growthink s Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs: How to Get More Done, Make More Money, and Take More Time Off

Transcription

1 growthink s Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs: How to Get More Done, Make More Money, and Take More Time Off

2 Welcome to Growthink s Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs. In this audio I m going to teach you numerous incredibly powerful techniques to quickly skyrocket your productivity and success. Not only is your personal productivity going to sky rocket, but I m going to show you how to implement these techniques with your employees, your co-workers and other team mates, which will result in exponential productivity increases for you and your organization. Growthink s Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs includes three things. First, it includes this audio file so you could most easily learn the Productivity System. Secondly, it includes a complete transcript of this audio file so you can 1) Read the materials for even better understanding and internalization of materials, and 2) So you can quickly reference specific parts of the materials and anything that you want to go over and get to very quickly, you have the transcript, and 3) Thirdly, the System includes a 30-day Productivity Action Workbook. The workbook is going to get you started to achieving peak productivity. As with everything else, the key here is the first step is what you re doing now. Listen to the audio. You just got to get peak productivity into your daily routine and make it a habit. So, let s get started. Houston, we have a problem. Those were the famous words that were said by Apollo 13 pilot Jack Swigert during his mission to the moon in What happened was that there was a fault in the electrical system which produced an explosion, which caused a loss of electrical power and a failure in both oxygen tanks, so the astronauts on Apollo 13 seemed doomed, as many of you have seen in the great Apollo 13 movie with Tom Hanks. Getting the astronauts home safely required new software to be written immediately by the NASA software engineers in the United States. Now, fortunately, the NASA team had created similar types of software in the past. Unfortunately, with all hands on deck, that software in the past had taken three months to complete on average. They had to create it in three days. In fact, the NASA engineers faced with the possibility of their crew dying in

3 outer space were able to create the software in just three days, and the astronauts returned home safely. Now, I want you to think about three days. What should have taken three months or 90 days they generated a 30-time increase in productivity. I want you to really understand what that means. A 30-time increase in productivity means that they can do a year s work in just 12 days. In just 12 days, you take off the other 350+ days and you get a year s worth of work of done. At that pace, in one month, they could have accomplished three years of work. In one year, they would have accomplished 30 years worth of work. Just imagine what you and your organization can do if every year you are accomplishing thirty years of work. You will simply demolish your competition. You will simply be unbelievably successful. Now, are you going to increase your productivity by 30 times? Are you working 24 hours a day against the clock to prevent the death of your friends? No, you are not. And you are not going to get a 30-time productivity increase from this course, in this system. But you can definitely get a twotime, three-time and even four-time increase in your productivity from yourself and your team. I m going to show you just how to do that. And the key here is that all the great ideas and tactics in the world that you and your team might come up with - all these great ideas and tactics don t mean a thing if you can t effectively execute on them. Now, what can you accomplish if you have more time? What can your company accomplish? I m going to show you now how you are going to accomplish everything that you dream of. Everything that you and your company want to accomplish by implementing the techniques and tips and principles I m going to share with you now to dramatically maximize your productivity. So the first area and the first way that you are going to maximize your productivity is a very, very simple technique of simply setting goals. The most important step to achieving success and maximizing your productivity is setting and documenting goals. Research has found that only 3% of Americans every year document their goals. I mean, write down your goals and really look at them. It turns out that those 3% are the 3% of Americans that control 97% of the wealth. The correlation is extremely high. The first step that you need to do is set goals.

4 Written goals keep you and your team accountable, committed, and focused. Once again: Written goals, keep you and your team accountable, committed, and focused. You need to have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual goals for yourself and your company. And you actually need to start with your 5-year goals so you can figure out where you want to go be in five years. And then, you really start spending time on your annual goals. Annual goals are the most important, as they shape the rest. But you need to look even five years out where you want to be so you can set the most effective annual goals. I want to talk to you now about the three keys to effective goals because just saying goal is not enough. First off, your goal needs to be specific - not vague. Thus, it must be clear and it must be measureable. Secondly, your goals must have a time frame and a deadline. And thirdly, your goal must be aggressive, meaning not so easy. You need to dream big to inspire yourself and others. Now, to give you an example of a goal. This will be a non-business goal. I ll give you a weight loss goal that probably everyone can relate to. A terrible goal would be I m going to lose weight this year. A better goal would be, I m going to lose 25 pounds by June 19 th. This is a very clear goal - you said 25 pounds. It s very clear. It s also measureable. I gave you a timeframe or deadline June, and 25 pounds for me, or whoever it is, that would be an aggressive goal for a lot of people. You then need to revisit your goals - your annual goals - every three to six months. It is okay to modify your goals and/or extend your completion dates. You don t fail. You need to understand this. You do not fail when you do not reach a goal by its completion date. You fail only if you give up, okay? That is why we don t say let s set realistic goals and realistic oftentimes means easy. You need to set aggressive goals and you really need to strive to achieve that goal by a certain date. But and this is an important but you need to consistently reassess your goals. The markets are changing. People are changing. You may modify that goal. You may extend the deadline. So, you are not going to beat yourself up if you do not hit a goal. You are going to extend the deadline. You are going to figure out what other resource you need to achieve that goal.

