MBA2068 Guest Teacher – Demir Bentley – How To Plan A Winning Week, Every Week

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Hey oh welcome to the 100, our MBA show business tips. You can't afford to miss every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today's guest teacher is Demir Bentley and he'll be teaching you how to plan a winning week every week. Do you ever get to the end of your week and really feel bad about how much you got done? Maybe you have a bunch of leftovers on your to do list. Maybe you're racking your brain on why you didn't have enough time and wonder are you being efficient? Sometimes it might even ruin your weekend. Well those days are over because we brought Demir Benley to teach you how to plan a highly productive week every single week. Demir Bentley is a productivity expert and the co founder of the LifeHack method. He teaches hard hitting efficiency techniques and proven accountability strategies to help you get the most out of every single week of your year. He's helped businesses and executives from Facebook, Google, Uber, Pepsi and he's here today to help you win your week. You're going to absolutely love this lesson. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's guest teacher, Demir Benley, is the man when it comes to planning your weekend. His work and strategies have been mentioned in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg and more, and he's here today to show you his secret sauce. I'll be back later in the episode to encourage you to implement what he teaches today and share a bit about what works for me when it comes to winning my week. Without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to Demir. Take it away, Demir.

Hey folks, I'm Demir Bentley from the Lifehack Method. Thanks for joining me today. Today I'm going to be teaching you how to plan a winning week every week. And this is such an important skill to succeed, to thrive as a knowledge worker because it's going to get you back on offense, help you stop feeling overwhelmed, and importantly, show you how to win your week every single week, all in 30 minutes flat. Now, I've taught tens of thousands of professionals this winning the week method, which is the first and most crucial skill that I teach every single one of my clients to transform their productivity and optimize their life. My client Rick used it to streamline his business and start taking vacations on the regular. My client Brandy used it to open two more offices and buy her dream vacation home. My client Winston used this technique to book a TEDx talk and launch his dream career as a public speaker. My client Jessa launched her online business and then moved her whole family to the Caribbean. Those are the kinds of stories that light my fire. People who step up their game, get organized, and create the results they always knew they could. So if you're that kind of person, then this method is designed for you. You. A crucial tenet of the Winning the Week method is that you have to believe that you can be incredibly productive while at the same time enjoying a luxurious work life balance. Now that might sound crazy to you, and it did to me once too. I reached my breaking point 10 years ago when I was putting in 80 hours a week in finance and one day I just collapsed. They took me to the hospital and diagnosed me with something called salaryman sudden death syndrome, which really just means I was working myself to death. So that brush with death made me step back and rethink my entire approach to work just from the ground up. And I think we've all been pushed to that place over the last few years, haven't we? We desperately need to change our relationship to work. So the good news here is that there are new ways of working that have made it more possible than ever to reach a sustainable work life balance. The first thing I had to do was throw away zero sum thinking and start looking for win win scenarios. Let me explain that. Zero sum thinking is the thought that whenever you do something for yourself, it's always going to come at the cost of your career. And that's a false choice. You know, I thought I had to be working 80 hours a week in finance to succeed. But when my health crisis made that impossible, I had to start doing more with the resources I had at hand. And I started doing things I knew I should have been doing, like planning my week. And then I even went further to explore unconventional life hacks. And here's what happened when within two weeks of my health crisis, I had cut my working hours in half and within two months I outsourced my entire job and I was only working two hours a week. And then I got promoted. Now that's extreme, but it shows you what's possible when you can stop thinking about this as a zero sum game. Okay, let's get into the five steps of the winning the week method. This method was crucial to escaping my 80 hour work weeks and I still use it every single week. And it's something you can do in 30 minutes or less to reliably win your week every single. Let's start with step zero. And I call it step zero because you only have to do it once and you never have to do it again. I call this removing the resistance. You know, there's one thing that prevents almost everyone from planning their week, even when they know they should be