How Top 1% CEOs Schedule Their Day

I'm going to share with you how you can actually get rich and even run a multimillion dollar business with a complete normal schedule without sacrificing your health, sleep or time with family and friends. These are what the top 0.1% of people use to do more in a day than most people do in a complete week. And they're what I use every single day as a multimillion dollar CEO despite having crippling adhd. I'm going to show you everything you should and shouldn't be spending time on and even go over my complete calendar so you can immediately implement this process. Life 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. My best selling book Buy Back. Your time is out now. Grab a copy@buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. The first time rule is Spend money to save time. See, most people spend time to save money. They mow their own lawn, they get their own groceries, they drive to Costco to save on gas. They're offering their time to any strangers. Then they have no time to actually invest in themselves. Rich people spend money to save time. Delivery services, lawn care. I mean, I don't even put gas in my own car. I didn't start there, but I got to that place. Because what I learned a long time ago is the difference between a broke person and a rich person is a broke person prioritizes things differently. They prioritize their money over their time. They value their money way more than they value their time. But rich people value their time more than they value money, only spend time on activities that are going to make you money. Either. They make you better, they teach you new skills, they give you more time. The key is to reinvest that time into other money making activities. If you're CEO, you gotta protect your time because if you don't, people won't value it, right? So you literally have to say no to the current activity, sometimes to say yes to the big dreams and goals. But it starts with first valuing your time. You'll never get a penny more than you think you deserve. And some of you the biggest opportunity for being more productive is just putting a dollar amount on your hour. Call it $100, call it $500. Just give it a dollar amount so that when you're looking at Things you can say, is this worth it? Will I get that return? If not, you can be polite, just politely say no. To create the space to become more. The second time rule is big rocks first. Now, I know you've probably heard people talk about eat that frog or productivity hacks, but I'm going to share something that most people get wrong about all that. When I was in my 20s, I used to just sit there and write a list of things I want to get done. And I just kind of run through it. If I felt like doing something, I do it, and if I I wouldn't. And that list just kept kind of snowballing forward every day and it never actually get done. What I changed that absolutely not only affected my ability to get stuff done, but it affected my energy, affected my ability to be effective. Is I started with the big rocks. The challenge was I was doing it completely wrong. Then one of my mentors explained the jar analogy to me. See, most people, their day is like a jar. It's a glass jar. And if you look at it and you start and you put the sand in there, you know, the little things that you got those little micro. Hey, got a second minute. So slack messages, those distractions. And then you put the pebbles, those are could be like some errands you got to run. You put that in the jar, then you put the bigger rocks. These could be projects you're trying to move forward. And then you got like these boulders, which are kind of like the big goals for the year, the vision for your life. And you try to stuff those in the jar. By the time you put everything else in and you stack it up, nothing fits because all this space is taken up and there's a lot of white space all around it. What he shared with me is like, you take that same jar and you start with the big rocks. So you put those big massive rocks in. Your vision, your goals, you put those in. Then you put the pebbles, you know, the projects, the meaningful things that you have to create. Then you can pour the sand in on top of it. And then he said, let's see this glass of water. This is just even more stuff. And he just pours the water in it. It just kind of goes into the jar. When you start with the big rocks first, you will get all of it done. If you start with the little things, none of it will get done. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. It affects your energy, your emotions, your ability to drive towards outcomes because you're doing it in the wrong order. So for example, I've got this document called the Preloaded Year. And it's essentially a one page document with each month as a line item and each day as a little square. And what I do is I use this to put all the big rocks on the calendar. The vacations, the birthdays, the big events, the money moving activities. I like schedule it into my calendar and I look at the energy. I used to make this mistake all the time where I would organize a three day event and then go on vacation right before it. Well, I was not present on vacation with my family because I knew coming back I had this massive event that probably had a lot of loose end I was getting pulled into while I was on vacation. So this one little tweak of moving the vacation after the event changed my whole family's experience around us. Going away. So when I look at my life, I take all these big rocks, all these boulders, all these pebbles and I put them into the calendar. And then all the other little things, the wake surfing with friends events here, the concerts, et cetera, those go there because the, then I know the big important things are gonna get done. The birthdays won't get missed. There's all these things that if you don't make them a priority, they create emotional shrapnel. Emotional shrapnel is like reaction. People upset at you, you gotta deal with that. And you don't understand how much time that sucks up going in proactively. Looking at my year, and here's the coolest part about doing it this way, is that when the year's done, I've got this one pager document that I can evaluate all the things I said yes to, all the things I wanted to do, and ask myself, do I wanna do those? Do I want to do that snowboard trip again with those guys? Do I want to do that mountain bike trip? Do I want to take that much time off with the family? And those are real questions that you can evaluate and pull forward into the current year. I've been doing this process for over a decade and every year is like a work of art. I'm just designing, sculpting, tweaking, editing, removing, adding stuff. It's the most energy giving activity because it's my life. And it's not by default, it's by design. And right off the bat, if you had more intentionality into your calendar, into your time, you will live a more fulfilled life. And by the way, you'll get get way more done. The other benefit is it also makes it easier to say no, because I know what everything's going on. I can just say yes or no in real time. Somebody texts me like, hey, do you want to come keynote this event? I'm like, sorry, already got a commitment. 