Learnings and Missteps

Mastering Your Time, Putting Yourself First

• Jesus Hernandez • Season 3

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We explore a comprehensive time management framework designed specifically for high achievers who excel at delivering for others but struggle to prioritize themselves. This system helps you honor personal commitments without sacrificing performance, using a three-phase approach that reduces stress and increases focus.

• The Self-First Time Mastery Framework addresses the common problem of deprioritizing personal goals
• Guilt-Free Future Planning helps extract priorities from your mind and organize them based on impact and effort
• Strategically Selfish Scheduling transforms priorities into calendar commitments using the "Firebox" prioritization matrix
• Daily Domination techniques include visualizing work, capturing distractions in the "Squirrel Cage," and setting firm task limits
• Knowing your daily task capacity (suggested: seven per day) dramatically improves your say-do ratio and credibility
• Important but not urgent tasks like sleep, exercise and nutrition often get sacrificed but eventually become emergencies if neglected
• The framework can be applied even with demanding jobs by focusing on the time spaces you control

If you're interested in joining a workshop to implement this framework, there are three upcoming cohorts with a maximum of 15 people per group. 

Sign up for the workshop: https://www.depthbuilder.com/do-the-damn-thing




Download a PDF copy of Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books

Speaker 1:

Like many, many of you out there, hard chargers, make it happeners. You go out there, you make stuff happen. You deliver at work, you deliver at home, you deliver for the softball team, but when it comes down to like you delivering for you and following through on the like, the big, impactful, meaningful things that that have been on your plate or that you've had interest and curiosity about, you just don't find the time to do that. So I was in that situation for a very long time Still looking good, right, still making stuff happen. But you know, my exercise wasn't so great and that thing I wanted to learn the language I wanted to learn kind of kept getting deprioritized for other people's stuff. Those things were good but I hadn't figured out like how to take care of myself and how to honor myself. It's over several years. What I did was tinker around with different things, because there's like a bazillion time management things, the Pomodoro thing and you know, time blocking and all these other things, which is like conceptual and and I don't disagree with them, actually they're integrated into this whole framework. But it took me applying a whole bunch of things progressively over years, to kind of get clear about what the hell it is that I needed to do or I needed to work on, so that I can not just be effective and deliver for everybody else, but so that I could also honor myself and make progress on those things. You know, those hidden things taking salsa classes, spending more time with family, spending more time with friends, journaling, reflecting vacation, like all of those things. They just they were going to happen some point and sometime in the future. It's a high level, it's future planning, which is one thing, and I'm going to get into some of the details so you guys understand exactly like how the system progressively works, from future long-term planning down to daily planning. So if you are out there in the omniverse, drop a note in the comments, let me know where you're calling in from.

Speaker 1:

So again, just a rebrand, a rename, same thing, same energy, same intent, same purpose, but we're calling it the self-first time mastery framework. The key words there is self-first. The 100% focus is on you as the individual, and I got a little framework to like help us make that happen, because most of us make it happeners are very, very good at serving others. We're very, very good at making things happen for other people in our life and that's absolutely critically important, but we're not as good as taking care of ourselves, and so this system not only is going to help you, like, amp up your performance, your effectiveness and bring your stress down, but it's also going to make you take care of yourself, and it'll help you do that. So let's get into it Self-first time. Mastery framework Can you tell I'm practicing Like I still haven't mastered the muscles in my mouth to say that well, and so the first thing that we get into is guilt-free future planning, and we do this in this sequence.

Speaker 1:

We start with future planning, and by future planning you get to define that. Are you talking about a week, a month, a quarter, a year, depending on where your brain is some of us? I'm just worried about the next four hours, bro. Good, let's talk about that future. It could be a week, it could be months, it could be years. I think I use it for like monthly and quarterly.

Speaker 1:

And so when we're doing the guilt-free future planning, the number one thing is you get to be selfish and only think about you, and I am like releasing everybody of all guilt and all fear. I will carry that for you during the workshop. After the workshop, you can go and start worrying about everybody else. But at least I want you to get one rep in or I'm going to make you get one rep in on thinking about you and putting yourself first, prioritizing the things that are important to you. And so the first thing we do is we just dump all the ideas right, the things that we've had in our plate, in the back of our mind, that we want to get done with relation related to, like, your business or your job, right, your career, business, job. Now the other bucket is personal growth and then the other bucket is meaningful connection. So what we're looking for is all those things that you've wanted to do, that you intended to do that you've wanted to do that you intended to do that you just haven't done. Now, critical point is the things that you want to do, not the things that you think you should do or somebody else wants you to do. It's only the things that you really, really want to do. That man, I want to get that thing done. We get those out of our head. After we get those out of our head, this is a whole group experience, so everybody's kind of sharing and asking and it's a lot of fun Then we go into prioritizing and we use the DAMN matrix D-A-M-N matrix to set priority of all of those things that are in our head to start building momentum, right.

