How to ACTUALLY be Productive (even if you lack discipline)

Here is a summary of the key points from the transcript: - The transcript discusses strategies for maximizing productivity based on whether you are a maker (create things like courses or books), manager (lead people and make decisions) or a hybrid. - Key tips include: - Set internal meeting hours (e.g. 12-4pm) so makers can work uninterrupted before that. - Schedule meetings from the bottom up to maximize makers' uninterrupted work time. - Have a dedicated manager day and maker day to theme your week. - Communicate your schedule and priorities so others know when not to interrupt you. - Reduce friction on Sundays by looking ahead at your week, ranking priorities, scheduling in detail, adding buffer time, and color coding your calendar. - The overall strategy is to engineer your environment and schedule to make it as easy as possible to focus and be productive on your most important tasks. Preparation and communication are key.

Productivity is the amount of output relative to input. In business, productivity is how much money you get out from how much time you put in. Those who have mastered making more money have actually mastered productivity. I know this because I went from $0 at the age of 22 to a net worth of over $100 million by the age of 28 simply by utilizing my time. So today what I want to do is I want to teach you my productivity system to maximize time. And at the end, I'm actually going to show you my calendar and I'm going to include in the link below the SoP I have to my internal productivity system that I use to run my companies. Getting yourself to do something when you don't feel like doing it is a skill in itself. But oftentimes people label themselves as lacking the willpower, when in fact, you actually lack the skill of engineering your environment to make it as easy as possible, to work as hard as possible. The best way to hack your way to productivity is through elimination. And the best thing to eliminate are the things and the people that you say yes to that don't drive the one thing forward that will move your business in the right direction toward your goals. In order to know what we need to eliminate, we need to understand what type of work is most important that we do. And in fact, what type of worker are you? There are three types of workers. First, we have a make maker work. You make shit. This is stuff that takes days, weeks, months, years, even having one call at noon or one or two, that will interrupt your entire day and it will take you out of flow state, and you cannot get shit done. If the most important thing you need to do right now to grow your business is build a course, make long form content, write a book, you might be a maker. There are seasons of business, and so you might be a maker. Right now, that doesn't mean you're forever a maker. The second type of worker is a manager. Okay, so manager work is mostly composed of meetings. This person is directing others, collecting data, leading training, encouraging, making decisions. This is a common schedule for anybody in a leadership position or a divisional leader. It's kind of hard to do your job if you're in a hole all day not talking to anybody. Maybe you have some make or work. But a lot of the times, especially when someone's new to a job, they are a manager. So if the most important thing right now for your business to grow is that you need to hire people, you need to train people, you need to lead people, you need to make decisions, you might be a manager. Now, the third type is a hybrid. A hybrid means you might have both. You might alternate between both, whether it be week to week or month to month. Sometimes your main priorities are communicating, leading, training, hiring. Other times it's building marketing materials, finishing a book. If in order to build your business, for example, you need to hire a sales team and design a course, you might be a hybrid. So an example is that Alex, he is traditionally a maker. Most of his job is making shit. You guys know this. By 100 million dollar offers, $100 million leads, all the content that he puts out. I am traditionally a manager. I have all the team report to me. Switching between tasks constantly. Now, here's where the problem comes in, because you might say here, and you might be thinking, I resonate, Layla, I'm a maker, or I'm a manager. I'm a hybrid. Knowing what you are is not enough. Alex, every day for almost two years, used to have to wake up at 330 or 04:00 a.m. to get his stuff done. Because he had meetings starting at nine or 10:00 a.m. he would work until he had meetings start at nine or ten, and then he would take meetings from nine or ten until five. And on the other hand, when I started making content and I'd had a manager schedule where I was taking meetings anywhere from seven to 08:00 a.m. until five or 06:00 p.m. i had to start waking up really early or working late to try and get the content in. Now, here's the problem. Neither of us put out our best work at this point in time. In fact, both of us were very stretched, we were stressed, and the quality of our maker work went down, as well as the quality of any manager work we did. Which brings me to the second part, which is knowing is not enough. You must do something. So the second piece of this productivity system, you want to design a working environment rather than be a product of it. Using one of these three templates to create your schedule. Controlling