Leaving at 5PM is How to (Actually) Grow Your Business
In this 30‑minute presentation, Ryan Deiss argues that the conventional wisdom of 60‑80 hour work weeks is a barrier to scaling a business beyond the $1‑2 million revenue mark. Drawing on his own experience of burnout and the subsequent creation of a $200 million holding group, he outlines three concrete systems that enable CEOs to work a sustainable 40‑hour week while still achieving growth. The first system, the “Big Three,” is a goal‑setting hierarchy that cascades quarterly objectives into weekly and daily top‑three priorities, blending business and personal commitments. The second system, a 12‑hour weekly CEO time‑blocking framework, allocates four hours to deep focus, 1.5 hours to strategic thinking, 2.5 hours to people management, two hours to rest/recovery, and two hours to professional development, with flexible rules for moving, expanding, or multiplying blocks but never deleting them. The third system is the 5 PM shutdown, which includes a 4:30‑5 PM daily “workday shutdown” calendar meeting, an auto‑decline out‑of‑office block, and a pre‑planned 30‑day vacation block to enforce boundaries. Deiss reinforces these systems with personal anecdotes about his family’s distress during his 80‑hour weeks, the impact of Parkinson’s Law, and the cultural shift that occurred when his team adopted the same cutoff. He also offers a free “5 PM Shutdown Kit” with templates for immediate implementation. The overall message is that disciplined constraints, rather than endless hustle, drive higher productivity, better team performance, and a healthier personal life.
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If you want your business to stay exactly the size it's been stuck at, then by all means, just keep doing what you've been doing. Keep working the 80-hour work weeks, keep pulling all-nighters, keep apologizing to the people who you're supposedly doing it all for. But if what you really want is a business that's growing, a business that can maybe even be sold one day, then you need to do something different. You need to start clocking out at 5 PM. Now I know what you're thinking, Clock out at 5 PM? There is no way. And look, I get it. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has been quoted as saying, "I don't think you can really do anything remarkable if you only work 40 hours a week." And he's not alone. The belief that 60 to 80 hour work weeks should be the norm for entrepreneurs, it's just the generally prevailing wisdom today. So why would I have the audacity to to claim the opposite. And is this just another get-rich-from-home-while-doing-absolutely-nothing videos? Well, no, it is definitely not that. It's not a pipe dream. In fact, as you're about to see, limiting yourself to just a 40-hour week is actually essential if you want to grow your business. And as far as why would I have the audacity to claim the opposite, well, two things. First, I freely admit that my goals aren't necessarily the same as Elon's or some other high-flying unicorn-riding founder. Yes, I want to build a successful and profitable business, but I also want my kids to actually like me, and maybe you do too. And second, I have the audacity to claim the opposite because I've done it. I've worked the 80-hour weeks, I've pulled the all-nighters, I've worn burnout like it's some merit badge, and I can tell you it didn't work, and I nearly lost my family in the process. There's a very important lesson about scaling companies that I had to learn the hard way, and I'm hoping that you can learn the easier way, and that's this: hard work and hustle can get you to a million in revenue, maybe two, but if you want to get beyond that, you're gonna have to shift the way that you work. You need to shift away from the scrappiness, from the late nights, from the grind, and you need to shift toward a more leveraged form of work. And the ultimate forcing function for making this critical shift is clocking out at 5 PM. In this video, I'm gonna give you the 3 systems that I put in place to do exactly that. The same 3 systems that have allowed me to build a $200 million holding group while still making it home in time for dinner. As you're about to see, there's a lot more to this than just leaving at 5. Before we officially dive in, if you want a head start on this, I actually packaged up all of my templates and examples and everything that you need into a free 5 PM shutdown kit. Again, totally free, link's in the description, go check it out. All right, back to it. The first system you need to install if you want to have a 5 PM shutdown is the Big Three. Now, here's what most people miss. It's not about how much you do, it's about how much you finish. And Steve Jobs understood this probably better than anyone else. Back in 1997, Jobs asked his 100 most senior people what they thought the top 10 things that Apple should be working on. Now, they argued, they debated, but they eventually did get it down to 10. Then, and it's so cool, Jobs walked up to the whiteboard and he crossed out the bottom 7. Then he pointed to the top 3 and he said, "This is what we do." If Steve Jobs only let his top 100 people work on just 3 things, then why the heck are we trying to do 15, 20, 50? Maybe it's time to, you know, think different. What I'm gonna show you now is how I choose my big 3 and how