How to Make Time for Everything (Seriously) | Ep. 337

If you are always busy, but you never achieve your goals, do you really have a productivity problem? Or do you have a priority problem? I used to work 16-hour days and I would feel exhausted like I had nothing done. And now I run a business doing multiple hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And I have learned exactly how to plan my day so that I make time for the most important things. So in this video, I'm breaking down the six principles the top 1% used to manage their time so that you can achieve your goals. Stop maximizing time. I want to explain what a lot of people get wrong about productivity. Everybody is trying to maximize their time. The top 1% of people are actually doing the opposite. And I'll be honest, this used to be me. A lot of people think that they need to maximize their productivity. Like, couldn't the day be twice as long? Like, I wish, I just don't have enough hours. It's the wrong way to think about it. I literally had a conversation recently with a founder and I said, at some point, you have to make the switch where your judgment is more important to the company than your work ethic. And that is the only way to scale a company, to scale a team, et cetera. Training for judgment is very different than training for work ethic. If you train for work ethic, then you maximize how many hours you can spend working. You sleep less, you work weekends, you grind harder, like you just more and more and more of all these things. If you train for judgment, you do the opposite. How do you maximize how good of a state you are in to make decisions? Are you fed? Are you rested? Did you work out? Because when you're exhausted, you make decisions. And so it's really recognizing that the top 1%, they realize that their brains and their decision making is what they're getting paid for it's how they get leverage if you can make a few good decisions that will go so much further than like one week two weeks months of work and so you can't just look at time in relation to your business you actually have to look at a relation to the whole system because if you don't prioritize rest recovery dampening the noise in the other pieces of your life then your decision making is going to tank And so a lot of people, for example, when they're starting off in business, you'll see like a lot of people who are struggling. They have crazy personal lives and like there's so much chaos going on. Whereas if you look at the top 1%, it's like they have this way of creating almost like a cushion, like a cocoon. I remember Jensen Huang talked about, he's like, I could not do this without the support of my family. And people ask him like, well, why is that? He's like, they've just been able to keep the noise low. I think that's really important because when you're just do, do, do, production, like it's just grind, grind, grind. It's like it's not really that important because like you are noise. So it's like noise around you is irrelevant because you're in the noise all day, baby. But when you're trying to be like the top one percent and make great decisions that are going to provide you with leverage, you actually need to kind of cushion yourself from that noise. And so this is the biggest, I would say, like fallacy of understanding how to get the top one percent. And I actually do think that kind of have to go through the point where you are grinding and putting in a lot of work and hustle. I don't know if you can skip that because you don't learn good decision making until you've been in situations where you had to learn that. So if you keep maximizing, you will stay busy, but you will also be exhausted and stuck because you will be the hardest worker who never breaks through to the next level. At some point, you have to realize it's not about maximizing. It's about optimizing. And if you optimize, then you'll be in the right state to build what only the 1% of people can build. That's the thing. Like when you look at the top 1% of people in the world, would you think that their ability to work long hours or their ability to make good decisions is more important? It's a real question you have to ask. And I will say, as somebody who identifies with working long hours and working very hard, this is like the hardest switch that I've had to make. It's like totally core to my identity. And I have a huge ego around how much I can work. And I'm like totally trying to let it go because I'm like, I need to focus on decision making because I see based on how big my company has gotten that my decisions are more important than my work ethic right now. And I will say work ethic looks different. I am working very hard all day to optimize for these decisions and making the right ones. It's just a different type of training, like I explained. The second thing is treat your calendar as strategy. My productivity as a CEO went through the roof when I realized that my thinking time is actually more important than my doing time. A lot of people can get to really close to the top 1% off of hustle and maybe the bottom of the 1%, but there's no way that you go further than that that way. And I don't know anybody who does. At some point, you have to make this switch. And like that has been this year for me. I do less now than I ever have. And it has been very hard for me personally because, like I said, I identify with working hard. But I saw that this was so much more beneficial for my business. Now, why is that? Because if you have Titanic in a rowboat, you can row really hard and like get a lot further in the rowboat by rowing. But like you don't row the Titanic. And in fact, if you tried to, it would be such an immense effort. It's like, that's not even a thing. We need a whole system to row this thing. So what does that mean about business? The bigger your business gets, the more important it is that you pay attention to the strategy. Because if you pick the wrong strategy for the Titanic and you go in the wrong direction, you're