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Jason Fladlin here. In this little 6.88 device will absolutely change your business and change your life. And at least it was 6.88 cents—I bought a two-pack on Amazon. Can't guarantee the price, but I can guarantee if you follow what I'm gonna say here, it will massively improve the productivity and the quality of your output if you follow my advice.
So there's two principles of productivity that will serve you well. The first one you've probably already heard of—it's called the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 Rule. And it goes as follows: a few of your inputs will get a majority of your outputs. So a few of your efforts will account for a majority of results; a few of your customers will spend the most of your money; and a few of the products that you create will make most of the sales. It's just a law of nature—a few inputs provide a majority of outputs. And that's a great principle, and hopefully you can adopt that. I've seen a lot of people have challenges with that; they get the theory, but the concrete implementation of it is tough. And I don't even think it's the best productivity law; I think it's the most talked about one.
But here's my favorite productivity law: it's called Parkinson's Law. And here's how it runs: Parkinson's Law states that the task at hand expands to fill the time allotted. So what does that mean? It means if you don't set a deadline on something, the time allotted is infinity, meaning it will never get done. This is almost always why you never get things finished because you don't set a deadline on them. This is why New Year's resolutions suck so horribly—you don't set a damn deadline on them, huh? Think about that, right? You just say, "Here's what I want...", and you might get it—it just might take you 80 years. So set a damn deadline on the thing.
But here's the problem with it: most people will set a deadline too far in the future. Short-term thinking creatures—that's on our nature; that's how we're programmed. So we can fight that, and we should work to overcome this instant gratification programming, the short-term time horizon. But we should also work with it, especially at first. And so if you say, "Hey, listen, I got a test in three weeks," I should start studying for us 21 days from now—you have a 21-day deadline—but you probably don't start studying until day 20. And that's because it's too far in the future. You've made the deadline too long. So a majority of the deadlines that you work with should be 30 minutes into the future. What? Yes, that's how we play it.
I mean, what's at stake here? Your livelihood's at stake. Your ability to produce is gonna affect your economic situation more than any other ability you could possibly think of. Output is key, and especially at the beginning, even substandard output is better than nothing. In fact, it is preferable. You know, the enemy of good? Perfect. Perfection is the most imperfect concept that you could ever have in productivity, and I'll tell you why: because if you wait six months to put it out there, that's six months that the world does not get to interact with your value, period. So somebody will suffer for six months waiting for you to get it right. But the second problem is you don't really know what's valuable or not until you put it into somebody's hands and see what happens. And nine times out of ten, what you think will be beneficial ultimately isn't. But when you put it into somebody's hands and see what happens, you can iterate. Quality and value is an iterative process—almost always. You are the luckiest SOB if you get it right the first time. Instead, you iterate; you get it out there quickly; minimum viable product and all of that; you see what happens; you iterate; you get it out there again; you get it out there again; you get it out there again. So the hyper-productive individual is going to win in terms of value—both quantity and quality. And this is why we want to take these really short deadlines.
So why did I say 30 minutes? Well, let me run you through a case study here. A first information product that I ever created, I ran into this issue where I noticed if I ever stop creating the product at any point in the process, it never got done. So I sat down one day—I didn't set a timer yet because I wasn't in tune to this deadline concept—but I said another type of limit. I said, "Listen, I'm going to sit down with this blank sheet of paper"—in this case, a blank Word document—"and when I get up, the product's done." So really my limitation was how long could I sit. It ended up taking me two hours. So this was a product I already had expertise in; I could just write it because it was something I knew and I already was a master at—I just never had documented it before. I tried several times—dozens of times—I never got it done. That's why I was frustrated—mother necessity of invention and all of that. And so I was like, "Okay, I just be done in two hours, because that's about as long as I can sit still before I had to go to the bathroom." When I got done, the product was like six pages long. But here's what was really cool about it: it forced me to focus on what matters. There's noise, and then there's signal. So the noise-to-signal ratio is important with any system that you're creating. The noise is all the possible information that exists out there related to the subject, but the signal is the most essential information. And the challenge is sorting through all the noise to hear the signal. If there's too much noise on a radio wave, you will not hear the signal that's going through. If somebody's communicating to you very important instruction, but it's surrounded by pink noise and white noise and all sorts of other static, you will never hear it. So the real trick with creating is subtraction, not addition—subtracting all of the noise so the signal could go through and be as strong as humanly possible.
