Millionaire CEO Explains: 5 Steps to Get Sh*t Done

Summary

In this video, millionaire CEO Dan Martell shares his top five strategies to drastically boost productivity and achieve more in a shorter timeframe. He illustrates how setting boundaries and managing communications can prevent time wastage on low-priority tasks. Emphasizing the need for a well-organized calendar and creative constraints, he stresses the importance of focus by minimizing distractions. Martell introduces the 'world interface system' to manage external stimuli and advises on pinpointing priorities for effective task management. Finally, he underscores the significance of delegating low-value tasks, highlighting the use of automation and outsourcing to reclaim valuable time for high-impact activities. These strategies, he claims, are the secrets behind successful CEOs achieving remarkable feats in limited time.

Highlights

• Successful CEOs set clear boundaries to protect their time from low-priority tasks. ⛔
• Managing communications effectively prevents unnecessary distractions. 📞
• Organized calendars and constraints spark creativity and productivity. 🧠
• Turning off notifications significantly boosts workplace focus. 🤫
• Prioritizing high-impact tasks leads to greater business success. 🎯

Key Takeaways

• Set clear boundaries to protect your time and energy. ⚔️
• Use the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks efficiently. 🧠
• Optimize your calendar with five scheduling rules. 🗓️
• Turn off non-essential notifications to enhance focus. 🚫
• Delegate low-value tasks to concentrate on high-impact activities. 🤝

Overview

Ever feel like there's never enough time to get everything done? According to millionaire CEO Dan Martell, successful people have cracked the code to productivity and it doesn't involve working harder—just smarter! Dan shares his tried and tested strategies that don’t just improve how much you do but also transform the quality of what you're working on.

It's all about setting boundaries, managing communications, and creating an optimized schedule. By implementing systems for efficiency and focus, the hustle and bustle get filtered away, leaving you with more time to tackle the meaningful stuff. And let's face it—no one wants to waste their precious time on endless email chains or unnecessary meetings!

Dan's practical approach isn't just about cutting things out—it's about adding value by delegating tasks that don’t necessarily need your personal touch. By reclaiming your time in smart ways, you open the door to focus on what truly matters and generate major gains.🗝️

