#1: 6 Non-Negotiables to 10x Your Productivity

Summary

Podcast Summary: Build Your Business: From Fear to Freedom
Episode #1: 6 Non-Negotiables to 10x Your Productivity
Release Date: November 8, 2024

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Introduction

In the inaugural episode of the Build Your Business Podcast, hosts Matt Reynolds and Chris Reynolds delve into the foundational principles that can exponentially increase productivity for entrepreneurs and business owners. Drawing from their extensive experience in business ownership and management, Matt and Chris outline six non-negotiable strategies designed to help listeners 10x their productivity, regardless of their industry or business size.

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1. Work When Everyone Else Sleeps

Key Points:

• Early Mornings: Both Matt and Chris emphasize the importance of starting the day early to capitalize on uninterrupted work time.
• Personal Routines: While Matt wakes up around 3:30 AM, Chris aligns his schedule with early mornings or late nights, depending on personal preference.
• Competitive Edge: Early work hours provide a significant advantage, offering 2-4 additional hours of productivity compared to competitors.

Notable Quote:

Chris Reynolds [15:48]: "When you work at 4 in the morning, nobody else is doing this. You're getting ahead. Your competitors will never catch you if you do this regularly."

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2. Establish a Consistent Prep-to-Work Routine

Key Points:

• Routine Triggers: Creating a consistent routine signals the brain to enter a focused work state. This may include activities like listening to specific music, making coffee, or physical preparations.
• Flexibility: Even when traveling or working remotely, maintaining the same preparatory steps helps sustain productivity.
• Psychological Readiness: A set routine reduces the mental effort required to transition into work mode, enhancing focus and efficiency.

Notable Quote:

Matt Reynolds [22:56]: "I put my noise-canceling headphones on, listen to the same playlist, take an alcohol wipe, put on a nose strip, eye drops, pour a giant cup of coffee, and sit down to kill it. It's the same every time."

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3. Work with Absolutely No Distractions

Key Points:

• Environment Control: Designate a specific workspace free from distractions like TV, social media, or household noises.
• Technology Management: Turn off all unnecessary notifications on phones and computers to maintain focus.
• Discipline: Implement strict boundaries to prevent interruptions, whether at home or in public spaces.

Notable Quote:

Chris Reynolds [25:19]: "We track efficiency constantly. Distractions make you less productive, cutting your dollars per hour."

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4. Leverage Artificial Deadlines

Key Points:

• Time Boxing: Assign specific time limits to tasks to prevent them from expanding unnecessarily (Parkinson's Law).
• Internal Competitions: Set personal deadlines to foster a sense of urgency and increase output.
• Delegation and Automation: Use deadlines to manage both personal tasks and employee workloads efficiently.

Notable Quote:

Matt Reynolds [30:20]: "Timeboxing forces you to make decisions about how much time and quality to invest in a task. It’s invaluable for both personal and team productivity."

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5. Focus on One Task at a Time

Key Points:

• Pomodoro Technique: Utilize focused work sessions (typically 25-30 minutes) followed by short breaks to enhance concentration.
• Single-Tasking Over Multitasking: Avoid the illusion of multitasking, which actually hampers productivity through constant context switching.
• Mental Clarity: Writing down distractions as they arise allows the brain to address them later without interrupting the current task.

Notable Quote:

Matt Reynolds [34:15]: "Pomodoros are reps. They train your brain to focus, building a muscle that gives you a competitive edge."

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6. Leverage the Eisenhower Matrix to Work on the Right Things

Key Points:

• Quadrant Analysis: Distinguish tasks based on urgency and importance to prioritize effectively.
  • Not Urgent & Not Important: Eliminate these to avoid time wastage (e.g., excessive social media browsing).
  • Urgent & Not Important: Delegate or automate these tasks to others.
  • Important & Not Urgent: Focus on these tasks to achieve long-term goals and personal fulfillment.
• Delegation: Assign tasks that are urgent but not important to trusted team members to free up time for strategic activities.
• Personal Development: Allocate time for activities that enhance personal growth and business strategy, ensuring sustainable success.

Notable Quote:

Chris Reynolds [41:06]: "If you're constantly drowning in urgent and important tasks, you'll never have the bandwidth to focus on what truly matters in the long run."

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Conclusion

Matt and Chris Reynolds conclude the episode by reiterating the importance of these six non-negotiables in building a productive and successful business. They emphasize that consistency, disciplined routines, and strategic prioritization are essential for overcoming the common challenges entrepreneurs face. By implementing these strategies, business owners can transform fear into freedom, achieving lasting success while maintaining personal well-being.

Final Thoughts:

Matt Reynolds [51:43]: "Your brain muscle gets bigger. You get better at these practices the more you do them. Just keep practicing."

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Additional Resources

• Matt Reynolds on LinkedIn: Matt Reynolds
• Chris Reynolds on LinkedIn: Chris Reynolds
• Companies:
  • Certain: www.certain.com
  • Reynolds Strong: www.reynoldsstrong.com
  • barbelogic.com & turnkeycoach.com: For fitness professionals seeking to enhance productivity.

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This episode sets the tone for the Build Your Business Podcast, promising actionable insights, real-world success stories, and expert advice aimed at empowering entrepreneurs to scale their businesses effectively. Stay tuned for future episodes where Matt and Chris continue to unpack strategies to help you navigate the entrepreneurial journey from fear to freedom.

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother Chris Reynolds.

[B]

Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast. This is brand new for Matt and Chris Reynold. From Fear to Freedom where we help you, the business owner, overcome the anxiety of the unknown. Hey man, welcome to the podcast.

[A]

Thanks man. Good to see you. As always.

[B]

I'm excited to launch this podcast. We want to do a really quick overview of kind of who we are. So I'm Matt Reynolds. I'm your older brother. A little less experienced in business ownership than you are, I think. I've been in a business owner for 16 years. Successful business owner. My first business was Strong Gym that grew to be the largest privately owned strength gym in the country. Sold it in 15 and started barbell Logic. And that is really a all inclusive online coaching company where we service individual clients. B2C. We've also have our Turnkey Coach platform that we license in the B2B sector and do government contracts as well. And so super excited to do this podcast and really kind of bring. I know when I was getting started and I'll let you tell your story here in a second, is that because you were a few years ahead of me, it was a tremendous help for me as I got started in business to really kind of overcome some of that anxiety. Often business owners don't have, they don't know how to start an LLC or get an ein number, even start the business or what to do. And then as they go through these different phases of the business, it's extremely, it can induce a tremendous amount of anxiety. And so having somebody there, and I think that's our goal here, is to kind of be the coach for our listeners, to walk them through the anxiety and the fear of the unknown. And so you were that for me. So thank you. I'm excited to do this show with you. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?

