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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2729 Q&A Wednesday: How Can I Be More Productive?
00:15:28
Some people think being productive means adding more to their to‑do list - longer lists, more boxes to check, endless tasks to cram into the day. But the truth is, that approach often leaves you overwhelmed and no closer to what really matters. Are you stuck in this cycle, too?
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Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. The all new five year business boost from Comcast Business it's the certainty of a price lock for five years on qualifying Internet bundles plus the most reliable WI fi with their best equipment. And ask about a $500 prepaid card when you add two lines of mobile. The five year business boost only from Comcast Business powering possibilities ends 22226 new customers only one year contract required for guaranteed rate. Five year pricing applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Best WI Fi based on Open Signal Awards USA Fixed Broadband Experience Report May 2025 Everyone thinks productivity is about doing more. But the truth is, if you want to be truly productive, you have to do less. Less? Yeah, less. I haven't lost my mind and I'll explain why doing less makes you more productive. In today's lesson, I'm going to show you how to become dramatically more productive. I'm going to show you how to cut out the noise, how to focus, how to prioritize the essentials in your life and work on the things that actually matter the most and move the needle in your business and in your life. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. Before we jump in, can I get 30 seconds of your time? We love guiding you on your business journey and we want to help even more build their dream businesses and lives. So if you could hit the Follow button on this podcast app, it would be greatly appreciated. It's completely free and it helps us out more than you know. Thanks. I'm not going to bury the lead here. Here's the biggest mindset shift that changed my life. Productivity is not about more, it's about focus. One of my favorite books of all time is a book called 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. And here it is. I grabbed it from my bookshelf. 4,000 weeks. It's called 4,000 weeks because that's the average lifespan. Yeah, only 4,000 weeks. It really makes you think, wow, we have a very limited time, brutally limited. And pretending otherwise is what makes you burn out. You fall behind and you feel consistently overwhelmed because you're trying to get so much done, everything done every single day. And you are suffering because you physically cannot do everything. So the only real path to real productivity is becoming incredibly selective about what you do work on. So it's not about how do I get more done, Instead it's about how do I get done that is worth doing? When you start thinking this way, your productivity goes through the roof. Not because you're working harder, but because you're finally working on the right things. One of the most productive habits you can build is to regularly look at your to do list. This is my to do list. I actually have a special notebook that like goes through all your to do's, right? And when you go through your to do list, you need to ask the question, what here is actually essential? Not useful, not nice to have, Not. I should probably do this essential. And I learned this from a book called essentialism by Greg McKeown. He calls this the discipline to pursue of less. If you have 10 priorities, you have no priorities. If you have one to two priorities, you have a lot of power. Now, side note, I actually have found in my experience that it's very important to only have one priority in each bucket of your life. So say, for example, in 2026, you want to improve different areas of your life. Let's say health, relationships, business, those are buckets of life. You should have only one priority, in my opinion, in each bucket. So a priority for business, a priority for health, a priority for relationships. In this example, now, the reason why I like one and not one or two is because it allows you to focus. It allows you to know what to say no to. Because if it doesn't align with that one goal, with that one priority, then it's a no. It's easy to focus, but when you're competing with one or two or three priorities, it gets kind of confusing. And honestly, you just slip into old habits again. Now, when you do this, you cut your to do list, like in half, maybe sometimes by 80%. And you see better results because your best work requires you to focus. It requires you to focus your time, your energy, your clarity, and honestly, your emotional bandwidth. You need to only worry about one thing. And when you overload yourself, when you overwhelm yourself, all that focus disappears. So let's say you want to grow your business. There are hundreds of things you can do to grow your business. You can improve your product, you can redesign your website, you can start running ads, you can optimize your sales funnel, you can hire support, you can build content strategy, you can start doing partnerships, you can improve onboarding, you could do pr. You can add new features, you can join masterminds, you can throw events. I can go on and on and on and on. Doing all of them is exactly the least productive thing you can do. This is gonna get you the best results. How do I know this? Because I've been doing this for 15 years and I'm