These 45 Minutes Will Give You Hours Back in Your Day

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is Entree Leadership. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey, with over 30 years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. This week, our team is in Texas for Entree Leadership Master Series 2025. It's our annual world-class event where we get 800 business owners in a room with me and my executive team for a week-long crash course on our proven system for leading and scaling a business in any industry. We'd love to have you join us next year, and today you're going to get a sneak peek at what it's all about. On this episode, you'll hear a talk I gave at a previous Master Series event all about time management. When you manage your time intentionally, you create the clarity, alignment, and accountability your team needs to move the business forward instead of staying stuck. And today, you'll learn exactly how to stay focused on your top priorities instead of constantly running around putting out fires. Enjoy. Look at your notes on this particular lesson through two sets of eyes simultaneously. One, for you, obviously, you are very good at time management because you could afford the ticket to come to this. So you're not struggling greatly with time management. You may pick up a few things here or there that you hadn't picked up before and at least make you think about the subject. But more so, you may want to take some of this material back and teach it to your team, particularly entry-level people who've never had to manage their time because we increasingly, with these things, have the attention span of a gnat in this culture. We cannot keep our eye on the ball. We cannot seem to stay focused and plow through a singular task without 62,000 times checking this throughout the day. And the younger the person, the more that is true. And there's some actual really disturbing medical and mental health things coming out of this. This is a wonderful tool, but it's also a destructive force, particularly for something like time management. One of the questions I get asked all the time by entree leaders is, how do I balance work with home? You throw this in a basket when you get home and don't look at it, period. And don't be checking your dadgum emails till 9 o'clock at night and then wonder why your children don't know your name. So you've got to be where you is. That's a time management technique. When you're at work, try being at work and working on work and stuff. Yeah. When you're at home, try being at home and working on home and stuff. Set this aside, close the laptop, at least until the little cherubs go to bed. My goodness gracious. All right. So getting control of your time is one of the most crucial things that people can do. You will either tell your day what to do or you'll wonder where it went. If you don't get control of your time early in the treadmill stage, time management will exhaust you physically. The lack of time management will exhaust you physically, emotionally, spiritually. Your tank will get emptied because all you do is run like a rat in a wheel. You've got to get control of this. Time is one of your most precious commodities. So managing it well is a normal exercise for successful people. We can get more money, obviously. We can't get more time. We know these sayings, these cliches. And sometimes money can help you gain some time. Several years ago, probably 15, almost 20 years ago, I started chartering private to go to events and go to speak in different areas. I can go to Atlanta in the morning, do something at lunch and be back before and still do the show. I mean, it's crazy. But if you try to fly or drive to Atlanta, you've got a two-day event from here back and forth. So I gain entire days with that. The jet is a time machine. Not everybody is in a position to do that, but anything you can do with money that gives you your time back is very, very valuable if you're using your time to make more money. Or you're trying to create some life balance finally after making all this pile of money. Either one is fine with me. It is an act of stewardship. For those of you like me that are people of faith, managing our money, managing God's money for Him is a faith activity. We call it stewardship in the Christian world, meaning we're stewarding over it. We're managing someone else's money. The time is the same thing. I'm managing the time that God gave me with this energy and this set of gifts on the earth, and I want to manage it very precisely. And actually, that's not new information. In the 13th century, monks did the mathematics to take an hour, which prior to that time was the only measure of time, hours and days, and break it up into minutes and even seconds. And keep in mind, this is when there were sundials. And the reason that the monks broke the hours up into minutes and the minutes up into seconds was to more precisely worship God. That was their motivation. So the idea that a person of faith is good with time is not a new concept. Multitasking is okay, but sometimes what it means, most of the time what it means is just lack of focus, lack of prioritization, lack of forced ranking. We're just not, you know, we just can't keep our eye on the ball. Everything is important, so nothing