your environment is immensely easier than trying to constantly control yourself. You see, the reason that understanding schedules for different kinds of workers is important is because what if a maker and a manager need to work together? Here's the prime example. Myself and Alex. It used to be impossible for me to know and Alex know when to schedule meetings because Alex had his whole day blocked and I had meetings all day. Until you understand how to optimize your schedule, managers, whether it be you or somebody in your company, often kill the productivity of makers. So managers will often ask makers to meet. Makers will begrudgingly accept the invitation out of fear of ruining the relationship or being an asshole. And in consequence, they will kill an entire day or an entire unit of work just to maintain a relationship. When somebody from the sales department wants to talk to somebody from the video department, somebody in the video department, they need, they're a maker. They're editing videos and filming videos all day. They're getting into the flow. And if somebody says, hey, can you meet at ten? It's like, shit, I'm 3 hours into this edit. I've got 3 hours left, and the likelihood that I get back to this edit and do a great job is low. So here's what we do that you need to set ground rules for your company, no matter how big or small it is, okay? So I'll explain to you what I do and the rules or the guidelines I've set for my company so that we can work cohesively together and respect each other's working styles. The first piece is we create internal meeting hours. That means that we, from 12:00 p.m. pacific to 04:00 p.m. pacific, designate that as meeting time. Meaning if a salesperson needs to meet with a video person, that is a window of time they can book that in. If somebody asks to meet that video person before at 10:00 a.m. and they say no, they need to understand, one, I probably should ask for the meeting window time because that's when they're available. And two, I understand I'm going to kill an entire unit of work for that person if I ask them to meet before the designated window. So, out of respect for the makers in our company, because we know that our makers, a lot of them start work at seven or 08:00 a.m. so they can get an entire unit of work done before twelve. It's out of common courtesy to our makers that we ask our managers not to request meetings internally before 12:00 p.m. and I often encourage my team, book all your meetings, interviews, vendors, et cetera, for before 12:00 p.m. so that after 12:00 p.m. that is when, if you need to meet with a maker, they have time set aside, and you have time set aside. The second piece is that we make it known that people have a maker schedule. So if you look at any of our calendars, which we'll show right here, you can see that my team will block maker time on their calendars. So that if a team goes to look, hey, I need to book a time with this person. They won't interrupt that time because they know how important it is to getting shit done. The third piece, and this is a hack that I felt like a genius for thinking of it, start scheduling from what I call the bottom up, the bottom of the calendar, to the top of the calendar. You have your meetings back to back and schedule them from the bottom up. This does two things. One, if you're a manager, it's much more efficient because you're getting way more done in a condensed period of time and you're eliminating gaps. So you constantly just offer people the last meeting of the day slot, and you work your way back up so that any maker work you have you can do in the morning. The second is that our makers in our company, if they schedule from the bottom up, that means they have the most time possible to do maker work. So, for example, if you look at Alex's calendar, which I'll show a screenshot of here, you can see that what we do is we schedule from the bottom up. He starts his calls at 04:00 p.m. and then the next slot is three and two. We try to only give him one manager block a day. If anything, most of the time he has nothing on his schedule except Mondays. That makes it easy, so that now I know if I need to book a call with a maker, I'm going for the 04:00 p.m. or the 03:00 p.m. because out of courtesy, that means they have the most time possible to work on maker stuff. The fourth piece is that we want to commit to a manager day. So Monday is a known manager day for our company, meaning what I've tried to do is condense all of their meetings into one day. So all of the things need to get done. We put it into one day of the week so that the rest of the four days they can get all their maker work done uninterrupted. If you look at the number one maker in our company, which is Alex, you can look at his schedule. He will typically slam himself on Mondays and then have nothing the rest of the week. This allows him to go straight into manager mode, and then the rest of the day is going to complete maker mode. And then the last one is just like we commit to a manager day, we commit to a maker day. Everybody, no matter if you're a manager or maker, you have other shit to do. And what I've noticed is, especially for managers, they need to have one day a week completely free. Now, not only do I think that this is a good reset for people, because if you know, you have a ton of meetings one day, you're waking up early, you're constantly in this go mode. And so what I have found is that Wednesdays are the best days. So