Dan Martell - November 16, 2024


Millionaire CEO Explains： 5 Steps to Get Sh＊t Done


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

221.51648

Word count

2,976

Sentence count

147

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

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Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the 5 strategies you can steal that successful CEOs use to get more done in 12 weeks than most get done in a year. These are the strategies that successful CEO s use to make sure they are getting the most out of their time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 These are the five strategies you can steal that successful CEOs use to get more done in 12 weeks
00:00:05.100 than most get done in 12 months. Strategy number one to get more done is set your boundaries.
00:00:10.520 See, your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other people's priority on your
00:00:15.080 time. I like to use this concept called the Eisenhower Matrix that looks at everything
00:00:19.180 through two axes, important and urgent, then uses the right response to get people to move
00:00:24.440 things forward. So for example, one of the boxes, not important, not urgent. Well, then just send
00:00:29.000 me an email. I don't need to stop and talk right now. Number two is important, not urgent. Well,
00:00:34.320 post it in Slack or a team communication. Third is not important and urgent. Send me a text,
00:00:40.560 right? Because it's like, it's going to be there. I'll get to it. And number four, if it's important
00:00:44.680 and urgent, how about you give me a call? Make my phone ring because then I'm going to pay
00:00:49.380 attention. There's this funny story where my buddy, Chad, he owns a retail store and he got
00:00:53.620 mad at me for texting him at six in the morning because his phone was going off and he was still
00:00:57.900 sleep in i said hey dude why don't you put your phone and do not disturb and then sleep in he goes
00:01:03.020 well it'd be cool to do that but unfortunately my security alarm from my retail store comes to my
00:01:08.720 phone so if somebody breaks in i need to know and i was thinking to myself dude you're not the only
00:01:12.900 person in the world that has this problem that has a retail store like you can find a solution
00:01:17.140 he's routing it improperly i mean if somebody's breaking into my house i want to go to the police
00:01:21.120 not to my cell phone i get frustrated with this all the time i remember one time i was on a finance
00:01:25.380 meeting and the team's going through all the different aspects and i'm going why are we having
00:01:29.540 a meeting about this when this could have been an email that i could have reviewed on my own time
00:01:33.940 not spend 45 minutes in the calendar why because somebody booked it we didn't verify if the agenda
00:01:38.740 was needed think about it some of the stuff that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis you need
00:01:42.820 to push back get people to use the right channel so that it doesn't eat up into your time and it
00:01:47.700 goes way beyond just the channel think about like times and days like if it's a weekend don't call
00:01:52.980 me unless there's like a fire if it's the morning when i'm creating then please send me an email so
00:01:58.420 you also have to protect yourself you got to share your preference for communicating with not only
00:02:02.500 your boss your clients your friends and then teach them how to treat you by not always responding
00:02:07.140 right away i mean some of it you're doing it to yourself so for example if your boss has something
00:02:11.780 to share with you you can ask him to just drop it into slack or text and not call you at 9 pm on
00:02:16.820 a friday night and you'll get to it if they're good people and you want them in your life then
00:02:21.380 then they should want you to be as effective as possible.
00:02:24.160 So share your preferences with them
00:02:26.120 about how you like to work.
00:02:27.580 In a world of 300 notifications a day
00:02:29.480 and 24 seven communication,
00:02:31.160 it can be scary to set some of these boundaries,
00:02:33.280 but I'm telling you,
00:02:34.100 this is how the most productive people
00:02:35.880 get things done in their life.
00:02:38.080 Share your preferences,
00:02:39.760 which leads us directly to strategy number two,
00:02:42.080 which is to lock in your calendar.
00:02:44.560 I remember in my twenties, my calendar was a mess.
00:02:47.220 Honestly, I didn't want anything in my calendar.
00:02:49.780 I just wanted to go with the flow and do what I do.
00:02:53.020 Then I realized that without some constraint,
00:02:55.500 I wasn't getting anything done
00:02:56.960 and I wasn't actually being even creative.