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 in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com which brings us to time rule number three, which is no white space. I once was working with a client and he was a very successful entrepreneur. And I remember he said to me, he goes, man, I'm like dying right now. I've got way too many meetings and I just don't know how to get my head above water. And I said, well, just show me your calendar. And he shows me his calendar. And did he have a lot of meetings? Yep. Was there a lot of white space all over the place? Uh huh. Could he take those five, ten minute white spaces and batch a bunch of stuff together so that he got similar meetings done in a shorter period of time? Absolutely. When I saw it, I was like, that's a big no. No. So here's my strategy. To compress your calendar, I need to recharge like everybody else. So you schedule your breaks, you schedule your meals, you schedule your workouts. You have to actually schedule the decompression time so that you have the energy to show up better, more focused on point. If you don't do that, then you're always playing catch up. Or you have this thing called bleed time where you go for lunch with a friend and you just like you're talking, you're having a blast and next thing you know, a 60 minute lunch turns into a hour catch up and then you're playing catch up in the afternoon, trying to get all your work done. So I'm a big fan of batching and blocking my time. So it creates a forcing function for me to not allow bleed time. I know a lot of people right now you're thinking, well, scheduling is going to restrict me. I don't like that. I like the freedom. I started a business because I want freedom. I've heard freedom's the thing. The truth is, is that scheduling will actually set you free to be in the moment. Because I know that everything I need for the next meeting, and it's scheduled and I've reviewed it, is the calendar I can be with the person I'm with, I can literally sit here, no worries, no concern and no open loops. And I'm just present. The value of that is immeasurable because people feel it. And people don't buy from you for what you know. They buy from you for how they feel when they spend time with you. And for me, the ability to be here now because my calendar is dedicated and committed to is priceless. Which brings us to time rule number four, which is optimize for energy. Everyone has different energy flows. You know, I've learned a long time with some people have morning energy, some people, they prefer to stay up late. It actually doesn't matter which type of person you are. I think when you have what I call human alarm clocks, your life might change. And all of a sudden those late nights to 2 or 3 in the morning and those sleep in still 8 or 9am kind of go away because you have these little people that wake up and they're going to come get you. But when you understand how your mind works in what parts of the day you get certain types of work done and you optimize for that, that's where the productivity comes from. There's no person, no high level person that you' met that doesn't understand this and use it at the fullest degree possible. So a few things that I believe in, you don't manage your time, you manage your energy. A lot of people think about time as this concept, but the truth is, is like art class for me felt like time was in warp speed. Math class for me felt like time stood still. So if you even think about the energy of the type of work you do, time doesn't feel the same because the type of work you do in that time matters. So if you know that some of the most critical creative work is best done in the morning, when your mind is fresh and your ide are ready to go, then you have to bring those creative ideas to the morning. If you know that your favorite time to have collaboration and conversation with other people is in the afternoon, then schedule those meetings in the afternoon. But the problem is, is most people, they just put it all wherever it goes. You know, the morning has 30 minutes of creative work and then 30 minutes of a meeting and then 30 minutes of a sales call and 30 minutes of a conversation with my team. And it's just all wacky on the energy side. So for me, I'm always looking at the energy throughout the day, the type of work I'm doing, how it makes me feel and I'll even go as far as saying, okay, this type of work feels best after I work out. Let's batch that after I work out. This type of work feels best, you know, right before the end of the day when everybody's kind of done and we're doing just creative brainstorming so they're not trying to worry about work planning. Best to do it on a Friday for the Monday versus Monday morning. Because Monday morning people are ready to get the work done. They're not thinking strategically and wanting to plan. That level of awareness on your energy will change the game for you to be way more productive. 