5 So, we talked about goal setting in your workbook when you start creating your goals and getting them on paper so that you can successfully achieve them. Next are the psychological keys to achieving your goals. What I want you to do we re going to you ask to work on your workbook - is to write down your three biggest business goals that you want to accomplish in the next five years, and the three biggest business goals that you want to accomplish in the next year. Now, you really should do the same exercise with your personal goals as well, which might or should at least include some of your business goals. So personal goals will be things like, Spending more time with my family. Once again, we want to be very specific in terms of the number of hours per day or week or month. Personal goals can include things like you health, etc. Right now, let s write about business goals here. You can do personal as well. Once again, I want you to write down your three biggest business goals that you want to accomplish in the next five years, and the three biggest business goals that you want to accomplish in the next year. The next thing that you are to do is you want to write down your goals in the present tense. So we talked about goals being specific, having a deadline, and being aggressive. Now we re talking about present tense. Okay? So, one example would be, I generate $1 million in sales of my XYZ product by December 31 st of this year. So I generate. I create. I sell. I recruit. I develop. Not I will try or I would like but I generate. I, then the verb - present tense. Then, I want you to take your three goals and put them in a piece of paper. I want you to type them up. I want you to put them in a nice big font. I want you to read that paper aloud at least once everyday. I want you to post it in your office so your employees can see it. Right now I m sitting at my desk. I m looking at my wall and I see my annual goals. I can see my three big goals written in big font. Whenever one of my employees walks into my office, they see that. Whenever I walk into their office, I see their goals. We are all reciting our goals aloud - at least everyday. While it seems hokey and while I found this concept hokey at first - when you keep saying your goal, you keep cementing it in your mind. It keeps focusing you. It keeps driving you to achieve it. Another key tip in addition to posting it in a place that you see it everyday, in addition to reading them aloud, is that I want you to visualize yourself achieving the

6 goals and sit back and spend time looking at it. What does it mean? What will it look like when you generate that 1 million dollars in sales of whatever product it is that you have as your goal? The more you think about it - the more you visualize yourself achieving your goals - the more likely you are to achieve them. Now, that s what I want you to do for yourself. In terms of writing down your goals, saying them aloud everyday, and visualizing them. And for your employees, I want you to do something similar. In this system here, I am talking to you as a business owner, an entrepreneur, and also an individual that is looking to progress. Maybe you don t have employees, and maybe it s something to do with your superiors or your co-workers, or when you get employees in the future. So when I say for your employees, if you don t have employees now, something that you can do with your co-workers or your employees in the future. All of your employees need to have goals that you agree with. Key point here is that goals of most employees are not congruent with what most business owners and managers think they should be. What I m talking about here is that if you have employees right now, I can guarantee you that if you walk around and say, What are your three biggest goals this year?, either your employees don t have goals, or those goals are different than what you think they should be. And if those goals are different they are not congruent - then there is no way that you are going to be successful or that your organization is going to be successful. So what you need to do is to have your employees also write out their three biggest annual goals. Once again, we need do the same things we talk about before. We want to make sure that they are specific, have a time frame or a deadline, are aggressive, and are written down in the present tense. You need to meet with each of your employees to ensure that you agree with them. You agree with those three goals, and you need to work them to modify them then your employees need to post those goals in a prominent place by their desks so that they see that everyday - so that you see it, their co-worker see it. They need to start saying it aloud. Key tip here is that you never ever state your goals too much. You can never state them too much. I want you to imagine that everyone in your organization was referred to by their goals. So let s say there was a guy Tom who s in charge of generating leads and rather than calling him Tom, you called him the guy who will