doing it. And that thing is called unconscious resistance. Let's get real. Nobody wants to think about the coming week. I mean, have you ever felt that creeping sense of dread on Sunday night? You know, you're trying to enjoy your week, but you can just feel your responsibilities bearing down on you like a storm, storm cloud. And it's such a bummer because you're not really enjoying your weekend when you're worrying about what's going to come this week? The big problem is that the anxiety and stress is then interpreted by your lizard brain as pain and danger. You know, my lizard brain doesn't know, oh, Demir is just worried about his week, no big deal. Instead, my brain thinks, oh, Demir is really stressed out about something right now. He must be in danger. So my lizard brain tries to come to my rescue by getting me far away from the source of that pain and anxiety. And trust me, in a fight between your prefrontal cortex and your lizard brain, the lizard brain always wins because it's a lot bigger and has been around a lot longer. Now, this is why you don't want to plan your week. Because we perceive planning the week as being the source of that pain. Because it's going to make us face up to all the things that we're afraid of, but it really isn't. It's actually the thing that's going to alleviate that pain. So the hack is to transform that resistance into craving. So let me explain this with a little story. One time, my wife Carrie and I were in Paris and we had like 12 hours to kill before a flight. You know, we needed to pre plan our week. So we decided, let's go to a cafe, gang. I was not prepared for how cool this cafe was. I'm going to be honest, I ended up having a Kodak moment right there in that cafe while I was pre planning my week. I mean, we were looking over the Eiffel Tower, sitting amongst all the cool French people, eating a baguette. So my wife turns to me when we're leaving. She says, you know, it's funny, at home, planning the week on Sunday is like pulling teeth. But this was so good, I could do it like this for the rest of my life. And that was the light bulb moment for me. So here's what we did. When we got home, we recreated that French cafe experience here at home. We found the fanciest brunch place in our town. Total French bistro vibe. Chocolate, croissants, lattes, the whole nine yards. And we finished pre planning the week in 30 minutes. And then we usually linger for another two to three hours. It's such a beautiful and productive way to spend time and plan the week. So I want you to think about what's happening there. My lizard brain isn't avoiding preplanning. It craves that experience. Because when we get to Saturday morning, I'm already anticipating that fancy brunch experience. And I want that more than I want to avoid the pain of planning my week. And if you don't want to go to a cafe, you don't have to. The point here is to design an affordable, luxury type of experience wherever you are, so that planning your week isn't something you avoid, it's something you look forward to. Okay, that's step zero. Do it once, do it right, and you'll never have to do it again. So now imagine the scene for me. You're ready to pre plan. Maybe you're down at a fancy brunch place, maybe you're at home. Pull out your laptop and get yourself a latte. Now comes step one, which is learn a lesson from the past week. Learn a lesson. We always start by identifying a lesson from the past week and using it to get smarter. Now, this simple practice creates what I call a positive feedback loop, where you're getting slightly better each time you go through the loop. Now, done correctly, this results in small but consistent improvements that create a compounding snowball effect within a few months. I mean, think about it from the perspective of a basketball team. You practice your plays, then you go into the game and you try out the plays, and then you rewatch the tape and you say, how did it work out? And you identify something to improve. So the loop is, practice, play, rewatch, practice, play, rewatch. Now, think about what would happen if you were on a team that didn't rewatch the tape. Now, I don't have to imagine what that was like, because in high school, I was on the losing soccer team. You know, the team that gets their butt kicked by every team in the league. Unfortunately, that was us. But the funny thing is, we actually practiced really hard. We really wanted to win. It's just that our coach never had us rewatch the tape, so we kept making the same stupid mistakes over and over. So here's the point. The most leveraged part of winning your week is identifying your blind spots and improving on them over time. Otherwise, you're going to keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. So I want you to ask yourself, what's one thing I would do differently if I could get into a time machine and go back and do last week over again? That question is going to lead you to your number one blind spot for the past week. That's step one. Learn at least one lesson. Okay. Step two. Choose a leveraged priority. Hands down, the biggest error in planning is choosing the wrong priority or choosing multiple priorities instead of one. Because that spreads your focus and it dilutes your impact and it traps you in a vicious cycle of overworking where you begin