is important. And that's multitasking too often. And we blame it on that. But what happens is you get to the end of the day, and I would be going like crazy. I'm running around with my fire extinguisher, putting out fires everywhere all day long. I'm fixing this, I'm fixing that, I'm fixing this, doing this, and running around and having that meeting and having this woo-hoo and this ooh, and all this, and back and forth. And I get home and just collapse on the couch and share and go, what'd you do today? I have no freaking idea. I'm a dog chasing its tail all day long, just around and around and around and around and around and around and around. I lived that way for way too long. And a high-energy person can be really fast at doing nothing. I know we entrepreneurs, the things that excite us are the things that get us, we have, our nature is to be distracted, that whole squirrel thing. We really do do that. So let's define what's important and what's not. You got to learn that. So one of the perennial bestsellers that has been up there with Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Total Money Makeover, now Atomic Habits has joined the ranks of that, staying on the Wall Street Journal advice bestseller list week in and week out, has been Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen Covey. Dr. Covey was alive years ago. I actually got to hear him speak when that book was in the rage. He was over at Belmont University to do an event, I think there was about 500 in the audience, and I watched him do this presentation that I had read about in the book. And so I give him full credit for this, because it really does shake up your whole paradigm on managing your time or helping your team to manage their individual time or their project time on executing a full project. We do a lot of work with technology stuff around here in squads. So squad time, what's the squad working on, what's our forced ranking there, what are we playing with, how many balls we got in the air before we drop one, kind of a discussion, before the synergy is overridden by the lack of focus in terms of creating something productive with a squad. Even that, we will use this paradigm to look through and look at it. He put together a time quadrant, and it's broken down into four boxes. Quadrant one, obviously, is important and urgent. Two, not urgent, but important. Three, not important, but urgent. And four is not urgent, not important, so why would you? But we do. So let's look at those for a minute. It's easy to know what belongs in quadrant one. You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't know how to get the quadrant one stuff done. You wouldn't be open. You'd be closed. Your business would not be successful enough for you to take time off or afford the ticket to be here. So quad one, it's just a must. We know how to get the important things done that are urgent. If we don't get them done, something bad happens. You know, it's pretty simple. Or we miss out on all the good, either one. And so it's something that is urgent, it's important, it can be paying bills, it can be collecting receivables, so we can make payroll Friday, we got to get this receivable in, this guy's got to pay his freaking bill. He's been dragging it out for 60 days. Now I got a cash shortage. I'm not his freaking bank. He's my customer. We got confused somewhere. We got to deal with this, all right? That's an urgent, important issue. If there's a medical emergency, obviously you drop everything. It's an urgent, important issue. We're going to deal with whatever's urgent, whatever's important, and get those things done. And you're pretty good at that. And most people are, actually. Even people you think of as time wasters, they generally get their quad one stuff at least to an acceptable level, just to function as a human being. But some people need help with it. There we go. Then you can jump catty-corner down to quad four, not important and not urgent. There's two things that happen here. One is a complete and utter waste of time. 98% of interaction with social media, a complete and utter waste of time. What some biddy in the HOA thinks is not of value to you whatsoever. Read a book, you know? Good Lord. You know, we're going to file this ASPIC group, and did you know? Oh, good Lord. No thank you. Now you can use social media for some things and connect with groups and have a positive experience. That's fine. But most people simply don't. Most people doom scroll. They just roll and roll until they find something that lights them up in a negative way, fires their dopamine, and here we go. And then they keep going. So be real careful with that. And, you know, Sharon and I have just about quit watching television, except sports. We'll watch a football game occasionally. I don't even watch those as much as I used to. But, I mean, you know, I did kind of go back once for a little while, and I lost my man card because I went through Downton Abbey with her. And that's a complete loss. I'll never get those days back. And I will never get that section of my pride back again. But I'm there. And yes, I did watch Tiger King during the Fauci pandemic, just like you did. And these are absolute lost days of my...I killed brain cells that will never come back to life. And so these