7 generate 100 new sales leads per week. So if want to get Tom s attention, you say, Hey, guy who s going to generate at least 100 sales leads per week! Do you know where the ruler is? or Hey, guy who is going to generate 100 new sales leads per week! Do you know where Bob is? If you consistently refer to Tom by his goal - by his number one goal - I will guarantee you that he starts to really internalize that goal and starts to think of himself as the person that yes - he IS going to generate 100 new sales leads per week because that s what he hears constantly. That s what people see him as the person who s in charge of doing that. So when you keep hearing, seeing, and visualizing your goals, you are much more likely to achieve these goals. Now, I m not saying that you need to do that and call somebody by that name. But I want you to understand that this process of just writing down your goals, saying them aloud, publicly showing them, will allow you to first absolutely critical step of achieving your goals. And Peak Productivity is about achieving goals. Amphetamines or something that s going to make you work three times faster - that s not what we want. That s not what this is about here, okay? It s not about working two times faster. It s about working much, much smarter, and you need to set that goals. Goals are what you are working towards. If you don t know where you are going, you are never going to get there. You need to understand what your goals are in order to get there. Now, the next thing that I want to talk about is creating plans. Goals that we just talked about - goals are dreams with deadlines. Plans, on the other hand, define what needs to be accomplished to turn those dreams into reality. So what are the three keys to plans? Plans must be documented. They must be broken down into smaller, actionable steps. And plans must be measureable. Must be documented, broken down to smaller actual steps, and measureable. Documented simply means writing them down. Broken down to smaller actionable steps - what this means is that you need to think about all the smaller steps that need to be accomplished in order to reach that goal. So let s say your goal is to take that new product to market. You need to break that down to into steps. So possible steps would be designing the new product. Creating a prototype. Beta testing the product. Improving the product based on customer beta testing feedback. Finding distributors for this product. Creating marketing materials for the product, etc. So you need to breakdown your bigger goals into smaller actionable steps. And thirdly, I

8 talked about measurable. You must be able to measure your progress towards achieving your goals. So, if in the next 12 months you want to take a new product to market, you create your actionable steps. You say, in month one we re going to design a product. In month two and three, we re going to create a prototype, and in month four, we re going to beta test, and in month five, we re going to improve the product, etc. You break it down to smaller tasks and then you are able to measure your progress. So in month three, where are you? Are you where you expected to be in month three? Are you before that? After that? What have you accomplished? It needs to be measureable. I have two tips that I want to share with you on this point here. Tip number one is that old plans would be converted into smaller tasks. I will discuss this in the next section. You want to start by breaking the first part of that plan into much smaller tasks. For example, the plan to write a book starts with writing the first chapter, page, or paragraph. And too many plans go awry right away - using the book example - when somebody says, Okay. I want to write a 12-chapter book in the next year, which is good thinking, and then they start with Okay, I m going to write chapter one this month, and they never get to it because they didn t break it down into an even smaller part. So rather than saying, I will write the first chapter, you really want to break it down to I want to write the first page, or even just the first paragraph to get it started. You need to break down these plans into very small tasks. Tip number two - which relates to the example that I just gave you - is because taking that first step toward achieving a plan is the hardest, make it easy. So many people are trying to quit smoking, lose weight, launch a new product, and it's very, very hard to achieve a new plan. The biggest tip that I can give is to make the first step really, really easy. Once again, with the book example. The first step should not be writing the first chapter. That is very hard; it takes a long time and you might start to get discouraged. Rather, make the first step - coming up with a temporary title. Not even the final title just a temporary working title. Maybe the next step is writing the first paragraph. Maybe the next step is writing the first page, and then your plans would get harder and harder as you build momentum. The hardest thing is always to take the first step and get yourself in the habit of investing time each and every day to achieve a goal. So you need to start small.

9 Break everything out. Do some of the easiest things first to get the momentum going, and then you ll start achieving your goals. Now, the next key section that I want to cover is creating your overall to-do list. To recap I mention those goals are dreams with deadlines. I also mentioned that plans define what need to be accomplished to turn those dreams into reality. And now, to-do lists define the individual tasks that when completed progress towards fully executing on your plans and realizing your goals. So let me give you a weight loss example again. So let s say, your goal is to lose 25 pounds in a year. That is a very challenging goal - 25 pounds in one year. And anyone who says they are going to lose 25 pounds in a year and doesn t have a plan and doesn t have a to-do list has no shot of achieving that objective and that goal. So the goal is 25 pounds a year. A good plan would be losing a half a pound a week. That s a reasonable plan. Losing a half pound a week. And now, on our to-do list in terms of the individual tasks - our to-do list today is to exercise 30 minutes today and eat a healthy lunch. So you could see, you take that big goal, you create monthly plans and annual plans broken down to months and smaller periods, and then you create a to-do lists which are the individual tasks - like exercising 30 minutes today and eating a healthy lunch - that allow you to achieve your goals. Now, what you need to do is you need to set up and keep a big to-do list of everything you need to do regardless of its importance. You call this the overall to-do list. And what you are doing here - and hopefully you already have some sort of to-do list, and if not, this will be your first to-do list - you start out by purging your brain and writing down all tasks that are nagging you. There s so much information in your brain. Things that you want to do. Things that you want to accomplish. Writing them down into your overall todo list allows you to concentrate better on the tasks at hand. It also reduces a whole bunch of stress, and it clears your mind so you are much more creative and much more effective. Now, if you have something nagging that pops into your mind while you are doing something, then you need to write it down. That nagging is hurting your concentration. I remember years ago, the company that had given me my oil burner insurance went out of business. I had to get new oil tank insurance, and what happened was that I didn t do it right away. I didn t write it down and I remember being in an