going to hit a iceberg. If you pick the wrong strategy for robo, not a big deal because you've got to get like five people to change. Getting 500 people to change versus getting five people to change. Just common sense. And so at some point, what you realize is doing more and having a busier calendar actually makes you worse at your job, not better when you get bigger. Because you make worse decisions when you're tired, stressed, hungry, overworked. And the truth is that every level of business, you have to do less so you can open up space for what matters. And there is a switch where it makes sense, where you have to focus on the strategy because the machine has gotten so big that taking a reverse step is so much more taxing on resources that it doesn't make sense to make the wrong step. And so you have to spend more time thinking thinking about the business thinking about alternatives talking to people networking understanding what happening look at the market look at this So you want to become better at predicting what going to happen next in the environment in the market in the economy in your business So then you don have to pivot the Titanic Now second to this what would create terrible thinking Like what kind of environment would I need for my thinking to just be like low quality? I would be super busy. I would be super stressed. I would have back to back to back to back to back meetings all day. What you see is a lot of people who are not the top 1%, they treat their calendar like a to-do list rather than a strategy document. And they think that time management is like, how do I fit in more? But in actuality, it's how you cut more out. So you only do the things that only you can do. Because think about the amount of times you've made decisions, you were tired, stressed in back-to-back meetings, and you're just like, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Agree. Approved. And then you have to go back and be like, I didn't realize this, or I didn't know this. Why didn't you realize it? Why didn't you know it? Because you're only operating with like 10% capacity. So when they said it to you, you weren't even thinking about it. You were thinking about the fact that it's a pee, you've got to eat, you're exhausted, and you have this next meeting impending in five minutes, and you're going to be late to it, and you haven't prepped yet. Your calendar should be a reflection of the priorities of your business, not the other way around. If your calendar is not strategic, and it doesn't have the main priorities that will move your business forward in it, you are working for other people, not for yourself. You cannot let other people dictate what goes on your calendar. You have to say, these are the two things that will move my business forward this year. They will comprise most of my calendar, nothing else. And if it can't survive without that, well, then it can't grow. If your business needs you to do all these other things and you don't have time to do the things that will grow it, well, then you have built yourself a job, not a business. So what do you want to do? All right. What is your takeaway here? Add the priorities into your calendar before you schedule anything else. Schedule the priorities of your business, your personal time, when you need to take a break, when you sleep, maybe you take a lunch break. Book your doctor's appointments, damn it. Get your thinking time in there. Put your time in that you're going to be making decisions. And most importantly, put the priorities first. Then you have time left over for whatever other people throw your way that you deem is a priority to put on your calendar. And by the way, if you want more strategies like this delivered every week to your inbox, I just launched Layla's Letters. I know it's super cheesy, but you're going to remember it. You're not going to forget. Which are my unfiltered, unedited memos that I actually send to my team. Like I slack them these things. And I've been doing it for years, every single week. And you can grab them in the link in the description. Now, once your calendar is strategic, it's not just like a dumping ground for all the tasks that you've decided you need to do, other people have decided you need to do. You need to protect what goes into it because one bad habit can destroy a lot of stuff. So what do you need to do? Okay, this principle is you want to go on a decision diet. Everyone says that you should delegate, but most people do not understand why because your brain can only make so many good decisions a day. You only have so much cognitive power and research shows that the more low value decisions you're making, the worse your high stakes decisions are. So think about it like this. When you're in the gym, there's like a phrase that people use called junk sets, junk volume. It's like, well, you don't want to be doing a ton of junk volume. What's that mean? It's like when somebody goes to gym and they do so much warming up that by the time they get to their main set, they can't because they're exhausted. I remember I had a coach once and I was like, I don't know why I'm never able to hit that deadlift. I was trying to deadlift like, I think it was like 400 for something. And he was like, you can't because you use so much junk volume to warm your shit up. A lot of people make junk sets decisions. It's like they have junk decisions. And I used to do that. In the past couple of years, I have eliminated dozens and dozens of meetings and operational responsibilities and decisions because I realized that I was doing that. I was like, oh, I shouldn't be making this decision. And I was like, oh my God, these decisions don't matter or at least they matter, but not to me. I am not able to make the most important decisions because I'm wasting my time making these small ones. And I realized the only thing I should be doing is setting the vision, allocating resources, leading leaders. Everything else somebody else should do. I know you've heard about delegation before, but this