gonna give you concrete examples in a moment. But when you have total focus, intense effort, you get incredible results. So say, for example, you're starting a new year and in the first month, January, you focus on just hiring one Rockstar team member who will level up everything for you. Maybe it's an ea, maybe it's a creative director, maybe it's a manager of some sort. By just focusing on this is all I gotta get done. This is all that's going to happen. I know that if I do this, that domino is going to impact everything else. I get that done, it's focused and I get it done within a month because that's all I'm doing. Maybe the next month. I say, okay, let's get in more sales by overhauling and optimizing our sales funnel only focus. February's over, March rolls around. Let's focus on upgrading the onboarding of our product, of our business, so that we can improve retention. Only thing we're working on. One focus equals real progress. Many focuses, right? Shallow results. You're not really going to get any results that are actually going to make it worth your effort. Listen, you're going to do the work. You're going to do the work. You might as well go all in, focus it happen so you can get the best results possible. Everyone's deploying AI agents now, but here's the thing. Sometimes they mess up, they delete the wrong files, make changes you didn't authorize, or just go off script, leaving you stuck trying to figure out what went wrong. Unless you're using Rubrik Agent, cloud AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. But can you control the risk? Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk. You need full visibility into your agent's actions, enforce policies, quantify risk, and undo destructive actions to data. Rubrik Agent Cloud gives you AI resilience and the rewind happens fast. We're talking minutes, not hours or days. Rubrik Agent Cloud gives you that safety net when you're experimenting with AI, so one mistake doesn't tank your whole operation. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern and rewind their actions. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent cloud. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com.
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Subject to change and people don't realize this, but here's a little secret. Every new project you say yes to creates a chain reaction of 10 to 50 more tasks for you to do. Let me give you an example. You decide to host a networking dinner next month. As soon as you make this decision, you are instantly putting a bunch of stuff on your plate. You're going to have to find a venue. You're going to have to negotiate pricing. You're going to need to start inviting people to the event. You create a registration page. You need to figure out how you're going to collect payments. You got to market and document what's happening so you can put it on social media. You need to design an agenda. You need to create reminders. You need to manage RSVPs. You need to coordinate with the restaurant. You need to show up early. You need to be on all night in the event to make sure that everybody's having a great time. You have to have to do follow up and surveys. Even if you hire help, even if you get your EA to do it, you must hire this person to do this first. You got to train them. You got to communicate your vision. You got to make sure that they're on Top of it. You got to review their work, you got to prove their decisions. I can go on and on because I know this like the back of my hand, because I've done it so many times to myself. And once you say yes, you start to open up that Pandora's box of 20, 40, 50, 70 hours of work that you did not account for. If you feel totally overwhelmed after what I shared with you, don't worry, there's a cure. And the cure is your default answer to every opportunity should be a no. Now, I know that sounds strange because you want to say yes to opportunities, you want to grow. But remember, you have a single priority. And the only way, if that no is going to be a yes is if it aligns with that priority. Right? Your yes should be earned by what's going to move you forward in your business. So you need to start with a priority that becomes like the strategy. Like, okay, this is what I'm going to focus on. And anything that doesn't align with this needs to be a no. I want to share something with you that I call the paradox of productivity. The more you do, the less that gets done. Really? I'll tell you why. Because quality work actually requires a lot of space, a lot of time, a lot of mental clarity. You need to recover. You need long periods of uninterrupted focus. You need single tasking, not multitasking. You need emotional bandwidth. Like I mentioned before, when you cram your schedule, you're not productive. You're actually exhausted. Because actually managing multiple things in a day in itself is exhausting. The truth is that real productivity shouldn't feel busy. Real productivity feels quiet, it feels calm, it feels deep. It's one meaningful thing that you're working on, done well, that moves the needle forward. So if you want to be more productive, I want to give you my system. I call the one thing productivity system. And the first step is you start with one outcome that matters the most to you. Ask yourself, what is the one thing that if I completed in the next 30 to 90 days, it would transform my business? It would really level it up, it would really solve a big problem that I'm facing. The second step is you build your entire schedule around that