How To Work 12 Hours Per Day Without Burning Out ($10 Mil+)

I was able to work 4234 hours in 2024 and not suffer from any burnout, missed time with family, or having to forego any hobbies or obligations that I had. If you do the math on that, that is about 11.6 hours per day over the course of an entire year. Sometimes I worked more than that and sometimes less. And I was able to do all of that while being a very happy person and still doing everything that a normal person does. I never once had to give up going to dinner or missing a Muay Thai or workout class or going to my nephew's hockey game or missing a birthday or any of that stuff. And in this video, I'm going to talk about six things that you can do to work more hours without burning out. Three of those things are going to be to do with your health, and then three are going to be doing with your mindset. So let's get started. The first thing that we need to do is to do with our health. And that make that is to make sure that our sleep is on point. Like that is a very obvious one. So why do we even put it in there? Because to tell you a story, there was once a time when I was growing my previous agency where I would literally sleep less than four hours per night. And I did this for several months in a row. And it's obvious, watching this video and listening to me right now and saying it out loud from my point of view, that this is probably the worst thing you could possibly do and it's not sustainable in every way. And I knew that while it was happening. But if you are an entrepreneur, and especially if you've been in scale mode before, sometimes there just is no choice. In addition to that, just because you have carved out eight hours per day of sleep doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to just sleep like a baby the entire time. You might be worried, stressed, anxious, you might be answering your phone in the middle of the night. A lot of things might be going on. So maybe you could think that and empathize that even if you are in theory in your bed for eight hours, that doesn't necessarily mean you're sleeping. So what do you do in my case, or what did I do to make sure that I got enough sleep? And I actually made a list of eight things that really helped me. And I tried most things to be fair. So the first thing that I did was after watching, I think, a Brian Johnson video. And obviously he's not the first to think of it or say it. But I made sure, and I was very strict that I did not eat anything at least three hours before bed to give myself time to digest for so to speak. This increased my quality of sleep right away, and it was definitely noticeable. And then I took it a step further and I was always the person that said, oh, I drink so much coffee, it doesn't even affect me. But even if that is more true than it is for the average person, it still affects you quite a bit. And I ensured and I was very strict about these two things, about the not eating. And then I did not consume coffee or any caffeine 12 hours before bed. So I would typically go to bed between 9 and 10pm so outside, you know, the 5am to 9am window, when I usually got up and started working, I didn't drink any caffeine after that point. And it really helped too. The thing that I think might be the most impactful on this list is the next thing and that it's to keep your phone turned off when you go to sleep and out of the room, even if you have it on your bed table, even if you have it on a desk, like on the other side of the room. I find the phone in the room, like causes your mind to wander and causes a severe amount of anxiety. And keeping your phone turned off and out of the room increased my sleep score, which I'll talk about later, by 50% all on its own. And none of the other things on this list came close to doing that. The next thing is to use a white noise machine or a fan pointed at the wall just to. I've heard people use the term regulate the noise in the room, make sure it's all consistent. Because if you're sleeping in silence and a dog barks or literally anything happens, it is a point of you waking up or you messing up the rhythm of getting to sleep. The next is to wear a nose strip, opens up the airways in your nose a little bit. The next is to wear mouth tape. And breathing through your nose is the second most important thing on this list. And I, my whole life before I started doing this, was definitely a mouth breather at night. I found that my nose, the airways just get blocked like a lot of people do. I started, or I was convinced to do the mouth tape thing when I read a book by James Nestor called Breath. And he made the analogy that your nasal passage is kind of like an overgrown highway or just a highway. If no one goes on the highway, it becomes overgrown with grass and foliage and Plants. But the second someone starts driving it again, that goes all away. And it's the same thing with your nasal passages. And I found that to be true by wearing mouth tape. You could use hostage tape. I just use this 3M Metacore tape that costs like $2 a roll and it works well for me. Try it out. It's hard to do it for the first couple of nights, but you get used to it. The next is to wear earplugs on top of the noise machine or fan point at the wall just to make it as silent as possible. And the final one is keep the room blacked out. It's very difficult, especially to go to bed early in the summer. If it's 9pm and it's still sunny or it's very difficult to, you know, get a good night's sleep. If you're sleeping until 6 or 7am and the sun starts to come up at 5am, keep it as blacked out as possible. Blackout