is what most people get wrong about it. People think delegation is about saving time. It's not. It's about preserving judgment and bandwidth. And this is where most leaders fail. If you delegate something and you still have to think about it, did you really delegate it? No. Like if you still have to think about it, is it true delegation? There were times when I first had a business where I thought delegating was like, okay, I'm going to meet you in the morning and we give you a list of stuff to do. And then we meet in the afternoon and you're going to tell me everything you did. And I'm going to think about it all day. Did you do it right? Are you doing it right? Did you say it right? No, it's still a mental burden. So this is when you delegate tasks rather than authority. You have to delegate authority to people. If they can't make decisions in their role, then what are they really doing? they're just a task do it. They're your hands. Who wants to be your hands? There's only a few roles you need like that in the business. Everything else, you need people to be able to make some decisions. And so if you still have the thing on your mind, delegating does not give you bandwidth. You have to let somebody else think about the problem and run with it. And if you are always the one thinking about all the problems in all the operations of your business, you can't be the architect of your business. If you aren't solving the problems that will grow your business, who is? Can't delegate that. And that's kind of scary. Because if you aren't doing that, then what's the future of your business look like? Now, I will say this. For beginners, you don't want to delegate too early. You want to delegate when you have the right people in place and the right process in place. Because if you're only delegating tasks and not true authority and decision making, you're still stretching your cognitive load. And you want to avoid doing that. And so you want to make sure that you have the right people that you trust can make decisions. Some of this you don't find out unless you let them make the damn decision. So like you got to trust people. But at the same time, sometimes, you know, you're like, yeah, not really going to use the noggin over there. And so make sure when you hire people, if I gave them this project and these decisions, would I trust that they would make them? It's not just about taking tasks off your plate. It's about judgment. So you've protected your decision making. Now you need to eliminate the thing that fragments it. The next principle is batch your days. OK, the number one source of exhaustion amongst leaders is literally just switching between things. If you look at the job description of a leader they have tons of things on their job description Why is that Because they oversee a lot of things which means they have to constantly switch between tasks I was the queen of this I have been the queen of a lot of things that I don do anymore But at some point you got to look back and be like do I want to be the queen of this And I was like, yeah, no, no, I don't want to be the queen of switching between tasks. Two years ago was when I really started doing this. And I will say that this year has been a huge switch for me in going from operator to architect of my business. And so I have gotten ruthless with my batching, meaning instead of doing a bunch of different tasks, I spend my time focusing on the few things that matters, and my business has grown more in this last year than it ever has. Why do I do this? To be more efficient. I batch my tasks or projects by days. So I have themed days. For example, today, you see me on camera. I have a filming day today. The theme of today is like filming. What did I do this morning? I actually, well, I'm writing a book. And so I started by writing the book. It gets me into content mode. Then I go, I do hair and makeup, then I'm going to film, and then it's like I'll do something else. I batched some tweets earlier too. So it's like I'm doing all that in one day. Then I have a strategy day where I'm going through the strategy for 2026. Then I have leadership days where I'm meeting with my executive leaders. And then I have creative thinking days for future. These all allow me to get deeper focus without pulling my brain in all these unrelated things that are going to steal my cognitive load. And so high quality output requires extended cognitive immersion. There was a study done at MIT that literally talked about how multitasking reduced the accuracy of decision making by up to 50%. Here's the thing, like, nobody's going to protect this more than you. So don't expect people to think that, like, once you tell people you're batching your days, like, they don't give a fuck. You own this company. They're going to come do everything. You train your team on how to treat you. Do not blame them if they interrupt you when you're batched. It's called don't respond until later and then respond later when you're doing something else. Think about it like this. If you just worked on that one thing, how much faster would it be to get things done? A lot of times when people tell me, they're like, well, that's going to take five months. I'm like, well, why? I'm like, there's no way that takes five months. What it means is that you have 17,000 other things to do and you can't get to it for four months. And so it actually takes a month. But if you did one thing at a time or a couple of things at a time and had more condention of your attention to do them, you would get things done faster as well and with more accuracy. If you think about like task switching, it's like it literally scrambles your brain. And then like people are like, oh, I'm burnt out. It's like, well, yeah, it's not like you burnt out because the thing you're doing, it's because you're doing like 17 things in one day rather than going very deep and solving things. And like if you're constantly solving important problems and seeing them from start to finish, you get a lot of gratification