To say that 2019 has been busy is nothing short of an understatement. This year relative to last year has caused far too much economic activity. It feels a lot like 2006/2007 hence why new money we’re getting is not being spent buying stocks or bonds (no we never sell or trade since it just isn’t worth the mental hassle). All that said, we figured there couldn’t be a better time to talk about extreme levels of productivity. Our up-coming book is going to have information that will only resonate with people who eventually make it to the top (not people who are now upset with this blog since the average income has gone up 250%). With that we’ll jump in.
Overview 2019, Too Much Money Sloshing Around
Money First: In times of high economic activity you want to do two key things: 1) focus your energy on the biggest opportunities and 2) start giving up those hobbies temporarily. While writing is fun and cool since we get to see the 1% make it and laugh at the people making $200K a year who will be out of jobs in less than a few years, it just isn’t a priority. This becomes harder and harder as your hours ratchet up while you think “Do I even need the money?” As soon as this question comes up you know you’re in a period of too much activity. Essentially, you’re losing respect for the amount of effort it took to make it somewhere so you’re thinking about taking the “easy” route which always ends in tears.
When we say money first we mean you’re going to work like you’re 23 again for at least a year. High economic activity means too many people have too much money to waste. This is going to put strain on a lot of your personal relationships. But. If they are close friends they’ll understand that you’re not going to be going out 3x a week anymore and it’ll fall to the classic “1x at most, see you Saturday”.
Now we’ll define “Money First”: calculate how much each activity should yield on a daily income basis (holler at those affiliates who correctly learned to think like this earlier!). Even if you have to travel all over the place to close a few sales, you should go ahead and do the death march. It’s all about probabilities to close and you’re going to throw all of that “partying money” into a driver, late night flights if needed and of course the classic “driver pick up” where you pay the guy to get your food as you move to different locations (have no time at all). If the value of the sale is going to equal more than 1 week of income (based on your current daily intake)… you’re working all week, all night, all year until that calculation breaks down.
No More “Heavy Nights”: This is probably the worst part about high economic activity times. You actually can’t pull those 4-5am party nights more than 1-2x a year. Seriously, it just isn’t possible. You’ll wake up and lose 48 hours worth of productivity which could have then (by the calculation above) bought you 2 weeks of income or 4 weeks of investment income at minimum (anyone reading this will be investing around 50% of their income). Even if you were 40 years old, it doesn’t make any sense to lose 1 full month of investment income for one “fun night out”. The only way it could possibly make sense is if your passive income was higher than $1M/year after taxes.
So the biggest way to prevent this productivity loss is to say no to all of those big parties. This will absolutely test your will power. Anyone who makes it in life knows that private events are the highest quality, highest return events as you don’t have to worry about ridiculous things like “paying for a drink at the bar” or having to “look through the crowd” for someone decent enough to talk to. Either way. The unfortunate downside to “making it rain” for a year is that you’re going to ditch a lot of the fun *temporarily* as you’re essentially purchasing 4-years of fun during the next down turn.
Normalized Activity: Before moving on, all of the items we recommend below are for high economic activity years like 2019, 2013, 2006 and 2007. They apply to any type of economic environment… That said… We’ll emphasize that these extreme measures are only needed for high economic times. If you’re in a standard year (normal), continue to go out and have tons of fun 2-3x a week since the number of money making events will be limited and doable with 5 days of effort per week.
Extreme Prioritization
Workouts Take a Hit: It really can get this bad. If you are in a time of extreme stress you will not be able to work out properly. You’re going to be forced to improvise and go into what we call “preventative workouts”. This means you’re trying to max out your workouts and minimize the declines. If you have a full month of money making, we predict your physical fitness will decline by about 10%. This is not terrible but it sure beats most people who would fall by 30% as their VO2Max would drop off a cliff (no running for a month causes a catastrophic drop). So here is the best way to workout in a hectic week where we assume you only have a total of 3 hours to work out.
3 Hours turns into four days of working out. That is about 45 minutes each. It is smarter to do this with 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 hour. During the 30 minute workout sessions you will be doing reps until failure. The whole “workout routine” is dead. Dead. It means that you just don’t have time for a full workout for 7 straight days. So you’re going to choose only four exercises: Cardio, back, chest, legs. Forget everything else.