10 important meeting and all of a sudden, it just pops into my mind. Hey don t forget to get a new oil tank insurance and that hurts your concentration. One of my favorite stories is the story of the truck that was stuck under the bridge. The father was sitting in massive traffic behind the truck with his little girl in the car and all the policemen and fire-fighters are trying to yank the truck out from under the bridge and the little girl whose mind was clear because she wasn t in a rush she was not worried about 50 other things. She was not worried about all the traffic. She came up with the idea to let the air out of the tires of the truck. They let the air from the tires of the truck. They easily dislodged it from under the bridge. The point once again is that when you have so much on your mind, when it s not clear, you can t think clearly. You need to create this overall to-do list that purges your brain and gets everything that you are thinking about - all these to-do items that reflect the plans and your goals - you need to get them into your overall to-do list. Once again, things that bother you and pop into your brains at times going forward, they need to be written down. Getting a life insurance policy. If that has been nagging you for a while - am I saying do it today? No. I m saying get it down on your overall to-do list. That s the key to the first step. And then you don t have to worry about forgetting about it. It s always going to be on your overall to-do list. The next step once you have your overall to-do list is creating prioritized weekly and daily to-do list. Now before you talk about what goes on your weekly and daily to-do lists, I want to talk about how you prioritize and how you start figuring out the priorities on your overall to-do list. And the framework that is used a lot here is the four-quadrants framework. The Four Quadrants of Things to Do. And I want you to visualize this as four quadrants - four boxes making up a larger rectangle, and the two core attributes are things that are important or not important, and things that are urgent, and things that are not urgent. And so in that top quadrant are things that are important and urgent. These are typically the daily fire fighting exercises that most business owners and employees take care off. This is the upset client call. It s urgent, it s important, you need to deal with it. And so a lot of people s time is spent in important and urgent issues.

11 The second quadrant is important and not urgent, and this is your priorities. This is the area that is left undone more often than not. Important but not urgent. This is executing on your annual plan. This is conducting employee performance reviews. This is taking the productivity course. So I commend you right now that you are doing something that is important to you - and yet not urgent but is going to massively improve your success and the success of your company and your teams. But, it is not urgent that you do it. And I commend you on that. The third quadrant is not important, yet urgent. This is the telephone call from a prospective vendor. These are things that are not important but they are right in your face. This is the co-worker or employee saying, Hey, do you have a minute? I need a hand with something. That s not really important not really going to get you towards achieving your goals. That not important, yet urgent. And then there is finally not important and not urgent quadrant which is taking a coffee break. Reading the paper. The key point here is that you absolutely need to prioritize quadrant number two with the important and not urgent tasks. You need to start judging all of your to-do tasks in your overall to-do list and prioritize those that are the important yet not urgent tasks that move you closer to achieving your goal. I just want you to understand how most people work and why most companies and business leaders don t achieve the success they want is because they start working on the important and urgent items that need to be done. And when they are done with those, they quickly go to the not important and urgent, and not important and not urgent. They answer the telephone call. They have a coffee break. They chit chat with their co workers. They answer s that are not that important. They don t block off and spend the time every single day on the business building activities - the important yet not urgent activities that allow your company to grow. Another framework that I want to present to you another way of looking at this one is the Four Quadrants, and the second thing is known as the Pareto Principle, which is as most of you know is the Rule. And the point here is that 20% of the things that you do result in 80% of the success you have in your business, and it works with pretty much everything. Once again - 20% of your actions result in 80% of the results. And so simply