[A]

Sure. Chris Reynolds. I started a software company called Brightcore when I was probably, uh, gosh, I was, I GUESS I was 22 or something. I was in my early 20s, had a ton of energy. It's a software company that runs small insurance companies and I ran that for about 15 years, sold it to private equity in 18 or 19, had a couple exits along the way, a couple small exits along the way and Then took a little time off for Covid when that happened, not on purpose, just already took some time off and Covid hit, which is strange, but then sort of started to get really bored and my brain really wanted to solve problems. So I started a new company called Certain and Certain is an engineering agency. And what we do at the engineering agency is we just help companies who are trying to figure out their tech stack, how to do tech things. I'm a software engineer by education by trade and so enjoying sort of seeing all the different kinds of companies that we work with. We've been doing a lot of fractional CTO work, just helping companies figure out how to run an engineering department successfully, which is, you know, certainly complicated. But yeah, that's what we do. And along the way I've learned a ton about building companies, building equity in your company. Mistakes not to make. I've made a ton of mistakes and so I'm sure we'll go through plenty of those throughout the podcast. But. Yeah, but excited to be doing this and helping teach people how to build their own companies.

[B]

Yeah. I still think it's like the highest thing that you can be called to, certainly in the western world, in the United States, maybe in the world in general. There's something that is that when you do it well, the freedom that is brought about by being your own boss. Again, you guys have picked up on. We're brothers and we were very close growing up. We certainly were more different growing up than we are now. We're probably more similar now today. But there is something that is really special about the freedom of being your own boss. When I started, I was a teacher. I was a public school teacher for 10 years. I never really had trouble with authority or bosses or things like that. My recollection you as a child were a little less apt to take instruction from.

[A]

From those that were never changed. It's still that way.

[B]

What's funny is now as I think about it, after, after nearly two decades of business ownership for me, I could never go back, I could never have a boss. But that requires a tremendous amount of self motivation. You've got to be intrinsically motivated. You got to be able to do this sort of stuff because there's an enormous amount of things to do and business ownership, as a matter of fact, the work is really never done. So we actually just. I've done a lot of manual labor in the last 10 or 12 days. We bought a church building for our church and just kind of fixing it up and renovating it. There is something Very satisfying about kind of renovating a building or mowing a lawn or doing a thing. And you can look and see, this is exactly what I accomplished. Business ownership is really not like that. You can look at the trend lines, but the work never finishes. And I think that's really key. And so that means you've got to be totally intrinsically motivated. There isn't anybody to tell you, go out and get the lawn mowed or paint this wall or do this thing. And so that's a big piece of business ownership.

[A]

There's such a huge part of it, too, that is you will never learn more about yourself than running a business. Like, there's no lying to yourself in a business. You can. I guess it's just not going to help you. All the things people tell themselves about, oh, I'm really good at this, or I'm really good at that. And I think that what you find out very quickly is what you're actually good at, what the market really wants versus what you think they want. I mean, all of those are brutal, brutal lessons. And they are. They don't care what you think. They don't care how you feel. They are just. They just exist. And you're there to observe it and respond and do the things you have to do. And so I do think you become a better person and your ability to handle hardship grows drastically over time as you. As you run your own company.

[B]

Yeah, we've talked about this. So this podcast really was birthed out of you. And I did some series for the Barbalogic podcast, which is where this originally started, and we call those the Principles series. And I remember doing a series about the importance of self awareness and business ownership forces you into extreme, brutally honest self awareness of, like, here's where you're good, here's where you suck. Here's where your business is good, here's where it sucks. I mean, that invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith wrote about so many hundreds of years ago is totally true, and you can't blame it on anybody else. I think that's the other piece is as a business owner, the buck stops with you. And whether you're a business owner with a employee pool of one and you're the only one, or if you got 300 or 3,000, the buck still stops with you. And so when the market says you suck, you suck.

[A]

That's right. That's right. There's just no shielding from it. You got to figure it out, get through it. And there's this sort of constant urgency to it too, because you're always dealing with either a cash burn or you're attempting to make sure that you can grow at a rate that you're looking to grow. And so it's just a brutal refining fire.

[B]

Yeah. For your life. So I'm going to dive in on the first episode today and we're going to really talk about six non negotiables that you and I have talked about many times together to 10x your productivity. And so one of the things we want to do a lot of podcasts, if those of you who are listening are podcast fans, I love listening to podcasts. I'm not a big fan when people just riff for like 15, 20, 30 minutes before they get into the topic. So we're going to dive into the topic pretty quick every. And so this first episode, again is on 6 non negotiables to 10x your productivity. And that doesn't matter what kind of business owner you are. And honestly, this is a pretty good episode even for people who aren't business owners. It certainly applies very well for business owners, but it doesn't really matter what industry you're in. And we're going to try to speak industry wide. I'm a strength coach, you're a developer, tech guy, engineering firm owner. And so we come from both the tech side. And as a side note, one of the things we'll probably get into is my company hires your company to do a lot of the tech work for us and the development for us. And that's we'll get into that in future episodes about hiring professionals and hiring experts and what they do.

[A]

But and, and I have to say our two founders also hired your company to train us.

[B]

That's true. Yeah. It's been a blast. So let's get into this. So one of the things I think that we are unique in, and I want to be careful the way I say this because I don't want it to come across as arrogant. And I would also say that you've been better at this your whole life than I have. And as I've come into business ownership and loving what I do, we have the ability, you and I specifically, to be hyper focused and just get crap done. And so I get asked all the time by young business owners like, how do I just get more done? How do I be more productive? I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and there's something that you and I have figured out. I think some of that is genetic, but because I think, and I think this also will be A theme of the podcast for both of us. We are in a sort of insatiable, never ending pursuit of knowledge. But if that knowledge stays head knowledge and never gets put into action, it's worthless. And so I think the other thing that we do pretty well is we read a ton of books, we listen to a ton of podcasts, we're learning as much as we can, but that we try to convert that knowledge into wisdom, which then turns into action. And so I think what I want to do in this episode is talk about just the actionable. I don't want this to be a productivity hack podcast, an episode, an entire podcast. But these are like the actual things that you and I do on a daily basis to get more crap done than anybody else. I have a book coming out December 10th called Undoing Urgency. It really focuses on a lot of this sort of thing. There's a lot of testimonials in the book from. From people I've reached out to, kind of influencers and whatnot. And it's funny how they constantly came back and said, I don't understand how Matt and his company gets as much done as they do in the short period of time that they do it. And so that's what we're going to talk about today, right?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So. And I think you've done that well, and you did that well even as a kid. So we'll start here. So productivity, something we've talked about in the past is that the great separator between those that are successful in life and I'm talking about business success and all the things that go along with that and those that aren't, is really consistent productivity over weeks and months and years and decades. There is a long tail consistency that has to occur with productivity. Anybody can sit down and get a ton of work done in one day or two days or a week or two, but doing this day in and day out forever, for decades, is what is the thing that builds great businesses. And so I remember you sharing a interview with Warren Gates. Yes, Warren Gates. With Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. And they both said that the great separator was the ability to focus and get stuff done. Get crap done.