00:02:58.840 The reason why is that constraints create creativity.
00:03:01.800 So if you actually wanna solve big problems and be creative,
00:03:04.080 you need to have constraints in your life.
00:03:05.840 These are the five rules of scheduling.
00:03:07.780 Number one is big things first, small things last.
00:03:11.240 You wanna put the big rocks, the big projects,
00:03:13.780 the big initiatives early in your day,
00:03:15.800 early in your week to move those things forward
00:03:18.060 and the small things will literally take care of themselves.
00:03:20.860 Number two is your schedule following your energy.
00:03:23.840 So some people are night owls,
00:03:25.220 other people are morning people.
00:03:27.160 If you know yourself, then schedule your tasks,
00:03:30.220 your activities, the projects that are gonna be best aligned
00:03:32.380 for the time that you need them throughout the day.
00:03:34.420 And again, ask other people to honor that
00:03:36.880 so when you collaborate with them,
00:03:38.300 they're getting your best you.
00:03:39.760 Number three is batch similar work.
00:03:41.900 I don't know about you,
00:03:42.640 but if I batch all my meetings together,
00:03:44.840 all my deep work together,
00:03:46.040 all my content creation together,
00:03:47.620 all my research together. I'm in that headspace and I get so much more done. So batching things
00:03:52.980 are going to make you more effective. Number four is be a hundred percent compliant. If it's in your
00:03:57.560 calendar, follow what it says, even if you don't feel like it. So many people wake up and it's like,
00:04:02.840 I don't feel like it right now. And then they go and they do the little rock instead of the big
00:04:06.840 rock. Follow what you've designed for your life and it'll build the muscle and your feelings does
00:04:12.200 not dictate how you act. Number five is constantly adjust. Move things around and test and play with
00:04:18.640 it. Experiment. It's never perfect. I continuously change my calendar based on kind of new commitments,
00:04:24.540 new initiatives, projects, people in my life as I get more time back, as I get overloaded. And it's
00:04:30.040 an experiment that I'm always evolving and playing with. There's this funny quote that I like to tell
00:04:34.060 entrepreneurs all the time is that small business owners are entrepreneurs who don't value their
00:04:38.540 time. Think about this. If they valued their time, they would be more diligent with their calendar.
00:04:43.440 If you can just follow these five rules, you'll be well on your way to getting more done. But
00:04:48.280 scheduling without focus is like planting seeds without sunlight, which leads us directly to
00:04:53.120 strategy number three, which is kill your distractions. But before we move into that,
00:04:57.680 we've got a goal of hitting 1 million subscribers. So if you aren't already,
00:05:01.920 click subscribe and turn on the notifications. It takes only a second.
00:05:05.200 Did you know in Silicon Valley, where all the tech companies build their products,
00:05:09.320 they have doctorate degree psychologists that are designing the software to distract you? I'm
00:05:15.240 talking about the sound that goes off, the color of the notification jewel, how the notifications
00:05:20.680 show up and where they show up on your app, on your phone. Their whole goal is to get you back
00:05:25.820 into the product. Your average person is getting 300 notifications a day. There's no point on
00:05:31.360 working on your clear priorities if you're not going to do deep work. And to do that, you have
00:05:35.920 to define this strategy for how the world interfaces with you. I like to tell people,
00:05:40.860 ambitious people by skills, lazy people by distractions. So I call this strategy the world
00:05:46.140 interface system. This is your API. In software, we call that the application program interface.
00:05:52.140 This is your version of it. So there's three ways to set this up. Number one, and I know I'm going
00:05:57.100 to freak people out right now, but turn off all your notifications. And I'm talking everything.
00:06:01.620 I mean, everything in my life is on mute except for my wife. So no notifications on my phone,
00:06:06.820 no chimes, no bells, whistles, nothing. Just go into the notifications and just
00:06:11.000 turn them all off. Your goals are worth more than your distractions. Stop that.
00:06:18.120 Number two, set check-in times. So now, instead of allowing the apps to just buzz and notify you
00:06:24.160 distract you, set the times you're going to check missed calls, text messages, emails,
00:06:30.300 or spend an hour on social media, scrolling on Instagram. I don't care. Make it a decision you
00:06:35.860 opt into, not because the app told you to. And that's different. Number three, and this is like