falling behind on your work and invariably you try to make up the shortfall by working longer hours. And eventually you realize you're stuck in a cycle, but you don't know how to escape. So most people's mistake is they set their priority by asking themselves what feels most important right now. And the problem is, the answer is everything feels important right now. So that's not a helpful question. That's not clarifying. Instead, the life hack method teaches you to think about leverage. What's going to make your life easier? Not just today, but next week and every week thereafter. Think about this example. Imagine a delivery boy tasked with delivering groceries to homes. With just one delivery to make, you just grab the bags and go off and deliver it. But now imagine that you have to deliver 10 homes worth of grocery bags. Now you've got a dilemma. Now I could tell you, well, you need to prioritize better, but that's not really going to help. There's just too many bags to hold on the bicycle. Working faster, working harder is not a solution to this problem. There's no amount of hard work or grit that's going to fit 40 grocery bags on this poor delivery boy's arms. There's just too much to handle. Now let me pause. Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like your life? There's just too much to handle. Now, what would really solve this delivery person's problem is to add a cart to their bicycle. So as the scale of the problem grows, the delivery person should be stepping back on a regular basis, look at the bigger picture and explore new tools or methods that would be leveraged in helping them get the job done at scale. But ironically, we humans tend to do the opposite. The bigger the sense of overwhelm, the more we dig into existing tactics and try to push harder. So working harder and faster is not going to get these groceries delivered. You have to go build a cart. That's leverage. So I want you to step back from your life and identify your leverage priority by saying, what can I do this week that would make my life permanently easier or better moving forward? I cannot emphasize how crucial this concept is to winning your week. When you choose a leveraged priority, you're going to start expending less energy even as you accomplish more and more. Life just seems to get easier over time. But without leverage, it's just a matter of time before the overwhelm takes you. Take five minutes at this point in your pre planning and choose a highly leveraged but attainable goal for the week. If you get this right, it's really where you win or lose the week. Each leverage point gives you momentum into the next leverage point. You're going to make life easier and easier. You're going to get more powerful. Okay, step three. Interrogate your calendar. Most folks think they know what the calendar represents, but they're really only seeing a small part of the picture. You know, your calendar isn't just for dentist appointments and meetings. It's a tool. It's a model that helps you visualize and manage your entire supply of time, your precious 168 hours a week. When you maintain your time inventory poorly, it really plants the seeds of disaster just waiting to happen. It could be that tennis tournament that you forgot that you signed up to drive your kids to. Maybe it's a meeting that got changed from 9 to 12 and now it conflicts with another meeting. These minor errors are buried all over your calendar like landmines waiting to explode. So your job in step three is to interrogate every hour of your upcoming week like a lawyer on Law and Order seeking the truth from a reluctant witness. Your calendar isn't just going to show you these landmines. You've got to sweat it out. So here's the process we created to make it fast and painless. Take five minutes, open up your calendar and review the next 14 days of your calendar. Notice that most people would just look at the next seven days, but then that forms a blind spot. If you only review Sunday to Sunday, what happens if that big project is due on Monday that would be lurking in your blind spot, showing up when it's too late. So every seven days, we look at the next 14 days. Meaning there's no blind spots, there's no overlaps where sneaky surprises can lurk in our blind spot. Let me give you some helpful questions to be asking. Number one, what shouldn't be on your calendar? Erase the events that you're not going to go to. Decline them. Erase them. Just get them out so they're not cluttering. Number two, what should be on your calendar but it isn't if it's a hard edge commitment, meaning you have to be at a specific time, at a specific place, even a video conference. Then make sure you block off all of the time it takes to do that. Number three, how much flex time do you need to build in to deal with unforeseen emergencies this week? Gang, we all have unexpected emergencies happening to us in one way or the other. So the smart move is preemptively block off some chunks of time in your week to day deal with those unforeseen issues. Number four, what could be arranged more optimally in your calendar? Maybe you need to do a couple chores around town, so why not do them all on the same day instead of scattering them throughout your week? Number five, when exactly will your leverage priority get done? Go ahead and estimate