are...but we all, we laugh about it because we spend...I mean, that is an...how many times have I watched Die Hard at Christmas? Oh, my God. You know, as if I don't know how it's going to turn out. Let me tell you, John Wick is going to kill a lot of people. I'll just...spoiler alert, you know? He can kill more people in 15 minutes than all have died in Vietnam. I mean, it's never something like it. And so, yeah, spoiler alert if you're...you know, wonderful gun action, but oh, my gosh. And so all that stuff's fun, it's entertainment. But if you live too much in there, pretty much, you start to understand that for a lot of people, it's an escape mechanism, and they're not dealing with life. And so it is truly a time waster. The other thing I had to discover about this quadrant is the quadrant says, it says, not urgent, not important. I had to discover that it might be important, but not important that I do it. That was a big breakthrough for me because I kept seeing things in there like, you know, we need copier paper. That's important. You can't make a copy, but it's not important that I order the copier paper. You know, the grass needs to be cut at my house, but I cut enough grass. I mean, I had a yard cutting business up into college. I cut enough grass by the time I was 18 years old, God said, you never have to do it again. And I haven't. So somebody else cuts my grass, you know. It's important because you get up this high, neighbors will be...I'll be in the HOA biddy thing, right? But it's got to get cut, but I don't have to cut it, right? So what that means is I'm delegating some tasks that do matter, but by definition, they're not important that I do them. So they're not in my time quadrant at all, but they would have landed in four were they to land somewhere. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 different answers. Economic growth or recession? 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It's free at netsuite.com slash ramsey. Two and three are where you can get your gains because most people don't just waste inordinate amounts of time if you're successful. You don't have a bunch of quadrant four stuff. You don't know everything about every sporting team and watch every 18-year-old play football that's ever played. You don't have all that sucking up all of your time. You're not spending 82 hours a week on fantasy on your fantasy football team. You may play it, but you're not spending 82 hours a week on it. You're not at that level, right? And so it's a little thing for entertainment, but we're not wasting inordinate amounts of time. We wouldn't be in here. So four is pretty easy. One's pretty easy. We got to get that stuff done or you wouldn't be in here. Those are pretty obvious things. Two and three are where we can get gains or where you can lead someone on your team to get some gains because you may be thinking about somebody right now that you wish they'd get a little bit more productivity, wish they were a little bit more on game. And so this is where we pick it up. So three is urgent, but not important. And this is the tyranny of the urgent. The thing is whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. It's a smoke alarm with a battery out, right? It's driving you crazy, but it's really not important. The house is not burning, but the beeping is driving me nuts. It's the tyranny of the urgent. So if it's a task or a thing that's coming at you with that, again, we've got to delegate that or we've got to change our systems where we're not even ‑‑ it's not even coming across my dashboard. I'm not even seeing it. Where then it's not urgent because I don't even know it's there. I quit doing it. So I had a guy years and years ago, he was way ahead of his time on email and on ordering things online before anybody ordered anything online. I'd never heard of anybody buying anything online, much less ordering something online. And he had tires for his car delivered to the office. And I'm like, where did those come from? He goes, I ordered them off the internet. I'm like, the internet? And this same guy, three days later, I sit 40 feet from him, sent me an email. And I'm like, hey, I'm right here. You could have ‑‑ just stick your head out the door and say, hey. He was the first time anybody ever sent me an email down the hall. And now I send like 4,000 a day down the hall, right? Because it's communication, but in those days it was so foreign, it was like, you know, it's like calling somebody that's 40 feet away to me. It was like, why would you do that? Just say, hey. But he wanted the stream of contact and me to be able to respond when I wanted to. So that's a good thing. But this same doober five years later, I was in his office and he had set up his inbox where when an email came in, it made like a NASCAR sound, like coming into the pits, right? And he got like five emails. So we had like five pit stops while I was trying to talk to him about something. And I'm like, dude, that's the tyranny of the urgency. You got to cut that thing off. He's like, ding, ding, turn the dad gum audio off on this thing. Because when it happens, your brain, even if you don't physically turn because you have discipline, your brain turns and goes over there and wonders what it is. When it buzzes in your pocket, you