How I Manage My Time - The Tripartite System

If you feel like you're busy all day, but you're just not getting the important work done, then this video is for you. Now, this was one of my biggest bottlenecks, so I built a three-step system around this just for you. This is called the tripartite system. And towards the end of this video, I will have you audit your own time and schedule so you can find the leaks in your productivity and actually fix them. And by the way, I'm Dan. I'm a discipline coach and the founder of DisciplineOS, and I help people around the world with identity, discipline, and focus. So take some notes as well, because information without implementation is just productive procrastination. Now, let's get into it. Part number one, the foundation. So this is the important holy grail of all productivity, of all time management, and it goes like this. You need to know what actually matters. Everybody tries to do more. They think time management, productivity is doing more and more and more, but it's actually the opposite. It is doing less and less and less, removing and eliminating almost everything that just doesn't align with your goals and where you want to be. And as a result, what you'll find is you're just left with the top five things, the top things that just matter, and everything else doesn't matter. Now, why would you spend all your time focusing on things that don't really get you to your goal? And remember, an important part of this book is the distinction between deep work and shallow work. Not every task is equal and all tasks should be treated differently. There is a bucket of, you know, admin tasks, things that just don't really move the needle. And this is shallow work. Shallow work needs to be constricted. It has to have a limited time. And then the rest of your time throughout the day needs to be focused on deep work. So before you start managing and organizing your time, you need to know what you're managing and organizing your time for. So what are you actually trying to build? And what are you willing to give up for it? That is important because once you understand what your top priorities are, then you can manage your time around that. And aside from the distinction between deep work and shallow work, there's another important distinction in the world of productivity. This is the distinction between important and urgent. A lot of things are urgent, but they're not important. And these are the things you get swept away with. For example, you get a notification, you get a message, you get things that seem urgent, but they actually don't align with your goals. Now, let me give you an example on how important time management actually is. Let's say it takes you 100 hours to achieve success. 100 hours of practice. This could be coding, this could be working on your business, this could be, you know, anything. Think about this. If you spend five hours every single day working on your craft, how fast will you get there? So I'm no genius at math, but let me just do the math here. If it takes you five hours every single day and like a total of 100 hours, that is 20 days, right? Now think about if you doubled the time from five hours a day to 10 hours a day, how much faster would you get there? Half the time. It would take you 10 days instead of 20. Now on a small scale, this doesn't really matter. But on a big scale, this could be the difference between you reaching your goals in a year versus five years. Now think about this. Why on earth would you not want to reach your goal as fast as possible? That dream life that you have envisioned, that income, the business that you want to scale, the things you want to achieve. Why would you just make that wait and postpone it and push it off? Any reasonable person would just want to do everything in their power to bring that success as close to them as possible. Now I'm telling you proper time management is the difference in your success. So you need to just use the time that you have in your day to the best of your ability. And that starts with a time audit. Now I'll talk about this later in the video, but in our one-on-one discipline mentorship, where you get coaching from myself to manage your time, fix your focus and build a discipline required. We do time audits, distraction audits, environment audits and everything to just understand what is holding you back. What is taking your time mostly and what is distracting you the most. So now the next thing I want to talk about is choose your season. So you can't give everything your energy 100% of the time. There are seasons, seasons where you work more, seasons where you relax more. You know, you just have phases in life. I had a six month phase where I just didn't do anything else except YouTube. Like this was all I did from morning till the evening. The only time I would leave my house was to literally just go for a walk. Now I'm in a different phase of life where I have a shutoff routine after 7pm, meaning I work all the way up till 7pm. And then after 7pm, I reset so that the next day I can be even more productive. You see, sometimes work is the priority. Sometimes health is the priority. Sometimes your relationship is the priority. And sometimes you just need 100% of your time and attention to get your life back in the direction of your choosing. It is all about understanding what phase of life you are in and making sure your focus and your mindset are just dialed. So before we go on to part number two, where we're going to talk about time architecture, I want to talk about this. The circle around you, the people around you shapes everything. And what I mean by this is your environment. So a lot of the time, like a lot of time wasted is actually wasted where you're not physically wasting it, but you're mentally wasting it by worrying about things you can't control, by spending time with the wrong people, by thinking about the wrong things. In general, just worrying about outcomes that you can't even guarantee. For a long time, I was just focused on the views. I wasn't getting views. I focused on that and that made my mental health decline. So instead of focusing on the outcome of what I am doing, posting these videos and, you know, getting views and growing and all that stuff, I started to focus on the process. I started to focus on just like the filming, editing, scripting, the whole process of making the video and how that fulfills me. And when I started to get fulfillment from that, from the actual process instead of the outcome, I started to manage my time better as well. Because the reason for