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Is anyone else feeling like, how am I supposed to do all of these different things in a day? How am I supposed to send looms every day, but also send outreach messages every day, but also book sales calls every day, but also create content for myself every day, but also move my own EC forward every day? Anyone else have this question? Yep, a lot of people. All right, well, here's the answer. It's very simple. You don't. That's the answer. There you go. Great question. Happy to share the answer. All right, let me. Let me expand. Every single person's biggest mistake when it comes to personal productivity is measuring success on a 24 hour timer. And I, again, just as guilty of this, I can't tell you how many years I spent doing this. Okay? So you think that especially whenever you're trying to build something new, you look at all the pieces and you go, I'm gonna do all of those things every single day. And you could expand it to the macro level and you're like, I'm going to not only do all of those things, but I'm also gonna get to bed early every day. I read Atomic Habits. I know. Gotta get to bed early. Right? Right. I'm going to wake up at 5am every day. That's what all the pros do. I'm going to do it for sure. I'm going to get to the gym every day. I'm going to journal every day. I'm going to ice bath every day. I'm going to meditate every day. I'm going to. Right. That's what everyone does. And I hate to be the one to pull back the curtain on all the motivational tik toks and YouTube shorts and everything, but no one does that. No one does that. No one does all of those things every single day. Okay? Something that you learn is that you have to expand your measure for success from 24 hours to a week. If you stop measuring every day and you start measuring over the course of a week, all of a sudden you don't have to do these things every day. You can do them once a week or twice a week. Okay? And I promise, 99% of the time when you try and do things every single day, you are unsuccessful the vast majority of the days. But if you just say, I'm gonna do this once a week, you're far more likely to actually do that thing once a week. Which means compounded week after week, you end up doing it ten times, a hundred times more than telling yourself, I'm gonna do it Every single day, not doing it and then beating yourself up every day. Right, so that's, that's the first point. The second point is that the whole key to productivity is this concept called batching. I did not come up with this. I heard it from someone who heard it from someone who read it in a book, who heard it at a talk. Whatever this is. This is not a novel concept. Batching is where you group similar activities together. Okay, so if you look at this question, this question looks like, well, it's just four bullets. I should be able to do four bullets every day. We make this joke internally inside our company all the time. We're like, it's just a bullet. Well, no, actually, if we fill in each of those bullets, there's a ton of steps. Like to send a loom. I have to find the prospect. I have to do my homework. What do they need help with? I have to write up a notion or a Google Doc. I have to make sure the lighting in my room doesn't look like I'm a hostage. I have to get ready to record. I have to try recording. Whoops. I messed up. I need to try recording again. I messed up again. Need to try recording again. That one was good. Then I'm gonna send it. Wait, I need to think about my message. Thinking, thinking. Okay, that's good. Send. It's not one bullet. There's like 20 bullets. And the, the mistake that people make is they, they make an. This is what their to do list looks like. It's like. And I know that this is going to hit and trust again. I am so guilty of this. Okay, this is what a to do list looks like. It's like, revamp personal website. Come up with content strategy for all of 2025. Rewrite my book. Are you joking? Those are. That's not three bullets. That's like a thousand bullets. You just grouped 300 bullets at a time into one bullet. And you're like, oh, it's just revamp personal website. Are you kidding? That's like a six month project. That's not a bullet. But this is how people come up with their to do list. It's a massive mistake. Okay, so the way that you achieve more productivity is you have to batch things together and you have to batch them, measuring success over a longer time horizon. It's not a day, it's a week. So let's do this together. This is what a typical. If, if, if you're ghostwriting either on the side or full time, here's what an average like List of things to do would be, it's like, all right, I need to send 50 outreach messages. I need to send 10 looms. I'm going to try and book, you know, three sales calls this week. I want to write at least two days of my next EEC and I want to come up with one long form post. I'm going to put that on LinkedIn and I want five short form posts, one per day. And then I gotta respond to emails from previous clients I pitched and then I have my kickoff