12 focusing more on that 20% - making that 20% 40%, making it 60% - that could triple your productivity right off the bat. So you really need to think about what are the 20% of tasks that you do that result in 80% of the results, and continue to focus on that. Make that 20, 40, 60, 80, 100% of your time. That would be a five time increase in productivity. Focus on that 20%. So to reiterate, when you are creating your daily to-do list, once again, you re going to be taking your daily to-do list because your brain purge of everything you need to do and you need to take that overall list and convert it into your weekly and daily to-do list. You always need to be asking yourself this one question: What is the most valuable use of my time? And then make sure that these priorities go to the top of your overall to-do list. So first thing you do is you take your overall to-do list and figure out which other tasks on your to-do list which are the items on your to-do list - that are in the 20% that is going to result in the 80% results that are the most valuable use of your time. And you need to prioritize those. Next, you need to breakdown those high priority items into small manageable tasks and this is the key of the to-do list - the small manageable tasks. I m going to give credit to this phrase, to the author Mark Twain. Mark Twain said the following. The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and then starting on the first one. So once again, if your goal is to write a book and to establish yourself and your company as authorities - if that is a key priority it s not going to be accomplished in one day, and it s way too big for your daily or weekly to-do list. So you need to break it down. You need to break down your priority tasks into smaller tasks that can be completed more quickly. Obviously, no individual task can take more than 8 hours because you re working an 8- hour day. Obviously, everyday is going to have interruptions unless you are working off site. And so you need to break down your tasks preferably into tasks that can be completed in two hours or less. And so what we are doing is setting our big goals, creating our plans, and then we are really breaking out those plans into priorities, and breaking them out into small manageable tasks.

13 What are the 50 or 100, two-hour projects that make up accomplishing these tasks? And so, the big task is going to be prioritized on your overall to-do list, and then within that you go have your running list of what those smaller tasks are to complete the bigger tasks, and those are going to go on to your weekly and your daily to-do list. So, let s start with your weekly to-do list. Every Friday or before the end of the week - You cannot start Monday morning not knowing what you are going to do. So the Friday before each week, I want you to go through your overall to-do list and identify the 4 to 10 main tasks that you are going to accomplish in the coming week. This is your weekly to-do list. So you have your overall to-do list. You take your 4 to 10 main tasks that you want to accomplish and you push them to your weekly to-do list. Next, everyday - you are going to do this every single day - you need to do your daily to-do list. And ideally, you are going to create this list the night or the day before. I shouldn t have said ideally. I should have said you have to. You have to go into each day knowing what exactly what you are going to do and having a plan of attack. So the night before, the day before, before you leave for the day, you are going to figure out, look at your weekly to-do list, and you are going to transfer items into tomorrow s daily to-do list. You need to make sure on your daily to-do list that you spending at least one hour of your day, if not much more, on your priorities - on those important but not urgent items, the 20% of items which are typically the most valuable uses of your time. One hour a day is the absolute minimum that cannot be brushed aside. Obviously, as you get better and better at this, I d love to see, four, five, six hours a day of highly productive time that allow you to grow your company much faster because you re working on those business building activities. You are working on your business rather than in your business in dealing with those in the business, urgent important/ not important tasks. Once again, I want to make sure that everything on your daily to-do lists is completeable. That means that you don t have tasks that take more than 8+ hours to complete. The ideal tasks take 30 min, 60 min, 90 min or 2 hours

14 max. For tasks that are larger than that, then break them down to smaller tasks. I also want you to understand that when you have your daily to-do lists with multiple 30- or 60-minutes to-do items/tasks, crossing them over your to-do list gives you a ton of renewed energy. When its 11am and you ve already knocked off four items, you are moving. You are excited, you are pumped. You are beating the clock. You are ahead of schedule. So you want to have smaller items on to-do lists. You want to knock them off and you will feel very, very good about yourself. It s going to give you energy, and you are going to be much more productive for the rest of the day. Now, I want you to revisit your big overall to-do lists once a week, or once a month. Add tasks. Obviously you can add tasks whenever a new thing pops in your head. You can purge it. You can write over your to-do list whenever you want. But on a weekly and monthly basis, you want to go back to that big list and reprioritize. Figure out what things need to be prioritized for the coming week. You need to breakdown those key things into smaller time chunks or smaller tasks, and start placing them on your daily to-do list and your weekly to-do list. Each and every periodically, you keep going back to your overall list - adding to it, reprioritizing, pushing them into your weekly and pushing your daily to-do list. Tip on your daily to-do list: When going to sleep the night before, visualize yourself completing the next day s to-do list. This is the second time I mentioned visualization. Visualization is a critical technique and this has been used in the sports world forever - visualizing yourself hitting a home run, or lifting that 500- pound weight, or whatever that is you re trying to achieve. Visualization - it works. It works and it works. And so, when you before the end of the day, you map out what the next day s to-do list is, and that night before going to sleep, you start closing your eyes. Start visualizing yourself achieving everything on tomorrow s to-do list and how you are going to feel. It s going to allow you to relax when you go to sleep, and the next day it s just going to be easier to achieve it because you have already seen yourself achieve it. And visualization works. I will give you an example or a story about visualization. They took some high school basketball players and broke them up into three groups. They did a one month experiment. To the first group, they said, We

