How To Organize The Perfect Day For Productivity & Money (And Still Be Home For Dinner) w/ Craig Ballantyne #TheOnePercent

You will have your next day planned out. You do the brain dump. You get all those thoughts out of your head so you sleep better. You do the to do list so you know what to do in the next morning. And then you make it a little bit easier so you can tackle it in your first block of deep work. And when you've got that in place, those are some real big game changers that allow you to, you know, almost triple your productivity in a day.

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One of the challenges as a high achiever, as someone who has had success.

In your life, is that you ultimately will be opened up to new opportunities. Too many opportunities, too many distractions, too many people who want your time and want your energy. So today I've brought Craig Ballantyne onto the show. And Craig is the guy that a lot of my mentors, a lot of my colleagues, and a lot of my peers pay to go to in order to construct their days in a way that is going to increase productivity, make them more money, and ensure that they're home by dinner all at the same time. So I wanted Craig to come on the show to deconstruct what he calls the perfect day formula. What I was surprised by my chat with Craig was that it's different for each person, but it has certain elements that are consistent across everyone's schedule. So as you listen to this episode, you're gonna hear Craig talk about why he gets up at 4 in the morning, but by no means does he suggest that everyone needs to get up at 4 in the morning. Thank God. If I'm up at 6, I feel like I have won the day. So my schedule is a little bit different than Craig's. But what I found was some consistencies among a lot of the high achievers that I've interviewed here on the show and that I've worked with in my life and those consistencies seem to be the same across the board. And so what we're able to do in this time together is we're able to pull out some of those habits and put them into a little bit of a constructed guide for you, including being very productive of your most important work, which can only be done if you are very clear on what your highest leverage money making activities are. And they're chunking the other activities so that you are not interrupted constantly. This has been a consistent struggle of mine of eliminating distractions and interruptions when I'm trying to get into the zone. And what I've discovered is the reason for that was because I wasn't clear on what my most meaningful activities were. I recently read the book how to make your business run itself and it was very, very clear to identify what it calls the queen bee. The queen bee being the activity that you or your business does that everything else is driven by. And for me that's building audience. For me that is creating content and in my physical products portfolio that is releasing new products to an audience. So by focusing on and protecting those things, all other d dominoes fall in line. And what Craig and I do on this podcast is identify where everything else falls in terms of priority and scheduling so that you get more done, make more money and are still home by dinner and have a life. Which is another thing we talk about in this podcast. Finally, Craig talks about a little bit, just kind of as a side note about how he's using Instagram to get really high leverage leads, which I thought was really interesting because Craig, he doesn't have a huge social presence, he just is making a lot of money from it. So we talk about that just a little bit as a nice Easter egg to be the cherry on the cake. I think you're really going to benefit from this chat with Craig Ballantyne. Also, Craig and crew, Craig Ballantyne, Joel Marion and Bedros Kuhlian are three really close friends who are all speaking at the Capitalism Conference this January in Dallas, Texas. The Capitalism Conference is basically a three day incubation for entrepreneurs and investors who are building towards a hundred million dollar empire or just have big visions for their lives and their careers. Every speaker that we invite has either advised, invested in or has built $100 million empire. And so we invite entrepreneurs and investors who share similar aspirations or want to see how bigger visions are built so they can use those strategies in their own companies. And we have me and we connect with one another and we Share keynotes together and new opportunities get started at capcon. So they're all speaking, and Craig is the one that most of the other speakers go to in order to construct their days for higher performance. So I think you're going to benefit a lot from this chat with Craig, and you're really going to enjoy meeting him this January. All right, let's jump into the show.

Craig Ballantyne, you greedy capitalists. Welcome to the 1%. Thanks for having hanging out with me.

Oh, this is gonna be so much fun.

I'm so stoked to connect with you because I've heard your name so many times over the last decade, and specifically because I have so many peers, even mentors of mine, who go to you in order to get more done, make more money, and still maintain balance in their life. So my primary question that I wanted to jump into is, when really high achievers are coming to you, what are they hoping to accomplish, and how are you helping them accomplish it?

Well, they're really overwhelmed with opportunity, as successful entrepreneurs are. I mean, the more successful you get, first of all, the more criticism you get, but also the more people saying, hey, let's partner on this. I'd love to have you come and speak here. Let's do a book together. You can get super overwhelmed with that if you don't have the focus. People come to me, and I give them the focus, the clarity, the discipline, the willpower, the intention, and the boundaries in order for them to be super successful. Boundaries is something very important that most people kind of neglect. The not to do list, the saying no, the boundaries. So I give people permission to have those as well.

You used the word willpower, which was a really interesting choice of words. Could you explain to me why you chose that word?

Yeah. So, I mean, we don't want to rely on discipline and willpower to be our only forces for good. But we do need to set up our rituals and routines that allow us to kind of leverage our willpower, because we all do have willpower, and it's generally stronger in the 1 percenters. And so, hey, listen, if we can remove distractions and temptations and allow our willpower to flourish, then we can go and really dominate in specific areas. So, yeah, we can't ignore it, and we can't just say, oh, it doesn't work. I mean, it does work for us when we foster it.