[A]

There's an interesting corollary. I feel like that's important here too, which is that the longer that you spend time on something, the longer you stay in deep focus over days, weeks, months and years, the more you come to love the thing that you do. It's really. It's an interesting thing. Like you could pick anything, like you could Pick a thing that was a total grind for everybody and was a grind for you to start. And the longer you stay at it at that deep work, that deep focus level, the more you will grow to love it. It's bizarre. And part of it is even just a response to the fact that it is so consistently rewarding. You get the reward of the. I got a thing done. I got a thing done. Oh, I'm becoming an expert in this thing. Oh, wow. I'm like an expert in this thing. And you, you just come to love it. And I think that's an interesting sidebar because it actually is a virtuous cycle. The more you love it, the more you will stay in the deep work. The more in the deep work you are, the more you will love it. And it just keeps going.

[B]

I totally agree. It reminds me of like, Mike Rose, Dirty Jobs. Right. Where he used to. He did a show for years and he found people who fell in love with, you know, cleaning porta Potties. And they're multi. Multimillionaires. Like, nobody loves cleaning porta Potties. Yeah. Right up until it's a $25 million business. And it's like, it ain't that bad. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so for us, I mean, I sit at a desk all day, you sit at a desk all day. But things are often monotonous things for most are problem solving opportunities for the rest of us.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

For me, the talking about productivity and getting crap done, there is nothing more frustrating to me than having a day that I work really, really hard all day long and I get nothing accomplished. And so we were talking about this. You talked about, for you, you've got kind of a. For better or lack of better terms, like a hack to make progress in anything. We dive into that just a little bit.

[A]

Yeah. So, like, I. I can literally get. Just difficult to be around if I have a day where I've slammed up against a brick wall five times and. And I've essentially accomplished nothing. Right. Like. Like you have, because that's sort of part of the journey of getting whatever thing done you were going to get done, you had to slam into the wall six times or whatever. So that is what it is. Still doesn't feel very good to end your day on I'm not done. Right. That's, oh, so miserable to end up in that situation. And my solution to this, psychologically to get out of it, because it happens so frequently in our world, which is doing programming and software engineering and stuff, you just run into these kinds of problems. My Solution to this is to pick anything at all on your list and try to end your day with getting anything done at all.

[B]

Usually small wins.

[A]

Yeah, the thing your brain wants is just to say, I made progress today, I got this thing done. I wake up tomorrow morning and solve this other problem, it's fine. But going to bed with zero wins is no good. Going to bed with a win is a hell of a lot better. And so I think part of this process is just figuring out what you have to do. And this is probably a broader theme here, but what it is you have to do to care for your own psychology one way or the other. This goes back to that brutal honesty of being an entrepreneur, right? Like, at the end of the day, you got to make it through the days and weeks and months and years. And if the only way to do that is to not lie to yourself and go like, hey, I need to do something different, I got to find a tactic to help me get through these hard days.

[B]

Closing those loops to get out of what feels like sort of a desperate spiral or depression spiral. I'm not wired for depression. I think a lot of founders are probably wired a little more to be anxious. I certainly am. But when I have those days where I don't get anything accomplished, it sends me into this little acute level of depression. And to get those little wins to close some loops immediately pulls me out of that. And we'll talk about this more in the episode. And this will certainly be a theme of the podcast as well. I want to be able to really focus my attention on the things that matter most to me that are most important. And that may be CEO work that only a CEO can do. But it also may be like being dad and husband. And when I end the day without closing the loops and I don't get anything accomplished, I'm not a very good dad or husband. That night. I don't really want to make dinner with the family. I don't enjoy dinner. So those things matter. Okay, so that's the sort of preamble to this. So let's get into the six non negotiables. So number one, one of our first big non negotiables that we think are extremely important is that we work when everyone else sleeps. Now for us, and we've been this way our whole life. That's early morning. I get up at 3:30 or 4 every morning. Now, listeners, I don't set an alarm. Let me just be clear. I don't really want to get up at 3:30 in the morning. That's earlier than I want to get up. So maybe that's five for you. Maybe it's 5:30. Whatever. I just do. And you probably remember when I was. I always even woke up earlier than you did growing up. And mom has pictures of me sitting like crisscross applesauce in front of the giant old tube TV with the wood around it, watching Ag Day. So for those of you who aren't from the Midwest, Ag Day is what comes on before the early morning news. And it talks about the price of pork bellies and corn and things like that. It was the only thing that was on because it was, you know, there's three networks and I'm. And I had the sound way down and I was sitting in front of the tv. I've just always gotten up early, but I'll also go to bed early. So I'm kind of a, you know, Benjamin Franklin. Early to bed, early to rise. But for me, I've found that like that time every day, let's say I start work at 4am from 4am my family wakes up around 7. Those three hours are the best three hours of work I get every single day. What does that look like for you?

[A]

I mean, it's the same. This morning was, by the way, as I've gotten older, I think I've turned into the same person that you are in terms of sleep, which is this morning. I was up at 2:30. Did not want to be up at 2:30, but once I was up, it was what it was. And you know what I did? I don't lay there and stress about it. I don't scroll Twitter. Yeah, I don't do any of that stuff. I get up and I just once I know I can't go back to sleep and that there's like a moment when that happens for me, like it's coffee. Start the routine right. Because like I can get so much done during that timeframe that that can almost fixes in my mind the fact that I had crappy sleep that early morning when there are no distractions, like nobody's up, nobody's pinging me on Slack, there's no real emails to. To do or whatever. It's easier. There's just less effort to block out all the chaos because there's no chaos coming at you. And I think that's, that's huge. And then the other thing is, I think there's a genetic component to when your brain is sharpest. So there's going to be people listening to the podcast that are like they're just night people.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's cool too. Like if you want to go at night when there's nobody around and your brain is like really at its tip top shape. My brain starts at its absolute peak for the day and I just go downhill from every hour thereafter.