the amount of time it's going to take you to get that big priority done. And do it as soon as you can early in your week. Number six, what are the landmines in your calendar? I recommend you take a mental walk through every part of your day in the coming week and ask yourself, where are the landmines likely to be hiding? And for each landmine you find, try to defuse it before it happens. And finally, number seven, did my calendar review unearth some hidden tasks? Often when you're taking that mental walk through your calendar, you realize there's some tasks that have to be done that you didn't think about. So write them down and save them on the side. Okay, that was step three, interrogating your calendar. Now you're ready for step four, triage your task list, gang. The nature of human beings is we want to do more than we have time for. But in a world where you can't do it all, you need to ruthlessly triage your task list. And that means letting go of the fantasy of getting it all done. It's a fantasy. It's not going to happen. In fact, I want you to ask a better question. How can I do the most good with my limited supply of time? Much better question. So in this step, you'll look at each task on your to do list as a bid on your time. And knowing that you can't accept every bid, you'll have to whittle down your to do list to only consider the highest yielding bids for your time. And that takes courage because you're going to take flack no matter what you decide. Somebody's going to lose out, somebody's going to be mad at you for the decisions you make. But the only other option is unacceptable, which is trying and failing to make everybody happy and killing yourself in the process. Imagine that you're a triage doctor on the front lines of a war. And that word actually came from Napoleon's army, where doctors would get overwhelmed with mass casualties all at once. Sort of like you get overwhelmed with too many tasks and projects all at once. So those doctors devised the triage system. They divided the wounded into three camps the people that would likely die even if they tried to help, the people that would probably live even if they didn't help, and the group that could benefit the most from their help. Now, of course, these doctors wanted to save everybody. But in a mass casualty event, they don't have the luxury of saying, hey, let's treat everybody. They have to choose. And you don't have the luxury of doing everything that comes at you. You've got to choose, too. In fact, choosing is your most important job because that's where you can do the most good. And it's your call. It's nobody else's. Now, I know that's easy for me to say, and it's hard for you to do, but, gang, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. Easy is magical thinking. Easy is hoping everything can get done even when it's clear there's no freaking way, even when you can see yourself falling behind. Gang, I would propose to you that we actually do the most damage to ourself and others when we pretend that we can do everything because we're shirking the hard decisions that only we can make the hard path. But the right path is getting the courage to make the tough choices and face up to the fact you can't do it all and somebody's going to be angry about the decisions you make and. And be brave enough to let those small fires burn so you can tackle the big stuff. That's step four. Now only one step remains. Bring it all together and solidify your plan for the week. This is step five. Marry your time supply to your time demand. You know, a simple but profound principle of winning the week is that when you say you're going to get something done, you block out the specific time to do it. Gang, without this, your plan isn't really a plan at all. So in step five, we're going to take five minutes and marry your to do list with your calendar. This is also called calendarizing. So like the children's game when the music stops and there's not enough chairs for everybody, this is the step where wishful thinking hits the hard wall of reality at full speed. You know, most people avoid this. They avoid calendarizing their tasks because they don't want to feel the full impact of reality on their beautiful magical thinking. But not doing this means that you did an excellent job preparing to plan, but didn't actually create a plan. Now I'm just as guilty as anyone. Like most people, I used to have a huge task list in one hand and an empty calendar in the other and I just hoped that they would match each other by the end of the week. Spoiler alert. They never did. And I was always short on time and long on tasks. And that's why I overworked. I was chasing the long tail of my tasks into infinity. Reconciling your time supply to your time demand is where the rubber meets the road. It's the moment where your dreams and your goals see forward movement. So call me a productivity nerd if you want, but this is actually a beautiful thing. So here's some tips. First, put the good stuff in first. Don't put the date night in last. Don't put in dinner with your friends or self care time or exercise or creative time or hobby time. Don't put it in last because if you put it in last, guess what's going to happen? It's not going to have space. Put it in first and then get the rest shoved into the cracks.

Okay?

