Momentum Podcast: 60

Double Your Productivity In Two Weeks

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

This is one of my most effective coaching tactics when working with a new client. The challenge that almost every one of us has is that we are doing entirely too much tactical work. Most of us know it. We feel the drag of doing far too much each day that doesn't feel productive or like our highest and best use.

The problem is for most of us that drag has been there for months if not years and we've done very little about it. Is difficult to wake ourselves up, and start offloading what we don't need to do. Most of us subconsciously just start going as fast as we can and before we know what we end up with part of our time giving us much less value than it should.

We all know who pays in the scenarios. Our families and our teams. Our families don't get the best of us because we are usually pushing ourselves too hard. Our teams don't get the best of us because we are doing too much tactical work we should have offloaded to them so they could help the company grow.

This is a tactic entrepreneurs for the last 20 years that has worked 100% of the time that someone has tried it. This successfully increases awareness, shows you exactly how to offload what you should not be doing, and will almost immediately show you how much more you can be getting out of your time.

Full Audio Transcript

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trail blazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so we can bend them, break them, and then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat, because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how.

While the rest of the world clings to average, and strives for the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Thanks for being here with me. I am excited to share this tactic with you. The title of this podcast is, Double Your Productivity in Two Weeks. I want to share with you a strategy that I have used for my entire career. I was so fortunate to find this early on, to find it when I first started. And this is a Peter Drucker strategy. I want to give credit where credit's due, or at least that's where I learned it. And it will change your life.

Now here, I want to share with you an insight that was shared with me. I'm trying to remember how long ago, but years ago from a consultant named, Kirk Dando. And Kirk came into my organization and conducted a 360, and talked to all my leadership, and gave me this very confronting review of how I was seen in my organization and really more importantly, the lack of vision and the lack of where we were going. I brought him in to do one thing, and we ended up doing something completely different. I sat down with Kirk, and he said, "What's the most important thing in the world to you?" I said, "Well, Cadey and my daughters." He said, "If I took your calendar and your bank statement, and I looked at the two of them, would I see that Cadey and your daughters were the most important thing in your world?"

I can remember being knocked back a little by the question, because I immediately, instinctively knew that ... I mean, not instinctively, I just rationally knew that if you looked at both of those places, my bank account and my bank statement to see where I spent money, and my calendar to see where I spent time that I was screwed, that I could not prove that that was a true statement. At the time, I was really burning the candle. I was pushing as hard as I possibly can. I really wasn't taking the right amount of time for my wife, or for my kids. This is the tactic that I used to fix that situation. When I get to the place where I'm overwhelmed, where I get to the place where I really can't see straight, this is the tactic I use.

It's called The Time Study. This is where you really put yourself under the microscope and understand what you're doing in your life and how you're doing it. Here's how it works. For a two-week period, now if you're gonna do this, here's what I say. I say just bite the bullet and go for 14 days. I do this. Every CEO I work with does this. People pay me $36,000 a year as their coach and this is what I tell them to do. This is what I'm telling you to do. It is life changing. You go for a period of two weeks, and in context, which means you carry a sheet of paper around with you that has a time block for each hour, and you write down what you do every hour, for two weeks, 24 hours a day. Here's what will happen. In fact, let me share with you a quick story about some recent feedback I got on this. I normally tell people you do this for two weeks, but after the third day, it's going to push back so hard on you what you've been writing down that you're want to want to start making changes. I don't hold back. You should start making changes. The person who I shared with this most recently was one of my private clients, but directly before that I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Dave Woodward, who's the CMO and I think he's VP of Business Development. I don't really know what his ... Here's what you need to know about Dave. Title doesn't matter with Dave. Dave's a guy at ClickFunnels that is helping Russell grow that company into what will probably be the first privately funded software-as-a service company that hits a billion dollars, like no VC at all.

