Why You'll Never Again Work More Than 15 Minutes at a Time

Everything you can do in 15 minutes. This is a 15-minute day. Do whatever you want. At the end of 15 minutes, write down what you did. That's it. From 9:15 to 9:30, do whatever you want. No restrictions. Write down what you did.

So it's just a documentation process?

Yeah. Now what happens is most of the times our brains are running on automatic and autopilot, and we're too receptive to the clicking around on the internets and getting stuck in what bucket? The downhers, right? Correct. Stuff that don't matter. When we force our brains to kick in every 15 minutes, the real part of our brain kicks in. The non-automatic response, the self-guidance, the what the fuck am I doing with my life feeling. And every 15 minutes it'll kick in, and after 4 or 5 rotations, you'll never wanna go on YouTube ever again. 'Cause you go, damn, I just fucking wasted 3 segments of my day. And then very quickly, your bad days don't become bad days. Your bad days become bad 15 minutes. I just spent 15 minutes doing nothing.

Ugh. Yeah, when you're conscious that you're losing 2 hours a day on that shit, and what you can produce in 2 hours every day. Yeah. You start adding up the blockers, the ad blockers.

Yeah, yeah. You start developing this outward mouth talk, but inside, it's like, goddamn, what am I doing today? Oh, I really should be changing this. You know how you walk around thinking about that? That is just your higher brain communicating with your mouth. And after a couple rotations, you'll be doing it internally. And either you'll be much more present, saying, this is the thing that I'm doing. I'm going to play video games. This is gonna be awesome, and I'm only doing video games and having a great time. Or I'm only working on the important things. Or you're consciously saying, this is a tiger. I can figure this out. I started doing this. 2 months ago. It's tough. But by noon, you've docked 90% of your to-do list off. Done, done, done, done, done. And then these big, hairy, audacious business objectives become very, very simple. I'll give you an example. What is the one thing that we did yesterday? Posted the image. That was it. How long did that physically take? 10 minutes. 5 minutes. 10 minutes, 5 minutes. We spent most of the time talking about it, right? You want a new offer? It's only gonna take you 15 fucking minutes. You wanna follow up with your leads? Takes you 15 minutes. You wanna have a sales call? It'll take 2 15-minute segments. If you have a thing to document and you're only doing your 15 minutes of documentation, what are you gonna end up doing? Documenting. That's it, nothing else. So if I sat you in a room alone and you could do nothing or do an IG story, what would you do? Probably do the IG story. So this is my 9 AM to 1 PM every single day, and I no longer have a to-do list for the first time ever. That's why I had time to do this event, because guess where it was on the board? It was in the book part. Yeah, and when I didn't have it, That's why we didn't have an event 3 months ago, 'cause I didn't do a 15-minute day. And my to-do list kept just racking up and up and up and up.

But what do you mean when you say you don't have a to-do list?

Like, for the first time ever, I don't have a to-do list. 'Cause you finished it. 'Cause I finished it. What the fuck, right? It's because I did this Eisenhower Matrix. Shit that didn't matter doesn't matter. And I'm only stuck on the top left. And my top left business initiatives are stuck in these buckets. So when you're trying to build out your course area, you're like, wow, I've got so many things in this course area I need to build out, and then Slack kicks off, what are you gonna do? Gonna go to Slack. Gonna go to Slack. Welcome distraction. Yeah, thank God I can do this. You wanna

justify it too. Goddamn, I really wanted to work on that, but this—

Bingo, right? Bingo. And when you start doing your 15 minutes a day, you're gonna say, fuck, I just, fucking Slack, oh my God. This is how you fill up your course area fast.

You know what that looks like? That looks like an elementary school schedule.

Yes. Sorry. Yes.

That's what I first thought. I was like, that's like what my son does at school. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Jeff, do you take any— do you recommend or have you ever Experience any nootropics to work faster?

Yeah, eating right, exercising, all that. I do mushrooms like once a week, once every 2 weeks. I'm reading a book on— the HBR book on creativity, and it talks about actually being creative is a very good way of staying in this bucket. And doing a whole lot of coffee is a very good way of staying in this bucket. Yeah, right? Ain't it fucking weird? Right? Creativity is required here, and this is just mechanical labor.

It's interesting when I look at this, something I've always thought, but seeing it like this, like she was saying, for me, like, it's almost like more technology gets more in the way. And if you just look at it like this and simplify things, it's crazy.

It's all the way down. Has anybody here had a bad day? Of course. How many, how many 15 minutes is a bad day? A lot. A lot, right? Is it really a bad day? Is it really like 3 15-minute bad segments? Sure. Right? And then all of a sudden it boiled out of control for no reason. The side effect of doing 15-minute days is that you don't have a bad day anymore. You only have a bad segment. It's only from 9 to 1. We don't track anything after that. Because it's fucking exhausting, dude. Like, it's— oh my God, after 1 o'clock, I'm like, I'm fucking done. I even tried documenting this agency school. I never got past 2 o'clock.

So let me ask you this though, because, you know, like, working in flow states is something that's talked about a lot. Yeah, I feel like this would very much disrupt the flow state if you did manage to fall into one, because having to reignite that every 15 minutes. I feel like it's almost impossible.

