How to ACTUALLY be Productive (even if you lack discipline)

productivity is the amount of output relative to input in business productivity is how much money you get out from how much time you put in those who have mastered making more money have actually mastered productivity I know this because I went from $0 at the age of 22 to a net worth of over $100 million by the age of 28 simply by utilizing my time so today what I want to do is I want to teach you my productivity system to maximize time and at the end I'm actually going to show you my calendar and I'm going to include in the link below the so I have to my internal productivity system that I use to run my companies getting yourself to do something when you don't feel like doing it is a skill in itself but often times people label themselves as lacking The Willpower when in fact you actually lack the skill of engineering your environment to make it as easy as possible to work as hard as possible the best way to hack your way to productivity is through elimination and the best thing to eliminate are the things and the people that you say yes to that don't Drve the one thing forward that will move your business in the right direction toward your goals in order to know what we need to eliminate we need to understand what type of work is most important that we do and in fact what type of worker are you there are three types of workers first we have a maker maker work you make this is stuff that takes days weeks months years even having one call at noon or 1 or 2 that will interrupt your entire day and it will take you out of Flow State and you cannot get done if the most important thing you need to do right now to grow your business is build a course make long form content write a book you might be a maker there are seasons of business and so you might be a maker right now that doesn't mean you're forever a maker the second type of worker is a manager okay so Manager work is mostly composed of meetings this person is directing others collecting data leading training encouraging making decisions this is a common schedule for anybody in a leadership position or a divisional leader if it's kind of hard to do your job if you're in a hole all day not talking to anybody maybe you have some makeer work but a lot of the times especially when someone's new to a job they are a manager so if the most important thing right now for your business to grow is that you need to hire people you need to train people you need to lead people you need to make decisions you might be a manager now the third type is a hybrid a hybrid means you might have both you might alternate between both whether it be week to week or month to month sometimes your main priorities are communicating leading training hiring other times it's building marketing materials finishing a book if in order to build your business for example you need to hire a sales team and design a course you might be a hybrid so an example is that Alex he is traditionally a maker most of his job is making you guys know this by100 million offers hundred million leads all the content that he puts out I am traditionally a manager I have all the team report to me switching between tasks constantly now here here's where the problem comes in cuz you might sit here and you might be thinking I resonate Lea I'm a maker I'm a manager I'm a hybrid knowing what you are is not enough Alex every day for almost 2 years used to have to wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 a. m. to get his stuff done because he had meetings starting at 9:00 or 10:00 a.

m. he would work until he had meetings start at 9:00 or 10 and then he would take meetings from 9:00 or 10 until 5:00 and on the other hand when I started making content and I'd had a manager schedule where I was taking meetings anywhere from 7:00 to 8:00 a. m.

until 5 or 6 p. m. I had to start waking up really early or working late to try and get the content in now here's the problem neither of us put out our best work at this point in time in fact both of us were very stretched we were stressed and the quality of our maker work went down as well as the quality of any Manager work we did which brings me to the second part which is knowing is not enough you must do something so the second piece of this productivity system you want to design a working environment rather than be a product of it using one of these these three templates to create your schedule controlling your environment is immensely easier than trying to constantly control yourself you see the reason that understanding schedules for different kinds of workers is important is because what if a maker and a manager need to work together here's the prime example myself and Alex it used to be impossible for me to know and Alex know when to schedule meetings because Alex had his whole day blocked and I had meetings all day will you understand how to optimize your schedule manag ERS whether it be you or somebody in your company often kill the productivity of makers so managers will often ask makers to meet makers will begrudgingly accept the invitation out of fear of ruining the relationship or being an and in consequence they will kill an entire day or an entire unit of work just to maintain a relationship when somebody from the sales department wants to talk to somebody from the video Department somebody in the video department they need they're a maker they're editing videos and filming videos all day they're getting into the flow and if somebody says hey can you meet at 10: it's like I'm 3 hours into this edit I've got 3 hours left and the likelihood that I get back to this edit and do a great job is low so here's what we do that you need to set ground rules for your company no matter how big or small it is okay so I'll explain to you what I do and the rules or the guidelines I've set for my company so that we can work cohesively together and respect each other's working Styles the first piece is we create internal meeting hours that means that we from 12:00 p.

m. Pacific to 400 p. m.