know, you wonder who's texting you. And it's actually somebody about your car warranty, right? And you go, golly, that's the tyranny of the urgent. And so you've got to turn off the buzzing, the dinging, the things that are coming across your consciousness and interrupting you from doing the important things and taking your eye off the ball and causing you to drop the ball. Don't do that. You've got to be real careful with your systems and processes to do that. And so, you know, we're in a meeting, six of us working on a project, the door to my office is closed, my assistant's next to me and her door to her office is closed, and nobody comes in there because we're working. And all the phones are face down. We're working on that. If there's an emergency, she'll come tell us. If something's up, she'll come tell us. But we need full focus. And in quieter times in the world, when you read like a newspaper, some of y'all don't know what those are, we used to get these things delivered to our homes and you'd sit on the front porch and your grandpa or your dad would do this, right? And there's actual news in there, not just made up stuff. And so, it wasn't just a National Enquirer about aliens or whatever, right? It was actual journalism back a thousand years ago. But in those quiet times, the rhythm of life with a rocking chair on the front porch was completely different. So, your ability to focus in those days and learn something was much greater. Now, it's harder to be as productive because we can be very productive with all these tools, but they can also be a distraction. So, be real careful with quadrant three. Quadrant two is where all your gains come. This is a big dog. You need to like circle that quadrant. I want to spend lots more time in there. The more time you spend in there, the bigger your business is going to get, the better it's going to be run, the better your life is going to be in general. This is something that is not urgent, but is important. Getting the budgets done, making sure your taxes are filed on time or early and paid because they've been funded throughout the year. You don't have to think about it. It doesn't take up any stress or bandwidth in your emotions. It's an automatic thing because we're doing it before we have to do it. We don't start the term paper the night before it's due. We do it six weeks before it's due. And then we forgot, oh, yeah, I've got to get it out of the drawer and turn it in the day it's due. We get way ahead of the curve. If you don't change the oil in your car and keep it tuned up, which is a quadrant two experience, it is not urgent, but it is important, eventually the car will blow up. If you don't exercise and you overeat all the time, eventually you're going to be on the operating table having a biscutectomy called a heart attack, right? Eventually. So you're either going to exercise, you're going to manage your nutrition intake at some level, you're either going to do that or you're going to pay for it. So what happens is if you don't take care of quadrant two things, they are important things, but they have the opposite of the tyranny of the urgency. There's nothing barking at you. It will move eventually into quadrant one. It will become urgent and important. All of a sudden. When I was a kid, we were playing in the front yard, and I was about six years old, and this grown man ran up our street. He wasn't walking. He was running slowly up our street. And he had on gray sweatpants and a gray sweat hoodie, looked like Rocky or something before Rocky was ever out, right? And I went inside, I told my dad, I said, dad, a grown man just ran up the street. I've never seen that before. Because the only people that ran were kids. Grown people didn't run. And this guy ran up the street. And every morning, and it got to be like a thing in the neighborhood, it was like everybody would come out on the porch and watch this grown man run. It was like so foreign to us, especially a bunch of hillbillies. Like, why is he running? Nobody's chasing him. It's like, you know, and finally somebody got up a nerve and figured out where he lived and stopped and talked to him. And he had had a heart attack. And the doctor said, you know, if you don't lose 150 pounds, you're going to die. And so he didn't care that he was like a zoo animal that all the hillbillies are on the front porch watching run by. He was not taking a poll on what was important. He knew what was important. But it had moved from quad two to take care of his physical body into quad one, because you're going to die if you don't do this. And now he's out there running before there were any joggers, if you've seen Anchorman, right? Jogging, right? So, yeah, it was no such thing as jogging. And we certainly didn't have any little short pants that we ran in and all this stuff. It was very strange. And so, but he didn't care. He wasn't taking a poll. It had moved for him into quadrant one. So, in business, this is cash planning. You got to have cash. It's retained earnings. It's a quad two. Nobody talks about it until we talk about it. Until something happens, something blows up, and you need some freaking cash. And now you hope the bank will take care of me since I'm on the ropes. Now, that's a great time to go to a banker. They will take you