blinds and all that kind of stuff. I started using an OURA ring at this time frame to monitor my sleep score. I went from a consistent 40 to 45 sleep score, which is absolutely God awful. You probably won't see a sleep score lower than that unless you just don't sleep to a consistent sleep score of 92 to 96 almost every night, which is almost perfect, or as perfect as you're gonna get unless you're a professional sleepologist or some shit like that. After you have ensured that you're getting a good night's sleep like this, the next thing that you need to do is to make sure your diet is right. And I found that the diet is one of the things that will either be a net positive or a net negative. You'll either get a diet that spirals worse and worse and worse and worse, or a diet that spirals better and better and better and better. I don't think that from my situation or my lifestyle at least you ever get a diet that's just a perfect net neutral all of the time. You're either gonna burn out more because of what you're eating or you're gonna burn out less. And again, I understand that just like the sleep part of this video, like you probably saying, duh, your diet is important and yes, obviously, but when I was at my previous agency and I was working so much, especially when you're making more money too, in my opinion that it's very easy to justify or say to yourself, I'm making so much money now and I am working so hard and have almost no time. I might as well just order Uber Eats or something of that nature. And when you're ordering a Uber Eats, it's not usually going to end well over time. So you could get a chef, that would be a good option. But you have to ensure that you have your diet that is at least not a net negative for you. It doesn't have to be perfect, but at least everything you need. So there was a time like when I was getting that bad sleep, I fixed my sleep and then I got this part, the diet, or I didn't have the diet yet. And I still felt that even though I was getting a 92 to 96 sleep score, I was still like, 3pm comes around, I'm still tired, I'm still crashing out. So then I looked to the diet the next. I read a few books and listened to some podcasts, and a theme that was coming up was that your gut is your second brain. And I really never believed that, or more realistically, never put any thought into it one way or another for the first 26 or so years of my life. This is when I was 27 until this period of time. And I just found the nice 8020 of diet that you could just do that doesn't, you know, make you have to live like a professional bodybuilder or model or something like that. And it's in five steps. The first step I took was to go to ChatGPT and I told it what I normally eat on average throughout the week, you know, and then I asked what the possible vitamin deficiencies with this diet are like. I did this before I changed the diet at all. Then you can tell it your height and your gender and your weight. And then you ask it to prescribe a vitamin snack. I usually say it's better to overshoot when I ask for ChatGPT, as long as overshooting is not going to be toxic. Then I took those recommendations and, you know, basically bought them on Amazon and started taking them daily. The next thing is don't eat anything that is obviously sugar based. It's almost impossible to not eat sugar in a modern diet. But some things, of course, are more sugar based than others, like cookies, chocolate pie, all that kind of stuff. I would recommend watching someone named Dr. Eric Berg on the effects of sugar. He has a very few very informative short videos on how to do it. And the thing that you want to repeat to yourself is that sugar is a very addictive substance. And the basis of addiction is that by doing it now, you're ensuring and guaranteeing that you have that addiction in the future, you have to break the chain. You know that, that basically sugar is the cause of this effect. It's not the relief of it. A lot of people when they're addicted to sugar or something else, you know, let's say it's smoking, you have a bad feeling or that little urge or nudge inside and you smoke a cigarette. And that basically gets rid of that feeling, right? It's the same thing with sugar or any addiction, only that that's not actually true. That's a psyop. That is the root cause of all addiction, basically. That is not relieving your pain. It's guaranteeing that you have the urge to smoke another cigarette in the future. And once you realize that, you can stop that sugar, caffeine, pretty much all of your vices overnight. The next is to try to get as much protein as you possibly can. Eat a lot of meat if you can, but don't overdo it, of course. Where to where you feel sluggish or your skin starts to turn red. Most people, in my view, should try to supplement at least 60 grams of protein through shakes or protein bars in addition to what they're eating. It's just a very nice rule of thumb that guarantees you're getting enough protein. The next is to delay your first meal as long as possible, but also don't eat a shit ton of food in any one sitting. You know, it's one thing to make a habit of delaying your first meal to noon or 2pm, but then if you eat 2000 calories in one meal, you're gonna want to go to sleep for the rest of the day instead of actually using it as fuel to work. The final one is no more than 450mg of caffeine per day. A lot of people think that coffee and caffeine wakes them up. It just basically suppresses the sleep hormone. And a coffee is about 125mg for like an average size. For reference, I know a lot of people, including myself, who would