So this is interesting to me because I think of willpower kind of like a battery that gets drained over time. If you don't have those specific boundaries set Up. What have you found with the high achievers that you work with that drains that willpower tank the most that we should eliminate?

You know, a lot of negative energy sucks. And so those negative energy sucks can be anything from, you know, the wrong people contacting us at the wrong time. It can be the temptations that all of us have. It can be some of our own self limiting beliefs that we've allowed to keep with us. And then there's also some genetics in there. I mean, some of us are a little bit more prone to anxiety and depression. We get drained by a lot of those things in addition to the modern world.

Can you tell me what to do about that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I like to use this imagery of we want to put up a fence and some boundaries around ourselves. You and I were talking just before this about what time I get up. And I get up very early in the morning. And I do that because at the end of the day I'm actually one of the laziest, weak and unmotivated people that you'll meet. I would love to just sit on couch and watch television and read books all day, but I got to get some stuff done in order for me to be most productive. I've identified when my most productive time of day is, which is early in the morning, and I go and block all the temptations. So then that makes it easier for me to be successful. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of really super successful people who are on the verge of success, they might feel like they're a race car with their wheels stuck in the mud. And if you remove all the temptations, the distractions, the obstacles in your way, you can essentially take that race car, that high performer, and put them on the path to success. And then they go 200 miles an hour straight down the road. But first of all, you have to remove all the blockages, or as my friend Bedros Gulian says, you have to take the E brake off from that high performing car so they can go and be more successful.

You mentioned Bedros, and of course you and Bedros will both be speaking at the Capitalism conference this January in Dallas. So I imagine this is going to be jet fuel on stage getting the two of you together. Craig, I'm really interested in this because you mentioned that you are most productive in the morning and you block out those distractions. Would you say that most entrepreneurs would follow suit in terms of being most productive in the morning, or does everyone have their own kind of unique productivity calendar?

Yeah, that's A great question. There's really two answers to this. First of all, everybody does have their own unique calendar. And so Joel, Marion, another person who's speaking at your event. Hell yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's going to rock the mic. He's amazing. And so it's funny. Joel and I are very, very good friends, and we have the opposite schedules, or used to have the opposite schedules, until he decided to change. So I would actually go and visit him at his very large home in Florida. I'd stay in the guest room, which is right beside his office. I'd get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. He'd be going to bed at 4 o' clock in the morning. We would just say, hey, what's up? And then he'd be gone. So he worked and he built his $100 million supplement company between the hours of 10pm and 4am because that was when he was really productive and there were no distractions. Now, here's the thing. Even if you are that way, the world is built around this first of all, this foundation of 9 to 5. And then the world kind of. It makes it hard for you to be a night owl. I mean, it's super sexy. I'm working really late, I'm really cool.

You might think. But at night, you have Netflix, you have alcohol, you have your spouse, you have your kids, you're tired, you have all these things that stop you from being that night owl that dominates. It actually is, for most entrepreneurs, easier. Even though it sounds hard, it's easier and simpler for them to get up earlier in the morning, dominate whatever their number one most important task is, and then move on to dealing with the chaos of the world as they go.

Yeah, this is fascinating because I found for me that I kind of get two sprints of creative energy. One is early in the morning when I do creative work or I'm doing my most important thing. And then late at night, sometimes over either, like, a cup of tea of, like, decaf tea or a glass of wine, I get a lot of meaningful writing or brainstorming down on paper. Both of those things have one thing in common, and it's that there's no distractions. And then in the afternoon when I've got meetings and interruptions, I've just asked me to do anything creative, and I'm a wreck. I'm a mess.

Yeah, there's actually. Sorry to interrupt. There's actually science. And so Daniel Pink has a new book called when, which is the Scientific the Science of the Best Time to do everything.

I bought it at an airport last night. That's interesting.

Yeah, that is because he talks and he talks about how you have the greatest, and I kind of used his words before, the greatest willpower, discipline and intention early in the morning. But he also mentions we then go into what he calls a trough in the afternoon of energy. And so that's when you, I mean, it's not like you're low energy in your meetings, but you're not doing that creative work. And then he says, we kind of have this second wind early in the evening. You mentioned before that in the evening and in the morning we don't have distractions. But there's actually one thing in the evening that can really power productivity and creativity and getting things done. Do you know what that is?

I think you're either going to say sex or chocolate.

Well, I guess the first one is kind of right, but it's really the deadline. Right? There's a deadline of, hey, listen, we have to get XYZ done before I go to bed tonight. We all know the power of the deadlocker. Before you go and get sex, before you think the chocolate to your wife to get the sex, it's the deadline. It's that built in natural deadline of the evening. When I was younger, I used to work a little bit more in the evening and I remember cranking out a lot of copy and a lot of content at 10 o', clock, 11 o' clock at night because I got to get this done before I go to bed tonight. And that kind of powered the way that Joel worked back in the day. So you do have no distractions. You do have that second window and you have the power of the natural deadline of wanting to get something done before you go to sleep or before you go to bed and do whatever you do there. So there you have it. You do have that extra little bonus. So there is something to working in the evening as you described.