you can do the same. So first, you need to know that you're not just gonna have one big 3. You're actually going to have 3 big threes, and I realize that's probably a little bit confusing, so stick with me. First, you're gonna have a big three for the quarter. These are the three most important goals that you have for the next 90 days, and I like working in 90-day sprints because it's enough time to really get something big and meaningful and important done, but it's not so long that you don't have time to pivot and adapt. So for example, my big three goals for the quarter might be Number 1, hit $250,000 in distributable profit. Number 2, launch the new pricing tier. And number 3, hire a new head of marketing. Now, these are all business goals, but as you're about to see, one of your big 3 could, and oftentimes really should be, a personal goal that you have as well. Now, once you've established the big 3 for the quarter, we can then use that to establish our big 3 for the week. Now, you may be wondering, why the heck do we jump from quarter to week? What about the month? Again, in my experience, monthly goals are just generally unhelpful. It's not really enough time to get something significant done, but it's too much time to stay nimble and agile. And so that's why I've established my Big 3 for the quarter. I then want to establish my Big 3 for the week. Now, determining your Big 3 for the week is pretty simple. Every Sunday night, that's when I do it, just ask yourself, what must I complete this week to stay on track for my quarterly goals? So if, again, if my quarterly goals are to hit $250,000 in distributable profit, to launch the new pricing tier, to hire a new head of marketing, then my weekly big 3 might be something like, number 1, finalize the Q3 pricing rollout. Number 2, make the head of marketing offer. Number 3, attend my daughter's piano recital on Thursday. Now notice, attending my daughter's piano recital That doesn't have anything to do with any of my quarterly Big 3s, but it's still critically important. In fact, it's probably the most important thing I'm going to do that week, and so for that reason, it is still going to make my weekly Big 3 list. Your weekly Big 3s do not always have to map back to your quarterly, but they should be informed by them. Once we have our weekly Big 3 established, those can then waterfall into the daily Big 3s, so at the end of every day. Day, I'm gonna ask, what would I need to accomplish tomorrow to stay on track with my weekly Big 3 goals? So if my Big 3 for the week again are: 1, finalize the Q3 pricing rollout; 2, make that head of marketing offer; and 3, attend my daughter's piano recital on Thursday, then my daily Big 3 might be something like: review the new pricing deck, call candidate references, and probably most importantly of all, buy flowers for my daughter's recital. Your quarterly execution goals inform your weekly to-dos, which then inform your daily to-dos. And it's the accountability that's baked into the repetitive daily check-ins that just make everything come together and they just make everything work. Alright, a couple of rules and caveats. So first, don't have separate goals for business, personal, and family. You are one person, you have one calendar, so you have one set of goals. And so your big three on any given week or day or even quarter should be a mix of business commitments with personal commitments. The Big 3 is how your calendar gets really honest about what you actually value. Now 2, if a daily Big 3 slides into the next day, it's not a big deal. It happens all the time, especially for big projects. You'll have a Big 3 for one day and it shows up as the Big 3 for the next day, just didn't get done, especially if it wasn't that most important critical thing. But weekly Big 3 slippage, especially when it happens multiple weeks in a row, That's a signal. So, if you're consistently missing your weekly big 3s, it's probably not a productivity problem, it is a priorities problem or even an unrealistic goals problem. Either way, the system is telling you something. Don't just grind harder, you got to get in there and you got to recalibrate. 3, know your right next thing. So, while I'm always going to be clear on what my top 3 priorities are, I like to put a star or just I'm going to list it number 1 for that thing that really is the single most important thing that I need to get done in a given day or week. And finally, your Big 3 list is not everything that you're going to do, uh, in a given day or week. You'll still have dozens of other things. The Big 3 is just the part where you've drawn a line in the sand and said, these 3 are the most important, these are the 3 that will get done no matter what. I'm not going to prioritize anything else above these 3 things. So remember, the Big 3 doesn't make you do less work, it actually makes you finish more work. Because growth isn't a function of what you add, growth is a function of what you finish, which is why growth typically starts with subtraction, not addition. Now of course, if you've run your business for any amount of time whatsoever, you know what happens next. You write out your big 3 on Sunday night, but by 10 AM on Monday, the fires have already flared up. There's the Slack pings, the client emails, a steady barrage of, "Hey boss, you know, you got a minute?" And so