This Is How Successful People Manage Their Time

Say no to everything that doesn't support your immediate goals. 41% of items that people put on their to-do list are never done at all. It's like a to-do list is the graveyard of, you know, important but not urgent. And when you truly realize what, like just how valuable a single minute is. I mean money, we can lose it and make it back again. Our health, we can get sick and get healthy again. Time, once it's gone, it is gone. Time is life. The 15 secrets successful people know about time management. The productivity habits of 7 billionaires, 13 Olympic athletes, 29 straight-A students and 239 entrepreneurs. You might not use all of them, but if you use 1, 2, 3 or 4 of them, I tell you, you're going to get a lot more out of your day. Anyone can make a big difference. Absolutely. And we all have the same amount of time. Every single one of us has the same amount of time. But some of us squander it, some of us waste it, some of us don't make best use of it. It's my goal, my hope at the end of this episode that you'll be able to see just how much time you have in the day. And there's something, something in this episode that you'll be able to use to maybe get more out of your day. And that to me is a win. Absolutely a win in my book. Hey, 1440 is the number that can change your life. And that number is the number of minutes we all have in a single day. And while most of the people that I interviewed, they're not all doing the same 15 secrets either. The common thread was that they always spoke about minutes and the value of time. And when you truly realize just how valuable a single minute is. I mean money, we can lose it and make it back again. Our health, we can get sick and get healthy again. Time, once it's gone, it is gone. Time is life. And so in one minute for your health, you can bang out some push-ups or sit-ups or take a cleansing breath. For relationships, you can tell someone that you love them or that you're grateful for them. In business, it takes a minute to have a breakthrough idea. And once you truly understand that, all of a sudden, you know, you're not going to let people steal your time with all those got a minute meetings or other trivial things. There's a certain number of minutes every single day that I have at my disposal. And so much of it is just wasted minutes. So if you start to capitalize on the time that you have, you'll realize, holy, I can get a whole bunch done. So golden nugget number two, identify your most important task and do it first. The most important task, the MIT. Your MIT is, you know, what is that project that is going to double the size of your business? What is that project that's going to get you the promotion or max out your bonus at work? And then break it down. It's like what domino can I tip over today that's going to lean on the next one and the next one? And then we have to get in that discipline of scheduling time to work on our MIT first thing in the morning. Behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely talks about we are at our best for about a two hour window of time in the morning. You know, we're at our cognitive best. But what most of us do, we stroll in, you know, to work. We open up email. We start working on everybody else's MITs by answering their emails and all that stuff. Before we respond to text, before we listen to voicemails, before we do email, we should work on our MIT. Golden nugget number three, work from your calendar, not a to do list. Stop using a to do list. You know, I was asking all of these people, self-made billionaires, self-made millionaires. What is your number one secret to productivity? They could have said anything and none of them mentioned a to do list. I was about halfway through the interviews and finally I started doing the follow up. I'm like, well, what about your to do list? Give me some advice. They laughed at me. They're like to do list. You know, we work from a calendar. And as I did the research, it turns out 41% of items that people put on their to do list are never done at all. It's like a to do list is the graveyard of, you know, important but not urgent. If you really want to get something done, pick a day, a time and a duration and then live from your calendar. Golden nugget number four, to overcome procrastination, beat your future self. So we need to think about, all right, how's that future evil version of ourself going to jeopardize our best intentions? And, you know, let's say we want to start jogging this week. We want to work out. Well, you know what? I know that my evil self is going to hit that snooze alarm. How do I fight back? I'm going to put my iPhone, I'm going to set that alarm, put it on the other side of the room. So I got to literally get out of bed to shut it off. And that evil Kevin's going to say, oh, man, I don't know where my workout stuff is. I'll work out tomorrow instead. Well, you know what? I'm going to beat that future version by putting my sneakers right at the end of my bed. In fact, I'm going to go to sleep in my shorts and T-shirt. So I