from that. If you're spread across 20 and you never see them finish and they go wrong and they're constantly not accurately solved, yeah, you feel broke out. I get that. So what you want to do is look at everything you do over a week. Try to chunk your days. Just theme them so you can go really deep on one thing and not have to keep switching between multiple things or context of the thing. So now you've batched your work, but there's still one massive thing. Hiding in plain sight, okay? Meetings. The fifth principle is to make meetings the last resort, not a rule and not a default. Okay. If you understand this, you can eliminate, I'm not, not with you, 80% of your meetings. I say this as somebody who had a tweet go viral of my calendar booked full to the gills with meetings. I have been there. I get it. And there's a better way. I remember what I first like started me on this journey was like, besides being like, I'm in too many meetings. I read about how Jeff Bezos and Amazon did meetings, how they did memos before meetings. I said, you know, about three years ago, I switched acquisition.com and I said, we're going to do memos before meetings. Literally now it's like through the culture. We say no memo, no meeting. We've got all these cute little like quippy phrases we use now. But what I realized in that process, because it created so much discipline around meetings, is that most of the time when we do have to have a meeting, it's because there's a large decision that hasn't been made. And once we make them, we don't need a meeting about it anymore. So there's no action to be taken. So we don't need another meeting. And a lot of the time people think that meetings are leadership, but oftentimes they're not. They're like status updates where they're areas of clarity that should have been written down and should have had a system put in place. And so a lot of times we throw a meeting on the calendar because we need to solve a one-time problem, but we make it a recurring meeting. Or we put a meeting on the calendar because somebody's lacking clarity. We could have used that time to create an expectations document that gave them clarity. Do you see what I'm saying? Most meetings are a band-aid for something else that's missing, but we don't know what it is. And so we just put a meeting on the calendar. And a lot of the times it doesn't need to be recurring. It doesn't need as many people in it that there are. and it just doesn't in general need to keep happening. And so if you're a leader with 20 or 40 meetings a week, that does not mean you're leading. In fact, sometimes it means you're very reactive and you're not taking time to be strategic. And this was very hard for me to realize because I used to think it was like a badge of honor that I had so many meetings that week. And I see people now and I try to coach them on it. I'm like, listen, it's not cool that you have 50 meetings a week and I know it's exhausting because let's not pretend it's not. It's exhausting. I could have been working so much smarter in my first business where I did this. So much smarter. but I wasn't. And most of the time, that's all it is, is that people, they have meetings because they don't structure. And you could use the time, say like 30 hours of meetings that you could eliminate a week, to be building the structure so that you wouldn't need a meeting. That's it. This is the thing. It's like, we're just using them as band-aids. And the top 1%, they don't do this. So what's something you can take away from this? Instead of having a meeting, ask for a memo first. I mean, half the time when I just say, great, I need a memo before the meeting, it's like, that just eliminates the meeting because they don't want to write the memo. And for beginners, I want to say this, you might still need some meetings because you haven't built that muscle yet. It's not a zero to a hundred thing. To get where I've gotten, where I understand the purpose and I can really see behind the requests and the agendas and stuff, it's like it's taken me years to get here. So there's some of it you can't skip, but you can do a lot less than you think you might need to to get to where you want to go. Now, that being said, here is the principle that changed everything. Once you have the structure right, you need to work with your biology, not against it. So you want to build your life around energy not time This is the last principle that I think a lot of the top 1 live by They think about energy more than they do time They don manage their time They manage their energy because like you really can't manage time. You can only manage the energy that you have during the time that you have given. And this is what a lot of people get wrong when it comes to time management. They book their entire day and they'll be like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to have 12 meetings and then I'm going to work on this in the morning and then I'm going to do this at lunch and I get home while I ride my bike and eat a PB sandwich. I'm going to go down to my wife. I'm going to do all of it at the same time. It's like, you know, those people. And I have said that to many people before. I'm like, it's not a bad divaner that you work out while you eat and while you your spouse. Let's not do that. We don't want a result to that. Like when I have people tell me that like I book time to have sex between I'm like, what is happening here? What they're not considering is this. How good is it going to feel to do that when you've just been in 12 meetings? Seriously, while you're riding your bike, eating your sandwich, having sex with your spouse. What's your energy like when you just had 12 meetings back to back. People try to force productive activity when they're in a low energy state. And then they get mad at themselves and they didn't get it done. They're like, I don't understand. I put it on the calendar that after I had eight meetings today, I was going to work out and then I was going to talk to my friends. I was going