by Friday you're basically looking at your big 3 and you're like, I got, I got to none of this. I didn't even get started. So as great as it is as having a list of big 3s, it's not worth very much if you don't have a system that protects it. So let's break down what that system is next. System 2: 12-hour CEO time blocking. And I get it, productivity systems are nothing new. The problem is that none of them actually work. So Let's roll back the clock a little bit. Back in 2001, David Allen wrote a book called Getting Things Done, and this book basically kicked off a massive productivity movement in the business world. Then in 2007, Tim Ferriss drops The 4-Hour Workweek, and productivity gets forever fused with entrepreneurship. Now we have AI, the greatest productivity tool that mankind has ever seen. We're all busier and actually less productive than ever. So what's the answer? Well, for me, it's a system I call the 12-hour CEO time block. The problem is most time blocking doesn't work because it's too restrictive. It literally has you block out every single minute of every day, and CEOs just don't work like that. At any given moment in any day, a fire could flare up that will force you to stop doing what you're doing to put it out, and you don't just get to say, "Oh, sorry team, I realize that the business is burning to the ground, but I'm not in my firefighting block for another 4 hours." Also, life happens. The reality is, in business, as in life, chaos is the norm. So that's why you don't want to block every single hour of every single day. You just want to block 12. Now, why 12 hours? In my experience, 12 hours is enough time in any given week to get the truly critical work of a CEO done while still leaving ample time for chaos and serendipity. I break my 12 hours up into 5 distinct blocks. Now, Block 1 is for focus work, and I give this block a full 4 of the 12 hours. Just as the name would describe, this is the block where I wanna get done the deep, high-leverage work that I know that I need to get done in any given week, and this is typically where I'm gonna slot in when I'm gonna get my Big 3s accomplished. So, as I'm looking on Sunday when I picked out what my Big 3s are gonna be, I'm then gonna go and look at my calendar, where I blocked off that focus time, and I'm gonna make sure that I've got enough time in those focus blocks to get at least 2 of my 3 Big 3s done. Block 2 is dedicated to strategic work. I'm typically gonna allocate an hour and a half for this. This is dedicated time for thinking, for planning, for zooming out. This is when I'm gonna review company data, scorecards, things like that. I'm gonna look to spot trends. I'm gonna look to plan for the future. We all say as CEOs, we wish we had more time to think and to plan and to strategize. Well, do it. Block 3 is people time, and this one gets 2.5 of the 12 hours. And this is where I'm going to connect with key team members. So, I might have meetings with, you know, my executives. I might also want to do an impromptu meeting with, you know, somebody else on the team. It's also where I want to look to connect with strategic partners. This doesn't always have to be person to person. This is when I'll also just set aside some time to maybe fire off some quick emails. But this is when you think about, "Who do I need to check in with? Who do I need to coach up? Where do I need to reinforce the vision?" This is also where if you're holding regular one-on-ones every week or two, and you should be, this is probably where those are going to get slotted as well. Never underestimate what a quick and meaningful, you know, "Hey, how's life?" question to somebody in your office or a, you know, "Hey, what's new with you?" text can be. Those can be some of the most meaningful interactions you have and that's why you need to make sure you're budgeting time for it on your calendar. Block 4 is for rest and recovery and I give a full 2 hours a week for this block and you're saying like, "Rest and recovery, isn't that what the weekends are for?" And yeah, weekends are also for rest and recovery but I believe that for us as business leaders, as just high-performance individuals, for us rest is work. To prove that, I would just ask you, when have you had your best ideas? Think about it. Do you have your best ideas hunched over a laptop? I mean, do you have your best ideas when you're, you know, responding and having to put out fires? Do you have your best ideas when you're kind of in a formal planning meeting? I know I don't. I usually have my best ideas when I'm on a walk or I'm at a casual lunch or when I'm taking a shower. So budget time, yes, during the week. For a walk, for a massage, for a hobby, for sport. I like golf, and I'll actually block out Fridays for playing golf. And for me, it sounds crazy, but I do see that as work, and not just because I'll sometimes take work people along, but because when I'm away from the office, it's when I'm actually thinking about the big stuff. I actually have a friend who, once a week, he has a ridiculously long European-style lunch. Tons of food, tons of wine. He's ordering multiple bottles of wine and it seems like a waste of time and it seems like a waste of money, but when I talk to him, it is one of the most productive and profitable times of his week and he uses it to, you know, reconnect with people, to, you