How to Be So Productive It Feels Like Cheating

If you're the kind of person who wants to get more done in last time, then you've clicked on the right video. Because if you give me just a few minutes, I'll give you decades of productivity advice and return. Because the most successful people, they don't rely on discipline or will power to be productive. They rewire their brain to make it impossible to fail. I've got intense ADHD, but the systems I've built turned that from a weakness into a weapon. And those systems is what helped me build several multi-million dollar businesses. And through it all, I've learned there are only five things that make productivity simple and life a whole lot easier. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martell method.com. Starting with the two minute rule. I first learned this from a guy named David Allen. He wrote an incredible book called Getting Things Done. And a long time ago, I went to an event in New York City where he's speaking and he shared this wisdom that was so simple yet so profound. A rule that applies to everything that I'll talk about today. If something takes less than two minutes, just do it. Don't think it, don't plan it, just act. Most people spend more time writing down, tracking, put it in their project management software than the actual work to just do it. The longer you hesitate, the heavier the task actually gets and the longer the list of the task get. I like to say JFDI, just do it. Send the email, book the meeting, shoot the video, respond to the text, just do it now. Less than two minutes. Don't even write it down. Those tiny actions actually build massive momentum. Reminds me of this quote by Jeff Bezos, which I love. He says, "Stress doesn't come from hard work. It comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring." It's true. Some people create more pain in their life from the decision they got to make than the downside that might happen if they just make the decision. Now, not every task takes two minutes. So what do you do when you've got real work that demands focus energy and time? You need to fix your focus. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business, and less than five minutes a week. Find it at MartellMethod.com. Here's a wild idea. You can't be productive if you have no idea what to focus on. Clarity creates acceleration. If I have a clear direction of where I'm going, I can sprint. Most people wake up wanting to be productive, but they can't be productive because they don't know what they're trying to produce. In many ways, I think about it like a target. How can I hit a target if I can't see it? But once I see it, then it's about focus. Follow one course until successful. That's what the best of the best do. As a nerd, I think of it like a vector. And if you don't know what that is, it's an easy thing to understand. A vector is essentially an arrow. The arrow has a direction, and it has a force. If it's got a lot of power behind it, then that vector is strong in a direction. It means that it's not about just how hard you work. It's about working in the right direction. This first got introduced to me through a guy named Sean Ellis, who's like the original growth hacker if you've ever heard that term. And he shared me this concept called North Star Metrics. Essentially, he said, if you can distill everything you're trying to accomplish in your business, into one number, then it gets everybody focused on the right thing. So as building this company clarity, and when we sat down as a team and looked at it, we realized there's this thing called expert driven signups. To the degree, we could convince people that we're using our platform to share it with other people. And they would drive signups to use our product that that was our North Star metric. That became our focus. That became our guiding light for all things. Our sprints, our developments, our marketing, everything that one decision to get everybody focused on our North Star metric is the reason why we sold the company two years later. Real productivity isn't managing time. It's managing focus. So here's two steps you can follow to fix your focus. The first, you have to define your 12 power goals. At the beginning of the year, I always sit down and I go for a walk and I get quiet. And I sit down with my heart in the trees. I literally like to go to nature. And I ask myself, what do I want to accomplish this year? In all aspects of my life, from the business side to the family side to the adventure side to just creating the world. And I just do a flood of consciousness. I say, just write down a bunch of things. And then what I do is I take that list and I look at them. And I always take the one thing that goes to the top that if I accomplish that one, it makes everything else easier. But then I backfill it with the other 11 that are aligned that feel good that I mean that are crazy. A couple years ago, I had this wild idea to donate 10,000 copies of thinking girl rich to every kid in my hometown as almost like an economic experiment in our city. That process of having those 12 goals is the first step because that'll give you your North Star where most people miss the opportunities. I then set up a habit to review that list three times a day. Think about it. Most people write a business plan or a life plan. And then after the first few weeks, they put it in a drawer and they never revisit it because I sit down and I have triggers set up in my life when I sit in my car, when I'm at my office, when I read in the morning, where I pull up my phone and it's in a note file and it's literally pinned at the top of my phone. And I just review. And that allows me to ask myself, how aligned is my calendar? What do I got going on today? When's the last time I did anything on that? It reminds me of a quote by Stephen Covey, which he says the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Essentially, if these are your goals, look at them and make sure your calendar reflects your goal. If you do that, you will be a freaking weapon. Then we have to choose our top three daily wins. Essentially, we have to ask ourselves, what are the projects that we move forward that if we win around, we'll get these things done. You know, a lot of these are projects, but I actually need to break it down into something tactical and tangible. So it has to be aligned with your goals. That's why there are three daily wins. If all I do is get those three things done for the day, I consider the day absolutely winning day. And my mission every morning is to create what I call a winning streak. Start with a focus, get those things done and everything else would backfill. All the got a second meetings, the conversation, the tech talk feed, the tweets, the requests, the text messages, the all that, all that will fill in. These are the big rocks. Three things, three projects, I get them done, usually first thing in the morning and everything else feels like gravy. Now you know exactly what matters. But if you really want to be productive with your time, the next step is cutting everything that doesn't. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you got a new episode. So you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Cut the crap. You don't need more to win. You need to do less. Most people fail in life from indigestion, not starvation, meaning they say yes to too many things at once. They get overwhelmed and through that overwhelmed, they don't feel productive. They get anxiety. They get stressed out. They got to take medication. It's wild. What people will do is themselves. So instead of saying yes to everything because we think it's a game of addition, it's actually a game of subtraction. It's removing things out of your life so you can focus on the things that are actually going to move it forward. The skill I would invite you to consider is a very deep scientific and powerful skill called the art of saying no. Know as a complete sentence and it ends with a period. You don't have to give a reason. You can just check in with your heart and say, if it doesn't resonate, it's a no. My wife and I have this very simple rule. If it isn't a heck yeah, it's a hell no. If somebody's asking you to do something and that thing would be today or tonight and the answer would be no, then I don't care if it's in six months, make it a hard no. It's better to close the loops by making a decision not leaving them open. See that two minute rule coming into play. Then to leave it as a maybe. You will stress yourself out around maybe. If you would jump out of bed to go do the thing that you're being asked to do, then yeah, do it. If it's a no, just say no. Put yourself first. So here are three ways to cut the crap out of your life and become more productive immediately. The first one, say no by default. It's a wild concept to consider that no matter what you're asked to do by other people, just say no. Protect your calendar. Treat it like a bank account that every time somebody asks you to do something, they're essentially asking for you to give them money because they are. It's your time. You just don't realize it. Every day has 86,400 seconds. Think about that. Is in dollar bills. Every time somebody asks, Hey, you got a second. They're not asking for a second. They're asking for maybe $17, maybe $60. Like what are they asking for? And if you wouldn't give them that, protect it, which then allows you to choose how you use your time, which I'm going to get into in a second. If it aligns with your goals, then it's an easy yes. If it doesn't, then you say no. But be careful, because there's this middle ground of things that will stretch you, that will scare you, that will put you outside of your comfort zone. And I don't want you to get too quick to say no. If it aligns with your goal and it pushes you outside of your comfort zone, those are the ones that are gas. So next, we have to audit your time weekly. Every Sunday, I want you to take some time to look at the previous week and ask yourself what worked and what didn't. The stuff that worked, run the play. The stuff that didn't cancel, cut, clear it, fix it. And then on a monthly basis, look at your previous month and then create a thing called the kill list. Essentially eliminate any task, any rear carrying stuff that don't support your dreams. Have no mercy. If you don't, you won't create the space to do the work that's going to push your life forward. And you do that by either deleting, delegating, automating, or just doing the work. And last, one of my favorite, simplest, easiest and easily the most productive is pretty much live in D&D mode. D&D mode is yes, on your phone, right now my phone is do not disturb. But by default, you should literally get rid of all your distractions. For those that are willing, go into your notifications and turn them all off. Oh, I know. You're going, I can't. What about my calendar? What about my messages from my friends? What I know? Here's what I've discovered. We allow these tools to take away from our life, our distractions, our focus. And all I would say is schedule time to plug in, either for me, 11, 30 or 4, 30, but I also even use the time when I'm doing my fasted cardio in the morning to do all my Slack messages. I've blocked these times to plug in. I don't let the apps distract me. I'm so easily distracted with my HD that like I said, I had to create these systems so that I could just be productive. It turned into be a massive level up. Turn it off. I dare you. Turn it off. And then you decide when you want to plug into an app. Notifications add so much crap into our life that we need to learn how to cut it. If you do this, you'll be way more focused on what matters most. All right. So once you've cleared all the noise, it's time to optimize your productivity for your most important resource. Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you. It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode. Protect your peaks. Believe it or not, time is technically not your most valuable resource. It's your energy. I don't care how productive you want to be. If your body is like shutting down, your brain is fried, you will not create your best work. That is energy. Every person has natural energy peaks. So you got to protect it like its sacred ground. When you line up your toughest work, your most creative work, your most challenging work with your peak hours of productivity, you get way more done with way less effort. For me, it's mornings. It's my deep work. Do not allow just anybody to come in during your peak time, your peak energy to create and distract you. The way I think about it is the energy that I put into something is felt out of it by the people consuming it. So my energy flows where my attention goes. I can't be distracted if I'm trying to do big things. Here's a wild thought that I had one day. Is that early in the morning or late at night, if you think about it, everybody else in the world, they're actually horizontal. They're sleeping. They're dreaming. I think the reason why most people do the most creative