But is it hackable then in terms of just moving the deadline to something else? Like I've got to have this done by five or wife or spouse is going to kill me or I have to be home by dinner, or is there a way to move that and stick at the same benefit?

Absolutely. And so you basically nailed it. It's like, okay, how do I hack this? Well, I need to have some accountability in a deadline. So for me personally, I have to have a certain amount of writing done before I will reward myself with stuff that people call self care these days, like meditation, walking the dog, all that sort of stuff. So I have to have it done. And I've told my company, I've told my team members, I've told all my readers that that's what I do. And so I have public accountability to them now. You can also have the same sort of thing to your spouse and say, hey, listen, I'm going to be home at 5 o' clock for dinner every evening and yeah, I might go work later on, but I'm going to do it. And if I'm not home, then I can't go do X, Y and Z. So you put some consequences in there. So when you have the power of accountability, deadlines and consequences, you can really stick to these deadlines and get more done by it. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, her book Lean In, I thought it was really great. At first I resisted the book, but I read it and I thought, she's got some really good principles in here. One of the things that her and her husband, when he was still alive, what they did was even though they ran those big companies, he was CEO of SurveyMonkey, they were still home by 5 o' clock every day. They made this claim to the world. They said, hey, we are dedicated being with our children for dinner. So they had everything done by 5pm she drove home, spent from 5 until 8 with the kids, and then after she went back to her office at home and worked. So it was that built in. Let's hack the deadline for increased productivity.

So you're known for the idea of the perfect day formula. I'm curious, Craig, what does the perfect day look like in terms of maximizing productivity? Are you moving deadlines differently for each person or do you have more of kind of a customized or more of a dedicated plan that you think serves as a good starting template?

We are looking for templates that are then customizable to the individual. So even though Joel worked from 10pm till 4am, he was still on his version of the perfect day formula, whereas I was on mine getting up at 4am So I like to use this little saying, and I think it's a writer downer, which is it's not about the hour you get up, it's about what you do with the hours that you are up. It's not about being in the 5am Club or oh, I'm better than you because I get up earlier. Listen, it's not about that. It's about making sure that you have the systems of formulas in place using a not to do list as well as a To do list, using something I call a brain dump to get all these ideas out of your head so you can organize things into your to do list and not to do list. All these techniques that allow everyone to build their own customizable perfect day. And when I say perfect day, it means you get so much done and you move towards your legacy in life, at work, in your career, while also having time to concentrate on what counts. Which for most people is going to be family, it might be their friends, it might be their health, their hobbies, whatever it is. But we're really, really structured when we're at work and then we are free at night. So it's, you know, classic Jim Rohn quote was, wherever you are, be there. And on the perfect day formula, you're living that little line.

What habits or daily activities are in each of your formulas. So I understand that it can be moved around in terms of when you feel like you can be most productive or most uninterrupted. But what things are the same across the board?

Well, for most people, they're going to want to have what I call the magic time. Magic time means you identify where you are most creative, productive and energetic. And you'll just need to do this through time journaling. You'll need to figure out, hey man, when. Oh man, I just noticed every day at 10 o' clock in the morning, I have all these ideas. I can be super focused. If I could only not have meetings during my magic time, I'd get more done. Okay, great, you've identified that. Let's foster and protect your magic time so that nobody steals it from you. Do the best that you can. If you're an entrepreneur, you should have a lot of control over your schedule. So you need to be able to step up and say, okay, I am going to then add my not to do list, go to my not to do list, which is another key component that everybody should have and say, I do not take calls between 10 and noon. I don't check my email between 10 and noon. I simply focus on my number one most important task. So when you find your magic time, when you have these boundaries in place through your not to do list, and when you've identified the time of day when you're going to end the day and use the brain dump to plan the next day. So I take people through this three step process of do a brain dump, which gets all the ideas, all the things you need to do the next day. You do that at the end of your day to get all those Ideas out of your head so you have a clear mind for when you go home. Then you can then take that list of all the things you want to do. You can prioritize, organize it into a to do list. Because if you're doing your to do list the the morning of you're already too late. It needs to be done the night before. And then there's one more step that I actually found from a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. And they talked about in order for somebody to take up a new habit or to make an activity regular, you have to remove all the barriers to getting it done. So for me as a writer, I get up every morning and I write for my books. And if I get up and I go to my computer, Ryan, and there's nothing there but a blank screen, what am I going to do? I'm going to get writer's block, right? So I need to do what I call process planning. So Chip and Dan Heath, their example in their book was if you want to make exercise a habit first thing in the morning, then you need to set out your exercise clothes right beside your bed so that you don't make any excuses for putting them on. And once you got them on, you're going to make exercise a habit. Now, for me, I need to do a little bit of bullet pointing in my document so that I wake up the next morning instead of thinking, oh man, I have a chapter of 1500 words to write. And being intimidated by it, no, all I need to do is write 300 words for each of my five bullet points. And it's so much easier. So whatever it is, I just added that little step that what I call process planning. And if you do that, you might do that at 5 o' clock before you go home. You might do that at seven o', clock, before or after dinner, or maybe an hour before bed, but not too close to bed. And if you do that, then you will have your next day planned out. You do the brain dump. You get all those thoughts out of your head so you sleep better. You do the to do list so you know what to do in the next morning. And then you make it a little bit easier so you can tackle it in your first block of deep work. And when you've got that in place, those are some real big game changers that allow you to almost triple your productivity in a day.