[B]

Yeah. 7:30, I've joked my IQ is about 87:30 at night, 7:30pm and I'm like, that's all I can do is I can't do anything that requires deep thought at that point. So, you know, one of the things when we wake up in the what most people would consider the middle of the night, what we consider mornings at 3 in the morning or whatever, often like your brain starts running like crazy and there's anxiety there. And I know we were talking about this. I had gone just a few weeks ago and met Alex Hormozi and did all the acquisition.com stuff. And Hormozius said that anxiety is really just when you need to get shit done but you don't have it done yet. It's just the cloud that hangs. I just know I need to get this done. And again, it comes back to what we were just talking about. As you close those loops and you get the stuff done, the anxiety goes away.

[A]

It's crazy.

[B]

If I get up that early, I often will get work done in the mornings and I might take a nap right after lunch. I sleep like a baby then because I don't have the anxiety that I had at 3 o'clock in the morning because I got the work done.

[A]

That's exactly right.

[B]

So for me, those real life examples in working when everybody else is sleeping is I really focus on getting the urgent work done that I can get done in a relative hurry in the morning. So for me, I'm an online coach. And again with barbalogic online coaching and turnkey coach. I do all my online coaching first thing in the morning. I knock it out every single morning, no matter what. I don't do anything else that's always there. Clients are always completing workouts. We always give feedback within 24 hours. So I do that every single morning. I get up in the morning. We'll talk about our work routine here in a minute. About what we do before I actually do the online coaching. But I knock that out. I knock out emails, I knock out basecamp notifications. It's the stuff I can sort of. It's the easy check off the list stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I start the day with 5, 6, 8, 10 wins. Most of that stuff there are 30 minutes or less, and often they're 5 minutes or less sort of jobs. That's what I start my day with from a work perspective, is that you do kind of similar stuff or what do you dive into?

[A]

Similar, probably slightly different, and it's probably the nature of the work. But I actually do my deepest, hardest work first thing in the morning. So I am inventing new technological systems for people. So sometimes, you know, the job will dictate that, you know, I come in as a CTO for a company and they have, you know, system failures occurring all over the place. And I'm looking at it going like, why is this happening? Oh, we need to reinvent this to do this other thing that it wasn't doing before. So my brain is both the most energetic and the most creative early in the morning. And so I hit whatever that work is right then. That's the first thing that I do. Now that can lead to the problem we talked about earlier, where I can hit a lot of brick walls that don't work and I don't have any wins to go on. Right. So I'm also very obsessive. And this whole idea of staying in the deep focus mode that sometimes will bleed far too long for me. And I have other things that are starting to leak because I'm not getting these other things done.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Um, so it's not. It's not perfect. But I will say that it is where I get the best work done. It's where I get the most inventive work done and certainly the most creative work.

[B]

Yeah, that's actually really interesting because I still, even though I wake up and I feel like I'm kind of wide awake originally at, you know, three in the morning, 3:30, 4:00 in the morning, I'm still actually, like, there's sometimes, you know, I pour water in my coffee grinder or something because I'm still kind of sleepy. And so I think I work probably an hour every morning with kind of urgent quick wins. And that wakes me up. Also online coaching. I'm talking, I'm doing video breakdowns where I'm speaking. The process of speaking also kind of wakes up my mind and kind of connects my words to my brain. And then I go into that session. So I do a lot of my best sort of writing or kind of CEO vision stuff probably an hour to an hour and a half after I wake up, after I've gotten that first piece of urgent work out of the way. And so number one is to work when Everybody else sleeps. And there's also sort of a thing that you gotta be careful. Like, it shouldn't be an arrogance thing, but there's also a part of me that's like. Do you ever just think about when you're working at like 4 in the morning, you're like, nobody else is doing this.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Like, we're getting ahead. I'm getting ahead right now.

[A]

I mean, this is the Kobe Bryant thing. Right. Your competitors will never catch you if you do this regularly. Not close. Because you will literally get, you know, you get two to four hours a day more than your competitor.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Think about the founder of a company that's competing with you. And, like, they're not doing it. Like, yeah, they're not in it that you know that much. They'll never catch you.

[B]

But that's. You literally just build the moat wider and deeper every single day. That's right.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So number two is probably hit this one pretty quick. It's the. It's the prep to work. Right, the prep to work routine. And go into that. What is your prep to work routine and why is this so important for you?

[A]

Well, so I'm a huge fan of science. This is a basic Pavlov response. I mean, so easy to get it right. Like, what you want to do is you want to get a series of things that you do every time before you go into deep work. And for me, I mean, I can literally tell you what it is because I've done the same way at this point for probably 10 years. And it is. I put my noise canceling headphones on. I listen to the same playlist, the same ambient sound playlist. I probably. I might change it once a year or something, but it's literally the same music. So I'm hearing the same sounds coming into my ears, and it's like Groundhog Day. Like, oh. Yep, here we go. I take a. I take an alcohol wipe. I've got a bajillion of them. I rub my nose with an alcohol wipe so there's no oil on my nose. I put a nose strip on. Opens up my sinuses, makes me feel so awesome. Put a few eye drops in my eyeballs and pour a giant cup of coffee, and I sit down and kill it. And it is the same literally every time. If I'm in the middle of an airport, I can do the same thing. And when I just go through the sequence, even if I'm sitting out in the public, not even in a club or anything where you can kind of get some private space. My brain will shift right into deep work mode just because it says, oh, this is what we're doing now. Got it. Let's go.

[B]

Yep. Yeah. I do a similar thing. And I wake up every morning. You know, I put my contacts in, I go to the bathroom, I get dressed. I actually get dressed for the day. I don't work in pajamas or, like, what I slept in. I don't sleep in anything. But I, you know, I don't. I don't just put on. I don't put on sweats usually. And so, like, I get dressed because it's like, okay, I'm going to work. Going to work means going downstairs and working downstairs like it's in my house, just like it is for you. Like, we both run businesses out of our home, so we're not going to an office, Which I think, by the way, I think if you do go to an office or you do go to a place that that is part of your prep routine of, like, you can listen to the same thing in the car, and you can prep your mind and think about the task for the day or whatever. So those are all really good pieces as well. I wake up, I go downstairs. I've got a nice commercial espresso machine. I make an Americano. I take my dog out and then go to the bathroom, which also kind of wakes me up, especially as it's getting more colder in the wintertime. Like, the cold air kind of wakes me up. Bring him back in. Sit down with the coffee. Sit in the same chair every single time, and open up the computer. And here we go. Every single time. It's the exact same thing and same thing. I travel, if I'm in a hotel or in an airport lounge, whatever, it's the same thing, minus the dog walking, but it's the same thing. It's the exact same routine. And so having that prep to work routine, I think, is really important. The next one for us, which is probably one of the most important, I would say, is the most important one is to work. Number three is to work with absolutely no distractions. Yeah, you've got. We live in a world, man, of like, everybody is short attention span. Everything is vying for your attention. They're competing for attention. And you've got to be able to put on the. The blinders. And just like we talked about. So all notifications have to be turned off your phone, all notifications be turned off your computer. You, preferably, you work in a room that is dedicated to work. Right. I don't I don't sit on my couch or I watch TV to work. I have a desk, actually a few in the house, depending on where the action is in the home, where I can always go to a private place. You know, you put in the noise canceling headphones, those sort of things. And this is exactly what I do, whether I'm at home, on an airplane, in an Uber, on a train, in a lounge, like, what, in a coffee shop, even. And I'm not crazy about working at coffee shops because there's too much visual stimulation. If I sit down in a coffee shop, I try to find a place that's kind of back and tucked away in the corner where I don't have the visual stimulation. But turning off those notifications are key to be able to get work done.