down. So, end up owning your business. So, you got to do this stuff. It is strategic planning. I make fun of myself all the time on that. But strategic planning is, it's not urgent, but it's important because if you'll just simply get up above the thing and go, the quickest way to Orlando, Florida by road is this interstate called I-75 from Nashville. Okay, let's get down there. You get up above it, you see, you don't have to go around and around and get stuck in a room and go backwards and backtrack. You don't have to do all these false starts, get trapped, have a bad, you know, there's a straight line. You can do this, but you have to get above it to work on your business, as Gerber says, instead of just in your business. His book, The E-Myth, talks about that a lot. So, we've got to do the things that are not urgent, not important. Doing a will, doing an estate plan, succession planning. We talked about with a little bit last time with legacy. Those are all not urgent. I feel fine. When we have the Dave Ramsey is going to die this year meeting, which we have every year, and we have all the leaders in the room and all the family in the room, and we have a full plan. If I die in the next 12 months, here's exactly what happens with this, what happens with this. I call it the Monty Python meeting. I'm feeling much better. It's just a flesh wound, right? And so, but we do it every year religiously because it's a gift to all the people that I love that that is all planned before it's urgent. The press release to be sent out, the statement, is already written. That's how thorough we are. And then you don't think about it. You can go and do other stuff. And it just goes straight through. It just goes straight through. So, and there's nothing wrong with me. I'm not going anywhere. I hope they don't fire me. Can't. Wait a minute. I don't want it. Can't fire me. Okay. Just checking there. One of the most important hires you can make if you want to get things moving is a personal assistant. In a lot of your businesses, you really need one. Now, a personal assistant is not a secretary. They might do some secretarial duties from the 1950s, but my personal assistant, Patty, has been with me 21 years. Prior to that, she was Kenny Rogers, the music guy's personal assistant for 13 years. I have never been able to get her to say a negative thing ever about Kenny Rogers, and I have tried, and it gives me great joy because that means she will never say anything negative about me. If she told me all the dirt on him, guess what she's going to do on me, right? Don't be naive that you're different, okay? But Patty is awesome. Patty is just like a family member of the Ramses after 21 years. She plans my trips. When I step off of an airplane, there's a driver standing there. He's got my name. I've got his name and number. We all know where we're going. Everything is dialed in to the moment. I don't have any false starts when I'm out of town. We do not have problems with hotels. We do not have problems in airports. We do not have problems because problems equal eating up my time, and my time can make me a ton of money. We're not going to have problems. That is her job, and so my itinerary hour by hour, minute by minute is in my PDF right this second for this entire week as if I was doing this out of town, and that's one of the things Patty does. Patty has a little window at her office when you walk by. It's right beside my office, and she has a sign in it. No one gets to see the wizard. No one. No how. Straight from the Wizard of Oz. Another good Wizard of Oz quote, right? Now, you can get to see the wizard, but her job is, no, Dave can't come. She'll get an email, and she says, look, I think this is maybe a charity that you know something about. You know this guy, don't you? Do you want to do this, and her email will say, yeah, I know that guy. I think I will go do that, and she'll email this, and she goes, can I run this one off, and I'm like, yep, done. You run off, and so 98% of the time the answer is, no, Dave can't come because there's only one Dave, and he ain't coming, so can't, sorry, sorry. I'm not a snob. It's not that at all. I just simply can't be everywhere that everybody wants me to be, and it's very disappointing to some of them, but me and Patty can handle that, so you need a personal assistant. They will make you hours upon hours upon hours upon hours upon hours. Watch band broke on my watch. She runs over the mall, fixes my watch. What's that, an hour, hour and a half on my day is back. If I got to run over there and screw with it, try going in the mall. Oh, my God, you know, and then you, or if you order it from Amazon, it'll be the wrong one the first four times you order it, right, so whatever, so I got to go, right, so I'm not doing that, you know. Patty, watch broke, and I just keep moving, right. It changes the speed of my life, the efficiency of my life, keeping me on track, on task, and Sharon and Patty literally together sometimes gang up on me, and not as much lately, but maybe 10 years ago when the schedule was going even wilder, and, you know, Patty would say something like, I talked to Sharon, and you look tired. I'm taking some stuff off your calendar. Sharon and I decided. I'm like, I guess you're taking some stuff off my calendar. These