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I'm going to show you how to make time for everything. I'm talking work, family, your health, your hobbies, all of it. And I'm not talking about generic productivity advice. Those other guys can talk about that. I own and run multiple businesses that generate over a hundred million dollars a year. And I still train for Ironmans, travel the world with my kids, have time for date night with my wife every week, and have time to go snowboarding anytime I want. And I'm not special. I just figured out a system that, that allows me to do that. So today I'm gonna show you why you feel like you don't have enough time and the exact frameworks to fit anything and everything into your calendar. But first, we have to start with the lie that you've been telling yourself your entire career. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My bestselling book, Buy Back youk Time Is out. Now grab a buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. Point number one, Work life balance is bull. Everyone's been told the answer is work life balance. Hey man, you gotta have balance, balance everything. Balance by definition means your work and your life are opposites. In that scenario, if you do one, the other one loses. And if you do this one, this one loses. I don't think there's a work life balance. It's work life integration. The healthy you are, the better you're at at your job. The more present you are with your family, the more creative you can be when you work. Cause you're not thinking about all the you gotta fix later. Your hobbies refresh you, keep you energized. It sharpens your thinking. I believe the best strategy is just to be more diligent on the people you decide to build with. Then when you hang and you talk with them, they light you up. You create. I mean, it's why I go to the gym with my creative director, Sam. I go on hikes with my CEO Todd. I do all my one on one meetings on scooters. Integrated, not separate. If I have to sit there at a computer on a zoom call because I'm in a zoom call moment and I gotta be in my office, that would drive me nuts. Instead, if I'm on vacation and I need to do some calls, I go and I sit In a place that lights me up, that makes me feel better. Everything reinforces everything. When you design it that way, it doesn't become a sacrifice because it's just who you are. A lot of people think they gotta work to then have fun. What if fun was just integrated into your work? Could you allow yourself to do that? I'm just, just curious. Stop asking the question, how do I balance it all? And start asking yourself, how do I design a life where it just all fits? The reason most people can't do this is you think you run your calendar, but you don't. Your calendar runs you. So spending your best hours on low value tasks, that doesn't do anything. And then wondering why your life hasn't moved forward, that's the problem. It's not a time problem, it's a priority problem. It's what you decide to put in your calendar or it's not even there. And then you just allow anybody to just take it from you. We can't make time, but we can allocate it. So how do you actually take back control of your life? Which brings me to point 2. Buy back your time. I know you hear buy and you think money and you say, I don't have any money. Hear me out. The buyback principle. And I wrote a whole book on this. It's because most people are stuck working 60, 70 hours a week. No time for their family, their health. They're doing everything themselves. At the end of the day, they're feeling super depleted and overwhelmed. There's 12 hours of busy work and they can't point to one thing that actually moved the needle. Constantly doing this loop, not thinking, reacting to every decision from a depleted brain. The core idea that I invite you to consider is stop spending time on work that drains you. Buy it back, and then reinvest it in the things only you can do. I remember a while ago I was on a coaching call with this woman named Andrea. She runs an AI automation. And the truth was, is I caught her answering all her emails up until midnight. And she was completely overwhelmed. She had no time for anything else other than the business. She even admitted. And I said to her, you know better because you work with me, you've read my book, and you're still holding yourself back from giving up control. So I challenged her. I'm giving you 30 days to bring in somebody to help you with your email so that you can get back to doing the things for you. Integrate the life. Not only did she get back 20 hours in a week almost immediately, but Revenue went up. Why? Because she was no longer making the decision for what email she replied to, what calendar event she said yes to, what things she put off. It turns out the only thing she couldn't afford was not to do it. Think of it this way. The most expensive thing that you pay for is not doing the thing that makes you the most money. If you know you make the most money on a sales call and you spent eight hours today in your inbox or creating proposals that somebody else could do, you should have spent more time prospecting and doing sales calls. So how do we actually buy back our time? This is where I need you to go. Grab a pen for this one. The first thing is we gotta calculate what's called your buyback rate. Essentially what you do is you take your annual pay, whatever that amount is, and if you have a business, it's whatever you pay yourself. But, you know, like the tax stuff, put that in there too. Then you divide it by 2000, because for most people, that's the amount of hours when you take