Wednesday is our quiet [email protected]. dot now, you can look at my calendar right here. You will see I never schedule on Wednesdays. I ruthlessly protect that time because I am the example of how to be the most productive, and I want to set that example for my team over and over and over again. I am more of a hybrid that Wednesday is the day that I can do my maker work. I can write content. I can move projects forward. I can build presentations. I can wake up, drink some coffee, sit in my pajamas all day, not even come to the office, and just get shit done all day. And I think that's really valuable for people who, especially like me, have to show up every other day and do all this manager work. Those are the five things that you can do to make it easy for your company to accommodate all the three types of work. Notice the key here, guys? Communication. If people don't know what type of work you do, if people don't know when you work on that work, how the fuck are they to respect the work you're doing? And the amount of founders that come to me and say, layla, it's so annoying. My team bugs me all the time. Okay, well, do they see your calendar? Do they know what you're working on? Like, the answer is usually no. And so I'm like, well, then of course they're fucking bugging you. They probably think you're sitting there doing jack shit. You get what I'm saying? Unless you tell people what your priorities are, what you're doing, when you're focused on things and when you're doing work, they're not going to know. I constantly put my away message. I put my away message on when I'm going to a business dinner. I put it on when I'm working out. I put it on when I'm doing a video. I put it on when I'm doing maker work because I want my team to know what I'm doing so that they know if they can disrupt me or not. Here is the template that you can stick to based on the type of worker you are. If you're a manager, stick to the dedicated meeting blocks. I used to be notorious for having 1112, 13 hours of meetings. You know what I realized? A lot of things are better in written word. And so what you'll find is that you actually create a more disciplined and clear thinking team if you force more things to be given to you in written word. The second is understanding the costs that you put on a maker when you request something from them. It costs a maker ten times what it costs you to have a meeting. Because if you compare your working units, that is what it costs. You work in units of 30 minutes. They work in units of four to 8 hours. So if you put a meeting in the middle of their work unit, you cost them ten times what you cost yourself. Either make sure it's fucking worth it or don't bug them with it. What's crazy is even a brief interruption, like knocking on their door. Hey, do you have 2 seconds? I just need something from you really quick that can cost anywhere between 15% to 40% of someone's productivity. These are studies that have been done. It's the cost of switching. And so you have to understand, if you want the best for the entire company, you will respect what's best for each person in optimizing their working environment. And so that brings me to appreciating and respecting the nos. When people decline a meeting, when people say, I can't make a meeting, do not take it as an offense. Understand? They're protecting the company so they can do meaningful work to help grow the company. Something that took me too long to learn is that saying no doesn't mean saying no. Saying no means saying yes to what matters most. Strategy is saying no is like when I need to get on a meeting with Alex. One, I don't do the Deagada minute things because he has a different type of working environment and schedule than me. And so I opt for. I go for a 04:00 p.m. slot or after work. So four managers set meeting hours. Respect your meeting hours. Try not to go outside of your meeting hours. Your work will expand the time you give it. So if you think that you need to have 45 meetings a week, you will continue to for the rest of your life. But if you try and constrain yourself to only having 20 to 25 hours of meetings a week, you will be shocked at what you can get done for the makers. What you want to do to maximize your schedule is to make your team aware of your working style and schedule, to put it on your calendar, to block it so that you do not accept meetings before a certain time each day to book from the bottom up and then on the latter, respect and maximize the manager day so that you can help other people move their stuff forward. There are so many CEO's that are responsible for marketing, making materials, building courses, and they get none of it done because they don't tell anybody that those are their priorities. And so then when they don't tell anybody, they don't make people aware. People pull at them to bring them into other things. What happens? They get distracted and then they look back and they didn't get anything done over this last week. Let people know and don't be afraid to say no. Don't be afraid to tell them. And you don't need to just say no and be an asshole. Tell them why I'm working on this video. If I don't get it done today, it's probably going to drag on another three to four days. I don't think that's the best use of my working time. You know, an example of this is we did a survey for our media team and basically something that I got from feedback from all of them is that best days of productivity where they had