call with my first client. Okay. These are all like reasonable things. If you try and do this in one day, good luck, you're going to end that day completely cooked. And I know because I did it for years. Horrible. Instead you want to two things. A, group similar activities together and B, space them out throughout the week. So which one of these is similar? Well, sending outreach messages. I'm in sales, so let's, let's group these by category. Let's say things that are sales related. So sales would be outreach messages. Okay. I'm like thinking that's that part of my brain is working. It could be looms. We'll put that here for now. Three sales calls, that's still in the category. And maybe respond to emails from previous clients. Okay. And then we'll put writing as the next category. We're like, okay, I want to write two days of my EEC and I want to write some social content for me. And that sounds good. And then this is actually the third category. This is like client management. So that to do list actually isn't one big to do list because it's three different lists. Right. So it would be smart to go, well, I should do all of these things together and then I should do all of these things together and then I should do this right. Because now I'm not bouncing around anyone here who is already working with clients. Have you ever gotten off of a sales call and then had to go directly into the writing and then had to go directly into like talking to a different client? Have you ever experienced some version of that? That was my entire life for about four years. Six days a week, 10, 12 hours a day for four years straight. It was the most exhausting thing I've ever put myself through. I would literally have a sales call at 10, another sales call at 10:30, I would have a 30 minute break until a client call. I would have 30 minutes to go straight a piece. Then at 11 I would talk to one of our current clients. Then at 11:30 I would have another sales call. Then from 11:30 to 12, I would have to write the next piece for the next client. It's literally how I lived my life for four straight years. And it was so incredibly exhausting. And it took me a very long time to learn that you want to group similar activities together. So this, maybe this is your entire Monday afternoon. And maybe you don't do the writing on Mondays. Maybe this is your time Tuesday morning. And then client management, you're like, I do this every Wednesday. Now you're measuring success over the course of a week. And you can take this a layer deeper. Like, this is a really great example. Outreach messages is text. Looms are video. Sales calls are video or audio, depending on if you're using Zoom. Respond to emails is text. If you. If you examine the list more closely, you realize that even within this batch, you're bouncing between different states, right? Writing text is different than sending. Recorded looms is different than hopping on a live call. Those actually all ask different things of you. So wouldn't it make sense to go, you know what, I'm going to do the text stuff first. I'm going to start my day and I'm going to do the 50 outreach messages and I'm going to respond to emails. Then I'm going to warm up and I'm going to do my three sales calls maybe, and then I'm going to do my 10 looms. So now it's like you're grouping even the state together. Or you might find, you know what? Actually, sales calls are the most mentally taxing. I'm going to do those first. And then because I'm already in a talking mode, I'm not going to switch to text and then come back. I'm actually going to do my looms after. And then after I finish my calls and my looms, you know what? The. Sending the outreach messages text like that requires the least amount of mental bandwidth. I'm going to save that for the. For the end. So is this helpful for everyone? Because this is how you should be looking at your daily list. This is how you should be looking at every single thing that you do. Every. And here's the skill to build. The skill to build is that every single day, someone else is going to try and put something on your list. Okay, so we'll. We'll call this just option. A client's going to email you and be like, hey, can you send me that a new draft really quick? And then your friend's going to call you and be like, hey, do you have some time this afternoon to show me that LinkedIn strategy you were telling me about. And then another, I don't know, person on X or LinkedIn or whoever is gonna be like, hey, we're in similar circles. Do you have 30 minutes to grab Zoom coffee today or this week? Every single day, other people are gonna be trying to put things on your list, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like, welcome to life, and welcome to playing the game of business. The mistake is when you. You spend all this work going, I'm gonna structure my Monday afternoon like this, right? And you're like, this Monday, and. And I. You took the time to think through it, just like we're doing here. I'm gonna start with sales calls. I'm already in that state. I'm gonna move to setting