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. Which brings us to time rule number five, which is batch work. One of my favorite exercises to show clients when I'm working with them around productivity is the idea of counting to 1 to 26 and also saying out the alphab. So if I ask you to count one to 26 and you do that and then I say okay, now say out loud ABC all the way to Z and you do that and I measured you to do those two things as fast as possible in order, most people could get them done in about 45 seconds to a minute. As soon as I ask you to go 1a, 2b, 3c and onward, all of a sudden the time takes two to three times more time. Most people are context switching all day long versus what I teach people is to dump all of the activ. All the projects. Just dump it down on a piece of paper in a note file on your phone and then group similar activities together. Then we sequence them by blocking them into your calendar. So the best way to do this that most people are never taught is to dump chunk in sequence. So what we do in step one is we dump everything on our minds. When you're feeling overwhelmed, there's a lot of loose ends. Just get it out of your brain onto pieces of paper. Your brain is not meant to be a storage place for information. Then what I want to do is I want to chunk those similar activities together so that I can look at. If it's phone calls, I'll put those together. If it's meetings, I can have with other people, I put those together. If it's creating content, I put that together. If it's saying no to things, I'll put all those phone calls together. What I'm doing is I'm grouping them to similar type energy and putting them together. Now this is where sequence comes into play, where I take all those activities and I block them into my calendar in a sequence that respects my energy and has the highest probability of being absolutely awesome. If I'm shooting content, you're better off shooting three videos. Not one today, one tomorrow, the one the day after. If you're already in the zone for creating content, you've already ramped up, shoot the content. Same thing for like project management. Same thing for like creative work. Look for things that are similar, headspace and energy. Example would be writing, drawing, content, creation, planning, being creative, strategic work, vision work. Put those pieces of work together so you can be in the energy and bring it to completion. Which brings us to time rule number six, which is net time. Easily one of my favorite things. I'm like a nerd when it comes to net time. Net time stands for no time, no extra time. So what you do is once you've got all the stuff laid out and your energies match into your calendar, you want to start asking yourself, is there opportunities for me to merge these things together? For example, a lot of my phone calls, I make them when I'm in commute, in transit because I'm in the car and I can do them. So my team has this little Notes file called @calls, a little Google Doc, puts all the calls in there, adds it to my calendar with a link. Before I start driving, I open it up, it's got the numbers in there and I just with the details of why I've got a call and I just click them and I call the person. And the cool part is because I'm driving that I don't got 30 minutes to just catch up. So it's like almost like a trick to just do it now, let the person know you're busy. We just got this really quick conversation to have and then we move on. So that way I'm not taking up extra time when I'm at my desk being creative or meetings with other people, I'm doing it when I'm doing something else. Other fun ways I do this to give you some inspiration. A lot of my in person meetings, my one on ones, I do them on scooters. I know it's kind of weird. Electric scooters, I just love it. We have this great path. We get on the scooters. I have a list in my mind of things I need to talk to them about. We scoot around for 30 minutes, we come back. It's fun disarming, and it just makes everything better. I mean, I don't feel like I'm working when I'm on an electric scooter. I also use Founders Hikes, so I have a Founders Hike I do every Tuesday. The whole world is invited. We meet at Knox Mountain park in Kelowna B.C. at 6:25am in the parking lot. And that way when people message me and they're like, hey Dan, I'd love to take you out for coffee and pick your brain. Or hey Dan, I'd love to meet up and tell you about my idea or hey Dan, I'd love to get your advice on this thing. And a lot of these people are folks I do not know I've never met, but they follow me on social media. I just say, sure, meet me at the Founder's Hike. And it does a lot of cool things. It allows me to still get my workout in my cardio, have great conversations with people I otherwise wouldn't have the chance to meet, and it doesn't take time away from my team or my family. Another one is hot tub reading. I love going in the hot tub almost daily because I feel like I'm on vacation if I've spent time in the hot tub. It turns out that reading in the hot tub is a lot of fun. So I have a waterproof Kindle now that used to not be waterproof and I'd probably go through one or two a year because I'd accidentally knock it into the water where I do most of my reading. I also like, for some reason texting people, podcasts, I'm doing travel stuff requests. I just like to do it in the hot tub. I don't know if it's because I just feel really good about life and that energy is felt over my text messages, but I know that about me, so I do it. IG lives while hiking or on the treadmill. I love to go live for my audience, but I don't want to take away from my family or my team. So when I got to go hike with my dog Blaze and go kick the ball down the hill for him to run back, or I'm on the treadmill downstairs doing zone two cardio, I just go live. I pretty much have a phone mount in all the different places I spend time, so I'll just put the phone on the mount, hit go live and just answer questions, questions. So I'm getting my sweat on and I'm being helpful to other people. I even did this with my Ironman training because when you're doing, you know, 15 to 25 hours of training a week, it starts to eat things up. So I would schedule all my internal meetings with my team to be done while I was on the bike on Zoom. I even got this cool little table that would roll right over the bike for my indoor training. And I would go for three four hour bike rides while I was doing my internal meetings with my team. Now is that optimal? It actually made my brain better. It might not have been fun to watch me, you know, huffing and puffing, especially if I was trying to attack a hill. But it didn' take away from other areas of my life, which is always key. Which brings us to time rule number seven, which is to negotiate the needs. I've got these three things. Anytime I'm making a decision, I always go to. The first one is business fundamentals. You know, whatever I gotta do to be successful, my success habits for me so that I can be the best version of me. And the third is commitments I make to other people. And sometimes I get myself in trouble where I say