And the beautiful thing about in my condition where I was like, "Hey, I got two hours to create this thing," essentially was it made me focus on the signal. So I didn't tell a history lesson; I didn't say, "Here's who I am and here's why you should listen to me." I just said, "Hey, you want to do X, here's the first thing you need to do." So immediately, within maybe a hundred words, somebody was able to start implementing on the topic of my information product. And that was a huge lesson for me; it forced me to focus on what matters and get it out there right away. Now, the product ended up being like six pages long, and I felt like, "Oh gee, it's too short; I better sell it for four dollars." So I did—vastly underpriced it; didn't know what I was doing—but got it out there into the real world and saw how people interacted with it. And I said, "Huh." One of the things that I noticed when I created this product that was so insightful and so valuable to me is I said, "Wow, people bought this product, and 15 minutes later they were able to get a benefit from it," and then they mentioned that because it was rare—in most instances, it had never happened before—where somebody paid four dollars and 15 minutes later they already felt they had 10 times their money back. I built a whole system just on that concept. So for the next year, that's all I did. But that was a great example of: I had this value that I was robbing people of by making it way too complicated, by not setting a deadline—an absolute hardcore, "It must be done"—a very tight, very short deadline. I've robbed people of that value for six months. And the funny thing is, if I would have created the product any other way, it would have been as good—it had been longer; it would have been padded; it would have been non-essential; it wouldn't have been as exhilarating to push it out there; and I wouldn't have had the momentum that I had creating something like this.
So let's say you wanted to create an information product. You have to go as hardcore as I just described. You could break it down into three sections. My favorite output of creating a system is the rule of three; three just seems to stick in the mind; people can wrap their heads around it—that's why we picked three. So if we didn't do an information product creation system, we could say, "Okay, three phases of that: one phase could be research; one phase could be outlining the product; and one phase could be creating the product." So those are three phases. Now I'm going to suggest that you make no phase longer than 90 minutes. And so in this particular case, 90 + 90 + 90—that's three phases—what are we looking at here? We're looking at like four and a half hours, I think it is. That's it. Now you can do one phase per day, and in fact, I recommend you do. If you do the system right, an hour and a half in a day is gonna equal what typically an average person could put out in eight hours. So yeah, you could do more, but start out with just an hour and a half a day. An hour and a half a day of actual work is better than what most people can do.
So each phase, 90 minutes long. Phase number one, let's say the research phase. I want you to break it down into three 30-minute segments. So you have your timer; you set it to 30 minutes; as soon as you push go on that thing, you start researching. You got 30 minutes. And this is a beautiful feeling if you can follow through on this because it's like you have some sort of metal detector for that most valuable information; you just seem to find it because you're forcing yourself to have to look for it and pull up on subconscious threads that you didn't even know were there before because you were too busy letting yourself research until the day is done and the next day and the next day under this false belief that more equals better, when more equals worse. And so you have the ability now to do three sessions of 30 minutes of research. So do it three times in the day, each time with a timer, and when you're done, your research is done. So then the next day, that's when you can do the outlining. Now you gotta remember, I gotta create an outline, so when I produced a product, the products got to get done in 90 minutes, and so you will make natural concessions and you will design things in those stream 30-minute sessions. The next day to do your research, and then the final day, whether you're writing the product, recording it for audio or for video, you got three 30-minute sessions, and then it's done. I might have to do the editing during those three 30-minute sessions, so it could be, you know, two sessions of producing, one of editing; it could be one session of producing, two of editing. I'll let you figure it out. Here's the beautiful thing: it doesn't really matter. The more you do this, the more you'll discover that it doesn't really matter how you set it up, because what matters is you're outputting; you're getting things done hyper-efficiently; and the quality is automatically higher because you're reducing the noise and you're increasing the signal. But the other most important part here is you're going to be doing this repetitively, so you'll be able to iterate, and you'll be able to adjust it; you'll be able to improve it; you'll be able to optimize over time. And that's what's so powerful with a system like this: let's say the first time you do this, you don't even implement. So I'm going to go, and I'm going to sit down; I'm going to start a 30-minute timer, and then you chicken out—that's fine. Here's what I suggest you do in that situation: this is called complete non-compliance. In that situation, you don't try to judge yourself; you just say, "Okay, here's an opportunity to try it again." Don't attach a story to it; don't beat yourself up over it; don't feel bad about it. This is not a normal experience; this is abnormal, so of course there might be some resistance the first time you try it. So do it again tomorrow. If it's a topic that's too complicated for you to do 30 minutes, find something that is stupidly easy for you to do 30 minutes to start with. So 30 minutes of email—a lesser important productivity mechanism, if you will—just to get in the habit of 30 minutes.