two women decided this. All right, whatever, so I'm fine with that. I mean, because, you know, they love me enough. They want input. They want, you know, don't run the gas tank completely dry. Don't run the gears completely dry and fry up everything, so this is the kind of personal assistant I'm talking about. Now, daily time management, we call it daily steak sauce. Figure out what's important, what's not, what's urgent, what's not. You're not living by the tyranny of the urgency. This is you teaching a particularly someone who's new. Maybe it's their first job even working for you. You've got to teach them basic forced ranking, and this is what we did in the 70s and 80s, even up into the 90s. This forced ranking idea helps people get things straight, and all I did was it was a daily to-do list method for short-term time management. All I did was just take a yellow pad back in the day before computers, and I would write on the yellow pad everything I needed to do, my to-do list at the office. What am I going to do? And then I would look at the yellow pad and ask myself, what needs to be done today? What's urgent and important? And I put an A beside the items that needed to be done today, or that it's urgent and it's important. Not I can't delegate it. It's urgent and it's important, both. And then I would look and say, if I could get to something in the next two or three days, maybe by the end of the week, now we're kind of sort of urgent but important. It's kind of next. I would put Bs beside those, A on one, B on the others. So I'd have a whole series of Bs on the page. And then that leaves everything else. It gets a C, which means it is important but not urgent. And so getting the will done is a C oftentimes, until it's not. Until I move it over and make it, we've got to get it done as an urgent thing, because I've just put it off long enough. I've got to get this taken care of. Getting the budget done. Getting the cash flow planning done. Making sure the taxes are done. It's a C until it's not. And then you can move it across. And then all I would do is look at this list of jumbled Cs, As, and Bs. And I would look at the As, rewrite the As in a list, and then look at those As and say, if I can only get one thing done before I go home today, what is that? What is the most important thing on this whole page? One. A, one. Steak sauce. A, one, steak sauce. If I get home, I've got nothing else done. I did the right thing. That's forced ranking. A, one, steak sauce. Guess what number two is? A, two. A, three. Then the As are all numbered. Then B, one. B, two. Then rewrite the list in order of A, one, through A, whatever. B, one, through B, whatever. C, one, through C, whatever. They're not intermingled. They're stacked. As, Bs, and Cs. It's a handwritten list in the old days. Then computers came out and I put it on my computer and just made it a Word document. And then I didn't have to update it because all those Cs just keep lingering, don't they? I don't have to hand write them every time. But I did print it and put an alligator clip to a yellow pad to remind me of the old days. I don't know why. I still actually have one of those in one of my drawers somewhere. But, you know, I did that. But you're marking through what you accomplished and then you get home at the end of the day and your spouse says, what did you do? I only got one thing done, but it was the right thing, right? And we moved the needle on what we were supposed to do. We only got four things done and I had this one interruption that was important. So do the Bs, do the Cs. Now, when you get distracted and you've got your forced ranked list, then the rule is go take care of the distraction or don't and then back to the list. I had this thing ringing in my head for a decade. Back to the list. Back to the list. Back to the list. I had a guy working for me. It was just about like that guy on the movie Office Space, you know, kind of comes and leans. Yeah, well, about the TPS report, remember that guy on the movie? Yeah, so he's like, I have a guy lean up in my doorway and start telling me about problems or telling me about this or that. And he's a nice guy. He's real conversational, real chatty, but he really took all of my time and I finally just, I had to get rid of him. So I actually, I added to his responsibilities so he didn't have time to bother me. And so it was driving me, he's the sweetest guy, but he just liked to talk. And I like to talk, but I prefer to get things done and we'll talk later, okay? And so he's just leaning up over there. But if somebody comes in and goes, hey, you know, the other day I was, we're doing a meeting and I looked out the window and there's an ambulance at the thing. And I'm like, we're going to start the meeting for a second. I want to see why we have an ambulance at our building. And that stopped the meeting. But then back to the list, a girl had had a seizure and she's fine. Everything's okay. And they took her and checked her out. She had not done her meds properly or whatever. Maybe she did. I don't remember what it was. She's fine. Everything's fine. And her mom came in from out of town to check on her. We checked on her. She's fine. But at that moment, yeah, we're stop, take care of that, find out what's going on. If I need to be