yes to a lot of people, get overwhelmed, and don't realize it's gonna impact the calendar of people I love in my life. Business partners, family members. Many times it's my wife or my K. So I've just learned over the years, before I make any big decisions about starting a company, buying a company, or things that are gonna impact my life, I always go through this filter. So for example, when I was deciding to start Myrtel Media, which is to create the volume of content we do here, where we're putting out hundreds of pieces of content every month, I realized it was gonna require a completely different calendar for me to be able to do that. Meaning that like 80% of my calendar would have to be changed so that I had the space to be able to do this. So I remember I was hiking one day and I started making phone calls. I called obviously my wife to let her know what I was making commitment to. And she gave me her concerns and I took those. I called my business partners at SaaS Academy and I said, here's what I'm thinking to do. They were crazy supportive. I was worried. They said, why are you not doing this now? I called my other business partners where I buy software companies and said, here's what I'm thinking of doing it's going to affect these things. And they said, I think we can manage. I called other people that I'd made commitments to, advisory roles, business partners, and just pretty much told them, I used to do this, I can't do this anymore. If that's going to impact us, let me know. And I just took all that feedback of it positive, all the issues, and I just resolved it. And because I did that, it allowed me not to have to deal with the emotional strain of feeling guilty for letting people down. And I think oftentimes in life we just don't negotiate our needs. We're not clear about what we want out of life. One of my favorite things to tell people is to express your preferences if you want to do more, but it's going to require you to say no to other people. Express that, talk to, to them, sit down, review your goals, have them explain to you how they think it's going to impact them so that you can actually offer a different solution or help them overcome that fear. Some of it is not even a reality yet, it's just a concern. Look at your calendar and ask yourself, whatever your goals are, does your calendar match your dreams, match your desires? Are they aligned? See, most people tell me what's important to them, family, their business, the community work they do, and I just say, show me your calendar and show me your bank account. And unfortunately, most of the time the things they said are priorities to them are not in their calendar or their bank account doesn't reflect those investments. So be quick to negotiate with people, reset expectations and manage the needs that they have to deliver on your goals. 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 2 Elder Martell on Instagram it's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I' to see you there. Have an amazing day. Which brings us to time rule number eight, which is to look for leverage. The name of the game of being productive is leverage, because you can only do so much in an hour. So this is the equation. The output that you're able to create is your time multiplied by leverage equals the size of your output. You have the same amount of hours as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson or Mark Zuckerberg, except they they have a lot more output per unit of time. Why they have Leverage. They have teams, they have capital, they have relationships, they have experience, goodwill. I remember when I moved to San Francisco after selling my first company, I met this guy named Naval Ravikant and he introduced me to this framework that I now call the four Cs of leverage. The first one is content. If you think of creating a standard operating procedure or a training video, you create that content once and it can be seen by a bazillion people and it takes no more of your time. Huge amount of leverage. Think about this video. Video. I'd shoot it once to teach people stuff and everybody could watch it in the world and it wouldn't take any more of my time than the initial shooting. The second C is code. Code stands for, like automation, tooling, software. There's a lot of small businesses, a lot of individuals that don't have the tools for productivity. They don't have a way to capture information. They don't use tools like a notion or an asana for project management. They don't have a CRM system for their business so they can track their customers and what they've bought and what they've said to them. Some people are still sending around faxes instead of using Slack for communication. Communication. Think about code is opportunities to automate or build tools to manage workflows for moving information and projects forward. The third C is capital. Right. As much as I think it takes resourcefulness to be successful, not money. Certain things like inventory requires dollar bills to pay somebody to give you that inventory to turn it into a finished good that you can sell to a customer or for you to invest in, in a computer so that you can be more productive. Or the latest iPhone or the camera that you're gonna need to create content. So there is capital. And you wanna make sure that. You're always asking yourself, like, how do I get more efficient with the use of capital? Cause then I get more leverage. The fourth C is collaboration. And that really comes down to people. And this is where most of you guys probably have experienced this, right? If I wanna get more done, I need somebody to help me. How do I enroll that person into helping me without it taking more of my time? Because I want it done right. You know, you hear this all the time. I should do it myself. That's a fail to the degree that you can master these four Cs. Content, code, capital and collaboration. Anything you envision could come true. That's how we increase our leverage and our productivity and our output. If you don't understand this, then you're just going to be working really hard, long hours and you're not going to get a lot done. You need a better way to create output using the four master skills of leverage. That's how I schedule my day as a multi million dollar CEO. But if you want to watch this play out in real time, click the link and I'll see you on End the the Other side. 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.