00:06:41.900 the real, real behind the scenes that nobody's going to teach you is you got to delegate your
00:06:46.020 distraction. And I know it's an advanced move, but check it out. Most CEOs have other people
00:06:50.780 check their email, take their phone calls, essentially look on social media, pull all
00:06:55.480 their Slack messages and then present it to them. I remember hanging out with Richard Branson and I
00:06:59.900 watched his assistant. All phone calls, everything went through her. Her name is Helen and she
00:07:04.760 collected it all and only the things she didn't know how to route that she would bring to Richard's
00:07:09.360 attention. Can you imagine how much presence and focus and awareness he had in the moment because
00:07:14.860 things weren't vibrating and distracting him in real time? And all that being said, the big idea
00:07:20.420 that I love to share with people
00:07:21.740 is that it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.
00:07:25.320 Don't think like, oh, I won't check my notifications
00:07:27.880 when my phone goes off.
00:07:28.820 Just decide to just turn them off.
00:07:31.180 It's easier to not have the food in your house
00:07:33.040 than to try not to eat it.
00:07:34.480 It's easier to turn off your notifications
00:07:36.140 than to try to stay focused.
00:07:37.660 But it's not just the notifications
00:07:39.360 from your apps that you wanna turn off.
00:07:40.980 It's also about trying to figure out
00:07:42.460 what you need to work on,
00:07:43.760 which leads me directly to point four,
00:07:45.960 which is to pinpoint your priorities.
00:07:47.940 Priorities are all about sequencing.
00:07:50.160 And I love saying this, sequencing equals success.
00:07:53.140 Think about baking a cake.
00:07:54.320 You have two people.
00:07:55.320 You have one person that has the recipe
00:07:57.140 and the other one doesn't.
00:07:58.340 They both have the same types of ingredients
00:08:00.380 to bake the cake, but one person follows the process.
00:08:03.580 They have their priorities figured out
00:08:04.780 and they bake a beautiful chocolate cake.
00:08:07.160 And we'll put some peanut butter in that one.
00:08:08.520 And the other person just takes all of those ingredients
00:08:10.580 and puts them together
00:08:11.560 and then creates this big mush of chocolate fudge, right?
00:08:14.720 It's not a cake.
00:08:16.060 Why?
00:08:16.600 Because of sequencing, because of prioritization.
00:08:18.940 and this applies to your life.
00:08:20.340 When I was in San Francisco building my second tech company,
00:08:23.020 I saw firsthand a guy named Travis Kalnick,
00:08:25.600 the founder of Uber.
00:08:26.760 I watched him every day wake up and do the thing
00:08:28.960 that was gonna make his company the most money,
00:08:31.120 create the most value,
00:08:31.920 and the thing that he was uniquely qualified to do.
00:08:34.820 I actually wrote about this in my book,
00:08:36.220 Buy Back Your Time, and I call it the drip matrix.
00:08:38.860 Every task you do sits on two axes,
00:08:41.260 one of money and one of energy.
00:08:43.140 Number one is low energy, low money.
00:08:45.240 These are things you want to delegate,
00:08:46.840 delete, or defer out of your life.
00:08:49.280 Quadrant above is low energy and high money.
00:08:52.180 These are things that over time you wanna replace
00:08:54.340 out of your calendar because they take your energy
00:08:56.900 that other people still need to get done
00:08:59.000 that you don't have to do anymore.
00:09:00.420 The third quadrant is high energy and low money.
00:09:03.500 That's called investment.
00:09:04.820 These are things like skills, beliefs, and habits
00:09:06.900 that are gonna make you more valuable.
00:09:08.820 The top right quadrant is high energy, high money,
00:09:11.960 meaning that you make money doing the thing you love to do,
00:09:14.640 and I call this production.
00:09:15.600 This is where you want to spend all of your time.
00:09:18.360 The most successful CEOs and leaders in the world do two things.
00:09:21.820 The thing that only they can do that makes their team or their business more money.
00:09:25.940 But how do you delegate those low value tasks that suck your energy?
00:09:29.240 This leads us directly to the fifth and final strategy, which is delegate low value tasks.
00:09:34.200 Most people think they have to be an entrepreneur with 10 plus employees to delegate anything.
00:09:38.660 I did at 22 and man, was I wrong.
00:09:40.980 I literally used to do everything.
00:09:42.660 I have team members. They do the work and I got to do everything else. I got to take out the garbage.
00:09:47.180 I got to make sure they're fed. All the mail's got to be processed. And I remember one time I
00:09:51.240 was thinking to myself, as a CEO of a company that does employees, like, why am I spending every
