. And I go,

00:09:04.640 why not Wednesday? Well, I can do a Wednesday. All right. Why when? End of the day. Why not noon?

00:09:11.640 Yeah, I could probably do it by noon. Cool. What changed from the first time I asked for it to get

00:09:16.540 done and me asking if you can get it done sooner? They're like, I don't know. It's like, how about

00:09:20.360 we do that to ourselves? So I'm a big fan of saying what is aggressive, but not impossible,

00:09:26.440 because if you don't, you will just take up as much time as you want to get the task done.

00:09:31.300 it's like when I go on vacation, the day before I leave, I get everything that are open loops done.

00:09:37.840 Why? Because I know the next day I'm gone for a while. So think about what's the mindset you had

00:09:42.360 before you went on vacation. How do you live your day that way? See, if there's no date,

00:09:47.100 there's no priority, there's no pressure, there's no execution. So what I've done is I've built a

00:09:51.420 system on how to do that. And it comes in three parts. Here's how we go about it step by step.

00:09:55.780 One, we want to allocate specific amounts of time to finish the task and schedule it in the

00:10:00.360 calendar. I'm talking a day of the week, a date in the calendar and a time of day. This is called

00:10:05.340 time blocking. And the reason I do this is that the more you do it, the more you'll learn to

00:10:10.380 estimate properly. Most people are always late because they don't ever give themselves deadlines.

00:10:15.120 So they don't know if they overestimated or underestimated. The second thing is at the end

00:10:19.620 of that time, schedule a meeting with somebody else or make a commitment to show somebody the

00:10:24.900 work that you did during that time block. That'll create a forcing function for you to get it done

00:10:29.760 because you know right after you're in another meeting

00:10:31.800 or you promise to show somebody

00:10:33.220 the work you've done so far.

00:10:34.220 It basically creates a deadline you have to stick to.

00:10:37.160 And then the third step is once I've committed

00:10:38.940 to that time block, I like to break it

00:10:40.740 into 25 minute chunks, which are called Pomodoros.

00:10:43.740 And then I have a timer that literally sits on my computer

00:10:46.740 and it runs off every 25 minutes.

00:10:48.820 And I gotta focus on whatever I wrote down,

00:10:51.260 I'll get done in that 25 minutes and I get it done.

00:10:53.620 This system creates a massive amounts of productivity

00:10:56.940 and accountability because it gives you an efficient way

00:10:59.460 to force you to focus, to force you to stay in momentum,

00:11:03.100 to force you to get the thing done.

00:11:05.000 So now that we've eliminated all the distraction,

00:11:07.180 we've built momentum

00:11:08.080 and we've learned how to work efficiently,

00:11:10.920 here's the next thing.

00:11:11.940 If you stop here,

00:11:13.100 you're gonna have to keep fighting yourself

00:11:14.760 every single day, forcing yourself to focus.

00:11:17.620 It's gonna feel hard.

00:11:18.900 It's gonna feel exhausting.

00:11:20.620 So the last step is to make it easy and permanent.

00:11:24.760 Point number six, turning hacks into identity.

00:11:28.560 I remember one time I was talking to Tony Robbins

00:11:30.300 and he said, the strongest force in human personality

00:11:33.300 is the need to stay consistent

00:11:35.080 with how we've defined ourselves.

00:11:36.860 The stories we tell ourselves is our identity,

00:11:39.560 it's our ego, and us being consistent

00:11:42.100 on how we see ourselves is crazy powerful.

00:11:45.700 So the last step is to turn those habits into identity

00:11:48.760 so you never have to think about them again.

00:11:50.680 So for example, if I asked you,

00:11:52.020 how many times did you have to stop yourself

00:11:53.780 from buying a vape when you're driving home after work

00:11:56.000 if you don't vape?

00:11:56.660 probably never why because you don't vape you have an identity of that's not who i am

00:12:01.380 and eventually a habit like going to the gym becomes an identity i'm an athlete and athletes

00:12:07.540 go to the gym and athletes don't order pizza for lunch and athletes are very consistent in their

00:12:12.300 training and athletes have coaches all of a sudden that identity drives your behaviors and we want to

00:12:17.500 do that for your productivity when it becomes part of your identity you don't have to hack yourself

00:12:22.040 anymore. I have an identity that I'm the kind of person that preps before a meeting, that gets

00:12:26.600 done on time, that follows my calendar 100%. So I don't have to sit there and stress myself out

00:12:31.000 trying to do these things because it's who I am. So here's what I want you to do. First off,

00:12:35.080 we're going to write one sentence, I always. And I want you to finish this with identity

00:12:39.760 statements that essentially is empowering. If you think about the person who easily achieves

00:12:45.120 the results that you do in your life, what do they always do? Do they always work efficiently?

00:12:49.680 They always put stuff in their calendar.

00:12:51.080 They always break things down easier.

00:12:52.940 They always meet their deadlines.

00:12:54.760 Write that down.

00:12:55.880 And the second sentence is I never.

00:12:58.160 And finish this with something that you no longer wanna do

00:13:01.040 or something you know that's holding you back.

00:13:02.620 Maybe it's a vice.

00:13:03.980 I never eat after 6 p.m.

00:13:05.780 I never play video games.

00:13:07.740 I never watch sports.

00:13:09.620 I don't know what it is for you.

00:13:10.760 I know I just said some crazy stuff,

00:13:12.480 but ask yourself if I had to give up

00:13:15.180 some short-term distractions for long-term dreams,

00:13:19.240 What would those be?

00:13:20.380 And write down, I never, and insert that there.

00:13:23.120 What I always tell people is you have a 10.0 version

00:13:25.700 of yourself that you could become.

00:13:27.580 And I think that person already exists.

00:13:29.600 You just gotta start acting like that person today.

00:13:32.260 So the key is, is to repeat those statements all the time

00:13:35.640 until your brain believes it, until it becomes identity,

00:13:39.280 until it becomes just who you are.

00:13:41.380 So now you've got everything that I believe

00:13:43.540 in avoiding the distractions to staying focused

00:13:46.080 and building momentum.

00:13:47.500 You just need to make a simple commitment.

00:13:49.080 Just start.

00:13:50.640 What work have you been avoiding?

00:13:52.540 Where's the potential for your next breakthrough?

00:13:54.680 Just write it below in the comments.

00:13:56.200 I'm gonna read them all

00:13:56.920 and I wanna know that you got what I was sharing.

00:13:59.240 And remember, if you haven't already,

00:14:00.640 find me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls of Martell

00:14:03.040 and DM me the word scale YouTube

00:14:04.980 and I'll send you over my full scale your business workbook.

00:14:08.060 And if you wanna learn how to make 2026

00:14:10.080 your best year ever, click here

00:14:12.200 and I'll see you on the other side.

Dan Martell - March 30, 2026

How to Stop Wasting Your Life (No More Distractions)

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