work then is because the connection to their creator is thin. Everybody else is sleeping and they're dreaming so that you can tap into that energy. I know it's wild. There may not be any signs of back at home, but I will tell you when I create in the morning connected to my creator, I come up with the most amazing and beautiful and elegant solutions to my biggest problems. So here are two simple and powerful ways to maximize your energy and protect your peaks. The first is we have to do an energy audit. We talked about doing a time audit. Now we got to look at energy. We have to look throughout our week and our day. What are the things that take our energy? And what I've discovered is that most people already have these natural flows. Like maybe the morning is really productive and in the afternoon is when you'd prefer to be talking to people. That's what I do. I don't do any meetings before 11 a.m. Why? Because that work is for me. Once I invest in me, then the rest of the world can get me. But guess what? They'll get a better version of me because I know that that morning was spent doing things that are going to move my dreams forward, my goals forward, my task forward. And then when I show up, I'm present with them. I'm not thinking about stuff that I should be doing later on. I'm not giving myself an out in the morning because I know I'm going to get back on my laptop after I put the kids a bed. And if you do that and you honor those energy flows, then it creates a rhythm. I know you've had these moments. They're usually the day before you have to go on vacation where you wake up because you have all this stuff you got to do and you honor that task. You honor that calendar and you're just like, oh my god, I got so much done today. Why can't every day be like this? It can be. Look at what happened. Look at your energy levels and try to replicate it. The other one is exhaust the body, tame the mind. I believe most people have to take medication or self-medicate or do whatever they can to try to be focused because they don't get their body moving. I got this concept from an old stoic quote that said that we treat the body rigorously so that it won't be disobedient to the mind. As somebody who suffers with ADHD, I have to move my body every day. Like I work out first thing in the morning and when I work out, I push to the point past pain because there's something that happens in that pump. It actually clears my brain. It's the weirdest thing. It's almost like a chiropractic alignment of my mind at the gym. Most people go like, oh, I'm going to be so tired after the gym. Opposite. It's a funny saying. It's like, I've never left the gym feeling tired more so than how I felt going in. I like to put my most difficult task right after the gym, my most creative task like this right after the gym. Why? Because that's when it's going to get my best work. My mind is primed after I work out because I exhaust the body, tame the mind. And your gym could be as simple as putting a weighted vest and going for a walk. It could be as simple as doing 100 air squats. It doesn't have to be complicated. You'll be surprised how much more productive you'll be. So now we got our body and our energy and our mind right. But none of that will actually make you more productive if you don't follow this next step, which is setting up simple systems. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell, two Elz and Martell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there. Have an amazing day. This is a universal truth. Systems beat motivations every single day of the week. A lot of people ask me like, I don't know how you stay so motivated. I'm not. I just follow the system. I make it easy for me to win. I just have checklist that I have a little bit of discipline to start with and review it. And the best part, the more you build your life, the more people you'll have in your life, the more you'll coordinate with other people to do life and they will keep you accountable to the system. Like my whole team works out. When we travel, we work out. I literally think they would probably be like, oh, something's wrong with Dan. If they texted me or I texted them and said, I'm not going to the gym tomorrow. So that's the whole point is that everybody has goals. You know, as James Clear says, but it's the systems that create the winners, not the size of the goal you wrote down on the paper. It's almost gotten to the point where I just make it hard on myself to fail. For example, when I was writing my book, buy back your time, I said to myself, I will sit down and I will write every day. And I sat there and I wrote every day. I think I made it to like 22 days. And then I realized I hated it and I didn't want to do it. And then I missed one day and one day turned into three days and then I wrote a little bit and then I didn't touch it for weeks. That was not a winning system. What I then change was that I hired somebody. His name is Ron. And I said, you be the book CEO. You hold me accountable. You're the expert. I will work for you. So I created a system with Ron where we actually co-created this project called buy back your time. This beautiful blue book that's helped millions of people. I had to create a system that I couldn't fail at by making it other people's dreams and goals for me to support because I learned a long time ago and I don't know if this is true for you. I will do way more for somebody else and I will ever do for myself. I mean, it's a challenge as you have more success in life to keep the hunger going when you don't need anything. And the way I do it is I make commitments to other people and that cheat code has got me incredibly productive systems. It's a fun acronym. It stands for save yourself time energy money and stress. So here are a few strategies that you can use today to build systems that literally buy back your time. The first one is we have to batch our work. There's no world where the same work sprinkled out throughout your week makes sense when the ramp up time in your brain has to be focused. I call this batch work. So for example, if I'm doing sales calls, put all your sales calls together. If you're doing content, put all your content together. If you're doing operational meetings, put all your operational meetings together. Think of it this way because everybody thinks you can multitask. You can't. It's an illusion. I don't care who you are. I will prove it to you. If I asked you to count to one, two, three, four, five, six, all the way to 26. How fast could you do it? A