Transcription
Everyone gets the same amount of time every single day. 86,400 seconds. No more for Elon, no less for you. Same hours, wildly different results.
You've heard the productivity advice. Wake up at 5:00 a.m. Cold plunge. Eat your frog. The truth is, most of that advice, it's it's performing for the sake of discipline.
I run a large company. I write. I travel. And I still have a life. And one of the questions I get more than almost anything else is the age-old, how do you do it all? And the truth of the matter is, in this video, I'm going to give you exactly what I do, how I stole it from a bunch of the smartest CEOs in the world. And if you take one thing away from this system today, I can tell you it'll probably change your life.
Get this. I believe your day actually starts before you even wake in the morning. I mean, if you wake up and plan the day that morning, you've actually already lost. Someone will send you something urgent, and before you know it, you're making someone else's needs a priority over your own. and things that could have been brought TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY. >> YOUR DAY becomes reactive instead of intentional.
So, I plan every day the night before, sometimes even months before. Non-negotiable. 15 minutes. Sit down. Ask yourself, what is the most important thing you can do tomorrow that moves the needle? I have a very particular way of deciding the big objectives and staying on track. Then, I make a list, not a to-do list, a priority list. A to-do list is a wish. A priority list is a plan. A priority list forces you to decide what matters most when you can't do everything. And trust me, you never can.
Section two, sleep. I spent years treating sleep like it was stealing from me. Turns out I was stealing from myself. Your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain responsible for judgment, decision-m, impulse control. Well, it takes a hit when you're sleepd deprived. You think you're sharp, but your brain is drunk driving. You have decisions on four hours of sleep that you can't even tell what's happening.
The evening windown critical. Little under eye patch, skin care, ways to tell my nervous system the day is over. It's time to chill. The transition matters. You can't go from 90 m hour to deep sleep without a runway. The single highest leverage thing you can do right now if you want tomorrow to be your best day, go to sleep.
Section 3, morning ritual. I get up early, 5:30, 6. And it's a priority right away to get some light on my face if it's out. This is like a free reset for your circadian clock and it supercharges your brain. People think making your bed is a sign of a clean and organized person. Really, it's giving yourself an easy win. And wins stack. Every one of those pieces keeps carrying you forward throughout your day. If it's not the sun out, then it could be a sauna or a walk.
I also like to journal. Not about feelings, but clarity. No email or slack. The second you open email, you're working on somebody else's priorities. You just handed them your sharpest hours. So, just get clear on what you want your day to look like. Your brain sharper in those first few hours. Decision-m cleaner. Creativity higher. The first window of your day, that's not free time. That's the most expensive real estate in your schedule. Protect it like it's money because it is.
Section 4, deep work. Most important part in the day. The deep work block. Decision fatigue is real. By 3 p.m., your brain has made thousands of tiny decisions, and it's worse at making the good ones. So, I do the work that matters when my brain is sharpest. The filter I use for what gets done during this time is to ask is this leverage work, support work or noise. Deep work is leverage work and that's what gets this precious time. It's strategy, content, sales, writing, big deal thinking. Support work is when you feel busy. You're checking boxes. You're responding to things, but you're not building anything. You're just maintaining. Give this time to work that can compound.
Section five, the gym. I do some form of exercise every day. No exceptions. Forget neutropics and the supplement stack. The best single performance drug I've ever found is picking up something heavy early. Almost everything in your professional life is optimized for typing and staring. All brain, no body. Almost nothing requires you to feel your own strength. When you lift heavy weights, your problems stop feeling that big. You're telling your nervous system, "Hey, we're capable. We can carry heavy loads." That signal transfers into every other part of your day.
The discipline of showing up even when you don't feel like it, even when you're traveling, builds a muscle that transfers to everything else. You prove to yourself daily that you do what you say you're going to do. The gym isn't on my calendar because I have time. It's on my calendar because I can't afford to skip it.
Section six, work in person. From here, I'm handying filming off to my team so I can focus on my day. This is me practicing what I preach. I can't do it all, so I don't outsource to the pros. Our office gets rolling early, and I strongly believe in an inerson work. Researchers found that face tof face requests are 34 times more likely to get a yes than email. A bunch of other studies found that colleagues who shared physical space reference each other's works three to four times more than those who don't. I found you just can't get the same momentum when you're remote.
