You’re Wasting 81% Of Your Time (Here’s How To Fix It)

My name is Sui, I'm 21 years old, and I run a consulting business doing north of $3 million per year while balancing full-time university and D1 basketball in London, all at the same time. Everyone always asks how I manage it all, and they assume the answer is discipline, and I'm here to tell you that it's not. I'm not more disciplined than you, and I'm not smarter than you either. The only difference is I found a system that gets the most amount of output with the least amount of input. I do a full week of work in a single day, and once you understand this, you'll realize that you've been working wrong this entire time. In the next few minutes, I'm gonna hand you the whole thing. My entire Google Calendar setup, my Deep Work protocol, and the entire system that I use to do more while working less. I'll take you from the smallest tweak to the one that changed everything, so let's get into it. The first thing is the power of Deep Work. I don't work 12 hours a day. In fact, most of the times, I'm actually working around 5 to 7 hours, and I'm getting more done. When I understood Parkinson's Law, it changed everything for me. If you give yourself a week to do a one-hour task, you will likely stretch the workout, overcomplicate it, and procrastinate until the deadline. Uninterrupted three-hour Deep Work session in the morning of your day is by far the most important part of this entire process. I personally set a one-and-a-half-hour timer, and I work until the timer rings, and then I set a timer for five minutes to relax, drink a bit of water, and then I set another 1.5-hour timer, and I knock out three hours of work first thing in the morning. Now, it's easier said than done, so how do you get into this Deep Work flow state where everything feels like it's just coming to you? You need to have a simple routine to follow to where it doesn't feel like you're working, it just feels like it's part of your schedule. I personally wake up, and the first thing I do is I meditate for 10 minutes, I journal on what I'm grateful for, and then I get straight into work, no questions asked, and this has been my routine for the last year. I block out all distractions, meaning my phone is completely shut off, no one can reach me, and even people around me know that this is my time where no one can literally talk to me at all. You have to have that level of strictness with this specific part of your routine because every small distraction, every small minute thing is gonna take your attention away from the task at hand, and that's gonna make everything harder. You need to know the best case and the worst case scenario from this session and understand what you actually want out of it and what's considered productive, which leads to my second point, and it's to get rid of your to-do list. Your to-do list is probably full, and you think that because it's full, you're moving your needle forward, but the truth is, it's completely wrong. Every time you switch between tasks with, let's say, it's ideating to scripting, you don't realize it, but you are using a different side of your brain, and you leave what I call task residue. Every time you switch tasks, a residue stays in your brain and makes it harder for you to fully lock into this new thing that you're doing. For example, if I want to ideate something, and I'm writing down a bunch of ideas, and I'm looking on Instagram and YouTube for inspiration, and then I start scripting, what ends up happening is that I'm still distracted because my brain doesn't really know how to differentiate between ideation and scripting. Whereas if I just spent that time just purely scripting, and I prepared the ideations beforehand, that would have been a much more productive session. You want to do less tasks, but be more intentional about it. So, if I have a 2-3 hour workbook, instead of me ideating, scripting, and filming, I am just potentially ideating for the first 1.5 hours, and then for the next 1.5 hours, I'm scripting completely. Don't fall in a trap of trying to do so much that you stack your to-do list up, and you think that, oh, you're doing all these things, when in reality, you're just making it harder for yourself because the most productive people are not the people that actually do the most, they're the best prioritizers. Now, I want to show you my Google Calendar setup, and show you exactly how I've structured everything to get the most out of my time. Now, as you can see, it is very, very split up. I have Wednesday calls, and I have Friday calls, and that is when I stack every call back to back to back to back to back, and let me explain why. You will have a manager day, and you will have a maker day. A manager day is where you have a lot of calls, you have to talk to specific team members, clients, group calls, whatever the case may be, and the key here is that you are most productive when you have every single block in your calendar filled up with calls. If you have a back to back to back call, and then you have a one-hour slot, and then another call, then that one hour is completely wasted. Your brain can't fully focus on getting a task done in that one-hour slot because they know that they have a call in an hour, so they can't fully focus. On the other hand, there's the maker workflow. These are the days where you get ---- done. You're filming content, or you're studying for something. This is when you're in your zone of genius, and you're doing something. The maker does things that actually drive the business forward compared to the manager that actually maintains good communication, and you have to understand which hat you're wearing, and when you're trying to constantly switch between the manager and the maker hat in a single day, that's when it gets messy. What worked