In a lot of ways, I think they should already be there in valuation. If anybody saw their negative cost of customer acquisition, they make money on every lead they acquire. Sit on that for a little bit. That just shows you what type of a business it is. It's incredible. They are doing so many things right, it's crazy. I've been around a log of fast growth organizations and they're just extraordinary. Dave and I were talking just last week. I felt so excited to be on the phone with him. ClickFunnels has done a lot for us and Russel's done a lot for me and to be able to chat with Dave and help him out. I was going through how I would normally coach an executive at his level or talk to an executive at his level about where the constraints were. About 40 minutes into the call, I said, "Dave, I think I know why we're on the phone." He said, "Why?" "I have this tactic to show it to you. It's a time study."

I explained to him exactly what I explained to you. I'll tell you again. Two weeks, you carry around the paper. You write down every hour exactly what you're doing. You check Facebook, you write it down. You're over to Twitter, you write it down. Even if it's just a couple of minutes, you're writing down everything that you're doing and here's what happened, that was about three days ago. Dave posted a live video on Facebook and he said, "I've been doing this thing called "The Time Study" for three days and I gotta tell you, it's like the most confronting thing I've done and it's just ticking me off." He said, "I got this from Alex Sharpen" and he explained our whole story of being on the phone that I just did to you and it was so gratifying to me because every time I see that, here's what I know. I know that Dave's life's about to completely and totally, irrevocably change because his productivity has gone up just through the awareness that he already has from three days. I guarantee you he would agree.

His awareness of where he's truly spending his time, where he's putting the most valuable currency any one of us have, is going up. As he does this for the next two weeks, whoever he was two weeks ago ceases to exist because the level of awareness you create and the reality that stares back in you in the face ... I remember with Kirk that when I did The Time Study, after I left his office, and by the way I was having my executives do time studies, I just hadn't done one in forever. I wasn't even doing what I tell people to do at that point, so Kirk really saved me. The Time Study I did for the next two weeks, the first three days I realized I had built my life, 'cause we create our lives as entrepreneurs. We decide what we're gonna do. We decide how we're gonna do it. We decide how much time we're gonna spend. That's why we do this, so I created this life where I had zero time with my family and within three days I started changing things. I couldn't keep it the same.

It will be the same for you because here's what you realize. Especially someone like me, I've consulted with hundreds of hyper-fast growth companies. I'm working with several right now that are just exploding and will continue to explode. Oh, gosh, which is just so freaking cool. We just starting working with Brandon and Kaelin Poulin, who own LadyBoss, which is like ... Ah. I get emotional when I talking about them. They have over 100,000 clients that they're helping with weight loss, and they have this massive movement where people are getting in shape. They're eating better foods. They're moving. They're following Kaelin everywhere.

The two of 'em just had an event recently where their core, real, I guess their highest advocates, like the people who really want to be around them, they attended this conference. They told us when I spoke to them, it was just so exciting to hear how excited they were about the effect they were creating in the world. It was so energizing to here how excited they are about how they're growing this. Here's what I know, as I work with them for the next couple of weeks, 'cause right now, they're going through his process and they're donna do The Time Study. Here's what I know, it will change everything at LadyBoss. That company is incredible right now, but I guarantee you the impact those two are gonna make is gonna go haywire, whether I was involved with 'em or not, just this tool will do it, like it will for you.

You don't need me. You don't need me. I help in a tremendous way, especially for people who are growing a business that's over a million and up. ClickFunnels is around 50, 60 million. I can make this process a lot faster. I can give insight. I can share a lot of other things, but for you, if you just went through this process, by day three, you're donna be saying, "Man, I gotta change things." In a two-week period, here's what you do. You go through all of it and you mark what was it that I did here? Was it strategic? Strategic is what you should be doing. You can feel it in your heart, but if you want a little bit more, and you know what I'm talking about ... But, if you want a little bit more of a definition, it's the stuff that you really should do. It's, I should do this podcast. I should not pay someone to do this podcast right now. That's strategic.

