My one word is believe
And I believe in people
more than they believe in themselves.
And my sincere hope is that if you see in yourself
what I see in you, you’ll be able to change the planet.
So to help you on your journey,
today’s message is schedule your time.
Over to you Tim Ferriss.
(rooster crows)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
– Large uninterrupted blocks of time
you have to schedule if you are a creator.
Blocks of time that are at least
two to four hours or more in length.
No frankenstein monster of 20-minute breaks and
10-minute breaks combined into 3-hours
will have the value of an uninteruppted
block of three hours.
If you are trying to make high-level decisions,
focus on time-consuming high priority projects,
push something to the next milestone.
We all have the same 24 hours in the day
and if you’re like
I don’t have time, I can’t sleep,
I need to cut back on sleep,
I need to do this, I need to do that,
If you don’t have time, you don’t have priorities.
That’s it.
– I never use I don’t have time
as a reason for not to do something.
I’m allergic to it.
As soon as you start saying I don’t have time
to do something,
then you’re giving responsibility away to something else.
You don’t have time, it’s not your fault.
You just don’t have the time.
It’s somebody else’s fault.
It’s this project’s fault, this person’s fault.
It’s always somebody else’s fault.
Until you take control of your responsibilities
and your priorities and managing your own time
you’re never going to go off and do
the big things that you want to do.
Especially the people who complain that
you have this big goal and this big dream
you want to build this huge company
and then you’re not doing it.
You’re not spending the time to do it.
Because it’s so great to live up in our heads
of all the things we want to do,
of the passions, and the way that our life could look.
But you don’t want to do the actual work to get there.
And now I get it. I get it.
I’m a father. I’m a husband.
I have three businesses that I run at the same time.
I’m a busy guy.
But if I want to work on something and I can’t,
then it’s my problem.
Right? It’s nobody else’s problem.
It’s not you guys. It’s not Believe Nation
expecting my video to come out.
I choose to make YouTube videos.
I choose to do three a day.
I choose to spend my time on these things.
And by very definition by choosing to do something
you’re choosing not to do something else.
I have control.
You have control over your time as well.
And the realities of paying the bills and
family life and all that stuff,
and it may force you to make some difficult decisions.
But as soon as you say I don’t have time
it means you’re never going to make it.
Because you’re never going to have time.
Because the people who constantly live in
when this clears up, when this thing goes away,
then I’ll have time.
And then when that clears away, something else comes up.
When that’s done, then I’ll have time.
And then you never have time.
It’s never the perfect time.
You just have to go and start doing it.
Nothing actually starts happening until
you put it into your calendar and you start taking action.
Otherwise you’re just living in your head
and those dreams never come out.
And so I would encourage you to
any time you say I don’t have time,
to catch yourself and say
I choose not to make it a priority.
This is not a priority in my life.
When you start embracing that and actually feeling it
then you’ll start making some important decisions
on how you schedule your time.
So to think what actually is a priority to you,
start making some tweaks and you’ll start to see
some big changes happening in your life
and in your business.
Now to Tim’s point about creating a schedule,
one of the things that I find really helpful
is chunking my time. We’ve talked about this before.
But I like having dedicated days to do dedicated things.
You know, I film once a month for my YouTube channel
for the most part.
And we come in on a Wednesday and film everything
in one sitting.
And I’m in video mode.
I find it really hard to switch tasks.
I think most people do.
But I just find it really hard.
I can’t go from meeting with somebody for half an hour
to then writing a book for half an hour
to then getting on a phone call for half an hour
to then recording a video for half an hour.
The switching costs are too high.
If I’m going to write my book or
do something else that’s really creative,
I need half an hour to forty minutes just to get into it.
Before I’m actually really creating something good.
It’s why when I make my videos here
I start with the easy stuff first and then
I lead to the Entspressos.
Because it allows me to warm up, to get going.
If I have to come in and boom, just drop an Entspresso
it’d be a lot more challenging for me.
And so anything you do multiple times per week,
try to do months for week,
multiple times per month,
once per month, and so on.
Multiple times per day, once per day.
Right? Like, email. Social media.
If you’re doing that all day long,
you do that once per day.
It means that you miss out on some small things.
It means that you miss out on getting some opportunities.
Maybe some reporter wants to interview you
and has a deadline by 3pm today
and you don’t open that email until 5 o’clock,
you’ve missed it.
But you have to be willing to let go of the little
to be able to go for the big.
And I used to pride myself as the guy
who responded to email super fast.
You sent me an email, like two minutes later
boom, response.
I would drop whatever I was doing
to respond to your email.
And what it meant was I was doing lots of little tasks
really quickly, but I never got to
focus on the big task because I kept getting distracted.
And so by chunking your time,
and by blocking off access in your calendar,
it means you’ll have to say no to some things,
some little projects, some things will slip through.
But you’re spending your time on
the big projects that matter.