Pacific designate that as meeting time meaning if a salesperson needs to meet with a video person that is a window of time they can book that in if somebody asks to meet that video person before at 10:00 a. m. and they say no they each understand one I probably should ask for the meeting window time because that's when they're available and two I understand I'm going to kill an entire unit of work for that person if I ask them to meet before the designated window so out of respect for the makers in our company because we know that our makers a lot of them start work at 7:00 or 8:00 a.

m. so they can get an entire unit of work done before 12: it's out of common courtesy to our makers that we ask our managers not to request meetings internally before 12:00 p. m.

and I often encourage my team book all your meetings interviews vendors etc for before 12:00 p. m. so that after 12:00 p.

m. that is when if you need to meet with a maker they have time set aside and you have time set aside the second piece is that we make it known that people have a maker schedule so if you look at any of our calendars which will show right here you can see that my team will block maker time on their calendars so that if a team goes to look hey I need to book a time with this person they won't interrupt that time because they know how important it is to getting done the third piece and this is a hack that I felt like a genius for thinking of it start scheduling from what I call the bottom up the bottom of the calendar to the top of the calendar you have your meetings back to back and schedule them from the bottom up this does two things one if you're a manager is much more efficient because you're getting way more in a condensed period of time and you're eliminating gaps so you constantly just offer people the last meeting of the day slot and you work your way back up so that any maker work you have you can do in the morning the second is that our makers in our company if they schedule from the bottom up that means they have the most time possible to do maker work so for example if you look at Alex's calendar which I'll show a screenshot of here you can see that what we do is we schedule from the bottom up he starts his calls at 400 p. m.

and then the next slot is three and two we try to only give him one manager block a day if anything most of the time he has nothing on schedule except Mondays that makes it easy so that now I know if I need to book a call with a maker I'm going for the 4 p. m. or the 3 p.

m. because out of courtesy that means they have the most time possible to work on maker stuff the fourth piece is that we want to commit to a manager day so Monday is a known manager day for our company meaning what I've tried to do is condense all of their meetings into one day so all things they need to get done we put it into one day of the week so that the rest of the four days they can get all their maker work done uninterrupted if you look at the number one maker in our company which is Alex you can look at his schedule he will typically slam himself on Mondays and then have nothing the rest of the week this allows him to go straight into manager mode and then the rest of the day is going to complete maker mode and then the last one is just like we commit to a manager day we commit to a maker day everybody no matter if you're a manager or maker you have other to do and what I've noticed is especially for managers they need to have one day a week completely free now not only do I think that this is a good reset for people because if you know you have a ton of meetings one day you're waking up early you're you're constantly in this go mode and so what I have found is that Wednesdays are the best day so Wednesday is our quiet day at acquisition. now you can look at my calendar right here you will see I never schedule on Wednesdays I ruthlessly protect that time because I am the example of how to be the most productive and I want to set that example for my team over and over and over again I am more of a hybrid that Wednesday is the day that I can do my maker work I can write content I can move projects forward I can build presentations I can wake up drink some coffee sit in my pajamas all day not even come to the office and just get done all day and I think that's really valuable for people who especially like me have to show up every other day and do all this Manager work those are the five things that you can do to make it easy for your company to accommodate all the three types of work notice the key here guys communication if people don't know what type of work you do if people don't know when you work on that work how the are they to respect the work you're doing and the amount of Founders that I come to me and say Leila it's so annoying my team bugs me all the time okay well do they see your calendar do they know what you're working on like the answer is usually no and so I'm like well then of course they're bugging you they probably think you're sitting there doing jack you get what I'm saying unless you tell people what your priorities are what you're doing when you're focused on things and when you're doing work they're not going to know I constantly put my away message I put my away message on when I'm going to a business dinner I put it on when I'm working out I put it on when I'm doing a video I put it on when I'm doing maker work because I want my team to know what I'm doing so that they know if they can disrupt me or not here is the template that you can stick to based on the type of worker you are if you're a manager stick to the dedicated meeting blocks I used to be notorious for having 11 12 13 hours of meetings you know what I realized a lot of things are better in written word and so what you'll find is that you actually create a more disciplined and clear thinking team if you force more things to be given to you and written word the second is understanding the costs that you put on a maker when you request something from them it costs a maker 10 times what it costs you to have a meeting because if you compare your working units that is what it costs you work in units of 30 minutes they work in units of 4 to 8 hours so if you put a meeting in the middle of their work unit you cost them 10 times what you cost yourself either make sure it's worth it or don't bug them with it what's crazy is even a brief Interruption like knocking on their door hey do you have 2 seconds I just need something from really quick that can cost anywhere between 15 to 40% of someone's productivity these are studies that have been done it's the cost of switching and so you have to understand if you want the best for the entire company you will respect what's best for each person in optimizing their working environment and so that brings me to appreciating and respecting the nose when people decline a meeting when people say I can't make a meeting do not take it as an offense understand they're protecting the company so they can do meaningful work to help grow the company something that took me too long to learn is that saying no doesn't mean saying no saying no means saying yes to what matters most strategy is saying no is like when I need to get on a meeting with Alex one I don't do the de a minute things because he has a different type of working environment and schedule than me and so I opt for I go for a 400 p.