know, when clients are in town, he uses it or he'll use it as a reward for people or heck, sometimes he'll just reconnect with his own family and he'll use that also just a thing. Block 5, the last time block, is for professional development. I'm gonna give 2 hours to to this one as well. We as leaders need to always be upgrading our skills. We need to be upgrading our knowledge. I was talking to a CEO just the other day and they're like, "I really need to learn more about AI. I feel like I'm behind. How can I possibly find the time to learn more about AI? To just play with it? When do I do this?" The answer is you do it during your professional development block, which should be at least 2 hours a week. These add up to 12 hours. And remember, these blocks can fall wherever they need to fall that makes the most sense for you and your calendar. So, for me, Mondays are meeting days. I call it Meeting Monday and so this is open for that strategy and that professional development. You know, some time in there for people because this is when I'm usually going to have my leadership meeting and I'm going to look to connect immediately after that. Is there anybody that I need to, as a result of this meeting, connect with? Now, Tuesdays for me are a focus day. They're dedicated to focus time and that doesn't mean that I've got a focus block the entire day. In fact, I just have a single 2-hour focus block on Tuesday. That's when I'm gonna do my deep work. There are no meetings allowed during that time. I'm gonna switch off Slack, close everything, and I like to do this on Tuesday because it's really informed by what happened on Monday. I usually try not to have a lot of scheduled stuff in the afternoon 'cause I wanna leave the rest of the day open for that focus block to expand if hopefully it can. Now Wednesday, for me Wednesday is another focus block. I've got another 2-hour focus block, and I like to have my focus days back to back so I can kind of really create some momentum. Thursday for me is all about people. I'm gonna have my people block in there, I'm also gonna have some catch-up time. If I don't have a lot of recurring meetings, I might try to throw in another focus block, but I'm also gonna make sure I leave time for the work that didn't get done in the previous 2 days. And then there's Friday. Friday's my favorite day of the week because this is my rest and recovery day. I'm gonna generally leave this day blocked off. I try to not allow any meetings at all ever on Fridays because that's when I'm gonna rest and recover and I might go into the office, I might work a half day and I might cut out early or I might work a full day and just do something kind of in the middle of that day that's more restful or I might just take the whole dang day off. It really just determines was I able to get my big 3 accomplished by Thursday. The reason more business owners aren't able to take time for themselves on Friday or heck even during the week is because they didn't do that first step in that first system. They didn't determine what was their big 3? But when you decide, okay, if I can get these 3 things done, then it's a good week and I can be done, that's when you're gonna find time for rest. And again, it's going to make you more productive than if you just try to get everything done and then some in a given week. The important thing is that you honor those 12 hours by honoring the blocks and by honoring these rules. So rule number 1: blocks can be moved. Meaning if something comes up and you need to change and shift the block around during your week, that's totally fine. Sometimes stuff happens and you need to give that block to something else that just more important or just screaming louder in the moment. Rule number 2, blocks can be expanded. This is my favorite. Every single one of the blocks can be expanded if it makes sense to invest more time in that given area. Obviously, that's not just okay, that's a really freaking good thing. And then rule number 3, blocks can be multiplied. So you can have additional blocks if you want to. I kinda have a, it's not like a, fixed block on my calendar, but you know, in my head, I try to get in another focus block. But here's the most important rule of all, rule number 4: blocks cannot be deleted. Move them, you can expand them, you can multiply them, but you can't delete them. Once you've decided that these are going to be the blocks, then that's what you need to get done. You need to honor those blocks. Again, it's just 12 hours, so there should be plenty of flex time in there. People are going to tell you that you can't run a business on just 12 hours of focused work a week, and I'm here to tell you, yes, you can. If you're selective about the work that you're actually going to get done, which is what we did when we chose our big 3s, and if you honor your 12-hour CEO time blocks, you can accomplish everything that you need to get accomplished in a given week. Because the reality is, most of what we're doing in those other 28 or 38 or 48 hours aren't the things that actually move the needle. It's just more chaos, it's just more urgency, It's just more busyness. So remember, if your calendar doesn't reflect your priorities, they're not priorities. It's just as simple as that. Okay, I've got one more system for you, and thanks to the previous two systems that we just