thing. Block 90 minutes in your schedule for deep work. These are deep work sessions that you do daily. And you could do five of these sessions a week at a minimum, I would say. And that will actually make a whole lot of difference in your progress. Those 90 minute blocks of deep work, of only focusing on that one thing that One challenge, third step, super important. Ruthlessly cut everything else. You cannot focus and prioritize something and get something done. If you don't remove things, you have to say no to other side projects, other shiny ideas, optional meetings, new commitments, all that kind of stuff. Anything that is going to take you away from this priority is going to detract you and detract from your progress. Listen, I'm the first to say that this is the hardest step, saying no to everything else. I get ideas all the time, great opportunities, great products. I can create opportunities to make more money, get more customers. But I know that if I chase these side quests, it's going to distract me and it's going to make my main thing, which is this podcast, less impactful and my progress will be impacted. Here is the math. Here is the reality, Here is the truth. I'm just going to give it to you on a silver platter. When somebody is focused and only working on one thing, they're incredibly dangerous. You cannot compete with somebody like that. If you are doing multiple things, if you are splitting your attention, your time, your resources on several things at one time, this person that is in your space, your competitor, is just focused and doing one thing. They're going to beat you every day of the week because that's all they do. And that's why step four is so important. You got to protect your focus like it's money. Why? Because it is. In fact, I believe that your time is more valuable than money because you can't make more time. Like we mentioned, 4,000 weeks is all we get. And step five, embrace unfinished tasks. One of the things I learned in this book, 4,000 weeks, Oliver Berkman says that you will die with things undone, things unfulfilled. Just accept it. That's the human condition. Do the things that matter and leave the rest. This is not theory, guys. This has actually been the secret to every major success and leap in my life. When you focus, you get results. My first career was a teacher. I was an educator for over a decade, and I focused on that. I got certifications. I became a master at teacher training at management, and that's all I worked on. That's all I studied, that's all I did. And at age 25, I became the chair of the department of the university I was working at. I was one of the youngest chairs ever. And I managed 30 people twice my age. And that's the power of focus. When I left my career in teaching, I started a podcast. This podcast, the $100 NBA Show, I focused on that I fired all my clients. I only worked on making the best podcast possible. Back in 2014 is when we started. And then in six months we won Best of Apple, which is one of the best podcasts, but it's awarded to about 12 podcasts a year. We won it the same year as Serial and Startup and the Tim Ferriss show. And the reason why we were successful is because all we focused on is this one thing. We gotta make an incredible show. When Nicole and I built Webinar Ninja, our software company, we spent 10 years focusing on building a great product, a great ethos and customer service culture. And after 10 years of building so much value, we got acquired, we got to sell the company and it changed our life. Now I'm doing the same thing. All I'm focusing on is helping people start grow and scale their business with our media, with our podcasts, with our videos. I'm just putting out there everything I know in the best way I can. This is all that matters to me. Every time you choose one thing and give it your serious attention, everything changes. Focus is your advantage. If you take anything away from today's lesson, it's you don't need to do more to be more productive, you actually need to do less. You need to focus so that you can create better products, better content, better work, better. Productivity is not about squeezing as much as possible into your day. It's about protecting your most valuable asset, which is time to do your best work. Stop trying to complete the entire to do list when you know 80% of it are non essential things. Start choosing the few things that actually help you achieve the one goal you need to achieve. In this season, in this quarter, in this month, in this year, if this episode has helped you share with someone that you know is feeling overwhelmed, feels like they're never productive enough, you know who I'm talking about. Reach out to them, let them know you're thinking of them and send them this episode. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. You become more productive the moment you start accepting the truth that you'll never get everything done. So you must choose what you want to get done so you can get ahead. When you master that, you stop drowning in tasks and you start moving with intention. You start saying no by default and you only say yes to things that are essential to you and your goals. And you're going to watch your productivity just go through the roof. These practices, these things that I've shared with you today have changed my life. And hopefully they'll do the same for you. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to to this podcast, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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