Second, put your most important work early in the week, Monday or Tuesday, and build in buffer time to it too. This step alone is why my busy clients are consistently winning their week. Because they prioritize their top priority and get it done first in the week. Third, build in plenty of flex time for unexpected surprises. These landmines that come your way, I would recommend if you're a knowledge worker, you need to set aside at least five hours a week for unexpected unplanned work. 4. Stuff your less important work into the cracks. I'm talking about admin tasks, emails, meetings. Just the status quo work that's important. It's got to get done, but it doesn't need your best energy now. Keep going until all of your time supply has been allocated. Yes, 168 hours a week. Every week. I have allocated every half hour increment of my 168 hours. Why? Not because I'm a nerd, not because I love it. I really don't. It's because I that when I've got it all allocated, I have the best chance of living my best life this week. Gang calendarizing is not a clean linear process. Let me warn you, it's recursive. It's muddy. Like politics. You're going to have to make painful concessions and trade offs. But just as politics is the art of what's possible and attainable, so too you must let go of your ideal and compromise to achieve the greatest good. It takes practice. It's not a perfect process, but even trying is going to result in a better week than you've had In a year you're quickly going to find that if you even try to do this, you get masterfully in ownership of your time and so much more happens. Now, technically, you're done. You can pack your computer away, you can sit back, you can enjoy a latte, and I can tell you this. The time between finishing your pre planning on Friday night or Saturday morning and Monday is going to be the sweetest weekend you've ever had. Because no part of your brain is going to be worrying or thinking about work you can really turn off and just enjoy yourself. Imagine that. So let's recap what we learned in the winning the week method. I told you it would take 30 minutes a week and actually I lied. It only takes 25 minutes. So you got five extra minutes to use however you want. Step zero, remove the resistance. Step one learn a lesson every week so you're constantly seeing into your blind spots and getting better. Step two, Choose a leverage priority that consistently makes your life easier. Step three, Interrogate your calendar to really daylight those landmines that would blow you up and optimize your time. Step four, Triage your task list like a doctor and make sure that you're doing the most good with your limited time. And step five, Marry the two together. Calendarize your to do list and allocate all of your time demands to your time supply. Gang. This is a technique that has been relentlessly tested and simplified across tens of thousands of people and it just works. I promise you if you do it consistently, you're gonna get 5 to 10 hours of time back each week. You're gonna get radically clear on what's really important. It's gonna get you back on offense and accelerate all of your other productivity tools and techniques. So now you know the right way to plan a winning week. So of course it's not enough to just make a great plan. You've gotta execute that plan. I mean, I don't know about you, but I used to be the master of making great plans and then come Monday I would throw it all out and just improvise. So I dive deep into both how to make a plan and how to execute a great plan in my hour long free training@winningtheweek.com that's winningtheweek.com alright gang, I hope this helped. This was Demir Bentley with the Life Hack method. If you want to continue learning about winning your week and get first access to my book on winning the week, you can visit winningtheweek.com thanks again for joining me today. Now back to Omar.

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The strategy that Amir laid out in today's episode is killer. I know because I actually do this on Sunday mornings. Actually, I like to do this after my breakfast. I go to my balcony, I get some fresh air. I step away from my office. This is kind of like my happy place. And I just take a notebook and a pen and my phone because I want to see what my calendar looks like. And I plan out my week. I like to jot down three or four things that if I got done, it would be a successful week. I'd be happy with that week. And I set the rules for winning from the beginning, right? So I know how to succeed. I then make sure that I give myself enough time to accomplish those three or four things and plug them into my calendar, just like Demir mentioned. Now, in that process, one thing I really love doing is, is asking myself the question, do I need to do this alone? Can I outsource any of these tasks to somebody else? Somebody on my team, somebody who's a freelancer? This will increase the likelihood of me actually accomplishing these tasks because, hey, I just need to delegate them. I don't need to actually do them. And often all of my tasks can be delegated. It just requires me to give the right instructions and the right coaching and to assign them to somebody and, and actually can get that done on Monday. And by the end of the week, I am done. And I'm happy because I actually feel like I accomplished my goals and I didn't get burnt out in the process. If you want to learn more about this concept, check out Demir Bentley's website, winningtheweek.com I highly recommend it. He's got some workshops you can attend as well that you can sign up for, but I encourage you to implement what you learned today. If you're listening to this episode on Monday, the day aired, it's not too late. You could still plan the rest of your week. You still can implement what you've learned so you have some momentum, and then on Sunday you can do it again. Re listen to the episode. If you want to take some more notes or customize this technique for your own busy schedule, you may prefer to do this on Saturday instead of Sunday or end of day Friday. Whatever you choose, implement. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast. Appreciate. By doing so, you allow us to grow. You tell the algorithm of the podcast app you're using that, hey, this show's pretty cool and gives us a little bit more exposure. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. In my experience, productivity is all about having clarity and focus. It's about not wasting time on what you should do and the how you should do it and just do it. And this is why you should dedicate some time to planning your week so that when the week starts, you're in execution mode. You're not in planning mode, you're not in thinking mode. You're not in questioning if you should be doing this or not mode. This wastes a lot of time, time that you can't afford to waste. Not only will you feel more productive and get more stuff done, you'll see the effects on you and your business and allow you to have a little bit more free time for yourself and your family. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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