Boost Productivity with 90-MINUTE Cycles | Maximize Your Output

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can be more productive.

High performers just produce more. If you look at a high-performing athlete, they're putting in more hours on the field. If you look at a high-performing executive, they're more efficient and effective with their time than their counterparts. It's just, it seems in the same amount of time, they get more done or they get in the experience deeper or they're more efficient and effective at it. And because they are, obviously they're able to get ahead faster than other people. But we have to look at that in our own lives, you know? How productive have you been in this last couple weeks? Be honest about it because it's gonna dictate whether or not you're gonna ever reach your full potential. Isn't it true? Productivity has so much to do with our full potential. You look at even an artist. A lot of artists are judged based on how prolific they were. Were they productive in their careers? Did they put out one painting or were they like Monet? Did they put out one music, you know, one musical arrangement or were they a Beethoven? Were they thinking of one formula or were they solving all formulas like Einstein? There's something about a high performer in any area that they just get more done, partially because they stay at it, partially because of clarity, energy, and courage. So honestly evaluating ourselves in that area is vital.

So no matter how late at night you go, before you wrap up, just take 4 minutes and really think through everything that you have to get done for the next day. So here's how I usually do it. First thing I do is I open up my calendar and I take a look at all the appointments that I have for the next day and the time that those appointments will take. Like this, 1:00, I got a team call that lasts 30 minutes. 3:30, I have a MarieTV script review that'll take about an hour. And then I have a 6:30 spin class. Then I write down all the projects and the tasks that I need to get done and I give myself a little bit of an estimate about how long I think each project or task will take. Of course, these are estimates. Sometimes I get things done faster and sometimes they take longer, but but at least I give myself a baseline to work off of. 9:00 to 10:30 AM, I'm gonna write a first draft of a sales video script. I'm gonna give myself about 90 minutes. Then from 11:30 to 12:30, I'm gonna review my social media schedule, give myself an hour for that. And from 2:30 to 3:00, I'll do a little email clear out. And finally, I make a new little section at the bottom of my notepad with personal things that I need to handle for that day. For example, get nanny a birthday card and mail it. That'll take me about 30 minutes. Order more Kuma food, all of 10 minutes. And book a haircut for the next month takes me about 5 minutes. Boom! That is it. Super simple. So when I do this, it informs exactly when I need to be at my desk and working, which tells me when I need to wake up to have enough time to do my little morning routine and get everything done without feeling rushed or stressed. The worst thing you can do is wake up in the morning and go straight to your computer and open up email, and then all of a sudden you're pretending to work all day, and at the end of the day, nothing important ever got done. Nobody's perfect, and of course not every day goes as planned, but this system gives you the best chance possible at making sure that your most important projects get done, especially if you have an inconsistent schedule.

The myth of the harder I work, the more productive I will be has been debunked by the science. If you study human performance, here's what they've realized, and Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz have done some great work in this field, but here's what the science says. Optimal performance and productivity happens in 90-minute cycles. So what am I saying? Work for 90 minutes and then take a break to recover. Then work for another 90 minutes and then go for a walk. And then work for another 90 minutes and then take a drink of water. And then work for another 90 minutes and maybe take a nap. Or read something interesting that's not related to what you were doing.

What will that do?

It will keep your mind focused on the work at hand. It will increase your energy because energy's like a well. You deplete it, you need to fill up the well again. And it will really keep you at your productive best and will also keep you inspired rather than getting burned out.

My marketing activity for Wine Library was productive because I grew my family business to a big business. It also became the output of my learnings that became the foundation of my personal brand, which became the beacon to building the fastest growing social digital agency ever. Right, like so, like I'm always, I'm doing things that people feel are not scalable in the moment that I find to be very scalable if you're willing to look at them in a 5 to 10 year window. Got it? Like was it productive for me to take that meeting with Chris Dessy when he randomly emailed me and said, hey, will you take this meeting? And I said sure, which then led to a 15-minute, I'm just gonna pay forward to this kid moment, which I love to do, because you never know. Well, this time I didn't know, because it led to he being one of the early employees at BuddyMedia, which was a company Mike Lazzaro had, and I will tell you that that led to free office space at Wine Lot for VaynerMedia when we started it, in the conference room at BuddyMedia. It also led to me giving a quote to Mike Lazzaro for BuddyMedia, where he gave me warrants to his company, which later sold for $1 billion to Salesforce, so I made 7 figures on a quote to a website, so I'd call that productive for that 15-minute meeting. But it also led to a friendship that has become one of the core friendships for Lizzie and I, and this Saturday night I got to spend time with a very small group for his oldest son's bar mitzvah, and the speech that the son gave and the speech that Mike gave is something that is engraved in my heart for the rest of my life. I call that productive, but then there's a billion 15-minute meetings that I take where the kid's a piece of shit and nothing good happened. So when you play it in a net-net game, I think that people are overthinking their at-bats, right? And I think intent matters, I think people are trying to be too technically sound, too, they're not allowing for serendipity. And serendipity is where all the magic is, my friends.