So, our whole team comes in every day and we're growing fast. Second office we've outgrown in 9 months. This was the size of my team just 9 months ago. Our first office was a 3,800t house. This is a 10,000t office building. by the time you're watching this will already have moved into a bigger space that's 14,000 square ft and thousands of feet in a studio. That's what happens when you keep building together.
Section seven, appearance. Most days, filming or hosting an event is part of my schedule, so I want to be camera ready. Look, I don't actually love wearing makeup, but that's mostly because I don't want it to impact what I can get done in the day. So, when I'm doing it on my own, I keep it simple. Otherwise, hair and makeup gets done during meetings, between decisions, or alongside reviews. My lesson here is that efficiency isn't just about what you're doing. It's about how you're doing it. Where can you combine tasks? Where can you think completely differently? Even if it's a little psychotic, like me doing this. And nobody wants to hear this. But how you show up physically is a decision you're broadcasting to everyone. Your team reads it.
Other things I stand behind the shoes. Always comfortable. I have long days. And if your feet hurt, your brain is solving the wrong problem all day. I eat chia pudding with fresh fruit. It's one of the best plant sources of omega-3s. It's great for your brain function. So bring it on. I think you should always try to feed your brain before you ask it to do tricks. You wouldn't run a Ferrari on gas station coffee. And every meeting on my calendar has a defined objective and defined end time.
These guys run all of the tech across my companies. And they've built something I've been wanting to share with you. It's called Top Prompt. And it helps you figure out how to create your own little AI robot that can help you prompt AI better in order to get it to build things that are perfect for what you want. So if you can't afford your own AI hire yet, I got this for you. All you do is you put in your email. It's totally free for you, by the way. Then you submit an idea. Let's say you want to build a website that's going to make you $10,000 a month. Then you generate approaches, but this isn't any autogenerator. It's going to give you, hey, do you want to have this actually coded? Do you just want to have design ideas? Which AI should you use? And it'll give you recommendations. And it'll help you prompt your idea the way you need to to talk to a computer as opposed to a human. Most people, by the way, are really awful at this part. So, AI never makes some real money. You aren't going to be that because you're going to use top prompt, my little gift for you. From here, my day is off and running. Hand it off from one thing to the next.
Section 8, work that comes to you. We have a full studio in our office. Guests come here. We record here. I used to go to the studio, go to the coffee shop, drive across town for every shoot. Now, all in one place. If you have something you need to do consistently, make it come to you. Every commute in your workflow is a leak. Plug it.
Section nine, scheduling days at the office. I try to block at least one hour on my calendar midday to sit at my desk and do a full check-in on what's happening around the company. Make approvals, complete quick tasks or asks. But this big no no. I really try to avoid people streaming in and out of the office. Got a minute? It's the most expensive question in any office. It never costs a minute, always costs 20. So train your team that you're not immediately available. You're not being rude. You're focusing.
So, first I admit this is not foolproof. When someone tries to grab an unscheduled meeting, my team knows the answer. Hey, just give me a brief loom or a Slack message. If we still need to sync after that, ask my assistant. We'll help you find 15 minutes on the calendar. Most of the time, it's not necessary. That's not avoiding people. That's respecting everyone's time, including yours.
Section 10, walking meetings. If it does require a meeting, here's one of my favorite ways to do it. A walk-in meeting. Get outside. It changes the conversation. It's loose. People are honest. Steve Jobs held almost all of his meetings on foot. There's a reason for that. Stanford found walking boosts creative output by over 80%. Even meetings that need to be virtual, I try to take on my office treadmill. I walk as much as I can during the day. Otherwise, I can't get my steps.
Another meeting rule, keep it small. Every person you add to a meeting isn't just another chair. It's another salary sitting in the room. Look around and think about the actual dollar costs adding up. You'll agree. Invite people whose input is required. Everyone else gets the TLDDR report.
Section 11, reducing stress. You might have found this guy before, Babar. He's my dog. He comes to the office. He's a cava poo I've had for 6 years. I swear if he can feel my mood, so when I'm stressed, he finds me. When I'm in the zone, he leaves me alone, but he's always by my side. I stand behind the research on this. Having an animal nearby measurably reduces cortisol. Bower doesn't know he's a stress reduction tool, but he is. Do whatever you have to do to break the tension because stress doesn't just make you feel bad, it makes you stupid. It literally shrinks the part of your brain that makes good decisions. I say, "Walk more, get an animal."