The 30 minute days = lift weights until failure on each rep. This is for back, chest or legs. You’re going to take a weight slightly lower than your normal weight (5% lower to prevent injury) and you’ll do each set until failure. Rep after rep. If you can get through 4 different exercises, you’re crushing it. Then depending on if you’re a night or morning person you rack up the body weight exercises: sit-ups, pushups, dips until failure just before you jump into the shower. This is of course extreme but allows you to extend the workout without losing valuable time.
The 1 hour days. Essentially you want to do at least a 40 minute cardio activity. Once you go over 20 minutes the body realizes it’s a real workout so when you push to 40 minutes twice a week you’ll prevent a step down in cardio declines. For the remaining 20 minutes you do the other body exercises you missed. Since you have 3 hours in total, you’re going to have to do back or chest before or after the run. Our own recommendation is to do the run up front (counter intuitive) since you’re typically so exhausted it is easy to quit the run early and say “oh I have to go back to work”.
That’s a brutal 3 hour work out while traveling around managing a 100 different things at once. It doesn’t even include your regular work but it’s 100% possible to still crank out 3 hours or so even if you’re living based on flight times. (extreme pro-tip, airports have yoga/meditation rooms where you can stretch if your flight gets delayed. You can also do basic workouts there in a corner and just hit the lounge for a shower).
Pack as Light as Possible Idle as Little as Possible: It isn’t enough to pack the minimum. You want to pack the minimum in order. When you open up all your bags when going to meeting or the hotel, everything should be organized in the way it will be brought out. If you have clothing that will be used on day 4, it should be at the bottom. The older used clothes should be towards the bottom (or bottom compartment) so the rest of your items press down on the used clothing (doesn’t matter if they get wrinkled since you’re not using them again). Think about everything you’ll pull out of the bag. Your bag will be different but once you think about this in detail once, organizing in the future will be like clock-work. Extreme situation, if you have specific liquids you need to carry, go on amazon and buy as many “travel sized” plastic containers as you need and they’ll allow you to save space versus calculating everything for each trip.
On the idling side, this is where having a driver is critical. If it’s a really jammed day where you have to move around fast, the difference between Uber Black and a driver is the ability to never sit around waiting for food. Have it ordered, eat and drink in the car and you’ve just saved yourself 1-2 hours. Uber’s slogan is “everyone’s private driver” but we all know that it really isn’t the same if you’re truly busy.
Low Quality at End of Day: You know those emails that make you cringe when you respond to them because they barely even clear your ROI? This is where you finally get to ignore them. That’s right! The one benefit of being legitimately ultra busy is you can laugh at all those smaller non-needle moving events and answer them in 2-3 sentences dead last at the end of the day. Ideally, you’ll actually win a few bigger accounts and you can delete them forever! Just thinking about this will make a huge smile cross your face, nothing like having someone you barely care about get upset and switch only to find out it’s because you landed something better. It’s kind of like running into an ex-girlfriend and she sees you with someone 100x more attractive (awful to say out loud but everyone knows that feeling)
Everything Gets Turned Off: You’re going to run out of energy. There is just no way to expect to be “on point” every single time you are trying to ramp up production of something or make a new sale. A good way to combat this is the “zig zag” strategy. You want to have the first 3-4 hours of the day be important, the next 2 hours be less important (lower money opportunity) and the last 3-4 hours be highly important. This causes you to take a “break” as your brain gets a bit of a rest in the middle.
As a note, during this time you should actually avoid responding to personal life items. This sounds ruthless as well but unless it’s an emergency just tell them you’ll respond end of the day. Yes. We realize this makes it seem like personal relationships are on par with a mediocre customer… While true in terms of time dedication, your personal relationships should “get it” and not cry about your delayed responses to their random messages. Also if you give them a heads up they are 100x less likely to care, they know this happens and will be understanding.