Uh, partial compliance—here's what you don't want to do: you don't want to blow past your 30 minutes. It's going to be tempting, and you're going to think that it's going to be good for you to do this because you say, "I set a 30-minute time limit; I gotten the flow of things, and I want to keep going past that 30 minutes," and you end up doing an hour, an hour and a half, and then you think, "I'm smart because I got even more done—this is fantastic." No, I don't want you to do that because it reinforces a negative behavioral trait. What I mean by that is it fights against the imposed limitation that will create the breakthrough. There's a reason why we want super tight deadlines—is because it forces you to find the breakthroughs; otherwise, you're going to fall back in the same old pattern where you could always research more; you could always write more; you could always create more; you could always do more of this; always do more of that; and it's diminishing returns all over the place. So we do not want to encourage that. If anything, if you get done before 30 minutes, just stop early, and then take the extra time and do something that is completely leisurely that has nothing to do with work, because now we're setting up a positive attribute that if I'm even more productive, I get more time to screw around—that's exciting, and that's fun. Or you might be able to do two of those three sessions but not do the third session. So then you start to learn things; you say, "Well, maybe I bid off more than I can chew here, so I gotta break this down into smaller 30-minute chunks," as opposed to, "I thought I could do this in 30, and really it takes 60." But that's fantastic because then you start to understand where you thrive and where you have challenges at. Start doing more of where you thrive in 30-minute chunks, and the challenging stuff, start to figure out ways you don't have to do it at all over time—outsources as much of it as you possibly can. Or again, the more complicated stuff, break it down into smaller steps.
So there's this thing where, like Roger Bannister, they said a big aha that he had in running the four-minute mile was he stopped thinking about it in minutes and he started thinking about it in seconds. So for whatever reason, four minutes was too much, but 240 seconds wasn't, because he could start finding ways to get a second here and a second there, but he couldn't do it for minutes. And I think that's very fascinating. And so if you can figure out ways to chunk down, and the things that are challenging to you, chunk them down into smaller chunks—maybe even less than 30 minutes, maybe three 10-minute sections of these smaller things—I think you're going to get more stuff done if you follow that process. And you can make anything a goal that can be achieved by the end of the day, and that's really when you want most of your deadlines to be. So writing a book—who knows how long that could take—but if you say, "Hey, look, a business book is about 50,000 words; if I produce a thousand words a day, it would take me 50 days." Is 50 days acceptable? If it is, then you say, "My goal is how do I produce a thousand words a day?" You say, "Well, can I do that in three 30-minute sessions?" Maybe, maybe not. So maybe we adjust the goal, or if we can figure out a way to output about 330 words per session, there you go—there's your book in 50 days. And then you sit down and you put a timer and you say, "30 minutes is this many words." What you might discover is you can write like that. What you might discover, though, is you can't write like that because you need more of an outline. So then it may be, "Okay, I got three 30-minute sessions; I do the outline in the morning, and then I do two writing sessions in the afternoon," and that's how I proceed. But we're iterating; we're always adjusting; we're always trying new approaches. And the best thing is is when you start getting these down where you're consistently getting the stuff done in 30-minute chunks—that's when you really could optimize. That's when you say, "How do we improve quality even further now that we have quantity? Now that we're just showing up and we're outputting consistently every single day, day in and day out, now how do we improve it?" And I've been able to build systems where I'm outputting at the highest level possible, doing things in minutes though that would normally take people hours, and that's quality plus quantity. But if we have to start any more beginning, quantity is the most important thing. I want you to get it out in a brown paper bag; I want you to get it out in beta mode; I want you to get it out where everything is sacrificed so only the essential exists. Put it in the hands of some people; see what happens; then go back and iterate it. And this is why most people, they underestimate what they can do in a year and they overestimate what they can do in a day. So I want you to work in 30-minute chunks; see how that plays for you. I believe you'll get more done; it will be better; it'll be more enjoyable; and it will set a foundation for you to break through and hit that upper echelon of your business that almost nobody else can compete with. And that's when your money—when you have a value monopoly where you can out-value anybody in the business—and then you get all the business. So let me know how that lands for you. I'll see you in the next video.
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