So what I'm hearing you say is at the end of every day or before every workday, you're planning out what is the most important Activity A to do list while also removing any friction that would stand in the way of getting something done most efficiently. And then you have structured time each workday that is uninterruptible where you're only focused on that thing. And you found that those things combined can increase your ability to get something done up to three times.

Yeah, absolutely. Because just as a real crystal clear example for myself is if I try and write at 2 o' clock in the afternoon, I might get 500 words done in an hour because it's just not a good time of day for me. But at 4 o' clock in the morning when I write, I can get 1500 words done in about an hour. So I'm tripling my productivity. There's and it's all because I've just done a little bit of self reflection and introspection to identify these opportunities.

Craig, you mentioned that you delay the gratification of what you called self care, like meditation or exercise. And I haven't heard you talk about where you fit in those things into your day. Would you comment on that?

Yeah, for sure. So the reason that I do mine later is because I found that some people, some very well meaning entrepreneurs are almost turning this self care and this planning and all this stuff that they hear you're supposed to do into this perverse form of procrastination. I had one client come to me and she said by 7:30 in the morning I've done yoga and gratitude journaling and all this stuff and I'm really stressed out because I haven't got anything done yet. I was like okay, we need to step back a bit. What I found is people are doing a little bit too much of the self care stuff early in the morning and not getting enough stuff done. I blame those articles about the 14 things that successful entrepreneurs do before breakfast and that entire list takes four and a half hours. I personally write and then I do a short bit of meditation. That's it. I used to have a dog, he just passed away recently, but I would walk him after that and then I'd sit down, have breakfast and then do more writing, prepare for meetings. And then I personally like to do some exercise right before lunch and then that's pretty much it for for the stuff that takes care of me.

And would you mention what time of day this all looks like? Because you mentioned writing at 4:00am in the morning. At 4:00am in the morning. That's redundant. So I'm curious what the rest of the morning looks like if you're writing at 4am Then you're up two days ago. So explain to me what that actually looks like.

Yeah, for sure. So I get up at 3:57am I don't know. For some reason I think if I set the alarm for 4am, I feel like I'm late. And I'm still 12 minutes up, 12 minutes later than Mark Wahlberg. And the Rock gets up at 4 o'. Clock. So you know these guys. I'm in good company. At 4:00 in the morning, I go and make a green streak and I go right to the writing because again, that's when I have the greatest intention. If I wait, then I'm like anybody else and the next thing you know, I'm wasting time on something. So I write.

And writing for you is like your primary. It's like your queen bee activity. It's the one thing for you and your business, just to be clear. Correct?

Yeah. Because I'm either writing books or I'm writing sales scripts or I'm writing video scripts or something like that. I'm really creative writing at that time of day. And then at 5:30 is usually when I'm done that do the meditation, go for a walk. I try and write a daily thank you card. Just another habit in there. Some gratitude just because that's helped me overcome a lot of scarcity, mindset and anxiety in the past and envy, which used to be my Achilles heel. So I write that thank you card, I walk, I put it in the mail, and then I come back. And usually I have breakfast around. I put my Instagram stuff up because I'm really into using Instagram to build my business these days. So I do instagram between about 6:30 and 7, breakfast and then some more writing in preparation for meetings. I live on the East Coast. A lot of my team lives in Denver, so they're a couple hours behind. So we start meetings at about 10:30 east coast time. So I'll do a couple of meetings and then I'll go and work out about 11:30, come back in, have lunch and do some email until about 2. And then I do a lot of podcasts and filming of videos between two and four. And then I usually wind down from my workday at about that time.

So, Craig, you mentioned at the top of the call you said that when you start to see success, it compounds opportunity. New opportunities come up in the air. They're all demanding our focus. And for me, the thing that is draining about that or kind of frightening about that is it's there's all kinds.

Of people to meet.

And it's, hey, let's set up a call, let's have a meeting, let's brainstorm this. And it's really easy for me to maintain the boundaries that you talked about for like a couple weeks. And then the next opportunity comes up or the next rabbit hole opens up. So I want to jive with what you're saying with this structure so much, but for me, I find that I get derailed after a couple weeks. I'm sure I'm not the first person to express that to you. So how would you comment on that?