have eight coffees or more in a day. And it just fries your adrenal glands after a while too. No matter what you do, you don't feel energetic, you don't feel well rested. It's just horrific. And it takes months and months to basically reducing caffeine to actually fix. And it's bad. So no more than three in a day. Basically no more than three and a half cups of coffee after you are done. Sleep and diet the next is exercise. And I like to keep the exercise routine very, very simple and very, very time efficient. Because when you're working very hard, it's very easy to mentally justify skipping an hour and a half workout. I like to keep them to 20 to 30 minutes and this is what I found is the best way to ensure that you're getting your exercise in, in a time way so you can work more. Monday when? Monday, Wednesday and Friday. What you're going to want to do is lift weights in the gym in the style of Mike Mentzer, which is extremely high intensity with very, very low volume. This works great because you only have to do it three days per week to get very good muscle gains. And it's only going to take an hour and a half or less per week total combined. When you're doing this, make sure that you go to failure as much as possible. Most people have a very, very poor judgment as to what failure is. You can almost always do more and you counteract that by doing very little volume. You can't do 20 sets at a time to failure. It's just not possible. You can do one or two sets per exercise to failure. Try to increase the weight every workout while maintaining the same strict form. Combined with the protein from earlier and the good sleep, you're actually gonna feel a lot more energetic, a lot more muscular over time. If you just stick to this, then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I found it very good to run as one mile as fast as possible on the treadmill. You can't do any long runs to fit it into this schedule. And anything like that's 30 second sprint probably is not going to get your heart rate to what it needs to be, you know, over a good amount of time. I found that running one minute as fast as possible three times per week is a great thing there. It's kind of like a longish sprint that will take, you know, between five and ten minutes, maybe less if you're an elite athlete. But what I did is I started at whatever I started with and then I just tried to increase the speed by 0.1 miles per hour. Every time I did it, I started maybe at like 7 miles per hour, which is not a good time at all. And now I'm in the 13 to 14 miles per hour range, which is in between a five and a six minute mile. And I did that not being a runner at all before, just by increasing gradually 0.1 miles per hour every time. The nice thing about that in a linear way is the faster that you or the you know, the more you do this and the faster it goes when you get to the 10 mile an hour range and then 11 and 12 0.1 miles per hour as a percentage of your total run speed becomes a lower and lower percentage. So it's actually kind of gets less of a percentage, less demanding and less intense of an increase every time. And it makes it more sustainable too. The third thing is to stretch for five minutes per day, two times. It's very important to make your body just feel good, especially if you are like this and you're sitting in a chair working all day. I like to just use any stretching app and follow along. And those are the things with the sleep, the body, slash exercise and the diet. And then I said at the start of the video, three physical to do with your body and three mental. And now we can go to the mental part. So the first concept that we have to understand is that burnout as a concept and as a feeling only really occurs when we're making a lack of progress or a lack of perceived progress. No one ever is burnt out, so to speak, when everything is going perfect and everything is going swimmingly. I've been in business over 12 years and had over 4,000 clients in that time frame. And I currently have about 550 clients I work with on a monthly basis. And I can guarantee you that I've never heard, I closed 24 clients this week. I am so burnt out. It's always, I've closed 24 clients this week. Let's fucking go. Yeah, you know, it's just never the case here. So what is the lesson that if you're feeling burnt out in my view and working with so many clients and doing this myself, is that burnout is almost always due to a lack of progress. And in reality a lack of progress means a lack of new sales. So going through the list, you should ask yourself, are you doing these things? Did I make three new ad creatives this week? Did I post three YouTube videos this week? Did I write at least 25 new tweets this week? Did I write 10 threads this week? Did I film seven short form videos this week? Did I write five newsletters this week? Did I spend at least five hours prospecting and networking with potential clients? And did I spend at least five hours prospecting and networking with potential partners? Did I follow up with my entire CRM at least twice this week? You don't need to necessarily be the one that does all those things. But are these things happening? Because those are the things that lead to new sales and making sure you do them consistently, even when things are going very well, is going to be your biggest shield against burnout. You're never going to feel burnout if you're always constantly getting new clients and that dopamine hit of new sales over and over and over again. Once this is taken care of and we're getting those nonstop dopamine spikes from our new sales notifications, the