15 want you to practice shooting free throws - just free throws, 30 minutes a day, every day for the next month. The next group, they said, We don t want you to do anything for the next 30 days. No playing basketball. And to the third group, they said, We also don t want you to play basketball at all for the next 30 days. But I want you to spend 5 minutes a day visualizing yourself taking a free throw and swishing it - getting it right in the basket without hitting the rim. Results after a month - the group that practiced 30 minutes a day improved 24%. The group that didn t practice improve 0%, as you might expect. The group that spent 5 minutes a day visualizing, getting a free throw in, swishing it, improved 23% - one percent less than the group who actually spent half an hour every day for a month actually doing the exercise. Visualization is that powerful. The next technique and series of tips that I want to give you revolve around scheduling every minute of everyday and working in time chunks. And this is absolutely critical. This to me was a breakthrough event and technique that I ve used to massively increase my productivity and the productivity of those around me. The most successful people place tremendous value on their time and are always on the clock. The example I give is, if you want to have a meeting with someone like Donald Trump or Richard Branson, they re scheduled down to every 15 minutes. It s not like you are going to say, Hey, can we meet next Thursday? and expect them to say, Yeah, my day is free. There is no way. They place a tremendous amount of value on every minute of their day. They are highly scheduled to be as productive as possible. And why is this the case? Scheduling allows you to prioritize and complete high-value work that otherwise gets pushed off to do the daily fire fighting - the daily urgent critical or non critical, important and non important items that we call fire fighting - and when you start doing the fire fighting what happens is that you push off and you blow off those key priorities. Scheduling forces you to accomplish those priorities. It ensures that the key items on your to-do list get accomplished because they are written right in your schedule. From 2pm to 3pm tomorrow, I m going to meet with my marketing team to create a new marketing plan. That is a critical item that allows you to be more successful. It is a very important but not urgent item, but we are going to

16 achieve it tomorrow as on the calendar. It is scheduled. Once again, the rule. Scheduling allows you to double or triple or quadruple the time you spend on those 20% of things that really back your business and allow you to reach your goal. Another reason why scheduling is so important is it forces discipline to perform key ongoing high-value added tasks. For example, conducting employee performance reviews. Critically important, rarely done, rarely done correctly or periodically. By scheduling, I m going to spend every third Wednesday at 3pm or the third Wednesday of every month at 3pm - I conduct employee performance reviews. Get it on your calendar. That s the only way that is going to be done, and it s going to get done month after month after month and you will start receiving massive benefits. Scheduling, forced discipline. Scheduling helps you work in time chunks which is highly effective. Once again, the book example. So many people dream of writing a book, but most don t. By blocking off time chunks - by blocking off just one hour a day - and that one hour a day, you just need to write one page in your book. At the end of the year, you ll have completed 365-page book. And you need to breakdown those time chunks. If you give yourself an hour a day to do something, you will have so many hours 365 hours a year or 200 if you only do it during work days. Just imagine what you could accomplish with 200 hundred hours. So you need to work in time chunks. When you work in time chunks, you can concentrate on the tasks at hand. You re much more effective. Also Parkinson s Law - absolutely critical. Parkinson s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted to performing. And what that means is that is if you have three hours to complete the task, most likely, it s going to take you three hours to complete that task. And most people go through their day without a schedule - without a minute by minute, hour by hour schedule - and thus, they don t have these deadlines and they take a lot longer to complete a task. Parkinson s Law says that if you have to work on a report, you allocate 3 hours, you are going to work during that 3 hours, and you are always going to stress at the end and procrastinate a little bit and really

17 work hard that last 15 minutes to accomplish that goal within the 3-hour period. Now if you only give yourself an hour to accomplish that, you are going to work harder during the hour. You can be much more focused. You are going to complete virtually the same work or even better work - in that hour. By setting deadlines for tasks, you complete the tasks faster. You are much focused on it. You are racing against the clock, but not in a bad way. We are not talking about making stress here. It is a friendly -competition against the clock. It is 3:19 - I have to complete this project by 4 o clock because by 4 o clock, I have to get to the next meeting. What do I have to do to get this done? Your mind starts working and you accomplish it, and it s fun. You are much more successful. Most people cannot get work done at work since they are constantly getting pulled into meetings and conversations and have a minute to discuss this and that, and please respond to this right away. A set calendar allows you to avoid all this - all these constant interruptions. A set calendar allows you to focus on one task at a time and completely focus on that task so it gets completed faster and it gets completed better. Conversely, numerous studies have shown that multitasking actually reduces productivity and actually reduces performance. In fact, a studies by the Institute of Psychiatry at a King s College in London found that people that were constantly interrupted by s and instant messages - after they took a test, after being bombarded with s and messages and multi tasking - they did less, they did worse on that test than a group of individuals that were high on marijuana. So you are going to have higher concentration and higher productivity if you have been smoking marijuana than if you were multitasking. And that s why you cannot multi task. You can multi task if one task is not really a task at all. It is a passive task. So if you want to talk about multitasking of driving to work something that is very, very easy to do - and listen to an audio tape at the same time. That you can do, because you are driving to work is something that is a passive task. Anything that is an active task you cannot possibly multitask. Successful people - what do they do? They do one thing at a time. That s it - one thing. They do the most important things. They do the priorities. They do that 20% that really matters and they continue on working on important tasks until they are completed. And you can do this, too, when you have