It is really tough. And especially, again, the higher up you go, you're having all these conferences, you're meeting all these great people. You are just getting opportunity after opportunity. But if we go to the guys who are financially the most successful in the world, and this apparently happened at a dinner party, Bill Gates mom asked Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, hey, you guys, what's the secret to your success? And they both said one word, and that was focus. I can quote Warren Buffett quotes all day long on this stuff. Like, the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything. And I say it all the time because it really is the answer. We need to go, and we need to be very clear about the vision for our business. I love creating visions for businesses. I think they're very helpful because they, to use an analogy, the vision for your business is the dream destination. And then so in life, in our personal lives, we all have a dream destination for our holidays. Everybody's probably going to Disney World at one point in their life, either as a parent or a kid. So that's a dream destination. Now, how do you get to your dream destination? You fly to Orlando, you get in a rental car, you drive to Disney World. You're at your dream destination. That's a straight line to success. So likewise, if you have a dream destination for your business, that's in three years from now, we want to be doing $50 million with 40% of that revenue coming from this product and then 30% from this product. And we want to have 100 people in our team, and we want to have an office here, and that's all we want to do. Great. If that's your dream destination, you can now say no to all the detours that come into your life, but you have to have that clarity of vision. So again, Bedros, who will be speaking at your event, he has very, very clear vision for fit body, Boot Camp 2500 locations by the year 2022 with. I forget exactly how many franchisee owners he wants to have, but it's not 2500, it's more like 800. So he has a clear, clear path. That means he wants to get owners who have multiple locations and all these other things that come into his life. Oh, hey, do you want to open up this type of business? And he'll say, no, that doesn't work for me because that gets me away from my path of moving ahead to 2,500 locations by the year 2022 with 800 franchisees. And if you can boil down your vision to such a simple statement that allows you to stay on the straight line of success, then every time, even if it's a close friend gets on the phone with you and says, hey, let's brainstorm this idea, well, you can say no to it because it simply doesn't fit. So you run everything through a filter. And it's hard. It's hard at first, but you develop almost like a tolerance. Like when you go to the gym, you develop resistance. We use resistance training to build up strength in your muscles. And over time, you get stronger. Just like over time you get stronger and you get better at saying no to all these opportunities that come into your life.

Hey, a quick plug for those of you who sell on Amazon. One of the things that worked really well for me when I was starting as an Amazon seller was I went hard into Amazon pay per click. And there's, I don't think, enough conversation that goes around about how much upside and opportunity there is in optimizing your Amazon pay per click strategy. For example, one of our backroom members, his name is Travis, he was given a quick crash course to me over brunch one day about, you know, how they grow so quickly, and he was just saying how aggressively they go into Amazon pay per click.

There's just.

There's so much real estate to be had. And Amazon keeps rolling out new opportunities with Amazon pay per click to the point where it kind of makes sense for you to not do this yourself and you to either have a team do it or some software do it so that you can just connect with some of the new opportunities that exist as Amazon expands their ad platform. And out of all the services that I have seen do this, well, PPC Entourage is my favorite. And I'm totally biased because PPC Entourage is founded by a couple members of our backroom Mastermind. So these are guys who are doing it and building brands and building the software for themselves, to automate and to optimize. Specifically their Amazon pay per click strategies. Their metric that they go for is profits per click, getting higher profits for every click that you send to your listings. So this is a service that will help you automate and optimize the ad platform at Amazon. And if you've seen Gary Vaynerchuk has actually rolled out an entire new arm of VaynerMedia that is helping people do this through people PPC, Entourage is doing.

It at scale, which is really impressive.

So if you are leaving sales and profit on the table by not going all in on Amazon pay per click, I highly encourage you to give a click over to PPC entourage.com or just search for PPC Entourage. They're the best that I have seen that does this well.

Craig, you mentioned that you are using Instagram a lot to build your business. I follow you on Instagram and you put out a lot of video and posts. But I mean, to be perfectly frank, you don't have millions of followers like Gary Vaynerchuk or a lot of the other big names in our space. So how have you been able to use one specific platform to drive growth without having a massive following?

Instagram is just such a fun platform because it has everything. It allows you to use video, allows you to quickly upload things. It allows you to do stuff spur of the moment, allows you to do the stories which give people the insight, look into your life. And it has the direct messaging, which is just like email. So it's almost like this, all in one platform. I didn't even start it until February of 2017. And like you said, I don't have a million followers. Like our friend Joel Marion, I only have about 23,000 followers right now, but I've generated about $750,000 in sales through doing what I call this story selling. And I realized I watched a lot of Grant Cardone stuff and I'm really influenced by his work on Instagram. He doesn't follow anything.

Breaking my heart, Craig, my arch nemesis. You're breaking my heart, Craig, but I'm listening.

Okay, all right. I'll have to learn more about that. He doesn't do anything according to the rules. He'll put up a whole bunch of stuff, doesn't worry about pretty grids or anything, which a lot of people do. And so here's the thing. I started doing more of that. I started doing more stories, and I started realizing I was getting more engagement. And then one day I realized your Instagram story is Essentially, the new email marketing. So what I do every day now, in addition to doing the email marketing, my main business is I put together a 90 second story that I post in my Instagram stories, and I use the exact same formula that I used to use in email marketing. The first bit is just like the subject line. It's something about curiosity to capture people's attention and imagination and kind of hook them in. And then the next part, I start telling a little bit of a story, then I teach a little tip and I've earned the right to do a call to action. Just like an email would. Use a subject line, a little bit of a story, teach a tip, and then have a call to action to either go to another webpage, watch another video, buy a product, anything like that. And so I started doing that in about January of this year. And I drive people to direct messaging. We get into conversation and I either have them get on the phone or sometimes they will just buy a $5,000 coaching program with me through direct messaging without me getting on the phone with them. It's really fascinating.