I should conduct my once-a-week calls with my coaching groups, the groups that I get together with in person. I should do that. When we sell a day of my time. Our day rate is $25,000 right now. When we sell a day of my time, I should do that. There's not anyone else we can get to go into a room that can produce $25,000, but more importantly, that also ends up in a much larger client for us. The larger the client, the more we help and the more we help, the more our revenue is. We've set up our system so we scale with our clients.

When we get a client that goes through this, their business explodes and to finish up the plan I was making, Brandon and Kaelin, oh man. I think that they are so ... I've worked with so many entrepreneurs and they are truly one of a kind. They're in their mid-20's. I've got so many millennials that are in their mid-20's running multi-million dollar businesses, but here's what's interesting, they're businesses that are making incredible impacts, like saving other people's businesses, making other people money and getting them in shape, like Brandon and Kaelin.

Here's what I know is when CEO or an executive in a business like that, or Dave Woodward at ClickFunnels goes through a Time Study, the impact of the company goes up. Here's why I'm sharing this with you. This is the stuff I get paid for, but here's why I'm giving it to you because I know if you're listening to me, you're probably a contribution-based entrepreneur. I look at ClickFunnels and you walk into that building and there's just hundreds of gold records lined up and those are seven-figure funnels. That means that every one of those records represents a million dollar funnel. Do you know how many businesses gross a million dollars? Three percent in a year. Three percent. Russell's coached hundreds of people to build a million dollar funnel.

If you're not using ClickFunnels, why not? When you look at Dave going through this, here's what I know about that company. It's going to explode. It's gonna do even more. It's gonna have even a bigger fan base and more people using it. It's gonna get even more consistent because this process at the executive level changes the entire business. If you're an entrepreneur, this process for you, changes your entire life, so I'm excited for you 'cause here's all you have to do for the next two weeks. Take this as a challenge for me to write down what you're doing every hour for the next two weeks, total it all up, and you're going to very quickly see the totals. You're going to write down how much of your time is strategic, how much of your time is tactical, how much of your time is something else and how much of your time is family time or self care. Something else is when you're using the restroom, but when you're reading, if that's self-care for you, that's self-care.

Strategic is when you're doing it, like I just explained. Tactical is when someone entirely different could do it. Tactical is when you could get help with it. You've gotta make that decision. Again, this is one of those feelings, but people ask me, "Is answering emails strategic or tactical?" Well, I can tell you that for years I've known that email is about 90% tactical and then 10% strategic. Can someone else do that for you? Is answering every Messenger message strategic or tactical? Well, depending on what's coming in to your Messenger, it's hard to look at it as strategic, so maybe somebody can help you with that.

Today, for people like us who want to grow their impact, grow a team, grow a business, there is more resource available to help you with tactical than there ever has been before. When I started running businesses, we barely had the Internet. I was one of the first consulting companies of my kind to have a website on the Internet. If you go look it up on the Wayback Machine, it's embarrassing, but today, on tap, we have tactical help around the world at pretty much you name the rate you want to pay and the service level you want to get, and it's just there. Everyone of us who does one of these time studies, can change everything in our lives. At the end of the two weeks, you're gonna have totals.

Here's what happens. That first time study where you have strategic, tactical, other, self-care and time with family, when you have all of that together, then you can do this again the last two weeks of the next 90 days. If you do this four times in a year, first, you're gonna double your productivity every two weeks. You let me know if it happened or not. Let me know if it worked because I challenge you to double your productivity in the next two weeks by doing this and then what will also happen is at the end of doing this, the last two weeks for every ninety-day period of the year, is you're going to have what will be the most successful and most growth-filled year you've ever had in your life.

Here's my challenge. Next two weeks do your Time Study, total 'em up and then let me know on social media how it went. This is one of those things that if you do this, you will not recognize who you are in 90 days.

Thanks for being here with me. I look forward to sharing again with you tomorrow.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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