What is your Attn/Hours Per Goal?

So you are nowhere near accomplishing your goals at all whatsoever. You are not close, you are far. You are not one funnel away, you are not one ad away, you are not one client away, not case study away, you are not one post away, nothing like that. You are light years away from your goal. If this was a video game and you had a map and you were dropped off on the map, your goal would be here, you would be on the exact opposite triangle or the exact opposite rectangle. Of this whole big square of this whole big map, you are far and you're not making any progress whatsoever. The reason for that is because you call them goals. The reason for that is because the amount of attention hours you are paying to accomplish your goals is off by an exponent, because the amount of attention hours you are paying towards your goal is not actually tied to any specific project whatsoever, and. When you are paying attention hours to your goal or your project, it's the wrong projects. And I say all of this to not re-motivate you or demotivate you, but instead to gather and get and keep your attention for the next part of this video because I'm going to digest and qualify and quantify exactly what I'm saying so that you can do better starting today. So you'll notice in the preamble, I moved off the word goal into the word project. The reason for that is anybody worth their salt knows that the word goal is a magnet for failure. And if you don't believe me, look at all the goals you've tried to accomplish over the past 5 years, or fuck it, on January 1st go to the gym and count the number of people who are like, I have a goal, and then count the number of people who are there 2 weeks later, 4 weeks later, 6 weeks later, 8 weeks later. The vast majority of people who have a goal end up failing, and not even getting close to their goal, by the way. It ends up being more this visionary aspiration, and it's just really a magnet for failure. And I know this to be true because I have set goals, and I have them on a list. I'm nowhere near close. And when I worked at Fortune 50 companies, and I bet if you talked to people who are wildly successful, they abandon the word goal very, very quickly, even though there's all this literary research and and thinking and frameworks on how to reverse engineer a goal and turn it into daily or weekly steps or like motivate you or remind you of your why or anything like that, I still believe to this day that the word goal is a magnet for failure and the people who drop the word goal and move towards projects simply become more successful over time. So that's the thing I wanted to point out. When I was preambling all this, I moved off the word goal and into the word project and you should too because projects just tend to be better, faster, and stronger by their nature. And we don't have this failure relationship associated with goals that the vast majority of people subconsciously have. And one of the reasons why you're not actually moving towards your goal is because you use the word goal. Instead, it should be project. Project inherently by itself enables a lot more progress and a lot more thinking very, very quickly. And your mental models around projects, they just work inherently, right? So that's the preamble. Let's break into it. I said right out of the gate, that, and I wrote them down right over here, that the number of attention hours you are putting into your projects is off exponentially. And I'll say it again, the number of attention hours you're actually putting into your projects are off exponentially. I'm not using the word goal anymore, I'm saying projects. Here's what I mean. If you look at yesterday, you have about 10 waking hours or working hours to do things moving you towards your projects or things that should be done towards your projects, right? So if you imagine your calendar You got your 9, your 10, your 11, your 12, all the way down. That's your hours. I want you to look at your yesterday hours and divide them into chunks of 4. So you got 9 to 9:15, 9:15 to 9:30, 9:45, or 9:30 to 9:45, 9:45 to 10. So you don't have 10 slots, you really have 40. I want you to look back at your yesterday and say, all right, out of everything that I did yesterday, how many of those are real-life attention hours putting into productivity? projects, right? By whatever metric or measurement you believe is a project. Nope. Let's get rid of that. By whatever metric or measurement you believe is a project. It's up to you to define it. Don't worry about it. This is more like brainstorming type of thing or really seeing how far we've gone. But I would look back at my yesterday and say, okay, I have 40 attention hours or 40 attention quarter hours. Out of those, how many am I actually putting towards any specific projects for any specific Here's the caveat. I don't want this multitasking bullshit. I don't want you did 3 things all at the same time, so your 9:30 to 9:45 counts as a detention hour. That is incorrect. If we take the approach of a Fortune 50 company, you know when they do this like headline which is like, we spent $18 billion on the iPhone or something like that? The way that they actually do that is they take a person, assign them a code, and their headcount goes to the code, which is the project. Any purchases that they have made go towards a project. Any software facilities, they're trying to have accurate billing at the CFO level and their financial level so that they can say, I know for sure that the new iPhone R&D for the whatever project, for the lens or the camera or the software, costs X amount of dollars. So we know what's going on, and I know that this specific project cost umpteen billion or something like that. The people in that project do not get to split their time across doing iPhone this and iPad that and iMac this and iLife or Find My iPhone or whatever. No, they're assigned to a specific project goal thing, right? So I want you to have that approach. Don't give me the I did 3 things at one time box. I don't want to hear that. I want to know if you were the CFO of Apple, would you say that is a billable 15-minute increment towards a specific project? Whatever project that happens to be. What I'm trying to say is you