Dan Martell - March 30, 2026


How to Stop Wasting Your Life (No More Distractions)


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

222.23785

Word Count

3,160

Sentence Count

193


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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
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.