[A]

Yeah, there's no. No question. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there's a few tricks here that if you're part of, and for some owners, some founders, this will be this way. You may need to have a few designated people that break through your phone on. When you're in do not disturb mode. That's a setting on every phone in the world at this point. And so if you can't get over the anxiety of, well, what if the company is burning down? Then what you do is you designate somebody in the company who can call you and break through all the things. Right. And you go turn off everything else. And so I use do not disturb mode on my phone all the time. It's basically always on mine, too.

[B]

90% of the time it's on.

[A]

Yeah. Because I just want to process all that stuff in batch when I have time. Like, all right, I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes going through slack and email and phone and all the things. Right. But I do not want it to ever really distract me. And so, yeah, that's the way to do it.

[B]

This is the number one thing I hear from my coaches and my employees that they tend to struggle with is the vast majority. Actually, all of our employees work from home, and the vast majority of our staff are coaches. And they can coach. They'll coach and they'll have Netflix on in the background, or they'll coach. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I went up. So we homeschool our kids. And my daughter Kinsley was doing. She was writing a paper the other day, and I was like, she's not in her room. Where is she? And she was in the guest room, and she was watching 8 Bit Ryan video game things on YouTube and writing her paper. And I was like, whoa, what's going on here with the tv? She's like, oh, it's just on in the background. I was like, huh? And she was not happy with me. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, listen, turn the TV off. No distractions. Sit down, finish the paper, and then spend the rest of the day watching 8 bit Ryan for all I care. It doesn't matter. And one of the things that's important for us, that we constantly track. You probably do, too. Well, you have to with your engineers, and they're all over the world, too, is we're tracking efficiency. Yeah, I want my staff to be efficient. I want my staff to make more dollars per hour than they normally make. And when you have the distractions, you make less dollars per hour. If a job could take an hour and you make it take three hours because you're distracted, that's. You just cut your dollar per hour. You're making a third all of a sudden.

[A]

That's totally true. I also will say, like, we want to try to dispel the myth of multitasking here. This is a good opportunity to just say, like, eventually you'll get, you know, you sort of get this idea that, like, you know, great people that get a bunch done are multitasking. They're getting all these things done simultaneously.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

Total crap. It's not real. Multitasking itself is just completely false. What's actually happening is your brain is context switching. Some people can context switch a little faster than others. Nobody context switches well, which just means I'm focused on this one thing, and, oh, now I'm focused on this thing, and now I'm focused on this other thing. No one does that well, and it makes you worse at both things that you're doing. And so it is far better not, you know, don't. Don't even, you know, get the lingo of just, like, don't be distracted. Not only should you not be distracted, you should not multitask. You should serially task, which means one thing when it's done next thing, like, over and over and over.

[B]

Yeah, we'll get into that a little bit more here in another step. Next one, number four, is to leverage artificial deadlines. And I literally take everything and turn it into an internal competition with myself. So I literally set deadlines sometimes to the minute. And kind of a silly way that I do this is if I'm flying out on an early flight, the flight's at 5am and I get to get up at 3, and I've got to leave for the airport at 3. 30, 3, 45. I'll literally make a list of everything I have to do, like from waking up, putting context in going to the bathroom, taking a shower, brush my teeth, do this stuff to the minute, and then I race it as fast as I can. I know. Is that really ocd? So. But I do similar stuff in business where I'm like, okay, I have this artificial deadline. I have, you know, 30 minutes to get. I like getting my online coaching done every morning by 5am at 5am I want all my online coaching done. And I think to myself, none of the other online coaches have even started their online coaching yet. But mine is already finished, right? And it's this little thing, this little dopamine. And you're like, okay, now it's 5am and I'm already done with the urgent work, and I'm moving on to the important. But this artificial deadline thing, and you have to do this often as a boss or as an owner for your employees as well. There's two sides to the equation. I'll speak to the one that's too long. So the too long one is Parkinson's Law. It's called Parkinson's Law, and you've probably heard of this, if you don't even recognize the term, is that a task will completely fill the time allotted for it. So if you're like, I need to do this report in the next two weeks, guess how long it's gonna take.

[A]

Yeah, two weeks.

[B]

Every time they're like, I need to get the report done by 8am Guess when it's done 8am and so you have to manage both artificial deadlines, really externally in your business with your staff and employees, but you also have to do it internally with yourself. And so I'm always in a race against the clock with myself. That's. So that's Parkinson's Law. Now, on the other side, you were talking about time boxing. How do you leverage that?

[A]

Timeboxing is this really valuable trick that you start with yourself. I'll say. But as you get employees, it actually really helps too. I'll kind of speak to both sides of that. The first one, when you're trying to decide how long something should take, all you really need to do is value that thing. One of the most classic examples of this in my mind is like a presentation. If you're working on a PowerPoint presentation or something that could take 10 hours, you could just sit and tweak the graphics on Something for that long easily and convince yourself that you're doing something that matters. But you're not. Right?

[B]

That's right.

[A]

You have to look at the thing that you're doing, value it, say like, what, what? How much of my time is this actually worth? And then say, no, if it's an hour, then you time box that you might. I use my calendar for this and I'll literally say, I'm going to start it at this time and I'm going to end it at this time. When that minute hits, I'm done. Like, I got to file it. It's over.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And so that forces you to make decisions about like, all right, I'm not going to design my own graphics. I know that much. Right. I'm not going to. There's all these things you could do and it eliminates all those things, which is great. And then the second piece of this is when you have employees, you want to timebox them. One of the things that bosses tend to get wrong is they'll give an employee a task. They'll say, I need you to get this thing done. The employee has no idea how valuable it is or isn't.

[B]

Right. How much time it should take, how much work I should put in on the thing.