talked about, it should be a lot easier to implement this last one. System 3: The 5 PM cutoff. Now, when I tell business owners that they should clock out at 5, they usually look at me like I'm just out of touch, like, ah, easy for you to say. Ryan Deiss, you've already got a successful business, you've been doing this for a long, long time. Well, look, it was not always like this. It definitely was not. Back in 2016, I had not one, not two, but three different companies on the Inc. 500 list simultaneously. And from the outside, it looked like I was crushing it. But on the inside, I was burnt out, I was miserable, and I was definitely feeling crushed. And one night, everything kinda came to a head. I remember I'd pulled yet another super late night. It was well after midnight. I remember rolling into my house. I could see that there was light coming from under the door. I knew that the light was on in my bedroom and I was like, "That's not good. She should be asleep by now." I remember coming in and there was my wife sitting up in bed and it was clear that she had been crying, that she was very upset with me. But I do remember some words that she said that I will never forget. She said, "You can keep doing what you're doing but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore. And I remember just feeling absolutely crushed because the reality is, is that she was who I was supposedly doing all of this stuff for. My kids were supposedly who I was doing all of this stuff for. And what she was basically saying is, this thing that's supposed to be a vehicle for us to achieve all these great things is actually a vehicle that's taking you away from us. I didn't know how I was going to fix it, but I did know that I was not willing to sacrifice my family at the altar of scale for this business. And so that night, I made 2 promises that changed everything. The first promise is I promised to make it home in time for dinner, which meant I needed to pretty much leave by 5. The second commitment that I made is that we would take at least one 30-day family vacation a year, and this was big because up until that point, it had been years since we had gone on a real vacation. Without even realizing it, I had accidentally implemented one of the most important and powerful productivity principles of all. You probably have heard of the concept of Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law simply states that work will always expand to fill the time allowed for it. The lesson is that constraints are what enable productivity. Now again, I didn't understand this when I told my wife that I was gonna be home in time for dinner. I was just trying to say something, anything, that would make her slightly less mad at me. But when I started doing it, something pretty amazing happened. I actually got more. Work done. Since I knew I was gonna have to leave every day at 5 o'clock, you better believe I was actually productive during the time. I was a lot more productive than I was when I would tell myself, "Oh, it's okay if I don't get this done by 5 o'clock. I can just stay later." When we do that, we are giving ourselves more time for the work to expand into. And the same, by the way, was true for those 30-day vacations. I remember the month leading up to that first 30-day vacation, I was more productive than ever. I literally did 2 months of work in a matter of weeks because I knew I had to. Now, here are the specific steps I took that made the entire thing work. So step 1, I installed a 4:30 shutdown ritual and I literally made this a meeting on my calendar. So I went into my Google Calendar and from 4:30 to 5:30, I created a standing meeting so it was blocked off, nobody could book time with me there and if they looked, they'd be like, "Oh, he's booked during that," and I made it a recurring meeting. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday was a standing meeting 4:30 to 5 that was called workday shutdown, and I would do a quick scan of, you know, my email, do a quick scan of the inbox, make sure that there wasn't anything that needed to get kind of done or responded to before the end of the day, and then I would also use that to help to define what's going to be my big 3 for the next day. It worked, it was great. It's one of the things that I still do to this day, but the important thing is you've got to start this before you actually want to leave. So when I first tried this, I actually had it start at 5, so it was like 5 to 5:30 was the workday shutdown. And when that happened, meetings were basically allowed to kind of butt right up against the time when I was supposed to leave. And what happens in meetings? They always run long, they're always gonna get expanded, and I was like, "Oh, it's okay, 'cause I've got an extra 30-minute buffer." But the 30-minute buffer wasn't supposed to be 30 extra minutes to work on things with other people. It was supposed to be 30 minutes to shut down so I could be walking out at 5. So make sure, When you do this, if you're gonna leave at 5, 4:30 to 5, that's your workday shutdown ritual. Step 2, when you build in this workday shutdown ritual, actually set it to an out-of-office block with auto decline turned on. So, you can do this in Google Calendar or any of the other calendars. Just make it to where if somebody attempts to book during that time, it's going to