Section 12, off-site meetings. Here's a line I'll stand behind. Carving out time to build relationships. Something you have to do. I set aside an hour or so three times a week for an in-person coffee. This is how I find my who's. It will help you figure out the critical shift from how do I figure this out to who already has figured this out to who can figure this out for me. This can change the speed of everything you do. Catch yourself next time you're googling something. Instead, find the person who already knows. Relationship building is a skill. It requires reps. You don't build a network by showing up when you need it.
Section 13. Evening. I protect my evenings intensely. I've watched high performers build extraordinary things, but burn their closest relationships to the ground in the name of work. They build lonelier lives and call it sacrifice. Your home life isn't the thing that competes with your work. It's the thing that makes your work sustainable. Burn that down and watch how fast everything else follows. When my home life is good, everything's better. So that means time together at home, even if we're still working, a meal together, and look, we're not perfect. We get takeout. Getting protein and eating together is the main priority. However it happens, I'm happy. There's something about coming home to a loving ally. They don't care what deal I was working on. They care that I'm home. And that's the most useful perspective you'll get at the end of a long day.
Section 14. Working with your spouse. Of course, Chris and I work together, too. not an accident and it's not for everyone, but for us it's one of the strongest competitive advantages we have. We're aligned on the vision. We share context. When something breaks, we're not explaining the backstory. There's a version of building a company where your partner is watching from the outside wondering when you're coming home. That's not our life, and I'll fight to keep it that way. When you build with your partner, they're not competing with the work, they're part of it.
Actually, one of the coolest things about building a company is doing it with my partner. We built this thing together and buy businesses together. And actually Chris is going to be on stage with me at Main Street Millionaire Live where in three days we're going to talk exactly how we bought all these businesses, how you can buy businesses, how to find, acquire, and cash flow from them, and how to use AI, too. If you're building with your partner, bring them because we have partners for free in our contrarian academy. Link in the description. I want to see more people buy businesses just like you.
The discipline is protecting where work ends and the relationship begins. We earn that boundary every day and we're certainly not perfect on it.
Section 15, winding down. Jacket off, soft clothes on, upstairs on the couch with Babar. There's usually a little more to knock out. Quick pass an email, finishing notes, but the energy is different. The pressure is off. It's taken me some time to realize that rest and recovery are not the absence of work, but rather they are part of the work. You can't run on empty and expect full output. I no longer see my recharge as a reward you earn. It's the strategy that makes tomorrow possible.
The GPS check. Finally, that one thing I mentioned at the start that ties all of this together. Every hack, every system, every block on my calendar only works if you know two things. They are where you are and where you want to go. Without a destination, productivity is basically glorified busy work.
So, the GPS check is a habit I do at the end of every week. I pull up my calendar from the past seven days and I look at it honestly on a piece of paper. How much was leverage work? the stuff that compounds. How much was support works necessary but not really where values created? How much was noise? Things that made so much time and produce nothing. And then I compare it to my goals. You know, if my stated goal is to grow this company, I spent 4 hours in meetings. They could have been emails and zero hours on strategy. Don't punish yourself about it. You don't have to spiral. You just look at the map, acknowledge where you drifted, and correct.
So, pull up last week's calendar, print it out, go through every single event, and mark it with one letter. You're going to do R for revenue, G for growth, L is for leverage, N is for noise. Be ruthless. Be honest. Drop in the comments where you're actually spending a bunch of your time that you probably shouldn't. What percentage of last week was it? I'll bet for most of you, it's like 50% plus. And that should actually be a wakeup call. That audit takes an hour. It might be the highest leverage hour you spend all week. One hour to figure out where you've been lying to yourself. Like your calendar shows you who you actually are, not who you tell people you want to be. And most people will be embarrassed by receipts.
Like remember 86,400 seconds. Same for everybody. The question was never how to get more. It was always about what you let in. And right now most of what you're letting in is everybody else's priorities and wondering why yours never move. I'm off to plan tomorrow. This was useful. Share it with someone who needs it.