[A]

No clue at the moment. I just want to impress the boss, let's say. And so I'm going to spend 50 hours on this thing that, you know, as the boss, you're like, I was thinking like an hour or less.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

So you want to time box this for people and then that gives them clarity about what the value is, but it also helps them set the pace for how much quality they're supposed to inject into it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So on both sides. Right. So if, if, if they thought about this is a five minute task, but you're like, no, it's an hour task. Like, we're going to up the quality on this thing or.

[B]

Or the reverse. Opposite.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So both ways. Timeboxing. Huge amount of value comes out of time boxing. And for your employees.

[B]

Yeah, that's excellent. To review really quick. Number one was six non negotiables is we work when everyone else sleeps. For us, that's early morning. For some of you, it may be late at night. We have a specific prep to work routine. Number two, we work with absolutely no distractions. Number three, Number four, we leverage artificial deadlines in order to get the most work accomplished in the right amount of time. Right. Moving on to number five. We've touched on this a little bit. Is to focus on just one task at a time. One task. We tend to use the pomodoro. If you've never heard of the pomodoro, it's a technique. I think the paper was written in the early 80s or something.

[A]

It's been a while. Yeah.

[B]

And it was called the pomodoro because if for those of you old enough, or maybe your grandma had it, your mom. The old kitchen timers were often in the shape of a tomato, like a plastic tomato that had kind of a. It was cut at the hemisphere and you would turn the top of the tomato to, you know, five minutes or 10 minutes or 40 minutes or however long the thing was supposed to be in the oven. Back before ovens had timers on it. Right. So this is how old this is. And this guy used this technique and he said, I found that about 25 minutes of totally undistracted work is about the best amount of time. Now that 25 minutes is arbitrary. It depends on the person. Some people work better for a little bit shorter. Some people can go 45 minutes, an hour or longer in deep, deep, deep work. And they don't need the break. I like that 25 to 30 minute session somewhere in there of just super undistracted work. And that means when I say undistracted work, I'm not just talking about the distractions on your phone and computer turned off. I mean, you don't go to the bathroom, right. You don't get up and get a new cup of coffee, Nothing. You just do one task for as long, for as long as you have set, right? And it comes back, really what you're doing is a Pomodoro is a 25 minute time box is what it is.

[A]

Exactly what it is. Yeah. That artificial pressure that that 25 minutes puts on you, I think is valuable. I tell you, one of the things that I don't know if you get this feedback, because I know that we've both talked about pomodoros to multiple people many times. They ask a question, I'm like, have you done pomodoros? One of the first things people learn about themselves is just how distract they really are.

[B]

It's incredible.

[A]

All like, if you've never done this before and if you've never done, I don't know, like mindfulness meditation or something. Like, you've just never worked on this, this kind of concept. It's crazy what things happen in your brain. You'll sit down, you're supposed to do this work, and the very first thing That'll happen even if you just went to the bathroom, is you start thinking, do I need to go to the bathroom? Oh, I'm gonna go fill up a coffee. Or I'm gonna go, oh, you know what I need to do? I need to go take out the trash. And all of those things you cannot do inside of a pomodoro. If you do, the pomodoro is gone, it's busted, and you don't get to do it. So it's just a lot of lessons here about all the things your brain is trying to trick you with. We'll also say that with all the distractions that we just have in the world right now, when it comes to, like, let's say, you know, I've noticed that, you know, YouTube videos are getting shorter. I've seen my kids, like, they're consuming these crazy short things. Part of the thing that is happening is that people just don't have an attention span at all. Like, they have no ability to sit and focus for an extended period of time. So that means that the more you will focus that muscle, the more you'll learn and build that muscle, the greater competitive edge you have over everybody else. Back to that idea of there's a founder out there who's doing what you're doing and you need to beat them. One of the things that that is an important factor in this is I think a lot about how many people are willing to train the muscle of constant deep focus. That's exactly right. And pomodoros are. Those are reps, man. That's all it is.

[B]

These are synergistic steps, right? It's not one plus one equals two. It's one plus one equals three. So maybe there are a handful of other owners or competitors out there that are in fact up working at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, but they're not doing deep work. Or maybe those others are doing deep work, but they're not up early in the morning. When you get up early in the morning, and I know you and I will often talk about time management in. In terms of pomodoros. How many pomodoros? Well, I got all this knocked out in three pomodoros.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And people will be like, in three. That's an Italian word for tomatoes. Like in three tomatoes. Yeah. In three 30 minute sessions. I got this thing knocked out. Coming back to that concept again, pomodoro is the technique we use to focus on one task at a time. One of the things that really helps me is I always Have a scrap piece of paper. I use the notepad on my phone all the time, but I don't use it for pomodoros. I use an actual piece of paper and a pencil and I have it sitting there so that when my brain thinks while I'm trying to focus on this one task and that thinks, oh, it's trash day. I need to take the trash out. I just write trash and I go right back to the thing. Or thaw meat for dinner tonight. So I thaw meat and I go right back to the thing. And then at the end of that pomodoro, I take a five minute break. I'll do the things that I wrote down. I go to the bathroom, I get some coffee, I check my emails, I check my text and then go right back into the next pomodoro. That's the concept. And so it's all about, just like you said, this is a learned behavior, this is a skill. I don't think anybody's great at this in the beginning.

[A]

I think, you know, no, they're not.

[B]

And we've talked about this before. Our dad, who lost a few years ago, he was a pastor and went to seminary. When we were little kids, dad would take us to chapel at seminary and they would often have, you know, they would have like two students and a professor. All preach sermons at chapel and they all try to outdo each other. So they were all preaching an hour long. We would be lit. I mean, you were probably like two or three and I was, you know, six. And we're sitting in these pews in a seminary with three straight hours of sermon with no iPads and none of that existed with a coloring book and would get the corporal punishment if we didn't handle, if we didn't do it well. So we really started honing that skill, probably unbeknownst to us from a very early age. And I remember having to do the same thing when I ran the gym. The gym was kind of hustle and bustle and there's people all around. You go to the thing. When I started working from home and we homeschooled the kids, I was like, I had this idea that we could all work at the dining room table together. The kids are homeschooling Mom's homeschooling kids. Within about two days I was like, this is not going to work. So I built an office down in the basement and I learned how to do the pomodoro. And then I can remember when Kaylin, my 19 year old, who's now graduated even from cosmetology school from college. And she's got a full time job. And she's done all this. When she was in about third grade, I made her do pomodoros with me one morning and her school homeschool was still taking. It was taking like seven or eight hours. And I said, you don't have that much work. And she's like, I'm just. I'm working all that. I was like, I don't think so. Come downstairs. So we would do pomodoros together. I'm gonna do a pomodoro. You're gonna do a pomodoro. I mean, really. She was like, in third grade probably. And I said, that means you're gonna work. You're not gonna ask me questions, you're not gonna go to the bathroom. You're gonna get whatever work you can done. We're gonna do math. This one or whatever Latin or whatever it was. And I can remember the first day she did that. She got all of her work done in three pomodoros in an hour and a half for the whole day. And I was like, guess what you get to do now? Play. You don't have to do eight hours of work. And that same thing happens with us. The amount of work we can get done increases exponentially when we're able to really focus and do these things. Or it opens up the rest of our day to do the things that are like to go play with our kids and be husbands and dads and whatever. The thing is, also, the more you.