So you're essentially using it as a way to create intimacy, to open up the next intimate touch point so you can close someone one on one. Is that correct?

Absolutely, absolutely. It's just like having your own television show and saying, hey, call in and let's chat.

Yeah. So I'm really impressed with everything that you're saying except for your fascination with adult like Grant Cardone, which is a.

Story for another day.

What's that?

The methods of Grant Cardone. The Instagram methods of Grant Cardone.

Greg, here's where I'm gonna have some cognitive dissonance or I'm trying to fit all this together. Social media is such a time suck. And it can be right. I mean, as soon as you put up a story that's gonna open up some intimacy and create some lead flow. Now you're in a sales conversation. Now you are responding to comments. Now it's easy to go down that rabbit hole. How are you preventing yourself from going down that rabbit hole while still staying within the boundaries of the day that you've set out for yourself?

Yeah, it's a great point. The word is boundaries. So it's blocking and batching. A couple years ago, I was able to move away from checking email every day, and I was checking it every couple of days, and I realized, holy cow, you can get through 50 emails in about 20 or 30 minutes if you just do them all at once. Whereas if you spread those 50 emails out over checking your email 10 times in a day. Now you're checking your email for 90 minutes. So it's simply, I've got 20 minutes to go on Instagram right now. That's all I have. At 3 o' clock in the afternoon, that's the time I check my direct messages. I go on there, I answer them, and then I have to get off. In a certain amount of time. You go in there and you are ruthless with the ones that you need to deal with. And it's the same with being ruthless with checking your email. I mean, the thing I loved about corresponding with you was you have the autoresponder and it said something like, you were on a book deadline and all that stuff. It's like, okay, I get it. You've managed my expectations there. So if you're on there all the time and responding to people all the time, they have this expectation that you're going to be on there responding to them all the time. I just have these regular answers, regular questions and answers. So people ask me about something, I just copy and paste something and put it in there. And even to get the conversation started, I ask the same question to every single person who inquires about it. And then we systematize things as much as possible. I will admit there is some manual labor in there. It's not like, hey, run a Facebook ad to a webinar, send it to a salesperson, and you're done with it. It's not the exact same thing yet, but we're systematizing it as much as possible right now.

So you've got structured time for social media, essentially, and when you're done, you're done.

Yeah. And then I have to protect myself as much as possible. I turn my phone into airplane mode, I turn the phone off, I put the phone in another room in a desk drawer. That's what I do in order for me to go back to another block of 90 minutes of writing. Otherwise, I'm like anybody else. I'm gonna open that phone up.

Craig, let's talk about coming home and disconnecting. Entrepreneurs tend to slide towards workaholism, myself included. And that is easy to undo when you've got easy access to email, social media, your phone, phone calls, all kinds of things that could interrupt you once you're trying to disconnect. I found for me that once I switch off, I'm like, what do I do now? I'm not even sure how to go back into life sometimes. Again, I'm sure I'm not the Only person who has ever expressed that to you. So how do you work with someone who's going through that?

That's a great, great question. And we built this out for a friend of mine who is a gym owner and an online fitness expert. So he, you know, he works outside the home, he comes home 5:30 at night and he's got two kids with, I mean, they, if they're not the most energetic kids in the world, they're up at the top. So he's going to walk into the house and if he's still thinking about work, he's not going to be super dad, right? So we built these little rituals and routines. As he drives home, he turns on and listens to a song that reminds him of a great family event, a great family moment. Just gets him in the mood. And sometimes he might sit in the driveway and listen to that song three times in order for him to make that shift from CEO to super dad. And he's also done already the brain dump and all that stuff. But he still needs a little bit of time to make that shift. Then he goes into the house, the kids attack him, but he's in that mode of being present. Plus we built in this, what I call the phone ritual. So he goes to his son Lincoln. All right, Lincoln, we're going to put daddy's phone in the phone box. So they have this ritual and they go and they put this phone in some other part of the house. And now they go and play. And it's quality time. It's focus time. You're present being there. And then it doesn't have to be hours and hours, but it is quality time that the child will remember. And then after that, once they're off playing on their own or doing whatever, maybe after they've had dinner and had bath and taken to bed, then now, just like Sheryl Sandberg, we might go back and do a little bit of work or if we have planned things out, then we won't. One last thing I'll say is that almost every entrepreneur that I talk to says, I wish I had more date nights. The only person who doesn't is Bedros Coolian. Because Bedros Coolian has made date night a non negotiable on the calendar every single Wednesday. So I spend a lot of time at his headquarters. We have our own podcasts. We, we work together, we coach together, and every single Wednesday, it doesn't matter if we just spent all day in the studio and we're wrapping up and going, man, what a great day. We should go and sell. I'm thinking we should go and celebrate. He's like, buddy, you're on your own for dinner tonight. I'll see you later. It's Wednesday night, date night, and it's non negotiable. And he just gives me the boot. And I'm like, I have so much respect for that. So it's planned on the calendar. And a lot of entrepreneurs, we are workaholics because we don't plan fun on the calendar. So you have to put that stuff on the calendar first even before you put a lot of the work stuff on.