next thing to guarantee that we're basically not going to have burnout is reducing our workload. So a heavy workload is going to burn you out? Maybe, if you believe in that kind of thing. But if you're like most people, you have a heavy workload and you actually do nothing during the day to solve that or to reduce your workload. So what does that look like? Most people, especially agency owners, suffer the most burnout when they trying to do lead generation and sales as well as the client work and fulfillment as one person at the same time. It is rare that one person has the skillset to do both, and it's almost impossible to do both in a good way once you get to a certain size of business. So what do we do here? The first thing is we obviously hire and buy back our time, but even more so on that because once we hire, we need to get them to do what we want every Saturday and Sunday, while things are quiet in theory, you know, not business hours, so to speak, and no one is bothering you, you should examine every single task you did that week. You're quickly going to see that a lot of things and a lot of stuff you're doing is not necessarily the best use of your time. And anything, in my opinion, can be trained. It might take a lot more time, you might have to hire a better quality of person, a smarter person, but it can be trained. So once you have this list of 10 or 20 or 30 or even 50 things, make a step by step checklist to do every single task. Make them detailed. Some will be longer and more extensive if the tasks are longer and more extensive, and some will be very easy and very quick. Once you have done this, you want to make these very detailed checklists and the thing that you want to strive for is you should be able to do the entire task using only the checklist itself. If you can't, then it is not a complete checklist and sop this is a continuous process and should be done every weekend, especially as your business goes bigger and bigger and your tasks and responsibilities become new and different. If you have ever had thoughts about Work life balance. And you're complaining about that, you're probably not going to make it first of all, and not cut out to be an entrepreneur. But in a more empathetic sense, you should realize that work life balance in the way you're suggesting here is actually the exact opposite. By sacrificing a few weekends. And it doesn't even have to be a few weekends. It could be 3, 4 hours on Saturday. 3, 4 hours on Sunday is actually what you need to make these checklists and make these trainings to ensure that you don't have to work as much on the weekend going forward. It's the exact opposite of what the people who aren't going to make it really think. If you ignore this problem, you're going to ensure that you don't have work life balance ever again. So once you have these checklists, you spent those three to four hours per weekend, like making them. You should spend two hours per day, Monday to Friday, for a total of 10 hours per week of training people to take on these tasks. And a lot of people say you need to train your employees in a very abstract way. Like, what does that actually mean? In its simplest form, you get on a zoom call with them, you do the task in front of them using only the checklist, then they do the task in front of you only using the checklist. That's the essence of training and skill transfer. If it's a very minor task, you could probably do the same thing with Loom and not have to get on a call. But for everything that takes actual skill and is not mindless administrative task, you should do it on the call and record it so then someone else can watch it as well. Once you do this, you essentially transferred the skill to them and you've essentially removed that from your workload and it can no longer contribute to burnout. It's very, very important to us. And then the final thing, the sixth out of six thing in this video, is we need to understand a simple truth and reframe this truth so that it will act as your permanent shield against burnout. This is the realization that the placebo effect is very real and can be even more harmful than the actual reality can be. The person who suffers from burnout the absolute most in life is a person saying, wow, I'm so burnt out, or, how do you stop feeling burnout? There's no one who suffers more burnout than that person, trust me. So what should you do instead? Anytime you think or hear the word burnout, I like to automatically reframe it as now you are in the zone that is basically stimulating growth and expanding your capacities. If you think of this in a physical muscle, bodybuilder sense, they're obsessed with training to failure. Because when you train to failure, you're basically burning out your muscle. And your muscle is going to adapt by growing back bigger and stronger than before. So that basically work that you did is no longer going to overwhelm and cause you to fail. It's the same thing with your mentality and your mental capacity. And basically by going to this thing where you're feeling burnout, when you reframe it as you are now in the position or you're now in the zone, that expands your capacities and makes you bigger, tougher, stronger, more capable. In the future, you're going to start to view this as a positive instead of a negative. And that is actually, in a certain point of view, going to ensure that you never feel burnout ever again. It's a blessing instead of a curse or a negative. So that is my list on how to work 12 hours per day without burning out over the course of a year. I hope it was valuable, and I thank you for watching.