[A]

Do it, the longer I notice that your pomodoros can be if you want them to be.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Mine. Mine have gotten to the point where I can absolutely do a two hour pomodoro with almost no difficulty. And I like it better that way. The programming tasks sort of are good tasks to do sort of long pomodoros. But you train yourself to get good at them. That's just how it goes like anything else.

[B]

And I still, what I do is typically about 45 minutes for me. But I don't need a full five minute break. I'll do about 45 minutes. I'll get to kind of a good. Kind of stopping point in the same project. And I'll go to the bathroom. I'm going to get a cup of coffee and it's. It's maybe two minutes off and then it's. I'm right back in.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it just gives me. And I like getting up and walking around. It's kind of active time offs. I walk and kind of walk around the house or go outside really fast or whatever. So. All right, last one. Number six is to leverage the Eisenhower matrix, which means to work on the right thing. So President Eisenhower, you've maybe heard of this before, he said, I have two types of problems or two types of things that I have to make decisions on. One are the urgent things, which are almost never important. And one or the other is the important things which are almost never urgent. I write about this a lot in my book Undoing Urgency. Stephen Covey talked about this a lot in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Brett McCase talked about this a lot. But really, if anything can be some combination of urgent and important, you can end up with one of four quadrants. You have the things that are not urgent, not important in your life, which for the vast majority of us, even everyone, I would say you should eliminate those in your life. And these are things that are truly non urgent, non important. So doom scrolling social media, binge watching, Netflix, playing video games, this is where technology comes in. But just stuff that's just a waste of time should be eliminated. And I'm not saying that you should never watch TV or never watch video game, never look at social media or Twitter or X or whatever. I think those things are fine. And even for me, my wife and I are almost always watching a documentary or something that I get joy out of once the work is done. But when you consistently do these things or time wasters, that's the first thing that has to go. Do you have anything in your life that you're like, is it Twitter? Is it like where you're like, this is the thing you have to keep watch on that are not urgent, not important.

[A]

It'd be Twitter for me for sure. I think, like, I mean, I'll watch a TV show or a movie every so often. TV show probably more than anything else. But it's in the evening when my IQ is dropped to the lowest possible level and I'm just like, I just need to veg out for like a little while. This is like recuperation. But I think for me it could easily be Twitter. Now I've trained myself to stop looking at it essentially. Like, I look at it when I need to. It's not never. I've curated my list, so that's actually good learning stuff for me, but it also spins off tasks for me because I'll watch it and go like, oh, I need to learn this new AI tool. Or I need to learn this New thing or whatever. So yeah, no, I think that's the one. Social media is addictive.

[B]

So then there is the quadrant of the urgent things that are not important. Urgent, but not important. And this is often like answering urgent emails. The phone ringing, you got to mow your lawn cause the HOA is going to get on top of you. Those things we want to try to delegate or automate as much as we can. This is again one of the reasons why my phone is on do not disturb. I never want to take an unsolicited phone call. Like I'm not looking for phone calls. So I will. If somebody called me and they left a voicemail, maybe I'll call them back. They can also text. It is 20, 24, those sorts of things. I'm not going to mow my own lawn. I'm going to hire somebody to mow my lawn. This also often I think housework is a big piece of this. And I realize not everybody that's listening to this can afford this, but it's surprisingly cheap to hire somebody to come in and do some of the general house cleaning in your house. Once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, something like that. And like floors and baseboards and bathrooms and stuff. And so we have people that do that because my time is better spent running the company, not cleaning my floors. Right. And so I totally agree. So those things. But they need to be done. But they don't have to be done by you. That when you feel like those tasks, all those urgent tasks have to be done by you. That's urgency and urgency. The urgent is the enemy of the important and that moves us into the two important blocks. And that's the urgent and important block. So that's stuff like for me, online coaching, emails, responding to staff, the stuff that as a CEO, my whole business stops working if people are waiting for me to make a decision. So it's urgent and it's important. These are the things I have to attack ferociously and be extremely efficient. These are the pomodoro things first. These are my first set of pomodoro things is things that are urgent and important. What does that look like for you? Is it dev work, engineering work, setting your team up? What's the.

[A]

I think it's a combination. I think setting the team up is big. I think responding to things in Slack is probably one of the most common ones because people have these sort of important, urgent requests. I don't know how to move forward. Can you help me xyz? You know, whatever it Is, Yep, I think those are the ones that. And they're very distracting too. Like you kind of have to monitor those all the time. And then I think the other ones are just in, in that quadrant. For me, anything that hits sort of the emergency space in someone's business that's related to technology, hey, we need this thing fixed, or we need to solve this problem, or we have this really critical thing going on, there's a bug.

[B]

And that happens with us sometimes with our software is like, there's a bug and everything's screwed up right now. And it's like, okay, now this is urgent and important, we gotta go right now. And if you do that well, so if you eliminate the things that are not urgent, not important, and you delegate and automate and again, we didn't even get into AI, but certainly we're both leveraging AI as much as we can to automate things. Delegate and automate the things that are urgent and not important. Work as efficiently as possible on things that are urgent and important. Then it frees up our life, our time, our space, our bandwidth to focus on the things that matter most, the things that are most important but are rarely urgent. And for me, that's stuff like time with my family, time with my wife, time with my kids, personal fitness, health, reading, and even the things that I would say are like long term vision strategy for the business. As a CEO, I put in that quadrant. Like those things are important, those kind of those disciplines in life that I want to do. But if I'm constantly drowning by working in my business and not on my business, then I never work on my business or I never work on my family. I never work on being a great husband or father or taking my wife on a date or those sorts of things. And so similar things, I assume for you as well that what are those things that you put in the highest quadrant of most important but often not urgent?