for me was prioritizing my maker time during the morning, and stacking the calls as far back as possible. So what I would do is I would look at my goal calendar, and I'd stack it from back to front, meaning I would stack it from 7 p.m. to 6 p.m. to 5 p.m. to 4 p.m., and if someone didn't book in 4 p.m. or 5 p.m., then I have until 6 p.m. to just do my maker schedule. This is what worked for me. I prioritized my mornings, and I did what took lower brain power later in the day because I don't need to be operating at 100% for my calls. I could be operating at 60%, 70%, and I'd still do an amazing job because I'm talking to a client. I'm getting the most out of them. I'm talking to a team. I have to do them anyway, so I don't need to do it first thing in the morning when I'm most energized. I'm saving that for the deep work that'll move the needle forward, and then later in the day, I'm taking the calls. Now, a few things to note here. Recurring meetings are absolutely useless, and you should delete them. I understand that my time as a founder should be spent taking as little calls as possible so that I can spend my time focusing on my clients, my fulfillment, and my marketing and my content. And so when you have these recurring meetings on your calendar, you force yourself to speak about things that are maybe not even important, which is completely useless compared to you doing another thing that could actually help the business. That means that you have to have the ability to actually say no, and that doesn't mean it's actually rude. Saying no means that you're protecting the real work that needs to be done, and for the sake of your company, the sake of your team, the sake of your business, that needs to happen. There has to be a point where you draw the line and you stop trying to please everyone and start pleasing yourself in a way where you prioritize your workflow and what needs to happen to get the business to a whole new level so that your team members can make the money that they want to make and your clients can achieve results that they want to achieve. My philosophy on this is calls are only needed when there's a lack of clarity, there's a lack of direction, and not everyone is on the same page, which is seldom the case, especially if you run a very, very solid company and you have good team culture. An exercise that I want you to do to really bring this point home is count the dollar per hour rate for every single one of your team members. Let's say you have 12 people on your team and let's say their dollar per hour rate is $100 per hour. Every one hour call that you have with your entire team, you are wasting $1,200. That is the opportunity cost of having your entire company on a single call instead of doing the work that they need to do. And so you need to really ask yourself, like, is this call worth $1,200 to get everyone on the same page? And if not, what could they be doing better? Could this be solved by a loom? Could this be solved with a text message? Does this actually need a call? Or is that unnecessary sludge that is getting in the way of them doing the work that they need to do that they already know they should do? And then when you add this up and you make a recurring meeting where you talk about bullshit that doesn't even matter, that's 1,200 times 4. Everything in business is about opportunity cost and the opportunity cost of allocating it here is huge compared to allocating it elsewhere. Now, this leads me to my third and final point, which is protecting your mind. I want you to stop accepting things just because they're quote-unquote normal. The small habits that you've normalized have made it hard for you to do the boring work that needs to be done in order to get to the next level. Everything that's high stimulation or high dopamine raises your dopamine baseline, which makes the boring work harder to actually do. There's small things that I do in order to minimize my phone usage, like making sure that I don't get any notifications whatsoever, always on do not disturb. I make my phone color more dull so it looks more boring. And I treat my phone and I look at it as if it's some type of weapon because it is. Every time that you pick up that phone, you don't realize it, but it's harming so much of your dopamine baseline that it's making it harder to just sit down for three hours and do the work. You fall to the level of your inputs and when you constantly scroll and you constantly are in a state of trying to get a new high, you can't be a good founder. You can't be someone that achieves great things. Curate the information and the amount of things that you consume on a day-to-day basis. Unfollow the people that have shitty content so that you're not inspired to make shitty content. Unfollow the people that have no benefit to your life. It sounds harsh, but if you want to achieve big ----, this is the way you got to go. You need to protect your idle time and, you know, embrace boredom. Instead of listening to music all the time, start listening to podcasts. These are all small things that add up and yes, it's hard. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but that's what it takes. Like that's generally what it takes. I'm not here to give you some tips and tricks and whatever. Like no, this is generally what it takes. If you want to scale a business to heights that people can't even fathom and people don't understand how you're doing it with everything that you got going on, this is what it generally takes. I follow these things religiously to build the life that I have today, to build the dream business that I have and serve the clients that I work with and every single point I seriously, seriously mean because I implement this myself. Hope you found value in this and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.