And so it’s been probably the single most important
time-management skill or practice that I’ve applied,
is chunking your time, having one main thing
that I do every single day,
so you know Wednesday is recording YouTube videos
and when I’m not doing that it’s my Lily day
where we’re looking at her channel.
Thursdays I have public facing day
and we’re doing interviews and podcasts
and radio shows and YouTube channels
and just extrovert mode.
Monday is my TDS day.
If I’m here, I’m working with Alex,
we’re working through all the problems
that we have to do with TDS.
Looking at opportunities where we’re going to grow.
I’m just in TDS mindset.
Right and so every day I’m doing something else.
But it also means that I will delay some things.
So if it’s something TDS-related
and Alex sends it to me on Tuesday
I’m probably not going to get it to next Monday.
And so part of that is training the team
to say hey, we’ve got to get it done on time
so I can handle it at the right moment.
But it also means that sometimes we may miss
windows of opportunities
because I haven’t seen it and
it’s not going to come up again until Monday.
And being okay with that, being okay with dropping
some small balls so you can keep the big ones in the air.
So the question today is I’m curious,
how are you scheduling your time?
Do you prefer to have full days or full afternoons
dedicated to one thing at a time?
Or do you like the variety and the mixup
and spending half an hour on one thing
and then moving to something else?
Really curious to find about your habits.
Leave it down in the comments below.
Super curious to see what you have to say.
And if you leave a comment in the first few hours
of this video going live,
you have a chance to win one of our two daily prizes.
I also want to give a quick shoutout to Dilip Gehlot,
thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book
Your One Word, and taking that picture
and sharing it with me.
I love the background of Moana.
I actually haven’t seen that movie yet.
Both Nina and Hayden have seen it
and they don’t want to watch it again
and so I either have to watch it by myself
or force somebody to watch it with me.
I don’t like watching cartoons by myself
so that’s the only issue.
We’ll see how it goes.
But thank you so much for picking up a copy of the book
and for sharing it!
I really appreciate the support.
Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is.
Much love, and I’ll see you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso keep me going
– [Neil] You know I’m very methodical about time-management
because it’s so hard to do.
So the first thing, I’ll give you a couple
important life-changing tips to
anyone trying to do something creative
on their computer.
So number one thing is no email in the morning.
Like number one thing is there’s a program
called Freedom that I downloaded
that it says,
I love the word Freedom because
that’s really what it is.
It says how many minutes of freedom do you want?
You say whatever it is, 90 minutes
and then you cannot access the internet for 90 minutes.
There’s no unlock code,
people are gasping, you’re all going to use it.
There’s no unlock codes.
The first thing I do is phone,
I give to someone else.
Or put it in a drawer somewhere.
It’s best if I give it to someone else.
Internet goes off and I commit to
that certain amount of time.
So my thing is compartmentalizing.
That if you’re going to check your email,
check it from four to five.
Someone wrote a book which I’ve never read
but it’s called Never Check Your Email in the Morning.
I don’t know if you read or not
but just know the title and it’s really great.
The thing is, with time is to become
proactive about time instead of reactive
because I know so many people who can’t do anything
because you get a message on Facebook
and then you’re getting an email
and then you’re just reacting to that
because it feels like you’re getting something done
and at the end of the day you’ve got nothing done.
What my thing is that I’m really,
and everyone knows that I’m proactive about that
to the degree that, by the way
I got Facebook and Twitter blocked on my computer.
What I did is I downloaded Intego ContentBarrier.
Is it ContentBarrier? Whatever it is.
– RescueTime can be used.
NetNanny can be used to block specific sites.
– Yeah, and I had someone else
put in their password for those sites
so I didn’t even know the password
so I couldn’t get to Twitter or Facebook if I tried.
So finding those things that are those,
and put in walls between you and them
or limiting them in certain ways.
There’s one other thing I was going to say was,
friends can be a pain in the ass
if you’re trying to be creative.
And if you have more than seven friends
and everyone wants to see you one day a week
what do you do?
So another thing I want to say is that I do
a Wednesday night dinner party.
So if my friends want to see me,
I’m like great, Wednesday.
Somebody wants a meeting who I’m not sure about,
Wednesday night.
So Wednesday night, we all go to a restaurant
and basically whoever I want to see or catch up on
I’ll see them there and then maybe afterward
I’ll break off with my closer friends
but that way I can see everyone.
People who I want to meet with but I don’t
really want to take the take time for a lunch
or meeting one-on-one and just bring them there.
If I like them, I talk to them a bunch.
If I don’t, I put them far away.
– [Tiesto] I mean, it depends. If I have some time off
I always take time for music.
So for me, it’s different I think.
But when I’m touring every day,
I actually have more routine than when
I’m not touring every day.
Because you have to have your schedules.
So you really have to plan your day well.
But if I have six weeks off,
I’m pretty much all over the place, you know?
Yeah, you don’t really have a schedule,
you just do whatever.
– [Offscreen] Yeah, and you waste time.
– Yeah! But if you have a really military schedule
then you have to really plan everything well.
So that works better for me actually.
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