So that is correct. And like all advice, this is rule of thumb, middle 80%. There are times where I'm like, I just, I didn't even know I wrote for an hour straight. Oops, I guess we're happy. I did something important. So if you are in the top A+ 1% highest category of a person that there can be for you in your journey, cool. Right, but you know what I mean, right?

Oh, I'm not that guy.

Yeah, yeah, as like, as a theoretical, that is correct.

Yeah, fair enough. So here's the thing, so it's not like you got a timer that's going off every 15 minutes. It's like, it's— you're— you have to be mentally cognizant to look at the clock.

Correct, correct.

I don't have like a timer. That's totally fine.

Totally fine. You can go back and override. Yeah, but I don't have a timer going off every 15 minutes. I toyed around with that idea. It was so annoying. And actually provided more anxiety. So now I just use that—

Everything tighter.

Correct, yeah. So you know that natural Alt+Tab that we all have? Somehow that happens, and you're like, how the fuck did YouTube come up? What the fuck, right? That begins to go away very fucking quickly, and at the very least, you've only lost 15 minutes. I started

using Matthew Larson, doing stuff in the agency space. He's made some really good YouTubes. I started taking one. He does a timer, but it's for a full hour. Everything's on do not disturb. You block out the first 5 hours of your day. No emails, no nothing. It has to be 5, 1 hour designated. You don't get up from your desk. You're not going to the bathroom. You're doing this one thing.

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, that's how they wrote Seinfeld. They said, we can do nothing or we can write. That was the first 5 hours of every day. They do $2 million a month in residuals now. What the fuck? That's insane, right? But the first 5 hours of every day was do nothing or write. So it's not too dissimilar. I don't think I could last 5 hours.

I can't do 5

hours. But again, that's like the extreme scenario.

2 to 3, but still, that's solid work.

I personally challenge every single person here to try a 15-minute day. Yeah. Yeah, and it's fun, it's interesting, it makes travel okay, 'cause I'm just gonna do this thing for 15 minutes. You get to read, which is like everybody wants to do that. You can start writing your book. You can do your low-ticket launches. You can even do your deck. Did everybody get the deck? Y'all got the deck. How many people started filling it in? Right? If you had 15 minutes right now to fill it in, how far could you go? Right, that's what I mean. So this is how you end up doing more stuff with priorities that matter. I've tried to-do lists. This shit becomes a big deal. But understanding priorities and having a 15-minute day just blows everything out of the water.

How do you get over a creative block? I've been experiencing that problem.

Yeah, read. Read and write. That's it. Oh, to answer your question about nootropics and all that. Eating right, exercising, and then just doing normal people stuff. And sleeping. And sleeping, interacting with human beings. Mushrooms kind of help, right? LSD. LSD, just go full-on Woodstock. Full dose, or like you just pull a long strip ball? I wish. I don't have the balls to do it. I just do a slight microdose, yeah. I was about to say, why strip balls? I'm not. No, not at all, no. I'm just gonna stare at the leaves and feel them with my eyes, yeah. Yeah, no, but doing normal human people things. So like, imagine this, if you stuck an orangutan behind a blue screen under fluorescent light and just yelled at him and gave him red lights and said, be a productive person, what the fuck would happen? We're 99% orangutan, man. I lost you. Yeah, right? So you have to eat right, you have to exercise, I'm talking like strength training, Outdoor, you need to interact with human beings, all that other stuff. That's how you end up being better than nootropics.

It's crazy that you say that. A lot of people in our space say, oh, like, mold, mold, 12-hour, you know.

Yeah, stupid. No, it's fucking stupid. All those people will burn out in 24 months, and they all move to Bali or some shit to relax. Like, they hate their lives so much they did an 18-hour flight. to get the fuck out, and then they live in the jungle. Hey, but they worked for every second of that. That's true, yeah, yeah, and then they're really guilty while they're in Bali. That's what happens. So to answer your question again, it's just be a normal human being thing. Read, write, exercise, speak, this type of stuff, and then you'll never have a problem.

I don't do drugs, but the best thing that I ever did for that was in the morning when you wake up, do not be on your phone.

Yes.

For like an hour.

Yep.

Take a shower, do meditation, do yoga, and you will get some of the craziest ideas popping up in your head just from not being on your phone. And then we're like, wow. That's how I came up with some of my best offers, just staying off my phone.

Did you find that saying, I'm not going to be on my phone for the morning, was more difficult or more easier than saying, I'm not going to be on my phone for the next 15 minutes or 20 minutes? Like, how do you think about that? Got it. Okay.

And then when it's time for lunch, I can then check my messages. Yeah.

Wes Watson. Wes Watson.

Since this seems to be in demand and there's a second here, the best app for this on the laptop is Cold Turkey Blocker. You can set whatever you want, and the only thing is like you need to get a new fucking computer if you want to change one of those settings and you like overcommitted. So.

You need to buy a new computer to change the settings.

It'll block whatever website you want for whatever period of time, whatever.

And you can't undo it.

You said there are ways that you can undo it that are very complicated.

Or you just set it as to break the rule you just set for yourself.

Or just buy a new computer.

Take you longer to buy a MacBook. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, there's a free version.

You said it's called Turkey Blocker.

Cool. The best way to reverse it is to just schedule it for how long you want, not for a lifetime.

I bet one guy did it for a lifetime as a joke. He's like, fuck me. That was me. You did lifetime? Yeah. Congratulations. How's your new laptop? It's great.