don't get credit for doing 10 things at once in 15 minutes. You get credit for doing one thing. So look back at your 10 hours, divide them into 4, and say, what are my total attention hours and where are they going? And I'll bet, by the way, you are off by an exponent. By like a factor of 10. I'll bet if you look at your yesterday and you had 10 hours at that yesterday, I'll bet you got 4 attention hour quarter time slots that could be applied specifically to a project. The rest was spent doing other shit that wouldn't be— that doesn't count for nothing. I'll bet you, by the way. Or you are unaware that it is accidentally applied to a project. So for exercise number 1, to qualify and quantify my preamble, I want you to go back at your yesterday, divide it into 10 hours, divide those into 4 1/4 hours, fill that fucker out, and you tell me, or at least tell yourself, how many attention hours did I actually put into my projects? I'll bet you you're off by a factor of 10. Based upon what you thought you were doing and what you're really doing. That's number 1, right? Number 2 is the work that you're putting into your projects. You're not doing it into any project at all whatsoever. It may be something, it may be nothing, but the work you're putting into your day or your attention hours is not tied to any project specifically with attention and purpose. So here's what I mean. Let's say it's your 2 to 2:45 or your 2:15 to 2:30 time slot. Cool. I'll bet if you look back at your yesterday or the past week or the past month and you were doing a thing, you were doing a thing without having it purposefully and intentionally tied to any specific project. I'll bet that you were just kind of being pulled into a million different directions. You're trying to solve a problem. You're trying to do a thing, but it was not specifically intentionally tied to a specific project. You just kinda got pulled into something or pulled into a meeting or pulled into YouTube or pulled into whatever. As such is life. But again, if we take that CFO approach, if you had your chief of research assigned to the next generation of iPads, and would you want them all of a sudden taking meetings about The iPhone? Or the iMac? Or the iMouse? Or i-whatever? No. The whole thing is that you're supposed to be focusing on the iPad, not the other stuff, right? And most certainly not the Mac Mini, motherfuckers. The point I'm trying to say is that when you believe that you are being of service and you're doing things, accomplishing towards your goals and making progress and all that, I'll bet you that the vast majority of work that you're actually doing is not tied to any project specifically or intentionally with purpose. I'll bet the vast majority of work that you are doing is willy-nilly and either tied to the wrong project or no project in particular. It's just fugazi. Here's number 3, by the way. I'll bet that the attention quarter hours or attention hours that you are focusing on, that you are putting into projects, that you believe is putting into the right projects, I will stand on my soap opera, my soapbox, my soap opera box, something like that, and I will argue with you until the day I die that those checkboxes that you did, that you're assigning them to a project, are not actually projects that are gonna move the needle in your business. I'll say it again. I will bet you that when you go back and you look at your attention hours, you will have a checkbox somewhere. And then I will argue that you think that you're working towards a project, but you really weren't. And then you're gonna say, but Jeff, I was. I'll say, okay, what project was it? And you will tell me, and here's the kicker, it's likely not a project that's actually moving the needle in your business at all whatsoever. And in terms of prospecting, in terms of selling, in terms of fulfillment, operations, and team, those are really like 5 major buckets. In terms of finances or branding or in terms of outreach or whatever it is, I'll bet you that you're working on the wrong projects. So if you come to me and say like, hey, you know what? I have 10 attention hours available. Of the 10 attention hours, I only did like 10%, which is probably accurate, towards a specific goal. I go, okay, so out of 10 hours out of the day, you had 4 15-minute increments where you were working specifically towards a goal. And of those 4, you would argue to me that those 4 are tied to a specific project. I go, okay. And then I'm gonna say the projects that you're working on don't actually matter, which is like tough to hear. So here's what I mean. I will talk to people that will spend a boatload of money on their website, a boatload of time on their website, gathering 10, 50, 100, 200 templates for their website while they don't actually have any inbound on a daily, repeatedly, weekly, or monthly basis. I will talk to people who have a consistent, reliable, predictable inbound, and then they spend a whole lot of time trying to master their automations and trying to get their reply rate from 18% to 22%, or they're spending a boatload of time on nailing all the SOPs and nailing all the specific ways of working, when the whole time the only thing they really need to work on was hiring a pretty darn good CSM or account manager. What I'm trying to say is even if you are Paying attention to the right goals, assigning that attention, paying attention to the right project, assigning to a very specific project, the vast majority of the time the project is wrong. If you don't have 5 or 10 inquiries per day, you need to focus on that. If you have 5 to 10 inquiries per day and you're not getting 1 to 2 sales calls, you should focus on that. If you're getting 1 to 2 sales calls per day and not closing, Once a day or once every other day, you need to pay attention to that. If your clients are not getting the intended result, you need to pay attention to that. In that order, by the way, from the left of the screen to the right: prospecting, selling, and fulfillment. Most people will say, okay, I want to accomplish said goal, knowing that they are getting 3 sales calls per day, and then saying, I am the best salesperson in the world, I'm going to focus on fulfillment. I go, okay. That's not the goal