00:09:55.800 Saturday and Sunday at the office just trying to get caught up? So one day I emailed the CEO of
00:10:00.820 this almost billion dollars insurance company in my hometown. I just asked him, I said, who manages
00:10:05.340 your mail? So I was spending five, six hours on a Sunday trying to process all my mail. And he
00:10:09.500 replied, well, my assistant does. And I kind of laughed at myself. It's like, why am I doing this?
00:10:15.100 That was the day I decided to hire somebody part-time to process my mail. The reality is
00:10:19.720 that's something that's been sold for a long time. It's called meal prep. I know in our town,
00:10:23.840 there's four or five companies that do it. If you're willing to outsource that, I'm talking
00:10:28.100 no more groceries, no more prep time, no more cleanup. Just have somebody else cook you food
00:10:32.880 that's actually designed to make you stronger, better, smarter. You don't have the decision
00:10:37.460 fatigue. That's a simple example of delegating high value activities that somebody else can
00:10:42.500 take care of that you don't have to think about so you can focus on the thing only you can do.
00:10:46.040 These successful CEOs buy back their time to focus on higher value activities, but you don't
00:10:50.020 have to be rich to start buying back your time. And that's why I created this thing called the
00:10:53.300 delegation ladder. I'm going to break it down for you. Number one is automate your workflow.
00:10:57.440 I want you to look at all the work you do in the processing and ask yourself what tool,
00:11:02.700 maybe AI and some automation could you install into your life where it would take care of 60,
00:11:08.340 70% of the initial research or doing of the work and then you can come in and finish it off.
00:11:13.920 But most people don't even think about simple things like hotkeys when they're using some
00:11:17.920 software that they're in all day long to increase their productivity. Number two is outsource your
00:11:22.580 errands. I'm talking grocery delivery, meal prep, getting the mail. You might be able to convince
00:11:27.780 a friend to go shop for you and maybe every other week you guys kind of share that process there's
00:11:33.140 ways for you to get your time back that doesn't cost anything it just requires you to be creative
00:11:37.620 with your peer group and your friends and maybe you have a young cousin that wants some extra
00:11:41.460 money and you could ask them to go buy stuff for you and just make them a list every two weeks
00:11:45.780 number three is delegate your chores think about somebody to help clean your house clean your car
00:11:50.980 laundry service wash and fold it's a small investment to get a huge chunk of time back
00:11:56.180 number four is offshore your work think about there's parts of the world where you can pay them
00:12:00.340 four or five six dollars an hour and they would be pumped to get this work the stuff you do the
00:12:04.340 admin level the research the booking your travel the purchasing stuff you can give them all that
00:12:09.140 and get a bunch of time back at a low cost number five is hire an assistant now this is a more
00:12:14.260 advanced move but i'm a big fan of having somebody else in my inbox processing in real time and
00:12:20.100 handling all the incoming requests on my time and then also managing my calendar you're getting
00:12:25.860 emails messages phone calls to you from people that need things from you now you also have
00:12:31.540 projects you need to get done so anytime you're doing that kind of stuff then you're not doing
00:12:35.540 the projects where you want to spend all your time is getting things done that makes you money
00:12:40.020 not routing and scheduling so my calendar my inbox is owned by my assistant she's full-time
00:12:45.540 and she's focused and in many ways she's a clone she can talk to people make phone calls schedule 1.00
00:12:50.580 things make decisions on my behalf so that i spend all my time doing things that make me money and
00:12:55.380 that light me up now most people get stuck because they don't have a playbook or they don't know what
00:12:59.460 to get their assistant to do so if you want my executive assistant playbook just follow me on
00:13:04.180 instagram and message me youtube ea i'll send you a direct link to my google docs so you can swipe
00:13:09.860 and copy even if you're working nine to five you can start today climbing the delegation ladder
00:13:14.820 to buy back your time so that you can focus on building your habits, beliefs, and skills.
00:13:19.420 So that's how CEOs get more done.
00:13:21.080 If you want to learn the 12 hacks to increase your productivity that costs nothing,
00:13:24.500 click the link and I'll see you on the other side.