to go on that hike and then I was going to have dinner with my wife. But you know what? I was exhausted by the time we were supposed to have dinner. Definitely didn't want to get my freak on. I wonder why. Comes with understanding your biology, not working against it. Understand when do you have the most energy? When is your peak thinking time when is your peak activity time when is it best that you meditate do breath work what are the decisions that you have to make and when should you make them during the day for me for example something i learned very early on is that past probably two or three o'clock i do not make big decisions if somebody comes to me alice probably to this day hates this about me he'll come to me at like three or four o'clock and i'm pretty i can feel like i'm cognitively like my it's low and he's like what do you think about this and i'm like let's talk tomorrow he's okay. Why? It's three o'clock. I'm like, I know, but I made so many decisions. And I already worked on this thing, this product for six hours. I don't have the mental load to make this decision right now. I can just feel it. It's not there. I can't access it. I'm like, okay. So instead of trying to push through that, I say, you know what? I think I'm going to go for a walk instead, or maybe I'm going to work out, do something like fun or write cards or something that doesn't require a ton of thinking. A lot of people look at their calendar and they say, this is how many hours I have in a day. I could be working all these hours. But how many of those hours, because you're doing them when you're in a low energy, low cognitive state, do you then have to take those hours and just put them on another day because you have to redo the shit that you did wrong? You have to reverse the decisions that you made poorly. You have to remand the conversations that you had that were poor because you just shouldn't have done it in the first place. You should have just said, I'm tired. I need to go do something that requires zero thought. And so for me, I think about it like, how do I have to architect my day so that I can maximize my peak decision making my clear thinking time and then how do I schedule things during that time that are going to maximize or I'd say that take advantage of that and then how do I put other things at the time and not so like for me I wake up I meditate and then I'm like okay I'm gonna go I'm gonna have water I'm gonna do whatever and I'm gonna sit down I'm gonna work I'm gonna work on the things that I know are most important to move my business forward I'm not gonna respond to slack I'm not gonna respond to email because I know now I'm in peak mental time and I know I've done my most important work when I'm peak cognitive bandwidth and then I say okay great I'm feeling like a little tired. It's been three hours. Like I can feel my brain's like, oh, you need to pick me up. I'm like, all right, now I'm going to walk or I'm going to work out. Then after that, I'm going to go in and I'm going to do whatever else I need to do with my day. We need to think about how our bodies, how our energy affects what we're doing every day. I have had to redo and undo enough decisions in my lifetime because I made them when I was cognitive bandwagonist low. But it's like we equate being tired with being lazy a lot of times in business. And I think that that's why people are afraid to say it. But it's just the truth that we only have so much we can get. We're not robots. Now, a lot of research shows that most people have 90 to 120 minutes of peak focus doing any one thing. I think that's a good place to start is like chunk your peak productivity time. Just put two hours in the calendar and start there and like see, do you have more? Do you have less? Etc. I think what I have learned is I have stopped trying to be switched on all day. Instead, I create different zones of my days. It's like my days are themed and then I have zones within those themed days of knowing when I want to make decisions, when I have the emotional or cognitive space for something or when I just need to like let loose, relax and like not be doing anything. And I think what this does is it allows you to sustain high performance over long periods of time without feeling burnt out, exhausted, etc. And ironically, you get more done in a shorter period of time. So if you try to sell me on this 10 years ago, I've been like, no, but now I'm like, this is how you get to the top 1%. So what can you do? What is the takeaway for this? Look at your day in terms of energy, like look at what you have scheduled on your calendar and then be like, ask yourself, how's that going to feel? Like think about it almost like a customer experience, but for your calendar and for yourself, like what's the customer experience walking into that day? Oh, she wakes up and then she has 17 meetings on her calendar. And then she, and now the cortisol starts to rise and she starts to feel anxious. It's like, let's not do that. Let's not work against the fact that we are humans and we have finite amounts of energy and we can do things. Don't get me wrong. There's so much that we can do to create more energy. But first, I just want you to understand it. When is your peak thinking time? When do you need to eat? When do you realize you need to move? Design your day around those natural rhythms and take advantage of them rather than trying to fight them. Look, I know that getting everything done and being successful feels like a lot, but I want you to remember that you don't need to always do more. The top 1% understand that you need to be more strategic about what you do do and what you don't do more than you need to maximize what you are doing. And hopefully after watching this video, you understand the place to start. So now the next step is learning how to lead people effectively, because even with the perfect systems, nothing works if people won't follow you when things get hard. I appreciate you guys watching and I will see you on the next one.