just need to put my sneakers on and I'm dressed. So we just need to think about all the ways that we're going to procrastinate. All those excuses were to come up with and try to beat them in the present moment. Golden nugget number five. There will always be more to do. Back when I was young, a young and dumb entrepreneur, you know, I was the guy who was just eight hours a day wasn't enough. So I'd work 16 or 25 days a week wasn't enough. I'd work seven. The girlfriend or eventually the wife would be like, hey, it's six o'clock. Dinner's cold. When are you coming home? Leaving the office in five minutes. Then it's an hour later. I'm still in the office. And, you know, one of the things that I learned from interviewing all these people is they have this sense in their bones. Like there will always be more to do. Andy Grove wrote. He was the founder and CEO of Intel. And he said, you know, my day ends when I'm tired and ready to go home. Not when I'm done because I am never done. A manager's work is never done. There's always more to be done. More that should be done. Always more than can be done. Maybe, you know, maybe we've decided that we're going to work a 10-hour day or a 12-hour day or a six-hour day. Whatever you decide, be intentional about it and then realize you've allocated other minutes for your health, which is gym time. You've allocated other minutes for your relationship, including date night or time with your kids. Everybody I spoke to talked about carrying a notebook. You know, Richard Branson has written about it over and over again. He says the single most important possession is his little notebook. That's how he built, you know, the Virgin brand. You know, there's all these people that I interviewed that just swear by this power of jotting down little notes. Whether it's journaling or notes from meetings or words of wisdom from the books they read. But it just really changes their life. Yeah, and one of the things that David Allen always says that our minds are best used for processing different ideas, not to hold on to information. You'd be surprised when you start carrying around a notebook with you just how much information comes into your mind that you want to capture. Now, when you start capturing that information, you realize, holy crap, I've been holding on to so many good like pieces of information and it's just been gone. Like I just lose it or I hold on to it and it just ruins the ability to allow your mind to free itself up to process new information, which is the best state for your mind to be in. To be honest, many of us use our email inbox and text messages and other social media apps as a form of procrastination, as a form of a little reward. It releases dopamine. It's kind of like pulling that handle on a slot machine. Is it going to be something good? And all of these companies out there and other people in our lives, they want our attention. And that's fine, but it can get in the way of our productivity. So the bottom line is shut off the notifications on your phone on everything. It's OK to go to email or messages and all of that, but do it when you want to do it. Not because someone else is calling you kind of like Pavlov's dog, you know, ringing a bell and I'm reaching for my phone. I process email like anything else, three times a day, morning, noon and night. Now, again, the number is not so important, right? I mean, you know, I know people who only process it once a week or once a day. And others, people tell me, hey, I'm a stockbroker or whatever. I need to get back to people all the time. Fine, process it every 30 minutes or 15 minutes. The idea is to be intentional about it. Shut off the notifications. So if you're out there and you haven't shut off your email notifications, what are you waiting for? I've done that a long time ago. I shut it off because it's just distraction. Goal number eight, schedule and attend meetings as a last resort. Now, we can't all, you know, be like Mark Cuban and just say no to our boss and other people with meetings. We can say no much more often. We can say no to a lot of meetings. We could say no to meetings before noon. Like let's keep our deep work in the morning, then our collaborative work in the afternoon. And if you have to say yes to a meeting, say no to long meetings. Richard Branson again says there's few meetings that need to last more than five or ten minutes. And so that's just the idea. Let's say no as often as possible, at least one day a week say no, and then try to say no to long meetings. Absolutely. And that actually, you know what, that breaks us into the next golden nugget, golden nugget number nine. Say no to everything that doesn't support your immediate goals. They're not being rude, but the most highly successful people, they know what their values are, their goals are, and they fill their calendar with things that will get there. And that doesn't leave time for a lot of other things. You know, we're raised from being really young to like, hey, you know, you want to be liked. So you want to help people. You're told it's nice to help