that is when you get clear about what you want, your energy starts to align. And this makes it easier for you to manage your energy. And time management is energy management. And by the way, if you're watching this video, this might be the last time management video that you ever need. So subscribe to the channel for weekly videos just like this to improve your focus, fix your discipline and change your identity so you can get to where you want to be. Part number two, the architecture. So let me start off by saying this. If something matters to you, you need to give it priority. You need to actually plan it out. And the best way that I manage my time is not through a complex calendar. It's not through like some fancy system that I'm only going to use for a week and then I'm going to forget about it. The best plan is the one that you can stick to for years. If you create the most nicest, like the most nice design and like fancy looking system, but it's so complex that like a weekend, you just, your brain just can't function around it. Then what is the point? Instead, just create such a simple system. Just write it, write down a list of your tasks. You know, it's just not that complex. Just like, just list out things you have to do for the day and just get them done. So everything starts with a pen and paper. Everything starts with your notebook. First of all, you need to write down the top five goals that you have. The top five things you want to achieve non-negotiable in the next three to six months. Get so clear on where you want to be. This is like before time management, this is important. And then after that, list out the top things you can do every single day to get closer to your goal. Like if you have a goal of, you know, scaling your business to 50K a month, what are the five things that if you do these things, you are going to get closer and closer to that goal and if you don't do these things, then the goal is like out of reach. It's unachievable. These are the five things. Could be four, could be six things, but whatever. These are the things that you need to be focusing on and planning your day around. Like we talked about in part one, time management is useless if you don't know what you're managing your time for. You need to have those top three life goals, the top things you want to achieve, so you can manage your time around them. So that when you come and create a schedule, create a planner, plan tomorrow, today, write down your tasks, list them in terms of priority. When you do that, it actually aligns and it actually makes sense. And this takes me to build around reality, not dreams. What I mean by this is a lot of people, they just think in terms of like, yeah, this would be nice to achieve. This would be, oh, I would love to become, you know, rich and successful and famous. I would love to achieve all these things and, you know, get to where I want to be. But like, I would love to doesn't cut it. What actually makes a difference is your physical input. That is why discipline and identity are so important because I've spoken and I've seen and I've like talked to so many people who had all these goals and dreams and like just talking and talking and talking. But at the end of the day, it's like when there's no action, you can't achieve what you want. So with time management, you need to understand that physical inputs equals your output. The results that you see, the income that you see, the business that you scale, the life and routine that you organize and optimize. A lot of people build schedules for the person they wish they were instead of the person they actually are. Think about that. The system that you use to manage your time, to manage your routine, it is designed not for the version of you right now. There is an incompatibility between, you know, your systems and you. So part of the system to effectively manage your time, the tripartite system, is number one, first layer, building the foundation. Understanding like what are your top goals? Why are you managing your time? For what are you even managing your time? This is priority, setting the priorities in your life. And then number two is the architecture, building a system around that, tailored to you right now, that is simple, that is effective. A system that you could use every day for the next five to 10 years. Because I'm sure you remember the habit trackers you made 10 years ago or two years ago, that you don't even use. And the next important thing I want to talk about is creating rules and not just plans. A plan tells you what you'd like to achieve, but a rule tells you what you need to do when things get messy. And that is where your system beats your daily goals. You've definitely heard of the saying set systems instead of goals. Because you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Now you are going to have days when life gets messy. You are going to have days when you have to do something. Things take up your time, the randomness of the day just comes in. Now at that time, that is crucial what you do. That is what you need a bad day protocol. Chances are a lot of you are managing your time for the good days, for days when everything is right, for days when like you have all the time in the world, days when everything just goes your way. But what about managing your time? What about creating a plan or a system? What about doing all these things when a day doesn't go your way? You know, when like things are messy, when things don't just like fall into place. You need a good day protocol, which is like time management for good days for like your average day. And then you also need bad day protocols, which is time management for your worst days. So in general, create rules and not plans. And I'll tell you why. For myself, I used to work a lot and achieve not that much. I would just like do random tasks and I would work and work and put all this effort. And I would just at the end of the day, like I was stuck with my revenue. I was stuck with my mindset, with just my growth in general for months. And it all changed when I set myself this one rule, work less and achieve more. So back to Deep Work by Cal Newport, amazing book. I would read it 100% twice. What I do is I set finish lines for every single work block. I make sure there are no distractions. There's nothing that is gonna pull me away from focus. I start off with the hardest task of the day first. I always create more than I consume. I put my phone in another room, 100% always. I set a shutoff routine after five to 6 p.m., which means that instead of working at 60% productivity