nothing on their calendar but that we had meetings about four days a week. And so then they found themselves even working on the weekends when there was time, there wasn't anything on the calendar so they could get more work done. And so what we did is we talked as a management team and said, okay, this is great feedback. We need to chunk those meetings into a couple of days to maximize productivity for everybody else on the team. It wasn't even a hard switch, but it made it easy for us to allow them to work hard. You have to work when you say you're working. If you're a maker, you make stuff. And so if you block time and you make nothing, you do your fellow makers a disservice. It's easier to be lazy than to try and to fail. So don't cop out on yourself here. A lot of people are scared. They're intimidated by the maker work, and so they do all these things to avoid it. Once you've blocked that time, your goal is, is that you remove as much friction as possible ahead of time so that you can work as hard as possible during that time to maximize your productivity. And lastly, as a hybrid theme your days. What I do is I theme my days. I have meeting days and I have non meeting days. So Monday, always a manager day. Wednesday, always a maker day. Saturday, always a maker day, depending on what kind of work I have so oftentimes as of lately, for example, I'm probably 50 50. I have 50% of my week that's a maker schedule, and 50% of my week that's a manager schedule. And based on the work that I'm projecting I'm going to have, I constantly am refreshing my schedule to accommodate the type of work I have. So, for example, the last two weeks I had a lot of events, I had quarterlies with my entire team, and so I gave up all my maker work. But what does that mean in the next coming weeks, I put aside more time for maker work. You also have to understand, it's not just about in the micro day to day and week to week, but over like months and quarters. And so the easiest thing I found is to theme your days. What I used to do is I used to split up my maker work and I would try and just do manager work and then maker work before or after. And it just never turned out how I wanted. My videos fucking sucked how I showed up, I was tired, I was exhausted, the quality was low. You know, the presentations I made for my team weren't that good. And so I've learned that chunking your time and theming your days is probably one of the best things you can do to maximize productivity. I see that you have two chunks every day because a maker has two units of time and they make in both of them. But a hybrid has two units of time and they are a maker unit and a manager unit, which means I might have on a day where I don't start meetings until 12:00 p.m. and I go till 04:00 p.m. which is my typical schedule. That means that I have 4 hours of maker time in the beginning of the day that I can dedicate to making something. It's not as much as a maker, but it is something. And so that is where I have found that if I split my day into two chunks, that's very helpful for me. And actually a lot of the time what I do is I do my maker chunk, I go to the gym, and then I do my manager Chunk. And so if you have 4 hours in the morning, you can do maker work, 4 hours in the afternoon you can do manager work. That is a very sufficient schedule for a hybrid. Now, on the other hand, you can also just theme your days alternating. So it could be all maker, all manager, and you can just alternate between those. I have a hybrid of both, which is Mondays are managers, Wednesdays are maker that stays forever. The days in between alternate. And so really you have to try this out, test it for yourself and see what works with the type of work you have. And I think you just have to know yourself. Some people honestly can't do more than 4 hours of make or work a day anyways, so fuck you. Might as well have the meetings in the afternoon, cause you ain't gonna do jack shit if you don't have them. Losers change their goals because they're too lazy to change their habits and themselves. And the last piece that's very important to having a proficient hybrid schedule is communication. So when you're a hybrid, it's more important than any other time to make sure you're over communicating what your priorities are, what you're doing, having blocks on your schedule. Guys, this all changes with time. For me, it changes every week, because I have different things on my schedule every week. I have to look multiple weeks ahead and say, all right, I'm going to theme out my days, make sure I have enough time for my maker work, my manager work. I'm constantly looking ahead and adjusting my schedule. But another thing to recognize is that you might be a maker right now. You may be a hybrid in a quarter, and you may be a manager two quarters from now, especially if you're the one leading the entire company. This is something that's constantly in flux and changing. So here's what I want to do. I'm going to flash up a couple of examples so you can see. Here's a great example of a manager schedule. Okay, so notice that we try to block as much time in the mornings so that we have manager stuff in the afternoons. But you'll notice that I try to chunk as much as possible and there's no time between meetings. Now here's a maker example, so you'll see that there's no meetings until later and the meetings work from the bottom up. And then lastly we have an example of a hybrid. So you will see that the hybrid schedule has one day fully allocated to making, it has some mornings allocated to making, and then it has some days that are split. If you know your working style, you know how to schedule it. The third piece is this, which is how do you prepare to attack the weak with violence. You do this by reducing friction. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to work as hard as possible, which means removing roadblocks ahead of your working time, not during it. It is far easier to change behavior by removing friction than it is to change behavior by motivation or discipline. The goal is that you set yourself up for success before you even step into your office, sit down at your desk, or open your computer for the week. Others may know this as preparation. People underestimate how much of a genius you can look like with just 1 hour of preparing for the whole week. So you spend 1 hour on Sunday preparing for your week. That can save you ten working hours if done properly. That's a good trade for your time, in my opinion. And there's a quote that I love that it always sits with me, which is, with preparation, a man of few advantages can give himself the largest one. I've never considered myself to be the smartest. I've never considered myself to be the most talented. But I can prepare my fucking ass off and work really hard. So here's why this is important. I used to plan my manager, my maker time, but then everything took me like 35% longer than I had expected it to take me because I had not removed the friction ahead of time. Okay? So it's sort of like saying, I'm going to lose weight, so I'm going to start a diet this week. The week comes, you didn't buy any healthy food, lunch rolls around, you don't have anything prepared. You have to say, fuck, I'm not going to get it done. I'm not going to eat. According to Plantain, the same happens in business if you don't prepare ahead of time. You spend all this time preparing when you could have been doing and executing. Which brings us to the last piece of my productivity system, which is Monday hour one. Monday hour one. What is that? It's usually 1 hour or less. It will take you less time the more you do it, of planning. That saves you ten to 12 hours of executing during the week. During this hour, you will pre plan your entire working week and your working hours to ensure that you actually get all the shit done that you want to. How do we actually do this? First, look forward, look back, looking forward. What do I have in the next week? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, month, two months, quarter? As well as what did I have happen this week? What is in my email inbox? What was on my calendar? What meetings did I have? So it's basically saying when you're looking back, what things do I have to follow up on? What things are incomplete? What things do I have to respond to? What things that I forget about because I was so busy during this week that I need to pull forward in the next week, and then I'm going to look forward and say, what are things that I need to be working on right now in order to hit my goals and my targets for the upcoming weeks, months, quarter, and I'm going to pull those things back into the present day, and then I'm going to compile that into one list of all my priorities. And so when I say we're looking forward and looking back, that's at the calendar. And then it's also anywhere that I work. So for me, I work in slack, I work in my email, and I work in Asana. Those are the major places I work. I cleanse each one. I look at all the stuff I've touched in the last weeks, and I look at all the stuff that indicates things I have to do in the future, and then I cross reference that with any goals I have for the company to list all the things that I want to get done this week. Now, the second piece is, once you've looked back and looked forward, you force rank. What is the most important thing that if you get done this week, moves you forward towards your goal the most. Again, were not trying to be productive to be busy. Were trying to be productive to actually get shit done. And so you need to force rank your priorities. If you dont do this, then when something unexpected happens, a teammate quits, a client makes an uproar, and you have less time than you anticipated, you know where to allocate it. The third is schedule. This seems ridiculous, but a lot of people, once they know what they're going to do, they don't schedule it in the calendar. And so what I want you to do is to go to your calendar and to actually have a calendar that can realistically depict your working schedule. So, for example, for me, I'm going to schedule in, okay, I have to work on this project. It's going to take me probably two and a half hours. So I'm going to allocate two and a half hours. But you know what? That's during my breakfast time. So I am going to put a little, okay, 20 minutes, I'm going to eat right here, and then I'm going to come back. Constantly looking at actually allocating my time properly. Because a lot of people they do is they block time on their calendar. They don't actually think about all the things that are going to happen in between. Yes, you have to eat, drink, get water, go the bathroom. What about the gym? What about a walk? What about all these things? And so I factor those into my schedule ahead of time so that my calendar is actually a reflection of what I do. We want to be as detailed as possible, especially if you're a maker manager, it's pretty