weekends and holidays out of it that you're gonna work. So I need to know what is your effective hourly rate? How much money do you generate per hour? Now, we divide that number by four to get what's called your buyback rate, because that's the amount of money you should be willing to spend to have somebody else do a task so that you don't have to do anymore, because then you get a four times return on your investment. See, because we divided by four. So anything you could pay anybody to do at $12.50 or lower is a great trade. This could range from anything from having somebody process your email, to cleaning your house, to taking care of the yard work, to putting furniture together you just bought online, to shopping for you to running errands. There's so much things. My favorite part about this is you're creating opportunities for other people. So now that you know what your time's worth, we need to audit our calendar. And I call it the Time and Energy audit. So what I want you to do is go through your calendar for two weeks and track every 15 minutes what you did with your time. Most people don't do this and don't realize just that exercise alone is going to bring to light where you're wasting time. Have you ever, like opened up a browser to go do something productive, and next thing you know you started typing F, A, C, E and then enter and you're on Facebook and then kind of have this like lapse of time and you wake up two hours later and you're like, how did I just spend two hours on Facebook? You'd have to write it down and then you'd have to be honest with yourself. But once you got all those tasks, what I want you to do is highlight in green the things that light you up, that you love to do, and then red things that suck your energy. And then for each one of them, write $1 sign or $4 signs. A $1 sign is your buyback rate. A $4 sign is what you make per hour or more. So now all of a sudden, I've got everything that takes my energy, that's a one or two dollar signing cost to pay somebody else to do. And I put that in a bucket. The third step, pick some of that and hand it off to somebody else. Pick the lowest value stuff, the stuff that you hate doing anyway, and I dare you, a double dog dare you to give it to somebody else. I don't care if it's an intern, I don't care if it's your kids. I don't care if you ask for help from family members. I'm challenging you to put yourself first so that you can get that time back, so that you can go invest in yourself to be more for the people you love the most. And if you don't know where to start, just look at the things that are in red and have a low dollar amount. Those are the easiest ones to hand off because you don't really care about them, you don't want to do them in the first place, and they wouldn't cost you a lot to learn how to delegate and manage other people. By the way, if you want to make this even easier, I have a whole workbook you can use to follow through for the rest of this video. Just go on Instagram and message me the word YouTube workbook and I'll send you the link right over so you can download it. And along with the pre built templates, we're going to talk about everything in the rest of this video. So now that you've bought back your time from low leverage tasks you didn't want to do in the first place, let's design your whole calendar from scratch in a way that's super fun. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martel Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week, find it@martell method.com. which brings us to point number three, the preloaded year. Now, I learned this from my buddy Taki Moore. He's kind of like a genius in the coaching space. A big philosophy he has is we gotta put the big stuff in first. Whereas my buddy Brad says we have to design the life plan before the business plan. See, most people end up letting the other stuff get in their calendar first. We wanna put the things that are important to you at the end of the day. If you think about it, if you only had five years left to live, what would you want to do with your time? Who would you want to spend it with? What projects would you hope to get done? What would you prioritize and what would just, like, not even register that for some reason are still there today? That's what we put in first. And I call it the preloaded year, because essentially, for the next 12 months, we're preloading our year. I do this exercise at the end of every year, and it's how my wife and I get all this stuff in place and never miss a beat. So before we can even plan your week or your day, we have to zoom out, look at our year, and start there. I know this can sound like super planny and structured, but here's the reality. I don't want to miss things that are important to me. I remember a few years ago, I show up at my dad's house to just say hi. I'm there with my buddy, we're going mountain biking, and at the end of the visit, I'm leaving, and his wife says to me, did you say happy birthday to your dad? I turned red. I was embarrassed. I couldn't believe I forgot my dad's birthday. Now, in the preloaded year, all the people in my family, our birthdays are highlighted and celebrated and written about because I never want to forget it ever again. Here's how I would recommend you think about it. Bank accounts and calendars. If you show me those two things, I will show you your priorities. What we do now is we grab our year and we look at the next 12 months. First thing, we got to put the big rocks in. Have you ever seen that diagram of, like, a jar and the big rocks and the sand and the pebbles? If you start by putting the sand and