lot of people pretty quick. What about ABCDFG? Really quick. Most people, if you do those back to back, it'd be like 23, 26 seconds. If I then ask you to go one, a, two, b, three, c, and onward, not only will it take you a minute and a half to two minutes, most people can't do it because the brain can't switch. If you can just focus on one task and get them all done and stack those as batch meetings, it will make you leafily productive. And it's because of the neuroscience behind it, it's actually called cognitive switching. And when you're doing tasks that cause you to go from different sides of the brain, analytical versus creative, it's just not a winning strategy. The second is dry and it's an acronym. It stands for don't repeat yourself. As a programmer, I learned this when I was 17, that if I'm going to write some code, put it in a place where I don't have to repeat myself and then I can reference it every other time I need it. Simple concept, change my life. Every time you make a decision about a preference, is that saved in a preference file? Now, I know you may not need somebody to help you today, but what about in the future when you want somebody else to do something for you? If you have all your preferences in a file, you can give them the preference file. On the other end of the spectrum, I have a document called working with Dan. What is that exactly what it sounds like? I have a document that introduces what it's like to work with me. Why? I work differently. Think about everything I just shared with you. So when new people get put on my team, I give them the document. And then that way, I don't have to repeat myself. I don't have to tell them how I like to talk or meetings or structure anything. It's all in the document. That to me is the concept of don't repeat yourself. So create checklist, create systems, follow them because the more you do it, then you'll have the playbook to have somebody else do it for you. That's called proper delegation. Imagine how much time you would save if you never had to repeat yourself. The third is the 108010 rule and this one will change your life because a lot of people have a hard time letting go because they're very creative and they feel that their unique vision and approach to stuff is their fingerprint, which I get. But I know that at scale across all these different creative industries from book writing to software development, to branding, there are people that have built massive companies by not being involved in every project, but influence every project. Did you know Tom Clancy? Have you ever seen his books or video games? He's been dead for like 15 years and he's the best-selling author last week and the month before and the month before and the month before and before. Why? He used the 108010 rule to have other people right like him. This is available to every mom, to every leader, to every CEO. The way it works is very simple. You want to be involved when you're delegating any project in the first 10%. I call that the ideation phase. That's where you sit down and you say, directly speaking, consider this, consider this. Here's the outcome we want to achieve and give all of your input's resources, relationship connections and encourage the team or the people to use those to move forward on the project. The other 80% is the execution. This is where the team does 80% of the work. Think about like Steve Jobs with Johnny Eyes. He used to come into the design studio, talk to Johnny about the vision he had for a product, then Johnny would sit down with his team and take all that time to build prototypes and get it to a place where there's a real product. Then the last 10% is actually integration. That's where you can come back at the end and you go, "Okay, let's make these little tweaks here and then I'm going to be involved in making sure that it reaches the market the way I feel like it." That could be doing the press tour if you're an author. That could be doing the podcast tour. That could be Steve Jobs on stage at the event announcing a new product. Finally, number four, standardize your meetings. I can't tell you how valuable this is if that you create rhythms in your life from work to personal that allows you to stay on track so everything is moving towards achieving the life you want to live. I do this for every meeting. I don't go to a meeting unless it has an agenda. My reoccurring meetings are few but very powerful. I'm very clear about what my expectations are and I even do it for my personal life. Today actually we have our family meeting where we sit down and we have a structure to that meeting that's written out the agenda and we go over every aspect of our life. Every week. Why? Because I want to make sure we're always aligned. It's one on one time because busy family sometimes forget that that one on one time is where you have these beautiful conversations and moments that otherwise might get missed. Standardizing my meetings because I already have the rhythm from doing my time and energy audit from before is a game changer for productivity. Every meeting should have these five things. First you should have an agenda. The other is you have a project owner what I call a DRI direct responsible individual. Like who owns a meeting and guess what? It's a rarely me. Three, what are the decisions we want to make in this meeting? Fourth is what are the next steps do we have them and then what are the deadlines for those decisions? If you make sure every meeting has this you will become incredibly productive and if you don't it's just noise. If you build these into your daily monthly and yearly systems you'll see yourself get way more productive way faster. Now I know when I share these strategies with people they usually push back especially if they're creative especially if they're people that they just want to like be a little bit more free in life because it can sound like a lot of systems it can sound like a lot of structure and a lot of people don't like structure. What you may not realize is that if you want to be creative then you have to have constraints. It's always been that way the more you have constraints the more creative you can be because it allows you to be present. If you actually want to be freer and have more time to feel creative than having structure is the way. Thanks for listening to Martel Method. If you like this episode could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review. This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck reclaim their freedom and build their empire.