easy. Like, you kind of have to title a meeting to have one. But for a maker, you need to know how long and be able to accurately predict how long it's going to take you to do certain things. And so it's very helpful if you don't just say, like, project work, it's what is the project you're working on? What's the thing you're driving forward? And what's the most important thing you're going to work on this week? Title it that. Don't title it project work. Deep work. The fourth thing you're going to do is we're going to add in buffer time, overflow, ad hoc. What are you going to do when the unexpected happens? Do you have any buffer time in your schedule? Guys, this is something I used to be fucking terrible at. I had no buffer time. So if somebody else needed to meet really urgently because something happened, if somebody quit, if somebody needed a meeting, if somebody called me who I wanted to do a podcast, and I really wanted to get it in with them, I had no buffer. And so what it meant is I just had to delete things. You need to have buffer time. Buffer time allows you to constantly stay ahead rather than get behind, because if you're constantly overbooking yourself, then you're constantly getting behind when unexpected things happen in the business. And so for me, you guys might look at my calendar now and be like, wow, okay, only having four or 5 hours a day allocated to meetings isn't that much. Okay, but do you know how many unexpected meetings happen on those manager days? Do you know how many phone calls I have to make before or after those meetings that I didn't anticipate? Do you know how many times I have to move those meetings because something urgent pops up with my legal team? What I do is I put in buffer time, and that almost always gets utilized about 2 hours a day. Now, on my maker days, I will do my best to protect myself and basically push any of those things into my manager days. There are obviously emergencies and urgent things in business that cannot wait. And so sometimes that happens, and then my day gets fucked. And it is what it is. Can't. No system is perfect, right? Because emergencies are emergencies. If somebody calls me and says, I'm gonna quit, I'm not gonna be like, hey, it's my maker day. Can't talk to you right now. Can you quit tomorrow? Not really a fucking luxury. Understand, this is not perfect, but if you add in the buffer or the ad hoc request time, then you will not over commit yourself. And a lot of people book 8 hours a day of calls and then actually end up with two or three more hours. And then they're overbooked. And then the last piece is color code, your calendar. I color code everything. And then what I do is when I've accomplished something, I label it green. So it's like my little dose of dopamine is that if I label something red, it means I didn't get it done. And I fucking hate seeing red on my calendar is you can look back at your weeks and see what weeks did I get the most green. You can ask yourself what was happening before and after work, and then that is a way that you can continue to optimize your schedule over and over again. Our brains love association. So if you associate colors on your calendar with certain activities, it's going to be much easier when you look at your calendar versus things will not stand out to you. If everything is blue, everything is purple, everything is green. If you associate green with being good, you're going to be incentivized to complete things because you want to see the color green and you don't want to see the color red. So if you need to have 2 hours of meeting with a vendor, interviews, et cetera, you schedule them up from there and everything else you try and protect so you can do your follow ups, move things forward, prepare for meetings, etcetera. The ultimate manager schedule is Monday. I just call it Monday madness. We just have meetings all day. Then Tuesday we have manager day, which is meetings for four to 5 hours, but you leave buffer time. Wednesday, quiet day, because we respect that. And you do have things you're gonna have to move forward and project work, and it's a nice reset so that then Thursday and Friday you can hit it back with the manager schedule again and again. I have found this is a fantastic schedule for managers, because the reality is, is that managers still have some work that they have to move forward no matter what. And so Wednesdays, if you block that, you can get all those things done. I've noticed that's very, very helpful for the makers. The best schedule I've seen is that Monday is your manager day. All the stuff to just get it done, murder yourself on Monday, 10 hours of meetings, whatever it takes. So that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, nothing on your calendar. I have just seen makers work much better if you just can have one day of meetings and then the rest of the schedule is clear. The best way I've seen it work for hybrids is essentially to theme your days. Intelligence is the speed of learning. And so if you watch this video and you do nothing, it means you learned nothing. So here's what we want to do. Do these things right now. One, write down what type of worker are you, maker, manager or hybrid. Two, determine which schedule you're going to follow. Three, let your team know or anybody else you work with. And four, try it out. And five, you can grab my sop that I use with my internal team right down below here to make it easier for you to work as hard as possible.