people. You don't want to be rude. What's helpful to me is when I realized that every time I say yes to something, I'm actually saying no to another thing or many things. I got myself into so much trouble, man, because I like to be liked. And so I would say yes to people all the time, even though I knew by saying yes, it would screw up my schedule. I'd have to push other things back. In the back of my head, I was like, you're not going to do this anymore. You're not going to go to the gym. Your whole schedule is thrown off course. Getting good at saying no and doing it in a very polite way, in a delicate way, is something that a lot of you out there have to do. Golden nugget number 10, follow the powerful Pareto principle. Yeah, the Pareto principle is more commonly known as the 80-20 rule. And it's this idea that most of the results in almost any activity, 80% of the results, comes from about 20% of the activity. So it's just really pausing, slowing down, and looking at with all the work that you're doing to build your business, to get your work done, what are the handful of tasks that are getting you most of your results? Just focus on those things. Golden nugget number 11, focus on your unique strengths and passion. We really need to remember the power of delegation. I'm a perfectionist, so nobody can do anything as good as I can. I've got to do everything to do it right. And the reality, Ryan, is that might be true. But we have to realize, again, think about that 80-20 rule. This feeds into this. Yes, if I delegate it to someone on my team, maybe it's not going to be perfect. But if it's 80% to perfect, I need to be okay with that and let it go because now that just freed up all of my time. Golden nugget number 12, batch your work with recurring themes. So this one, you read in the book, innovative entrepreneurs, they really assign different themes to their office days so that employees can really concentrate on one specific type of work. A well-known consultant to consultants, Dan Sullivan, he talks about entrepreneurs should have focus days, buffer days, and free days. And the focus days, those are your game days. Those are the days where you are doing your most important activities. Usually it's sales or revenue related, but whatever your strengths are. A buffer day, that's the day to catch up on phone calls and emails and sign paperwork and all the other administrative stuff we have to do. And then free days are days where you do not work. And what you're doing is you're resting and recharging, which all the Olympic athletes really talked to me about that. Golden nugget number 13, if you can do a task in less than five minutes, do it immediately. So this really comes down to the touch it once principle. I go to an extreme on this one. I walked to get the mail out of the mailbox every day. Well, most people, you come inside and there's the two piles. There's the junk pile and then the bills. And then later we go through the junk again. And then we go through the bills again. On my walk back up to the garage, I am sorting that junk and I'm dropping it right in the recycle bin before I even get into my house. Those bills, they go into the bill pile, which again, I process on Friday afternoons. I don't even open the envelopes until I'm ready to do them. I don't care about what my electric bill or cable bill is. I'm just going to leave it sit there until I'm ready to to process it. So, you know, email, you open an email when you're ready to process it in that moment. Just learn to touch everything once. Golden nugget number 14, routinely use early mornings to strengthen your mind, your body and your spirit. Because, you know, I'm asking people, give me your number one productivity tip. So I'm expecting to hear about task lists and calendars and priorities. So many people said my number one productivity tip is what I do in the first hour of my day. And they're not talking about getting work done. They're talking about their mind and body. Most of the people that I interviewed, these high performers, they weren't waking up, feeling stressed, rushing to the office and diving into emails. That first hour, that first 30 minutes, they were investing in themselves for the long game. Last but certainly not least, golden nugget number 15, productivity is about energy and focus, not time. You know, we all have the same 1,440 minutes a day. We can't get more of that. It's not about managing the time. So the idea is, first of all, take care of our bodies, light cardio, lots of water, get good deep sleep. In addition to that, the most productive people, they actually take more breaks. So we're designed to kind of like sprint and rest, sprint and rest. And so, again, to each their own. A lot of people like this Pomodoro technique. You just sprint for 25 minutes, then pop up and walk around, get some air, get some water. The idea is to spend more time on single tasking, all out focused attention, these working jam sessions, then a little break, and then get back to it. Go to CutTheCrapPodcast.com. 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