18 designed small time chunk tasks - when you break things down into one- or two-hour projects, and you put those on your schedule on your daily schedule so you get this done. This productivity system that I m going through with you right now - you can just imagine the time of preparation work, the time recording this audio. Everything has been pre-planned, broken down into 30-, 60-, 90- minute chunks, put into my calendar, every single day over a month by month period, culminating in this process right now - recording the audio. So it s doing one thing at a time - the most important things that you continually work on a project until it s done by working in time chunks with your calendar. A couple of tips here. I want you to schedule your most important work during the hours when you are at your peak performance. And most people don t think about this. Everyone has peak performance hours. For a lot of people, it s when they first come into the office - they have their most energy. For a lot of people, right after lunch, they are very, very sluggish. So when do you - and I don t want to say because I hate when people say, Do this first, because everyone is different. I want you to think about when you are at your peak performance. Maybe you are somebody that after lunch - you had a light lunch you come back from lunch or you had lunch in your desk - you have tons of energy. When you have the most energy, that s when you should schedule you most important high priority task and accomplish them. You get them done better and faster. Another tip is like with your daily to-do list - you need to schedule you next day s calendar before leaving work the night before. So tomorrow, when I get to work, I m going to have my to-do list written down. I m going to have a to-do list transferred already into my calendar. I know what I have to do at 9 o clock. I know what I have to do at 9:30. I know about my meeting at 10 o clock. I know what I have to do at 10:30 etc. You have to map out your entire day. Clearly when you map out, you need to put some buffers in there for some unexpected occurrences. And those unexpected occurrences - once you start the habit and get yourself in the habit of scheduling every hour of every day of your work day and get it done in advance - those unexpected occurrences become less and less because you create systems to deal with or cover those later. Now, the next thing that I want to cover is eliminating interruptions and time wasters. Eliminating interruptions and time wasters are key to

19 maximizing your performance and for you and your team to achieve peak performance. To begin, as I ve mentioned in the multitasking example, you cannot accomplish anything meaningful if you constantly get interrupted. Period. Nobody who has ever accomplished anything meaningful has constantly been interrupted when they achieving what they are setting out what they want to achieve. Now, scheduling your days significantly helps with this, ok. Once your day is scheduled and you have a meeting at 3 o clock, you are not going to get interrupted at 3:10 because you are in that meeting. Now a lot of what you need to do is to set meetings with yourself. So you are going to set up a 2 o clock meeting - 2 to 2:30, or 2 to 3 o clock with yourself, and you cannot let yourself get interrupted. Scheduling your day will get you in the habit and will get others in the habit of not interrupting you and not wasting your time. Here are some other things to do. One, eliminate any sort of got-a-minute culture. Hey, got a minute? I used to always get, Hey, Dave. Got a minute? I used to always say, Hey, Andrew. Got a minute? Hey, Pete. Got a minute? You have to eliminate the got-a-minute culture. Got-a -minute questions - they interrupt and they are rarely, rarely emergencies. They prevent important tasks from getting done. Got-a-minute questions or ideas rather should be documented and should be discussed periodically. Got-a-minute questions, got-a- minute ideas to be documented and discussed periodically - for example weekly. They don t warrant - unless it is an absolutely emergency - interrupting anybody. By not accepting got-a-minute questions particularly if you are the employer, you are the boss, it allows your employees to help figure things themselves and helps them to grow. It also helps them to plan in advance, because if they know - they plan their day, they plan their week - they start thinking through the issues, the smaller tasks. They start thinking about some of the questions that they going to have, and they put together those questions, and they set up a meeting with you to go through 10 questions so that in 1 hour, they get all their 10 questions answered rather than interrupting you 10 times.