[A]

Well, I mean, for me it's been crystal clear that things like working out consistently has a massive effect. It creates a multiplicative effect on all the other things that I can do. I sleep better, I'm in a better mood. I mean, all those things are really good. So I think working out is a big one. I think taking the time to sit down and learn new technology in my world, that is a very difficult task to keep up with because it's changing super fast. So I'm taking courses, I'm reading books, I'm doing all these things and I need to spend a lot of time that the value that our company gets out of me. Spending time doing those things is enormous. I mean, absolutely enormous. I put those things to work almost immediately, but finding the time to do it is absolutely a critical step. And the reason that you have to divide and conquer these things into the different quadrants, because you won't. You will never do any of those things if you're spending all of your time on the important, urgent stuff, which is where most entrepreneurs find themselves locked in, where they can't really get out of.

[B]

Yep, sure. I think one of the things that I love just to give a little shout out to our businesses, our businesses have really focused primarily on helping people in that quadrant two and quadrant three section. Those things are both urgent and both like the things that need to be delegated and automated out. And the things are extremely important and urgent. You know, for us with Turnkey Coach, if you're a fitness professional, we have a software that actually and your team works on a lot. So we actually really kind of partners in that, that our goal is to make it so that coaches can do what they do best, which is coach. And for us, when we say coach, we mean like, really truly interacting with their clients, building relationship and trust, actually breaking down technique, those sorts of things. All this stuff that comes with that job, the administrative tasks, the bounce credit cards, the payment processing, the stuff, we handle that stuff. So you get to delegate that out to us at Turnkey Coach so that you can really focus on the stuff that matters the most, whether that is efficiently doing that urgent, important work of online coaching. And Andrew Jackson, my. My project manager, as well as you guys at, at certain and the rest of the dev team, have made it so that we've actually applied applied lean manufacturing techniques to the fitness industry, which I don't think anybody's ever done before. And we've removed all of the waste that we can with no loss in service, which I think is really awesome. And then you're really connected to a lot of what you guys do as well. Like, people come up with, they have a problem, they have a challenge, and your team provides solutions for them. So I know this has happened a ton for us where we had a technology challenge from an engineering development standpoint, and your company's been able to step in and fill the gap there.

[A]

That's right. I mean, most people don't want to spend their time dealing with, hey, we have servers that have gone down or, you know, we've got a critical bug that we need to go fix. Like, at the end of the day, they Want to focus on the things that move that business forward.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And I think that having high levels of expertise in our area is really hard to come by. And so it's better not to build those things into your business, especially if you don't have that in your DNA. Like if your company is not a software engineering company, then it is very difficult to acquire those skills.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's easier to partner with someone who has those skills, who can put all the best practices at play and make sure that you're doing those things in a way that doesn't eat up all of your company's time and all of the founders time.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, for us, we're a service company and I'm a, I'm a sales and people oriented CEO. And I think if you compare that, I'm certainly. Well, if you compare that to say like an Elon Musk or even like a Sergey Brin or like those guys were tech guys. So it is possible in the technology space, you're a tech guy.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

You understand social norms and how to talk to people, which a lot of tech guys struggle with. And so, but if you're a tech guy, you can do the tech and then you've got to hire out the sales and customer service and the all that sort of stuff. But if you're like me and you're a customer service, people person, sales guy, you've got to hire out the technology, the dev stuff. And that's that. That is where if I got bogged down in that, I would be constantly bogged down in quadrant two and quadrant three and I would never get to focus on quadrant four. It's much easier for me to hire professionals to do the thing that they do best, that I have no idea what I'm doing. And I then reap the rewards of the extra time and the extra bandwidth to focus on the stuff that really matters, that only I can do as a CEO, as a husband, as a father, my own health or spiritual disciplines or whatever the things are.

[A]

And that's a trend, I think in general, I think this general trend for entrepreneurs founders is to figure out what that thing is that you do that no one else can do. The thing that is one of the ways I like to frame this is the thing that feels like play to you, but feels like work to everybody else. That thing that you do, you should protect your time to do that thing more than almost anything else that you do. And that means hiring experts to do the things that they're good at. Because there Are people in this world, believe it or not, that love doing the things that you hate doing.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And so you probably want to find those people for all of the things that you need in your business. And I'm sure we'll do a podcast episode at some point on that topic itself. Like how do you find the good experts?

[B]

Yeah. And even identifying the things that you hate and how to. And how to delegate those out. So first episode of the build your business podcast again, real quick recap. Six non negotiables to 10x your productivity. And by the way, that sounds maybe a little bit clickbaity, but I actually think 10xing your productivity for a lot of people is not that difficult. It can absolutely be done. Right.

[A]

Yeah, totally true. Absolutely.

[B]

Number one, work when everyone else sleeps. Most of you. That's going to be early morning to me. That's going to be late at night. Prep to work routine. Make sure you have the same routine every time. Prepping for work, getting yourself in that right mindset to do it. Work with absolutely no distractions. Leverage artificial deadlines and turn those things into internal competitions. Things like Pomodoros. Think about Parkinson's law, time boxing. Give yourself those artificial deadlines to get as much work done as you possibly can. Again, carrying over the Pomodoro theme. 5. Focus on one task at a time. If you are easily distracted, you're add have that little sheet of paper down so you can make little notes and keep it. Your brain doesn't have to hold the bandwidth in. And last is to understand, do the right things and by understanding the Eisenhower matrix so that you can focus on the things that are important and not drown in urgency. And there you go. Any other closing thoughts before we wrap this up?

[A]

No, man, that's it. This is a good, good podcast. Definitely helpful, I think for everybody who lives in this, in this space. I think about, you know, your brain muscle gets bigger. You get better at doing them. You just got to practice.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Where can people find you on Twitter or the social medias?

[A]

I'm Chris by Boston on Twitter and I am Chris Reynolds on LinkedIn. I have a very, very active LinkedIn profile. So check me out on LinkedIn. I shoot some videos every so often. I'm sure we'll probably do a little. Some little pieces of this podcast over there as well.

[B]

And then your company is certain which is spelled kind of funny to if you're looking for development or technological issues.

[A]

Engineering S U R t o n.com and you can email me at [e-mail] awesome.

[B]

And I am at Reynolds Strong personal for Twitter and all the other social medias. Matt Reynolds on LinkedIn. You can go to Ryan mattreynolds.com to check out the book Undoing Urgency. And of course, always check out barbelogic.com and turnkey coach if you're a fitness professional and you want to really talk about 10x ing your productivity. We've watched our coaches go from about 50 bucks an hour to somewhere in the ballpark, middle of the bell curve of 165 per hour for our coaches, which is pretty incredible. Look that sun came in. If you're watching this, you can see I just lit up like an angel. Sun just came out and shining in my face. So love to see you. Feel free to reach out and say, hey, shoot us an email. We're easy to find and we'll catch you guys next week.