So this is the recurring theme that I'm seeing in a lot of your answers, Craig, is that there's prioritization of what's most important. For you. It's prioritizing writing first thing in the morning when you're most productive. For Joel, it was prioritizing his most important activity late at night when he wasn't distracted. For Bedros, it's prioritizing date night and having it as a non negotiable and turning off anything that could be a threat to focusing on that activity. For your one client, it was prioritizing getting into super to add mode, but it was identifying the things that are most important in business and in life, scheduling them, making them non negotiable, and turning off any distraction that would prevent someone from getting into that mode. Is that a fair summary?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

If I were to have one major takeaway, it sounds like it's that.

Yeah. And the thing is, most people struggle with that because they don't do any self reflection or introspection. So it actually all starts with getting away from the iPhone and the computer and sitting there with pen and paper and figuring all this out. And then it's easy to implement as you go forward, but you got to figure it all out first. It's like, I like to use this analogy that inside your head you have a jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces are all scrambled out. If you don't get that out on the table, you can't organize it into a beautiful picture. And that's what you need to do first.

So that was going to be my next question is, I have many times created a calendar that prioritized my most important things. And then invariably, either a new project or a new client or a really important team emergency will come up and derail my focus one day. And then the whole schedule's off and I forget that I even had a schedule in the first place. So how do you coach somebody through identifying what's most important and getting it all out so that it can be prioritized in whatever order it needs to be.

Yeah. So first thing to do is I start at the highest level, which is what are your values in life? So I would say to you, Ryan, what do you want to accomplish in the next 10 years for your family, your health, your wealth and your experiences? And we would sit there and we figure those out. It would only take a few minutes. Now.

That'S very clear. We know what really, really matters to you. Then we go and create a classic business vision for the next three years. When you have your values and your vision, they drive every decision. Your values and vision drive every decision that allows us to say no to detours in life. Now here's the thing is that there will be those emergencies that come up. All of a sudden, website goes down and you have to be there for it. But we need to get back on track as quickly as possible. When you do your events, when you do your events every year, you are able to remove yourself from the day to day. When the event is over, you get back on track. You've proven to yourself that you can get back on track very quickly. That's the same thing that we need to do as high performing entrepreneurs. I like to use another analogy, like think about seven game series for whether it's a World Series in baseball or whether it's basketball. These guys are flying across the country, right? Different time zones. You're expecting LeBron James to play an amazing game at 9pm in Cleveland on a Tuesday night, then fly to Golden State on Wednesday and then play an amazing game at 6pm Pacific Standard Time on Thursday night, and then go and fly back to Cleveland on Saturday night and play a brilliant game on Saturday night at 9pm so it's funny how we expect other people to do this, but then when we look at ourselves, we kind of give ourselves these excuses not to be that high performer. So when we put this stuff on the schedule, just like all those games are on the schedule for LeBron, we have to honor those things. We have to be very, very planned and prepared to deliver our best. And we have to look at our schedule like a pro athlete looks at their schedule. And when you do that, all of a sudden excuses become few and far between. And you look at yourself as that operator who's going to go out and get things done. And when you travel a lot, especially if you do time zones, especially if you're going to Europe, you arrive there you're groggy. You're like, you know, you got 19 things that you put into different seat pockets and you can leave something behind, but you realize after you get burned once that you need to put stuff in a specific pocket. So even if you are in groggy mode, your brain is operating on autopilot and always puts the passport in a specific pocket so that when you get to customs, you're not fumbling around for it. And it's the same as when we want to be high performers in any area of life. We have to build these rituals and routines. We have to plan and prepare for them. We have to practice them over and over again so they become so automatic and ingrained in our nervous system that we are able to perform at the highest level no matter what time zone we're in. And doesn't matter if we had to perform two days before.

Craig, where does rest fall into this entire puzzle? Because you mentioned flying across country, I imagine getting up at 4am for you is difficult if you're traveling across time zones. As creative entrepreneurs, we tend to get bored with routine after a certain amount of time, and we tend to burn out if we are burning the candle at both ends. So where or does resources rest fall into the entire equation?

Yeah, it's a great question. We can't be in playoff mode all the time when we thinking about planning out that week with date nights and magic time and all this stuff in our days. I also make sure that my clients are planning out recovery. I encourage them to have what I call device free time on Sundays, which could be three hours, six hours, even 12 hours, where there's no cell phones, no laptops, no TV screens. So they get a big break from that. Also planning in family time, also making sure that you're planning your sleep just like you plan your meetings. So one of the things that I coach my clients on is, hey, we're going to set a bedtime every night in addition to bedtime. If we're having trouble sticking to that, we're going to set a reverse alarm. A reverse alarm is an alarm that goes off an hour before bed that gets you to shut off your electronics, gets you to do all of the things to prepare yourself to fall asleep on time so that you are recovering just like a professional athlete is putting all these systems into place to recover so that they can be a high performer. And then you do need to have those times where it's like, okay, we just went through a real strong stretch here where just like right after your event. I'm sure a few days after, maybe the week after, after things calm down, that's when you need to have that recovery time and go on that vacation and step away from the day to day and really take care of yourself. Again with a lot of analogies here to pro athletes. I mean, these guys train hard, but they recover hard and they take very strategic rest breaks after the season when possible so they can come back better in the next year.