involved, you know, I've got an ambulance outside, I want to know what's up. And back to the list. Back to the list. If you'll manage the correct activities, you do not have to manage results. The activities create the results. And if you teach your team to manage the correct activities, they will get the correct results. In sales, there's a number of contacts multiplied by an average order value creates your total sales for the week. If you will manage your contacts, you will have sales for the week. If you're doing quality contacts and you're in sales and you make six contacts and the guy next to you makes 60, expect him to make 10X what you make because of, not because of what he sold, but because of the number of contacts creates the sales. Manage the activities that gives you the results. Manage the KPIs, the key performance indicators, gives me the results. Manage this. How, you know, I'm going to manage the details. Is the window in the building? If it's the wrong window, when is it going to be here? Is it going to hold up the project? What about the stone facing around it? How are we going to stay up with that? We're on schedule. I don't want to lose two weeks because of one stupid window. Are we fixing this? Okay. I'm managing the window, but the result I want is an on schedule build. And so that was a conversation we were talking about a while ago that we actually had this week. So workflow and technology, if you want to use technology not to be an interrupter, but to increase the speed of your workflow. So I put this in the book, contrary leadership, and it really happened when I was in my twenties, I went to visit this guy who was running this company with about a thousand people. And I went in, he was going to give me an hour of his time. And I was going to quiz him on how to be a better version of me. And he was so far above me. I don't know if any of it took, but a great guy. And I went in and sat down at his desk and his desk had nothing on it. Nothing, not even a computer, not a yellow pad. I started talking to him and asking him questions about some things. And he turned and opened the door and pulled a yellow pad out and put a pencil on it and started writing what we were talking about, taking some notes. There was not a phone. There was not anything in there. And there was a computer behind his desk, but the desktop was completely clean. And I'm like, this is one thing I remember from the conversation. I'm like, what in the world? I'm like, where's your stuff, man? You need some stuff. How do you get, where's your stapler? You need some stuff. I mean, you need some tape and some pens and you got to have, I mean, a light or something. You need some stuff. This blank table is creeping me out. And he goes, I don't need stuff. I got people that got stuff. If I need something stapled, somebody else is going to be stapling it. I'm like, dude, you are way delegated. He's like, yep, my job is not stapling. My job is making sure the people that do the stapling get paid. And that's called higher level thinking. And I have to keep my desktop clean because your desktop, and this is what he said, and it bothered me and it'll bother you. Your desktop is the condition of your brain. Uh-oh. Chaos! Yeah. And some of you, your desktop on your computer is the same way. 73,000 icons you cannot access, okay? Delete them. You don't even know what some of them do anymore. It's chaos. The cleanliness of your desktop indicates the condition of your brain. That just blew my mind. So your file system that you use needs to be customized to you. We're obviously 98% paperless around our place these days. Most of you are as well. But your file system is your electronic file system. So my email inbox has a bazillion files. And so if I get an update on George Camel's book launch that we launched last week on the pre-sales, I get a daily update on how the sales are going. I don't just delete that after I read it. I dump it in the George Camel book file. And so if I ever need to go back and track how those went, I've got all that right there. It's accessible, easy. It's just filed, it's filed, it's filed, it's filed. Obviously we all get a lot of junk emails. But I'm amazed at the number of people that have 73,000 things in your inbox. And how do you know what you're doing? I can't even figure this out. You know, I purge that sucker. And I don't mind just going through delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. I'm just not going to answer. I am not obligated to answer every human being that gets into my email. I'm just not. I love you, but I just can't get there. And it's okay. I'm going to work on the things I'm supposed to work on, which is the stuff that's in front of me. So delete, delete, delete. The other thing you can do is be emails efficient. Just don't get sucked into answering them while you're supposed to be doing something else more efficient. So a lot of people take an hour a day or a block of time a day and clear, and just clear. At this moment when I walked on the stage and my email inbox is one email in my inbox, right this second when I walked out here after a 20 minute break. There were four when I got off stage. I cleared three of them. I cleared them by deleting them, by putting them in a file, or by a quick, concise