my looms. And then once I'm fried, then I'm going to do my 50 outreach messages, respond to emails that doesn't require that much mental bandwidth. And then the mistake that everyone makes is someone gets a message like this, and they go, sure, no problem. I'm going to do this right here. Or even worse, I'm going to do this right here. Well, you just. You just disrupted the whole point of batching. You just took yourself completely out of the sales mentality, right? Like, you had it all batched and structured, and then you let someone walk in, and it's just like, I'm gonna commandeer the second part of your morning. And in the moment, it's so easy to go, well, it's. That won't take that long. It's like 30 minutes. It's not the 30 minutes that's taxing. What's taxing is that you're switching the part of your brain that you're using. The switching cost is the taxing part. And the reason why. And this all goes back to, like, literally the entire reason why I. And we were so excited to start pga is because I lived this problem. And I see how many people struggle with versions of this. And if you want to know why every single freelance writer is just completely burned out, it's because they live their entire life going, I just do whatever someone asks me to do whenever they ask me to do it. And they don't batch and they don't structure, and they don't have any of these mental models. And so as a result, every hour they're doing something different. And then they end their day and they're like, none of those tasks seemed that difficult. Why am I so tired? You're tired because you didn't batch anything. You're tired because you switched between 10 different states in a day. You shouldn't be switching between more than two states in a day. Does this make sense for everyone? This is a really. This is a great question. And this is a really important part of, I mean, not even just ghostwriting, like, figuring out how to maximize your own personal productivity, figuring out how to juggle multiple things, figuring out how to batch similar tasks together. Right? And sometimes, you know, there. There is a skill to build, and there's an endurance to build, where sometimes there's opportunity, there's moments, or there's opportunities where you're like, this isn't the cleanest. This isn't a perfect batched morning. I just got to do what I got to do. I still have days like that. And that's fine. But the key is to be conscious of it. And if you live your life unconsciously, just reacting to all these things, you're gonna be fried. You're gonna be so burned out. But if you're conscious about it and you're always working to batch these activities together, but then every once in a while, something pops up. You're like, ah, I gotta take this call. I had that happen all the time. I would get connected with a client and they'd be like, I'm in China next week. Sorry, you gotta take the call at 4 5am your time. Be like, all right, like, that's going to be a tiring day, but I want the client, so let's make it happen, right? Like every once in a while, it that happens, and it's fine. The. The key is you don't want that to be your life every day. Then things get really hard. All right, so is this clicking helpful? Good? I guarantee probably every single person on this call, myself included, is struggling with some version of this. Okay, this is. This is the. You don't come up with the solution, and then you never have the problem again. This is a daily struggle. This. This is the fight. This is the daily fight. You have to fight to protect your time. You have to fight to protect your focus. It is very hard. And I promise you, I promise, like, I read this amazing book 10 years ago, which is crazy to think about 10 years ago when social was like, just starting to really explode, which is. Hasn't been that long. And everyone was writing all like, the business publications were writing about, like, notifications and how to be focused and not be distracted. And like, it's. It's hundred times worse now. And you're crazy if you don't think it's not going to get a hundred times more worse 10 years from now, you know, like, it's only going to get harder to focus. That's. That is the, the journey that we're on. That is the path we're on. And so one of the, the biggest unfair advantages that you can cultivate in yourself is the ability to focus. If you can do that, congratulations. Like, it's, it's actually not hard. The rest of the population is just glued to their phones. If you cannot be that, it's really not hard to win. It's really not. But you have to build the skill of not letting people infiltrate your schedule. Measuring success over a longer time horizon. So not measuring every 24 hours, but measuring over the course of a week and batching similar tasks together. And if you do that, you will be far more successful than the vast majority of people, because that's not what people do. What people do is they bounce between 11 different things in a day and then whenever they have a spare 30 seconds, they open TikTok. Like, think about how mentally exhausting that is.