the pebbles in the bigger rocks, then there's no room for the big stuff. So I actually reverse it and I put the big rocks in first. I'm talking family events, birthdays, anniversaries, trips, 3 to 5, business events that drive real revenue and results. Put the personal stuff in there. Quarterly retreats with my wife, getaways, weekly date nights. Those are all the important stuff. Second, we batch the reoccurring commitments. We put those in as well. So we think about, like, client check ins, quarterly reviews, team meetings, strategic thinking. Those blocks have to be in there because we know if we do them, we feel better. Third, bucket of things that we add are maintenance. Everything you need to recover so that you don't crash. Because most people spend more time trying to fix problems that they created themselves that they knew would be a problem because they didn't plan. So, for example, I used to go on vacation before hosting these massive, really cool client events. And I was shitty on vacation. All I did was said, oh, let's go on vacation after the event. Poof. Magically, it all changed. It was like the right way to sequence it. Crazy. You can look at it with your family and you could see like, oh, we have way too many things this month and we have nothing there. Let's move things around. The second half of the year is open. What do we want to do? Travel to a new country? I don't know. But you get to design it. The ultimate sign of intelligence is a life designed with intention. So now that the big rocks are in there and other meaty rocks and personal, professional stuff, now we gotta zoom in and actually design how the week looks. Which brings us to point 4. Build your perfect week. Most people start each week blank, and then the rest of the world sends them emails. I call these public requests and to do lists added to your time, and then it fills in your week. It could be your boss, it could. It could be a client, it could be literally a friend. Last minute, no planning, just like, hey, do you got a minute? You got a second? You got a thing? That's not how you want to do it. What you want to do instead is design a perfect week. That if you executed exactly what was on there, you would walk away feeling energized and productive and feel like you made some real investments. Because sometimes we got to make some investments in our relationships, in our health, so that we don't have problems we got to fix in the future. It's like a building. If I don't improve or tweak or change things in 10 years, that building is going to look run down. So that's why most building managers put 10% of their budget aside to tweak, to improve, to make sure that in 10 years that building is better than it was 10 years prior. So what we want to do is be proactive versus reactive. We want to decide how your time gets spent before anyone else does. Thirteen years ago, I had a gear. It was called getting done. I was running on pure frenetic energy. It was my superpower, my adhd. I would just like ba, ba, ba, go, go, go, 100 hour. That was who I was. And what happened was that not only did my body completely shut down, but my mind shut down. I had adrenal fatigue. It was too much. And honestly, I just didn't know how to be another way. People around me couldn't stand me. And I don't blame them. I wasn't a good brother. I wasn't a good person to be in a relationship with. I wasn't even a good friend. Massive pain forced me to reevaluate the way I was approaching it. So that's where I had to create this concept of a perfect week. Where, yes, I could get everything done, but I also had the other stuff in there so that I was more of me for the people I cared about. The truth is, is you just can't do more if you don't have more energy. So we don't manage time, we manage our energy. And the perfect week is how we build this. So again, follow along in the workbook, but there is only five things you want to consider first off, the big rocks go in first. The same way we thought about the preloaded year. You know, what goes in there we got to do on a weekly basis. So this is where for me, workouts, family time, deep work, creative blocks, strategic thinking, things that usually get the worst time of day from you. Late nights trying to catch up. Those go in first because you got to put them in so that you're fresh doing the work. The second thing is you got to optimize for energy. I remember Jeff Bezos said this. He says, when I wake up, I know I only have one to two big decisions I got to make that day. And I try to do them first thing in the morning when my mind is fresh and he loads up all the reports and he reads up on the news and he has full context. He meets with his team and he makes those decisions. If you wait until you're absolutely toast at 4 or 5pm end of your day to make decisions that could cost you millions of dollars, you're doing it backwards. For me, I know my morning is like where I do my best work. So that's where like the deep creative thinking, deep work decisions, those go in the morning, the end of my day is left for things that like, honestly, it's just like admin and processes information. It's like autopilot type stuff. And what's unique is that I ramp up and I shut down as a process. And at the end of my workday I have a document where I dump all the open loops. Anything that came up that I didn't get a chance to work on in that document that is linked to my morning routine when I start my day. So that way when I go to bed, I don't toss and turn thinking about the things I gotta work on next day. Cause I already wrote them down. Most people are in their head because