and focus for like the whole day, why not just work at 100% for a shorter amount of time? This way you can be 100% productive, achieve everything you need to achieve for the day. And then after 6 p.m., you can reset. You can take a day off. You know, you can like chill so that when you go to sleep and wake up the next day, you can start off at a high level of productivity. So before we get into the biggest and most important part of this video, which is the audit, part number three, I wanna talk about this last thing. Decide what gets sacrificed. Think about this in terms of time. First of all, I wanna tell you something very important. When it comes to time management, like you have 86,400 seconds every day. Let's say every single day you were given $86,400. If you lost some of that, right? If you lost maybe five or 10,000, would you throw the rest away? Of course you wouldn't. So when it comes to your time, what happens is you waste like an hour, you waste two hours. And because of that, you feel the need to waste the whole day. Or maybe you have a bad hour or like 10 minutes where something bad happens. You have a bad argument. You have a conflict. You know, you feel confused. You see like a bad news, bad news comes in. A lot of the times you let like 10 minutes take away the rest of time, take away all the other 86,400 seconds. The same thing goes with time management. One wasted hour doesn't mean you have to waste the rest of the day. One bad 10 minute conversation doesn't mean you have to feel bad for the rest of the day. So treat your time like money because it is like money. To make more money, you need to spend time doing something, which means that time equals money. Think about that. Now, another thing is every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else that happens in the same time. There is the law of balance. If I say yes to going out with my friends, then I am saying no to potentially locking in for another five hours. Now, again, from part number two, this always depends on what type of season you are in. You just need to be conscious of what you are giving up when you say yes to something and when you say no to something else. When you say no to something, you have a time and space where you can say yes to something else. When you say yes to something, you are taking time away from something else you could be doing. So always ask yourself, am I sacrificing for something that aligns with my goals? So part number three, the audit. So this part is like an audit basically. Number one is look at the data. We need to look at numbers and feedback, not just feeling. You cannot manage your time based on, oh, I felt productive. Oh, I felt good. Don't tell yourself you had a productive day. Look at the actual data. So right now, as you're watching this video, take out your notebook and just write down, what did you actually do today? Or if it's the morning for you, think about yesterday. What did you say you were going to do? What did you plan on doing? And what did you actually follow through and finish? Think about your day in terms of hours. Break your day up into hour by hour by hour so you can find out the leaks. Now take out your phone. You might be watching this video on your phone or it's probably next to you. Pull out your phone and then look at your screen time. Just look at the data. Look at the... Maybe it's three hours. Maybe it's six hours on your phone. Now those six hours, that is time. It might not seem like a lot. It might pass by so quickly, but I'm telling you, it's a lot of time. So how much time did you spend on your phone? What did you actually do on your phone? And does that align with your goals? And second thing here, check the gap between executing and saying. If you want to manage your time like the top 1%, you need to realize that there's a gap a lot of the times between what you say and what you do. So number one, find out how big is this gap on your average week. If me, Dan, I came and I watched how you live your life for seven days, I spent seven days with you. Would I just like believe if you told me your goals, would I believe that you're actually serious about them? That's a good question. Think about that because you might be thinking I want this goal. You might be thinking I want to scale the income. I want financial, mental, physical freedom. But then you might be just scrolling TikTok for six hours and it just like it doesn't align. And the next thing here is don't try to fix everything. Don't try to fix 10 things at once. Just isolate one thing, one leak, fix it and then move on to the next. With time management, you need to find your leaks because think of a bucket, right? If you want to pour water into the bucket, but it has all of these leaks, the more water you pour, the more water is going to come out and leak. In this case, the water is like your goals. It is your priorities. It is the results that you want. You're trying to fill the bucket, but it's like more water is leaking than actually coming in. So the first thing you want to do is you want to fix your time leaks. Identify what are the one to three biggest time wasters. It could be your phone. It could be Netflix nights. It could be a lot of things, but just identify what are those biggest, biggest things that are taking most of your time. That is where you start and optimize the bottleneck. For example, what is one thing you've been doing repeatedly every single day, but that you know you need to change? Now, when I look back at the time where I actually made the most change in my life, it usually wasn't because I changed my schedule or I changed my productivity system, but it was usually an accountability change. For a long time, my best friend and I, we talked about meeting up, creating content, you know, building up the businesses and scaling and all that stuff. It was all talk until we actually made it happen. And just having that It's the same thing. Like if you go to the gym alone and you just try to figure out everything by yourself, it's going to take you a long time to see results. Instead of trying to do it alone and getting the same results, you can have a coach by your side who helps you get there. And that's exactly what the Discipline Mentorship is for. If you know the importance of time management, of focus, of discipline, of productivity, of identity, the link is in the description below. You want to watch that training over there. There's a free video over there and then you can apply to book a call. Your level of success never exceeds your level of discipline. Take care and you got this.