All of it.

And when you think in terms of outcomes and not activities, pretty soon some of the activities you don't even need to do to get the outcome. You find a better way to get the outcome quicker. Now, how do you do that? You ask 3 questions. Question 1: What is my result? What is my outcome? What is it I really truly want from this? If you're going back next week and you say this next week, what are the most important— what outcomes for me to get this week in my business? And you just write those outcomes out. Not your action items, the outcomes. You, if you do that and nothing else, you'll be ahead of the game. And if you just keep looking at those outcomes every day, how am I doing on that outcome, your brain will come up with ways to get to that outcome. I promise you. Focus on outcomes, not on activities. Action for most people, activities, most people mistake movement for achievement. They mistake action items and to-dos for achievement. We're after the achievement. Are you with me on this? Yes or no?

Yes.

It's a different way of thinking, and I think all of you inherently have it, but if you make this ritualized, just like the things you've learned this week, they're all great, but if you don't systematize them, they'll work when you do them. But if you systematize them, right? And you see, like Mr. Hallman here, where he goes in and just does it and does it and makes sure it's being done again. Or what you've seen Chet do or what I do. You just do it over and over again. You don't miss it. Now the results are geometric. So I want to get you to systematize the thinking, whether you do it visually the way I'm going to show you or not. So first question, what's the result I'm after? What's the ultimate result? What do I want out of this week, out of this thing, out of my business, out of my life, out for my body? And you want to be as what as possible when you describe that outcome, that result. As what? As clear and specific as possible. Generalities will confuse you.

The 4-hour workweek is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset. And the reason that's necessary is because there is an epidemic, and I do mean epidemic, in this country of information abuse and information addiction, where people have come to believe that checking email 200 times per day, having a BlackBerry to your head or in your hand while you're at dinner or on the subway or in your car or with your friends is the path to becoming more productive and more successful.

You mean it isn't?

It isn't because giving everyone around you, every person in the world, immediate access to you is inviting interruption and inviting minutia to completely invade your life, which is happening to everyone.

Did it happen to you?

It did happen to me. I had no intention of writing this book, but from 2000 to 2004, I was working at startups in Silicon Valley. I started my own, I was CEO. And I worked from 7 AM to 9 PM every day. I checked Outlook, hitting send/receive 100 to 200 times per day like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser, slept under my cubicle, sent emails on Thanksgiving to prospects. It was a depressing scene, and it's a very unfortunately common scene, and I think everyone is at a point of overwhelm. There is more information than we can possibly organize. Time management is dead. There's a—

How do you turn that, turn that around?

The way you turn around is you have to completely unplug and reset. That means you need to take a step back, forget about what people expect you to do, forget about what's popular, and really look at what works and what is consuming your time. So there are 4 steps. There's definition, elimination, automation, and liberation. Definition is simple. First, you need to define your ideal lifestyle. What do you want to be doing from when you wake up to when you go to sleep? And so what do you want to have, what do you want to be, what do you want to do? And how much does that ideal lifestyle cost? And that becomes your target. Elimination is simple. It's getting rid of everything, all the static, all the noise, all the interruptions, all the micromanaging, all the people possible that interfere with getting you to that ideal lifestyle. The third, automation, is about taking the few remaining tasks that are important but time-consuming and either delegating, automating, or somehow outsourcing them. So in my particular case, I have an army of MBAs in India, about 25 of them who work for $4 an hour and take care of tasks that would otherwise consume hundreds of my hours. And then the last step, liberation, is about the final ingredient in lifestyle design, which is mobility, and then also how to use the time once you create it, which is very difficult for most people.

Okay, this is fascinating, but that's the point. It is difficult. I mean, how do you put the BlackBerry down?

How—

aren't you worried that you're not gonna make as much money, that you're gonna lose clients? Do you have statistics that show that that's not the case?

I have statistics that would absolutely make your head spin. So if you're interrupted by email and phone, there was an There's an experiment done at King's College, for example, that showed that people who were stoned scored 6 points better on an IQ test than people who were interrupted by email and phone. Wow. And that—

Good to know.

Good to know. 26% of people in the American workforce are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The system is not working. So it's not a question of if I should do this, it's a question of when. It is the only real alternative. So one simple step that people can take people can take, a baby step to prove the concept, is to simply use an autoresponder, set up an autoresponder that tells everyone who emails you, I will be checking email twice a day.

That's a great idea.

At 11 and 4 PM. If you require a more urgent response before one of those two times, call me on my cell phone.

Okay, if I start losing customers, I'm going to call you, Tim.

You can call me.

Okay.

What's going to happen instead of losing customers, you'll get more done in the next 48 hours than you would in the next 2 weeks.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Dan Suchio1 asked me to. So if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the clips resonated with you most and why. Leave it in the comments and we'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.