trigger an auto decline message that just everybody sees, "Hey, this is declined because I'm out of office." Step 3, I want you to actually block out the 30-day vacation. Just block it out, put it on your calendar. You don't have to decide where you're gonna go. You don't even— if you kind of get cold feet at the end, you don't even have to take the vacation. But I want you to choose a 30-day period when you're going to be gone. If you want to say for the first week of your vacation you're working, but maybe you're working from home, so you're not technically gone, and then you're just gone for 2 weeks, and then you kind of have another week where you're transitioning back— that's how I did it for the first time. Just to be clear, now the way I do it is I take a full 30 days and I actually take off the week before that and then the week after that to kind of transition it out. So I'm really gone for a full 6 weeks, but you don't have to get there, you know, day 1, year 1 or anything like that. But I do want you to block it out on the calendar and I want you to let your team know that you're going to be gone and I want you to ask them, "Hey, what needs to be true between now and then so that I can actually take this time?" You're going to be surprised but your people actually be happy. For you. And they're frankly going to be happy that they get a little time to work without you having to bug them all the time. Ask me how I know. Now, one of the concerns I hear from entrepreneurs when I talk about this strategy is they say things like, "Yeah, Ryan, but if I leave early, then won't my team feel like they can leave early too?" Well, first of all, 5 o'clock isn't early. 5 o'clock is a normal workday, assuming you're starting around 9. It is normal for you and it is definitely normal for your team. Again, 8 hours is an astounding amount of time. But here's the cool part. When you implement this strategy, you should actually hope that your team implements it too, because the productivity gains that you will experience by leaving at 5 will trickle down to your team as well when they do the same. They're gonna be more deliberate during the day, they're gonna be more efficient, and in doing so, they're actually going to get more work done. And this is exactly what happened to me. When I started leaving at 5, I also saw that other people were beginning to leave at 5:00, and at first I was like, what the heck? You don't get to do that, that's just me, and then I realized, no, Ryan, you're a jerk, they do get to do that, they should do that, and what was really cool is the people who did leave early were actually the most productive. So I just made it a rule. I made it a rule that everyone had to leave no later than 6:00 PM. We're shutting this office down, get the heck out, go home. And I wasn't just being nice. I knew that if I required people to be out by 6:00, and if I modeled it myself by even leaving a little bit early, it would force better productivity into the hours that people were in the office. And again, it worked. Projects that had slipped for months actually got finished, sales actually increased, and unsurprisingly, employee net promoter score went up. So employee delight, happiness, people liked working there better. Now, I want to be clear, late nights still happened. It still happened, and they'll still happen for you. There's still going to be plenty of days when you don't leave at 5 and plenty of weeks when you work more than 40 hours. It happens, but when it happens, it happens because it's the exception, not the rule. Now, here's the trap most founders fall into. They say things like, okay, cool, I hear you, I'm gonna try to leave at 5, meaning 5 is a suggestion, it's not a hard stop. Or they say, yeah, I'm gonna try to take a longer vacation this year. Try is not a 30-day block, okay? It's a hope. If you want this to work for you, the hard 5 PM stop and the 30-day locked live vacation in your calendar in writing with auto decline turned on is what needs to be in place. Now look, if you have a family or just someone back at home who's waiting for you hoping that you're going to walk through that door excited when you do, I want to talk to you directly. Your life is not merely defined by the work that you do. Your life is defined by the impact that you have on the people that you love and by the people that love you back. And those people don't want more stuff. They probably don't want more money, they probably don't want a bigger house or a boat or anything like that. What they want is more of you. They want your time, they want your presence, they want you fully there, not looking at a screen or anything like that. I don't know about you, but that was why I started my business in the first place. I built it because I wanted more for the people that I loved the most. Yeah, more money, but more money so I could buy more freedom and more opportunity and more times together. And if your business isn't doing that right now, and instead it's taking you away from the people that you love the most, hopefully this can be the start of a transition back to the way the business was supposed to be all along. And look, if you want to see the systems that I also put in place that made the 5 PM shutdown a reality for me, be sure to check out this next video. It is the core thing that just makes all this work.