there, buddy. That's not the right project that you should be working on. You're spending a boatload of time trying to increase the quality of your sales calls so you decrease your no-show rate or decrease your no-offer rate or increase your closing rate when an acceptable closing rate is 30 to 35 to 40%. Totally acceptable, 100% fine. An acceptable cost per acquisition For an $8K program is $2,000 or less. And if your numbers are hitting that, you don't have that problem. You should not be working on that problem. You should be working on the next problem, which is probably client fulfillment and CSM. And once you've done that, you go back to prospecting. The reason why I say that is because every time I sit down with a client that's sitting there going, hey, you know, we just broke $100K, we're doing consistently, but I can't break into $200K or $300K a month, the vast majority of time they are working on projects That are not actually increasing the throughput of their business. Here's your visual, by the way. Imagine you have 3 cups in front of you by whatever metric or measurement you believe are correct. Whatever size cups is up to you. Most people are visualizing 3 equal-sized cups. That is incorrect. No, your cups are not the same. You have different cups all over the fucking table, all right? Your cups are different sizes. Maybe your prospecting is a pretty big cup. Maybe your selling is a big cup. Maybe your fulfillment is a smaller cup, or maybe it's a big cup too. Whatever your business's or your personal strength happens to be, just imagine that is the size of your cup. Let's say you're very, very good at prospecting, as an example, so you've got a very, very big prospecting cup, but your selling is your weak point. You take your very, very big cup of water and you pour it into your very, very small cup. What happens to that water? It doesn't sit around in your prospecting cup waiting to be poured out again. All that water falls on the table and falls to the floor, and all you have is this small cup. And then you take that small cup and then you try to put it into your big fulfillment bucket, and you're like, oh well, you know, my fulfillment cup is full of air and 10% water. That's how you should be approaching this. So the vast majority of projects that you're working on right now are not opening or increasing the size of your cups. The vast majority of the projects that you're working on are trying to make a bigger cup bigger instead of realizing that your very, very big prospecting cup pouring into a very, very small selling cup means your prospecting is effectively this big. See what I mean? And that's the same thing with fulfillment. If you have very, very good prospecting, very, very good selling, and very, very bad fulfillment, effectively all you're doing is having this much fulfillment. You need to have this approach with your projects where you say, okay, my only job is to open up XYZ bottleneck. That's my entire project for the next 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks. Not a goal, not a vision, but a project. So here's what's fun, by the way. The vast majority of projects in your business that are like sub $1 or $2 million a year, can be done and completed in probably 10 to 12 attention hours. So if you work on a project through its completion, through the entire day, you can figure out your prospecting. And then if you work on to completion for the entire day, your selling, and then you work on completion for the entire day to your fulfillment, you will have increased the size of all those cups. Probably not incredibly massively, but just enough so that each cup now is bigger than it used to be. Then what's even more fun, by the way, is then you can double up on the smallest cup. So if you fix your prospecting, cool, and then you fix your selling, cool, and you fix your fulfillment, then the next time you do your rotation between working on projects for prospecting, selling, and fulfillment, you can work on the selling and work on a little bit more and then increase that throughput. Maybe it's hiring, maybe it's automations, maybe it's SOP, maybe it's marketing assets, maybe it's branding, maybe it's automations, maybe it's follow-up, maybe it's AI, who knows? I probably said that twice, but as a philosophy, The projects that you're working on stereotypically are not the projects that actually move the needle in your business. Instead, stereotypically, you end up in a scenario where you're focusing on making the biggest cup biggest instead of fixing the bottleneck. I'll give you an example. When we turned on ads, we only turned on ads after we had our SOP for our fulfillment figured out. We had case studies, and we ended up in a scenario where we have a lot of proof and we know the timeline it takes for our average client to get results. Cool, we figured that out. We increased our fulfillment. We wrote that stuff down and we're off to the races. Then we increased our prospecting a little bit. Cool. Now that we've increased our prospecting, the smallest cup that we have is our selling, which we're now figuring out. Maybe that means a thank you page video. Maybe that needs a follow-up. Maybe that means some automations. Maybe that means different sales training. Maybe that means different marketing altogether. Maybe it means figuring out SQL and MQLs. That is the biggest philosophy. Again, this is a long way of saying the following. One, You are light years away from your goal because you keep using the word goal. That's number 1. Number 2, the reason why you're light years away from your projects, see what I did there, is because the number of attention hours you're putting into your projects is off exponentially. Number 3, even when you are of the belief that you're putting the right number of attention hours into your projects, you are putting attention hours into a project without a specific intention or purpose, or it's not even a project at all whatsoever. And number 3, the projects that you are putting your attention hours into are not the projects that will actually move the needle in your business, of which are only prospecting, selling, and fulfillment. That's a long-winded answer to saying that's the end of the video. Peace out, bye.