How I rewired my workday (less work, better results)

0:00I completely rewired my workday and it changed my professional life. Let me explain how so that you can do the same. A few years ago, I noticed a problem in my professional life. I would end the day completely drained but not be able to point to a single thing that I had meaningfully moved forward. I started telling myself that I wasn't doing enough. I needed to do more. I needed to grind harder. But that wasn't the problem. The amount of work wasn't the issue. It was the type of work that was filling my day. I was spending all of my day on busy work that wasn't actually

0:30moving me forward. So I developed a model, which I call the four types of professional time, that completely rewired the way that I work. If that sounds like you, always busy but never really making progress, this video is for you. I'm going to show you what those four types of time are and how you

0:46can use them to restructure your day. Most importantly, this model works no matter what type of job you're working. I used it when I was working a traditional job 80 to 100 hours a week in finance and I use it today as an entrepreneur, writer, and investor. [music] Let's dive in with the first type of time. The first type of professional time is management time. This is calls, meetings, emails, presentations, people and team management, general coordination, all of those things that feel like productivity but generally speaking aren't really moving you forward. Now, for most of us, management time fills the vast majority of our professional lives. 90-plus percent in a

1:26lot of roles. And look, I get it. This work has to get done. But we need a system for getting it done more efficiently, more effectively so that it doesn't bleed out over our entire calendars. What we're going to do here is we are going to use a scientific phenomenon to batch and constrain management time activities a little bit more effectively. It's called Parkinson's Law. It says that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. So if you give yourself all day for management time activities, it'll take all day. But if you give yourself two hours, you will crank through those management time activities

1:59in 2 hours. What we're going to do here is we're going to create discrete windows of time during which you are going to have focused sprints on management time activities. Now, note, this is going to be easier to do as your career progresses. Early in your career, you may need to have three to four blocks, windows of time throughout the day. So, just looking at this in practice, here's what it looks like for me. I have three management blocks during the day. The first one is

2:27management time for email processing. That's from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. The second block is from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. I have management time for team check-ins and calls. And then I have a final block at the end of the day, which is just email and closing any open loops that exist. So, I have those three blocks during the day. That's going to batch and constrain that management time so that it doesn't bleed out over the entire course of my day. So, what you've done by constraining management time is you've effectively created time. So, now let's talk about where you can invest that newly created time for higher leverage

2:59outcomes, which brings us to the second type of time creation. Any and all acts of building. This could be writing, coding, designing, analyzing, anything where you are actually creating something. For me, [music] this work happens before most of the world is awake, 4:30 a.m. to about 7:30 a.m. The goal here is to carve out one to two windows of time per day when you're going to perform acts of creation and to

3:28block and protect them on your calendar. Now, ideally, you're going to actually align these blocks of time to windows where you have high creation energy. You need to find what works for you, when you feel most creative, when you feel most capable of these acts of creation, block, and then protect those windows of time on your calendar. Just looking back at my calendar, what you now see is that this creation time window has gotten

3:52slotted in from 5:00 to 7:30 a.m. Notably, that's when I'm most creative and it's before any of these red management time slots happen during the course of the day. For me, that's going to be writing. That's my [music] act of creation. That is going to get protected. I'm not going to allow any other activities to come in during that window. Phone is going to be put away during that window in a lockbox or in another room so that it doesn't distract [music] and that act of creation is going to be sacred because that's actually what's going to start moving us forward. Lock in, put on your favorite

4:24playlist, and just create. Okay, we've got management time, we've got creation time, and I look rather disheveled. Now onto the final two types of time. These are the forgotten types of time, the ones [music] that almost nobody has in their schedule, but that create the non-obvious wins that are going to move you forward in your professional life. So, let's move to the third type of time is consumption. Every single thing that you create is

4:52downstream from something you consume. The quality of the things you were able to create is a byproduct of the quality of the things that you consume, your information diet, if you will. So, what we want to do is we want to create one to two blocks during the course of every single day, ideally, when we're going to be consuming, bringing new ideas in the top of our funnel. For me, that comes in the form of reading and it comes in the form [music] of listening, whether to audiobooks or podcasts. I do a lot of my listening while driving [music] in the car and also while out on long runs. And

5:25then my reading, I have a specific block of time every single day when I'm going to sit down and quietly read. Creating the space to actually have this and protect it in your day allows you to, on a regular basis, create from new ideas that are coming in the top. So, now you can see that I've added to my calendar this block for consumption time from 11:00 to 12:00 p.m. That's going to be a focused reading block. Generally speaking, while I eat my post-workout meal, I'll do some reading, then go up to my office, do a bit more focused reading to just have that structured block for consumption. One last note of

5:59caution when it comes to consumption, avoid the tendency for all of the things that you consume to need to be productive in nature. Like you only read business or productivity books or things that feel like they're productive. Sometimes your best ideas come from consuming things that feel completely out of the blue. Like reading science fiction or reading history or might actually be the thing that sparks the new idea that sends you forward in some way that you didn't predict. Consumption time done. To cover the last type, I'm going to have to meet you downstairs,

6:30and you'll see why. [music] The final type of time is easily the most forgotten, but it's also the secret cheat code of history's greatest entrepreneurs, builders, thinkers, and everyone in between. The final type of time is ideation. This is brainstorming, meditating, thinking, experiencing solitude. All of these actions that fundamentally allow you to connect things in your brain, allow you to come up with the creative ideas that actually spark the step function improvement in your life that we're all trying to create. Philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, "All of humanity's problems come from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." That was all about the lack

7:16of ideation time, the lack of solitude, the lack of space in your life to disconnect from the stimulus, to not worry about output, and to just think. For me, ideation time generally comes in a few different forms. I love the 20-minute sauna every single evening and a few minutes in my cold plunge to just disconnect, to create that space. It also comes for me on long walks, drives in the car, or during workouts. When I just disconnect, I don't listen to

7:41podcasts, I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't have incoming stimulus. You're going to find that when you actually structure and carve out these windows to think on a daily or at least weekly basis, you're going to start having the aha moments, those creative ideas that spark the forward progress that you've been looking for. Okay, sauna, cold plunge, ideation time done. My rewired work day done. But now, as I promised, I want to give you the exercise so that you can put this model of these four types of professional time into practice in your own life. What you're going to do is you're going to pull up your calendar from today. And I

8:16want you to color code all of your activities from the day according to whether they were management time, mark them red. Creation time, mark them green. Consumption time, mark them blue. Ideation time, mark them yellow. Do that every single day for the next week. Then zoom out and look at your calendar and identify the trends. How much is management time bleeding out over the entire course of your day? How much creation time do you have? How much consumption or ideation do you have dedicated in your flows? And then what you're going to try to do is using the principles we've talked through, rebuild one day to be a little bit more balanced

8:50across the things. [music] You're going to batch and constrain the management time, free up more space. You're going to make sure you create an attention focused creation window during that day. And then ideally, you're going to carve out a short window for both consumption and ideation during that day. If you do that, you're all of a sudden going to feel in much more control of your time, of your professional life, and you're going to start making forward progress in much more pronounced and accelerated increments. After you've done the exercise, comment below what type of time dominated your weeks, what changes you're specifically going to make to do

9:24that. As always, until next time, stay curious, friends.