Speaker 1:

And so that is what we are doing right here in this space, in the damn matrix, and then we say, okay, based on impact and effort high impact, low effort let's do that one first. Let's just get it started, let's just get the ball rolling, because that's how we get momentum. And then we get that little ball rolling, spin that plate, and we say, okay, which one are we going to do second? All right, here's number two High impact, low effort, let's get that plate spinning, and that's the whole point. So we get it out of our head, we prioritize it and then we do, we walk the plank which one's going first, which one's going second, which one's going third? That's guilt-free future planning.

Speaker 1:

Jennifer says what helped me the most was getting all my stuff out of my head and in a structured space. Oh, I love it, jen, and that's the hard part, right, like that's. The thing is we don't really even understand how much static is in our head, like all the commitments that we make and intentions and ideas, like it's all in there and and it gets staticky and they start banging up against each other and then our stress goes up, and so this is that's why we use the mural board, so we get it out. It's super visual and they're all the same size and all of a sudden they're not as big as they used to be and we can move them around, and then we could say, okay, that's not as important. Oh, these are really important. I want to do these first. That's it. Just get it out of your head, give it some order.

Speaker 1:

That is how we do the guilt-free future planning. Again, the main focus is planning the stuff that is important to you, not the stuff that you think you should do, that people want you to do. That you're kind of like oh man, I got to do this. No, no, no, no. The things that you want to do, you just haven't done because you've been putting other people ahead of yourself. So now we're going to go to the next evolution.

Speaker 1:

So once we get past, once we do the guilt-free future planning, then we get into like, oh, now it's time for action, right, and we were thinking we were brainstorming. Action right, and we were thinking we were brainstorming. Now we get into the strategically selfish scheduling which, again, if you can't tell, I'm using boxes and frameworks and the mural board. If you, when you sign up for the workshop, you'll have that link to go in there and access the mural and continue working on it or copy it or do whatever you want. But it's just a nice venue or format for it's very user-friendly First time users get the hang of it, get in here and play. Anyways, the strategically selfish scheduling. So we talked about the guilt-free future planning.

Speaker 1:

Right, we get all this stuff out of our head, we prioritize it, we walk the plank and then the next step is to plug it into our calendar. Go find empty space in your calendar next week, two weeks out, three weeks out, whatever it is. But everybody finds out. It's like, oh my God, my calendar is full of junk, or I don't have anything in my calendar, but I know I have commitments. Exactly, it's all in our head. We got to get it out of our head. And so when we struggle we realize like man, our calendar, we need to do some work on our calendar. That's part of my problem of not being able to stay on top of things, always rushing around, always double booked, never having enough time right. All of these things, I live it, we've all lived it. Some cleaning, we're going to run the things to the firebox right, and that's my justified version of the Eisenhower matrix, which I know. A lot of people know the Eisenhower matrix and I've been thinking through it.

Speaker 1:

Using it as like a mental model for me has been extremely helpful. The problem for me is it says right, if it's not important, not urgent, stop doing it. Like, yeah, I get that right, like intellectually, I understand that, but it's not important, not urgent. Stop doing it Like, yeah, I get that Right, like intellectually, I understand that. But it's like, how the hell do you stop doing it Right? Some people like me need a little extra help to like, ok, but how do I stop, how do I delegate, how do I do those things? And so that's why I made it, muddied it up with the firebox Things that are urgent and important.

Speaker 1:

You're going to finish those first Things that are important and not urgent. You're going to focus, invest more, focus time there, right, which is not. Again, it's a deviation. But the things that are important and not urgent are the things that we always deprioritize. And here's the thing about those things is those things that we deprioritize will become urgent. And I'm gonna give you a simple example Sleep, exercise, nutrition.

Speaker 1:

How many times answer this question to yourself or drop it in the comments? How many times have you deprioritized sleep to get a task done, to follow through and do something or do a favor for somebody else? Right, it's not a big deal right now, but the more you deprioritize sleep, your performance drops. So it's not urgent, it's important, but if you keep ignoring it, it turns into a problem. Same thing with exercise, same thing with nutrition. If you can't tell I'm down from three chins. Now I only have two because I've historically deprioritized my physical wellness it will become a problem, and when it's a problem, it's a damn emergency, anyways.

Speaker 1:

So we take the things in our calendar. We go like for real, for real, go to your calendar, get all of the stuff out of next week, all the things that you have in your calendar and the things that you know you have to do that aren't in your calendar. And that always stirs a beautiful round of like, what do you mean? Like that's personal, it's like yeah, my recommendation is combine both of them. So, anyways, we drop them in that white section there there's some instructions, and then we put them in the firebox Again. Then we put them in the firebox Again, being ruthlessly selfish. Is it urgent and important to me? Not to my boss, not to my girlfriend, not to my wife, not to anybody else, just to me. And then, from that perspective, now we understand where they sit so we can start doing some strategery around how do we minimize, how do we outsource, how do we delegate, and so forth.