Millionaire CEO Explains: 5 Steps to Get Sh*t Done Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 these are the five strategies you can steal that successful CEOs use to get more done in 12 weeks than most get done in 12 months strategy number one to get more done is set your boundaries see your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other people's priority on your time I like to use this concept called the Eisenhower Matrix that looks at everything through two axises important and Urgent then use the right response to get people to move things forward so for example one of the box is not important not urgent well then just send me an email I don't need to stop
• 00:30 - 01:00 and talk right now number two is important not urgent well post it in slack or team communication third is not important and Urgent send me a text right because it's like it's going to be there I'll get to it and number four if it's important and Urgent how about you give me a call make my phone ring cuz then I'm going to pay attention there's this funny story where my buddy Chad he owns a retail store and he got mad at me for texting him at 6:00 in the morning cuz his phone was going off and he was still sleeping I said hey dude why don't you put your phone and do not disturb
• 01:00 - 01:30 and then sleep in he goes well it'd be cool to do that but unfortunately my security alarm from my retail store comes to my phone so if somebody breaks in I need to know and I was thinking to myself dude you're not the only person in the world that has this problem that has a retail store like you can find a solution he's routing it improperly I mean if somebody's breaking into my house I want to go to the police not to my cell phone I get frustrated with this all the time I remember one time I was on a finance meeting and the team's going through all the different aspects and I'm going why are we having a meeting about this when this could have
• 01:30 - 02:00 been an email that I could have reviewed on my own time not spend 45 minutes in the calendar why because somebody booked it and we didn't verify if the agenda was needed think about it some of the stuff that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis you need to push back get people to use the right channel so that doesn't eat up into your time and it goes Way Beyond just the channel think about like times and days like if it's a weekend don't call me unless there's like a fire if it's the morning when I'm creating then please send me an email so you also have to protect your yourself you got to share your
• 02:00 - 02:30 preference for communicating with not only your boss your clients your friends and then teach them how to treat you by not always responding right away I mean some of it you're doing it to yourself so for example if your boss has something to share with you you can ask him to just drop it into slack or text and not call you at 9:00 p.m. on Friday night and you'll get to it if they're good people and you want them in your life then they should want you to be as effective as possible so share your preferences with them about how you like to work in a world of 300 notifications a day and 20 47 communication it can be
• 02:30 - 03:00 scary to set some of these boundaries but I'm telling you this is how the most productive people get things done in their life share your preferences which leads us directly to strategy number two which is to lock in your calendar I remember in my 20s my calendar was a mess honestly I didn't want anything in my calendar I just wanted to go with the flow and do what I do then I realized that without some constraint I wasn't getting anything done and I wasn't actually being even creative the reason why is that constraints create
• 03:00 - 03:30 creativity so if you actually want to solve big problems and be creative you need to have constraints in your life these are the five rules of scheduling number one is big things first Small Things Last you want to put the big rocks the big projects the big initiatives early in your day early in your week to move those things forward and the small things will literally take care of themselves number two is your schedule following your energy so some people are night owls other people are morning people if you know yourself then schedule your tasks your activities of
• 03:30 - 04:00 projects that are going to be best align for the time that you need them throughout the day and again ask other people to honor that so when you collaborate with them they're getting your best you number three is batch similar work I don't know about you but if I batch all my meetings together all my deep work together all my content creation together all my research together I'm in that head space and I get so much more done so batching things are going to make you more effective number four is be 100% compliant if it's in your calendar follow what it says even if you don't feel like it so many
• 04:00 - 04:30 people wake up and it's like I don't feel like it right now and then they go and they do the Little Rock instead of the big rock follow what you've designed for your life and it'll build the muscle and your feelings does not dictate how you act number five is constantly adjust move things around and test and play with it experiment it's never perfect I continuously change my calendar based on kind of new commitments new initiative projects people in my life as I get more time back as I get overloaded and it's
• 04:30 - 05:00 an experiment that I'm always evolving and playing with there's this funny quote that I like to tell entrepreneurs all the time is that small business owners are entrepreneurs who don't value their time think about this if they valued their time they would be more diligent with their calendar if you can just follow these five rules you'll be well on your way to getting more done but scheduling without focus is like planting seeds without sunlight which leads us directly to strategy number three which is kill your distractions but before we move into that we've got a goal of hitting 1 million Subs subscribers so if you aren't already
• 05:00 - 05:30 click subscribe and turn on the notifications it takes only a second did you know in Silicon Valley where all the tech companies build their products they have doctorate degree psychologists that are designing the software to distract you I'm talking about the sound that goes off the color of the notification Jewel how the notifications show up and where they show up on your app on your phone their whole goal is to get you back into the product your average person is getting 300 notifications a day there's no point on working on your
• 05:30 - 06:00 clear priorities if you're not going to do deep work and to do that you have to Define this strategy for how the world interfaces with you I like to tell people ambitious people bu skills lazy people bu distractions so I call this strategy the world interface system this is your API in software we call that the application program interface this is your version of it so there's three ways to set this up number one and I know I'm going to freak people out right now but turn off all your notifications and I'm
• 06:00 - 06:30 talking everything I mean everything in my life is on mute except for my wife so no notifications on my phone no Chimes no Bells whistles nothing just go into the notifications and just turn them all off your goals are worth more than your distractions stop that number two set check-in times so now instead of allowing the apps to just buzz and notify you and distract you set the times you're going to check Miss calls text messages emails or spend an hour on
• 06:30 - 07:00 social media scrolling on Instagram I don't care make it a decision you opt into not because the app told you to and that's different number three and this is like the real real behind the scenes that nobody's going to teach you is you got to delegate your distraction and I know it's an advanced move but check it out most CEOs have other people check their email take their phone calls essentially look on social media pull all their slack messages and then present it to them I remember hanging out with Richard Branson and I watched