Stagger the Caffeine: You’re going to consume caffeine. Unless you’re against it for religious reasons using caffeine is going to put you in the “right mood at the right time”. If you up the Caffeine dose before the first 3 hours you will be in a fantastic “on mode” for the important meetings. This will lead to a moderate crash during the less important meeting (zig zag). So think about changing up your intake to match when you should be paying attention. As you know, we recommend coffee with butter if you’re going to be in some sort of long form conversation. This would mean you’re going into a single long meeting for 4-6 hours of focus for something extremely important vs. smaller shorter meetings. For those really in the know, we also mean stagger with two meanings here (covered in book so no don’t ask what, if you know, you know)
Read Read Read: This is what travel is for, reading and preparing for what needs to be said the next day. This can either be actual information or it could be soft information. Is the guy an avid Democrat? Don’t be stupid, leave the republican cufflinks in the bag. Did the guy get married early with limited life experience? Don’t be stupid, wear the boring trustful color of blue. Did the person recently get divorced and wants to go out a lot? Don’t be stupid, line that meeting up last so you may convince him to go out and party. Essentially, don’t go into any meeting with the same material. You’re just being unproductive with your time. Those low quality customers that you’re responding to are actually causing you to lose money (substantial amounts of money). Oh and of course, always choose the window seat. It’s always easier to sleep in versus getting bumped in the aisle seat by a random person walking around (aisle seats are just terrible).
Extreme Organization
Quick recap, you’re going to have 1) no more meaningless personal life conversations unless it is serious, if it’s serious all “work” needs to go on hold – death for example but we really doubt it will occur, 2) you’re going to zig zag the important items, adjust your caffeine intake and do a painfully efficient three hours of working out and 3) you’ll turn off all devices hit the window seat and either prepare or sleep.
Food and Drinks: You’re going to be busy so you actually want to think about what you’re consuming through the day. There is a zero percent shot you’ll be able to eat something amazing mid-day so this means breakfast and dinner is where you’ll line up something extremely healthy. Also. You want to drink a TON of water in the morning since you’ll be dehydrated within a few short hours. It’s fascinating to see how poorly the body operates when dehydrated and if you’re not drinking at least 32-48 ounces of water the first 30 minutes in the morning. You’ll pay for it quickly. Sounds extreme because it is. It also works. (Note: yes you pack chlorella and toss it into the water in the morning)
Paperwork: No one should be using paper. Always put everything on an iPad. Period. The way you prevent ever carrying worthless pieces of paper is asking if “soft copies” are fine. This is going to tell you how old the person is (decision maker). So not only are you decreasing the weight of the items you need to bring they are handing you valuable information. No one under 40 or so wants to deal with paper, it’s all digital.
“Dead Clothing”: If you know you’re going to have to pick items up and perhaps carry things? Guess what just take some workout clothing/accessories that you’re going to get rid of soon. Extreme yes… again that’s why it is called extreme organization. You can one time use it and be on your way. You can take it to the ultimate extreme by throwing away old workout shoes if you need to (this of course would mean you’re picking something up on the very last day).
Scatter Pack: Need to carry a lot of cash? Scatter pack it. If you are moving more than $100,000 around, you want to stack it up into groups of either 5,000 or 10,000 and scatter it around the carry on. This won’t be registered by the equipment and you won’t have to waste time with TSA for example if you’re going through TSA instead of Clear.
Not So Extreme: Always have the following: Clear, TSA Pre-Check, Global services. Also have the following: travel sized liquid containers and combs/grooming kits that are thin (less space). Also have your phone set to vibrate and stacked alarms to give you an idea of when you need to get going. All of this is obvious but it’s fun to see how many people break all of these rules and end up wasting time going to buy something at Walgreens last second.
That’s our quick rant on extreme prioritization in a travel heavy environment. Yes. This article was written on a phone hence the limited time to organize a photo or backlinks. It has been insanely busy this year and on a positive note we will have a Q&A on a Monday (yes we’ve actually got a Monday off). So circle that day and then we’ll do our status/class post on Tuesday. As many of you have noticed the $150K a year online crowd has finally turned negative on our blog, right in-line with our expectations. We finally made the jump to the next level so the content here will naturally change. For the better, the people at the top for some reason are always more attractive, younger looking and less focused on boring stuff like “dating” since no one has problems in that category!