Craig, I have one final question for you and you mentioned Sheryl Sandberg earlier and it reminded me of a quote that actually came from Randy Zuckerberg and it was the idea of picking three priorities at least every day of work, sleep, fitness, family, friends. And I think her thesis was every day picking three. But she said pick three to focus on essentially and basically bucking the idea that you can have it all or at least having it all at the same time. What is your opinion on if someone can have it all or not?

I think I saw Randy talking about that at Joe Polish's event a couple years ago and I like her approach to it. Because if you pick, pick three every day and as long as they're not the same three every day, you look at the big picture, you can have it all. And you can have it all in my opinion, in the big picture. But there will be days where you work longer. When I'm coaching people and I'm telling them to plan out their week. The funny thing is, Ryan, I actually realized when I wrote the Perfect Day formula, I wrote the wrong book. I need to write the perfect week formula and that is my next next book. Because one of the things that I coach people on is it's okay to front load your week. You know, if you want to work 10 hours Monday and Tuesday or 12 hours Monday and Tuesday so that you only work four hours on Friday, let's do that. In fact, I have a financial advisor friend of mine who works till 7 o' clock on Tuesday and Thursday so that he takes every Friday off and he has a team of 25 advisors. So it's thinking about not every day has to look the same. That's where a lot of people get hung up. And if you realize I am in full control of my time, I'm in full control of my weeks, I am going to block this time. I am going to make certain things non negotiable. Then yes, you really can have whatever your description of having it all is, you can darn well have it all.

Craig, where can people follow you and who and when should people reach out to you?

First of all, Instagram, RealCraig, Ballantyne. I love putting my stuff up there. It's very raw. I mean, I think if anything, as you listen to this, you hear that I'm pretty blunt and that's the way I am with a lot of my Instagram posts as well, challenging people. I'd love for people to grab a copy of my book at the Perfect Day Formula. You can get that on Amazon as well. I'm also an old school guy. I don't actually use Facebook messenger as some of those other things very much. But if somebody wants to email me, they can email me@craigodfather.com and I will be able to direct them any way that they they need help.

Craig, I'm so excited to have you on stage at the Capitalism Conference this January. So excited to connect with you. So many of my colleagues, peers, mentors have referenced you as somebody who has really helped them to accelerate their path to greatness. So thanks for everything you're doing in the world for entrepreneurs. Keep on changing the world, buddy.

If you've been listening to the last few episodes of the show where we featured entrepreneurs who have crossed the seven figure mark and are on their way to eight figures, then you undoubtedly have heard us talk about the back room. The Backroom is a group mentoring program where we cast the vision for getting to 10, $10 million a year and beyond and being ready to sell your company because ultimately that's where the big payday is going to come from. We also open up investment opportunities so that you can put your profits into places that give you more wealth and potentially more cash flow or even help you save on taxes. We have some pretty cool places where we put cash that give you sometimes all three. Plus you're in a room with people who are the best in the world at what they do. We bring in my team of advisors that help people get into retail. They help people clean up their systems, they help people clean up their books, they even help them reposition their companies so that they can be sold for more money. We also talk about what's working right now on Amazon and on other channels, but the focus of the group is on casting the vision to get to 18 figures and beyond and clearing all bottlenecks that stand in your way while also opening up other opportunities for you to enjoy a life of freedom. Because that's what we're after here. We're not just after this to work hard and work 16 hours a day. We're Doing this so that we can have freedom and we get freedom by making enough money so that we can invest into places that allow us to never have to work again and then building empires with people that we love doing business with. And that's what we're doing inside of the back room. And I could also tell you that we're looking to buy and buy into some of our students businesses through something else that we're doing pretty cool in the back room. But I will save that for another day because that is still in process. But if you have an idea that you're not sure how to bring to the marketplace, if you've got an audience that you know could be the fertile ground for a really profitable seven figure physical products brand, or if you're selling enough product to be able to say, you know, I could step on the gas here if you've got that million in sight, or you're beyond the million and you know that it's time to accelerate the process to get to that eight figure mark. Because you're playing the review game, you're playing price wars. You're tired of sacrificing profit margins, you're working way too long for too little result and you want to clear those bottlenecks so that you can grow faster and have a sellable company. So one day you can have that ideal freedom lifestyle. We can help you inside of the back room. It's one of the more expensive things that we do. It's also the highest ROI thing that we do. So it is application only. You need to be ready for it and you need to be ready to move when you join. So you can go to freedomfastlane.com, click on backroom and see the application, see all the pricing details from there. Working with me one on one starts at about $100,000. Joining the back room is a little bit less than that. So just know going into it that it's a serious investment and it is only for people who either have funding, have sales and are ready to go once they join. So if that's you, go over to freedomfastlane.com, click on the back room and you'll see the application and full details there.