• 07:00 - 07:30 his assistant all phone calls everything went through her her name is Helen and she collected it all and only the things she didn't know how to route that she would bring to Richard's attention can you imagine how much presence and focus and awareness he had in the moment because things weren't vibrating and distracting in real time and all that being said the big idea that I love to share with people is that it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it don't think like oh I won't check my notification cuz my phone goes off just decide to just turn them off it's easier
• 07:30 - 08:00 to not have the food in your house than to try not to eat it it's easier to turn off your notifications than to try to stay focused but it's not just the notifications from your apps that you want to turn off it's also about trying to figure out what you need to work on which leads me directly to point4 which is to pinpoint your priorities priorities are all about sequencing and I love saying this sequencing equals success think about baking a cake you have two people you have one person that has the recipe and the other one doesn't they both have the same types of
• 08:00 - 08:30 ingredients to bake the cake but one person follows the process they have their priorities figured out and they bake a beautiful chocolate cake and we'll put some peanut butter in that one and the other person just takes all those ingredients and puts them together and then creates this big mush of chocolate fudge right it's not a cake why because of sequencing because of prioritization and this applies to your life when I was in San Francisco building my second tech company I saw firsthand a guy named Travis KCK the founder of uber I watch him every day wake up and do the thing that was to make his company the most money create
• 08:30 - 09:00 the most value and the thing that he was uniquely qualified to do I actually wrote about this in my book buyback your time and I call it the drip Matrix every task you do sits on two axes one of money and one of energy number one is low energy low money these are things you want to delegate delete or defer out of your life quadrant above is low energy and high money these are things that over time you want to replace out of your calendar because they take your energy that other people still need to get done they you don't have to do
• 09:00 - 09:30 anymore the third quadrant is high energy and low money that's called investment these are things like skills beliefs and habits that are going to make you more valuable the top right quadrant is high energy High money meaning that you make money doing the thing you love to do and I call this production this is where you want to spend all of your time the most successful CEOs and leaders in the world do two things the thing that only they can do that makes their team or their business more money but how do you delegate those low value tasks that suck your energy this leads us directly to
• 09:30 - 10:00 the fifth and final strategy which is delegate low value tasks most people think they have to be an entrepreneur with 10 plus employees to delegate anything I did at 22 and man was I wrong I literally used to do everything I have team members they do the work and I got to do everything else I got to take out the garbage I got to make sure they're fed I all the mails got to be processed and I remember one time I was thinking to myself as a CEO of a company does employees like why am I spending every Saturday and Sunday at the office just trying to get caught up so one day I emailed the CEO of this almost billion
• 10:00 - 10:30 dollar insurance company in my hometown I just asked them I said who manages your mail I was spending 5 six hours on a Sunday trying to process all my mail and he replied well my assistant does and I kind of laughed at myself it's like why am I doing this that was the day I decided to hire somebody part-time to process my mail the reality is that's something that's been sld for a long time it's called meal prep I know in our town There's four or five companies that do it if you're willing to Outsource that I'm talking no more groceries no no more prep time no more cleanup just have
• 10:30 - 11:00 somebody else cook you food that's actually designed to make you stronger better smarter you don't have the decision fatigue that's a simple example of delegating high value activities that somebody else can take care of that you don't have to think about so you can focus on the thing only you can do see successful CEOs buy back their time to focus on higher value activities but you don't have to be rich to start buying back your time and that's why I created this thing called the delegation ladder I'm going to break it down for you number one is automate your workflow I want you to look at all the work you do in the processing and ask yourself what
• 11:00 - 11:30 tool maybe Ai and some automation could you install into your life where would take care of 60 70% of the initial research or doing of the work and then you can come in and finish it off but most people don't even think about simple things like hot Keys when they're using some software that they're in all day long to increase their productivity number two is Outsource your errands I'm talking grocery delivery meal prep getting the mail like you might be able to convince a friend to go shop for you and maybe every other week you guys kind
• 11:30 - 12:00 of share that process there's ways for you to get your time back that doesn't cost anything it just requires you to be creative with your peer group and your friends and maybe you have a young cousin that wants some extra money and you could ask them to go buy stuff for you and just make them a list every two weeks number three is delegate your chores think about somebody to help clean your house clean your car laundry service Wash and Fold it's a small investment to get a huge chunk of time back number four is offshore your work think about there's part parts of the world where you can pay them four5 $6 an
• 12:00 - 12:30 hour and they would be pumped to get this work the stuff you do the admin level the research the booking your travel the purchasing stuff you can give them all that and get a bunch of time back at a low cost number five is hire an assistant now this is a more advanced move but I'm a big fan of having somebody else in my inbox processing in real time and handling all the incoming requests on my time and then also managing my calendar you're getting emails messages phone calls to you from people that need things from you now you
• 12:30 - 13:00 also have projects you need to get done so anytime you're doing that kind of stuff then you're not doing the projects where you want to spend all your time is getting things done that makes you money not routing and scheduling so my calendar my inbox is owned by my assistant she's full-time and she's focused and in many ways she's a clone she can talk to people make phone calls schedule things make decisions on my behalf so that I spend all my time doing things that make me money and that light me up now most people get stuck because they don't have a Playbook or they don't know what to get their assistant to do
• 13:00 - 13:30 so if you want my executive assistant Playbook just follow me on Instagram and message me YouTube EA I'll send you a direct link to my Google doc so you can swipe and copy even if you're working 9 to5 you can start today climbing the delegation ladder to buy back your time so that you can focus on building your habits beliefs and skills so that's how CEOs get more done if you want to learn the 12 hacks to increase your productivity that cost nothing click the link and I'll see you on the other side