answer. And so if you work on our team, it's almost legendary or humorous that Dave doesn't answer emails. I say stuff like, sure. That's the whole email. Cool. That's the whole email. I used to just put the letter K, and then I found out that's like a smart aleck thing, and I didn't even mean for it to be, but I was just trying to be concise. K. Apparently that's like dissing somebody. K. I didn't know that. I did it for like two years before anybody told me. I don't use K anymore, but it's all right. It's all right. It's a cool yes and no. No is a good one. No. But everybody wants to know more. Well, it's a complete sentence though. No, we're not doing that. I got a DocuSign thing to sign, and they're like, we're going to have one of these signed for every events now. I'm like, no. Not doing that. We're not doing that. Looks like bureaucratic bull crap to me. No, we're good. I've done them for 35 years. No, we're good. No. Now, I will end up having to explain why I think this is stupid, and I'm not doing it, but that's okay. I'll do that later. No, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. And so, nope, nope, nope. One time I was sitting and having a cup of coffee, and I was all relaxed, and I sent a guy a paragraph, and my phone rang. He's like, are you mad at me? He goes, I've never gotten a paragraph from you ever. I was just relaxed and thought I'd tell him something, but no. I never get an email that long, but it's legendary. It's like a joke around here, and it's okay. You can be nicer than that or whatever, but my purpose is simple communication. You ask me what to do, I get a lot of stuff that they just want. I want to see it, but I'm not micromanaging. It's already done. It's already launched, but hey, Dave, we just wanted you to see this book cover. It just went out. Or here's the test we just ran, and here's the results, and we're going to go with this cover for Georgia's new book, okay, as an example. That's when I got last week, right? Okay, no, more than last week, four months ago. But anyway, I just look at it and go, oh, great job, guys, or something like that. Boom. It just keeps it moving, keeps it moving, keeps it moving, keeps it moving. So getting into all of your time can be one of the most important and intentional choices that you make as a leader. Pick some kind of a method where you do. Today I do not have an A, B, and C list. I haven't had in full disclosure for over a decade, but I do have a forced ranking of what I spend my time on. I'm very, very careful. Mine is my calendar. It's broken up into 15‑minute increments, and if something's on my calendar, it's more important until it's not. If someone brings something more important, we'll bump one of those things. But on and off of the calendar is where I manage all of my time. Because I'm doing something in those blocks of time that's running Ramsey. You know, I'm sitting with a project, we're working on a broken product line that's not profitable, and I'm walking through the whole thing with my muddy boots, tearing the butt off that dad gun P&L, we're going to fix this. I do not like red ink. It will make you go away. I don't like for me to be passionate with my math skills. I'm going to be in there with that team, no holds barred. We're going for it. My time blocks are how I do it today. You can do it however you want to do it, but you've got to do it. You will either tell your time what to do, or you will wonder where it went. There's no exception. For the brand new 24‑year‑old straight out of college, and they never had to do anything intentionally in their entire life except graduate, and now you've got to teach them how to live life. You're parenting them as their leader, or for you sage dogs that have been doing this a long time, and you're still chaotic and disorganized, and you've got to force rank some things. You've got to figure out what's important and get it done. If you're a member of elite, you can dive deeper into this. We now have a time management course that follows this line of thinking. You can go through this exact course again, and we're working on some time audit tools to help you with and show you how to do that. We help you with that process as well. So pretty fun stuff. So that's a very basic lesson. No information there that most of you in this room go, well, I never heard any of that. Most of you could have taught that lesson. I'm fine with that. I want you to rethink it for yourself, rethink it organizationally, and certainly rethink it for down your layers of leadership. Are they doing this? Because you should not be surprised to find the three layers down, it's being very poorly handled in most cases. Very few people manage their time well because very few people are successful. Hello. You know, it's the reason, again, we step back, we look at someone or some organization that's successful because they've been productive. It was not a lightning strike. It was not random. It was a series of things that they did, skills they developed, and that includes time management. We hope you enjoyed this special episode. And remember, better a wary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high-quality leaders. So take courage and lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for joining us on Entree Leadership.