m. slot or after work so four managers set meeting hours respect your meeting hours try not to go outside side of your meeting hours your work will expand the time you give it so if you think that you need to have 45 meetings a week you will continue to for the rest of your life but if you try and constrain yourself to only having 20 to 25 hours of meetings a week you will be shocked at what you can get done for the makers what you want to do to maximize your schedule is to make your team aware of your working style and schedule to put it on your calendar to block it so that you do not accept meetings before a certain time each day to book from the bottom up and then on the latter respect and maximize the manager day so that you can help other people move their stuff forward there are so many CEOs that are responsible for marketing making materials building courses and they get none of it done because they don't tell anybody that those are their priorities and so then when they don't tell anybody and they don't make people aware people pull at them to bring them into other things what happens they get distracted and then they look back and they didn't get anything done over this last week let people know and don't be afraid to say no don't be afraid to tell them and you don't need to just say no and be an tell them why I'm working on this video if I don't get it done today it's probably going to drag on another 3 to four days I don't think that's the best use of my working time you know an example of this is we did a survey for our media team and basically something that I got from feedback from all of them is that best days of productivity where they had nothing on their calendar but that we had meetings about 4 days a week and so then they found themselves even working on the weekends when there was time that there wasn't something on the calendar so they could get more work done and so what we did is we talked as a management team and said okay this is great feedback we need to chunk those meetings into a couple of days to maximize productivity for everybody else on the team it wasn't even a hard switch but it made it easy for us to allow them to work hard you have to work when you say you're working if you're a maker you make stuff and so if you block time and you make nothing you do your fellow makers a disservice it's easier to be lazy than to try and to fail so don't cop out on yourself here a lot of people are scared they're intimidated by the maker work and so they do all these things to avoid it once you've blocked that time your goal is that you remove as much friction as possible ahead of time so that you can work as hard as possible during that time to maximize your productivity and lastly as a hybrid theme your days what I do is I theme my days I have meeting days and I have non- meeting days so Monday always a manager day Wednesday always a maker day Saturday always a maker day depending on what kind of work I have so often times as of lately for example I'm probably 5050 where I have 50% of my week that's a maker schedule and 50% of my week that's a manager schedule and based on the work that I'm projecting I'm going to have I constantly am refreshing my schedule to accommodate the type of work I have so for example the last two weeks I had a lot of events I had quarterly with my entire team and so I gave up all my maker work but what does that mean in the next coming weeks I put aside more time for maker work you also have to understand it's not just about in the micro day today and week to week but over like months and quarters and so the easiest thing I found is to theme your days what I used to do is I used to split up my maker work and I would try and just do Manager work and then makeer work before or after and it just never turned out how I wanted my videos sucked how I showed up I was tired I was exhausted the quality was low you know the presentations I made for my team weren't that good and so I've learned that chunking your time and theming your days is probably one of the best things you can do to maximize productivity I see that you have two chunks every day cuz a maker has two units of time and they make in both of them but a hybrid has two units of time and they are a maker unit and a manager unit which means I might have on a day where I don't start meetings until 12:00 p. m.

and I go till 4 p. m.