they don't write things down. And what happens is when they're at work, they wish they were at home. And when they're at home, they wish they're at work. I would say be where your feet are. And then the third thing we got to do is we got to eliminate bleed time. Bleed time is when meetings that were supposed to be 15 minutes go to 30 or a 60 minute window allocated for a meeting that could have been done in 20. I will challenge you to actually cut off 15 minutes from all your meetings. If it's your meeting, try it. If you got a 45 minute reoccurring meeting, try doing it in 30. If you got an hour, do it in 45. You will notice that people will come prepared, ready to go. A lot of the chatter that kind of goes nowhere is, it's just kind of filler, conversation goes away. That alone would just add so much productivity to your life. And number four, we got to block the hobbies. For me, it's working out. It's physical activity. Because I always say exhaust the body, tame the mind. My rule is, is I've never missed working out two days in a row. One day I'm traveling, that's fine. Two days no go. If I got to a third day, it's a sit down. Hey everybody, I need to go work out. Just get your sweat on. It could be as simple as putting on a weighted vest and going to getting workout on. And the fifth strategy is to use net time. Okay. I learned this from Tony Robbins. It stands for no extra time, meaning there's certain things that you could do and you can put them together. So for example, if you use slack and you gotta reply to a bunch of people, how about you go in the hot tub and then you sit on slack in the hot tub. Some people are like, oh, then you're not really where you're at. You know what? When I'm sitting in my hot tub looking over my beautiful view, I am where I'm at and I feel productive. It feels like a vacation. You could do your meetings while you're walking, get a workout in. You could listen to an audiobook at the gym or while you're driving. There are ways that you can things together where both get done and it takes nothing out of your calendar. So the perfect week is your template for success. So now that we got the year preloaded, we've got the week design time is bought back. Now let's tie it all together before we get back to this episode. If you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you get a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Let's get back to the episode point number five, your new identity. See, most people think that it's what they do that defines their value. And if everything in this video comes down to one identity shift, it's this. The old one is, I'm valuable because I work hard. The new one that I would invite you to consider is I'm valuable because I make good decisions. Having a clear brain and a well designed system equals good decisions. Most people have a hard time because they don't have a process. And good decisions compound faster than hustle. Everybody wants to talk about hustle, hustle, hustle, work harder. It's not about working harder. It's saying, how effective was I in that time? So to bring this back full circle, you're not being run by your calendar anymore. You're running it. It's by design, not by default. The identity part really got imprinted by one of my early mentors. I remember I was finally making money, I was working hard, and I asked him to look at my calendar and give me some feedback. And he looked at my calendar and he said something crazy. He says, you look like you're working like a $50,000 a year employee, not a CEO. That one hit me because I thought I was being effective. And he's like, every hour is just filled with execution. There's zero space for thinking, deciding, leading. And that was the moment that I had to think about it and shift out of it, that I'm no longer a doer. I have to become a director. So you can get stuck on this hamster wheel of doing, doing, doing. And it's intoxicating and it's addictive and it feels, feels productive. But doing more means doing the things that only you can do. If you followed along and did the exercise. Pull up your preloaded year and your perfect week. Now look at your calendar from last year and look at the old weeks. Look at what they used to look like. Put them side by side. If they don't look completely different, then you have to upgrade your identity. Does the new one reflect the life you actually want? Your goals, your path you want to follow? If yes, you just designed your future. Now we got to protect it. Here's the big idea that I hope will really resonate with everybody, is that if you're truly progressing in life, your calendar should be 80% different than it is today, in six months. It all depends how fast you want to grow, how much you want to scale. If you're doing that, that is a pure fact. I'm redesigning my calendar every three months right now because of the pace of change and growth. I just gave you the system that I use to do everything I want in the time that I've got. And the truth is, you don't need more time. You need to stop filling it with things that don't require you. That 10.0 version of yourself that isn't working harder, it's choosing to work better. So leave a comment below and let me know what's the one thing that you would do with an extra 10 hours a week? If somebody just said, poof, you got extra 10 hours a week, didn't cost anything, what would you do with that then? Remember, if you want my buy back your time workbook, just go find me on Instagram and message me the word YouTube workbook and I'll send it right over for free. Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom, and build their empire.