20 There s been research that says that once you get interrupted, it takes you 7 minutes to regain concentration. I don t know if I fully buy 7 minutes it seems like a long time - but let s say it took three minutes to regain concentration. Two minutes. So for 10 interruptions, you will lose 20 minutes of actual time and you just lose your focus. So I want you to eliminate that got-a-minute culture. If you have an open door policy, and I m going to doubt you do because most entrepreneurs and business owners once they get that they start open door policy, they quickly end when they realize that they are not getting any work done. But if you do, then lessen the time lower the time when you have open door policy. Eight hours a day - make it 1 hour a day, or 30 minutes a day. Set that time. You cannot have got-a-minute culture and expect to get big things accomplished. The next thing to eliminate interruptions and time wasters is reduce time spent on . In the next section, I m going into great detail about management. in today s environment is by far the number one time waster. It can be eliminated and I m going to show you how. Next, thirdly, stop answering phone calls. Unless the call is an expected call it s on your schedule, it s on your calendar - unless that call is that from a perspective client that you need to close, or the call is from a pre-approved number like your spouse or your child, don t accept the phone call. Now, what I do is I pull my work phone cord out. I don t even turn the ringer off. I pull the cord out and I put my cell phone on top of the cord so I don t forget to put it back in later. That is just how I do it because I do not want to be interrupted. I refuse to be interrupted. If something if reaching me is that critical, somebody will call somebody else in my company. Somebody will call my wife, will call my business partner, will call my cell phone. They will figure out a way to get in touch with me if it s that important. What you also do to eliminate the time waster and be a lot more productive is you want to return important phone calls in batches, or better yet so, say you received four voice messages, you prioritize the ones that you feel you need to call back, and you block out the time from 3:30 to 4 o clock to return those phone calls. I can guarantee you those phone calls are going to be more focused and more targeted when you know that you only have half an hour to make them.

21 Now, another key thing if it s an important phone call, what you want to do to be more productive rather than calling them back, ideally, you can that person and set a specific time to speak with them. Because what you don t want to do is you call them back and then you waste five minutes of your time calling them, waiting for their voice mail, and leaving voice messages for two or three minutes, and still having that on your to-do lists. Ideally, you can schedule the call back time and not have to worry about leaving voice messages. Now another key way to eliminate time interruptions and time wasters is to stop the social chitchat. Stop the joking - stop the time you are spending you are on the water cooler, talking about last night s football game, or basketball game, or TV show. I understand that you want to bond with your employees. I like having the periodic social times like lunches where you can shoot the breeze and bond and get that teamwork bonding done, but the social chit chat - it doesn t work. It interrupts your day. If you are going out to get and grab some water, go straight back to work. There are no breaks in achieving success. There are no 15-minute breaks. Maybe give yourself a 3-minute break. There is no time for ideal chit chat. If all else fails, then work offsite. If it s the only way to avoid interruptions, then work offsite or at least part of the time. And in terms of working offsite, you have to remember, if you are the business owner, one of your key goals is to allow the business to run without you. To allow your business to run without you. Now, I didn t say to allow your business to grow or thrive without you. I mean, to run without you. Your goal is to grow the business. Running day to day operations - part of your goal is to get your employees more productive to create systems so that your business can run without you. If your goal is to eventually sell your business, one of the most important things the buyer wants to see is that the business runs without you so that they can buy and have the business continue to run successfully. So you want to be able to have the business run without you and the way to do that is to get your employees more productive to create systems I ll cover systems a little bit later here. I have a whole course on systematizing your business as well.

22 Now, I told you I will talk about management. The vast majority of business owners and employees spend way, way, way too much time writing and checking s. Listen to this data from the Radicati group who studies this and researches this. Last year, the average person working at a corporation sent or received 167 messages per day. This number is expected to rise according to 219 messages a day within the next three years. I mean, this is outstanding, assuming that an average takes 1 minute to process - that s 3.65 hours of simply checking and sending s. That is half of your work day. It is way too much. You need to manage . Okay, the first thing you do. One - If you are the boss, you need to reduce the -crazed culture that you are living in within your organization. You need to create standards. The question you ask yourself - ask your employees. You are about to send an . Would you or your employees be willing for that to print it out? To put it in an envelope? To put a stamp on it and to pay the 45 or so cents or whatever the cost of mailing a letter is these days? Go to post office? Go to the nearest mail box and mail that letter? Would you be willing to mail that letter? I m not saying that that should be your standard, but I can guarantee you - if that is your standard, you will immediately get rid of 99.9% of the s. So what you need to do is set some standards and figure out what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. Go through the s that you ve received and that you ve sent over the last month and figure out which ones fall into the 20% of real value added. Which are the ones that can really help in your company versus hurting you? Secondly, train your people to consolidate s. Most people, a lot of times, will send two s when one should have sufficed. Send and and then five minutes later, Oh, I forgot this. They added this. You want to train people to possibly create the , save it as a draft, wait a minute, think through it, make sure that you don t forget anything and send it once to reduce some of the clutter. I m going to recommend my third key for reducing the -crazed culture. I recommend using Gmail to thread your s strings. I ve used Microsoft Outlook for many, many years, and I fought moving to Gmail - Google s system - I fought it tooth and nail and did not want to change. What I