Speaker 1:

This one's a lot, a lot of fun, because now we're talking like brass, brass, tacks, oh, my goodness. So that's phase two, right. Phase one is guilt-free future planning. Phase two is strategically selfish scheduling, and we're going to get into daily domination. Next, I want to help you prioritize, you, be a better friend to you, and guess what the outcome is? Your performance, professionally and in everything else, it don't get worse and it gets better. Like the energy you show up and that you bring to the table, to the people that you're interacting with, is going to be a million times more focused, more positive, more present, because you got less junk in your head. Basically, that's it. So we talked about guilt-free future planning, right. Then we got. We talked about strategically selfish scheduling, and so now again we're going through the funnel, right. We start big picture long-term. We use Mural for that. We get into the strategically selfish scheduling.

Speaker 1:

We use a different tool for that. We use our calendar. It doesn't have to be like a super fancy digital calendar. It could be. If you're like a daily planner person, same thing. It doesn't matter what media it is, it's just that you have a calendar and use it and start using it just a little bit differently. Then it's like okay, now we've kind of put some order and sorted things out to so that we can have a little more fun. Now we're going to get into daily domination.

Speaker 1:

Right, because all the planning in the world don't mean a damn thing If you can't get shit done. Period. You know that you've worked with people, that they got big plans. I'm going to, I'm thinking about this. I got this project idea. Like oh, oh, but they ain't never done nothing. You don't want to be that person. I would start losing credibility. Now.

Speaker 1:

The other thing is and I promise I'm not calling anybody out specifically I'm really talking to the past, when I was double booked on meetings, when I was sitting in a meeting at the office on my computer doing stuff, I was losing credibility when I'm having a conversation with somebody. While I'm on the phone, I'm losing credibility. So, me rushing around, panic, stress, sliding in right on time and leaving I'm sorry, I got to go a little bit early, I got a little bit, I got a hard. Stop all this stuff. What I was doing was I was losing credibility. It wasn't because I didn't know how to make things happen. It was because I had overbooked and overcommitted myself and I had no line of sight to how many commitments I had made. Sure, there's a conversation to be had about saying no, we can have that conversation and it is one of the tactics. But for real, for real the reason and I'm stealing Jennifer's quote from yesterday's call there's no one else to blame for me not guarding my time. That's a me thing straight up. That's a me thing straight up. And so that's the whole point.

Speaker 1:

Here. We're going to take ownership, we're going to get our hands wrapped around this bad boy and start getting more gooder. So let's get into the daily domination. And this is where, like, the rubber meets the road, and a lot of people like to start here, and I've been asked like where should I start? Which one is going to bring me the greatest result and the answer is it depends. So if you're curious, like, where should you start? Like you're like, yeah, jess, this sounds great, this is too complicated. Where should I start? Long-term planning, scheduling or daily, drop me a comment, ask me specifically so that I can give, like, the specific cause. It's a different answer for everybody, kind of depending on where their problem is.

Speaker 1:

Again, this is about executing. This is about getting things done. Now, if you notice, we started future planning and then, from future planning, we took that down into scheduling. That's getting plugged into our calendar One, two, three, four, five, six weeks, as far out into the future as you can and now we've got the core, the material, the source material to kick butt day by day. And so what we do is say, okay, look at Monday, what are the tests we have for Monday? And we drop it into.

Speaker 1:

If anybody is familiar with Scrum or Kanban personal Kanban it's the same framework. I've added some tweaks because there were things that I needed and it turned out the people that have been through the previous workshops got a lot out of it. So I'm like, okay, we're adding this to the system. And so the basic idea is focus on one thing at a time get the things out of your head, make your work visible, prioritize it and get it done. Very simple, but you'll notice there's a to-do column doing and done, and then there's the squirrel cage.

Speaker 1:

That's my little innovation there, because we all get distracted. Right, we're all busy working, the phone rings, we get an idea, we go through TikTok and we go down the wormhole or whatever it is, and so for everybody it's different, but for me, the thing that distracts me the most, that causes me to have to work 10, 12, 15, 16 hours on a thing, is ideas. I'll get an idea about something and then I chase the idea and then two and a half hours later, I go crap. I got to get that other thing done. I told him I was going to send it to him by five, but I was off lollygagging, right and so. But here's the thing like I was, I had a little paranoia, like if I don't do something with the idea, it's going to disappear forever. Oh my God. And it could change the world. So what I do now is, when I have an idea, instead of doing something about it, I create a card and I put it in the swirl cage so that I can stay focused on the task that I'm working on right now, and then I get another idea or somebody texts me but I'm in the middle of like real deep work. I'll create a card, so usually I'll just not answer it and look back later. But anyways, the point is there's we all get distracted by different things and we have control over them, and using this simple tool or this methodology because I use Trello specifically for this of capturing the squirrels, putting them in the cage, because I can come back and play with them later so that I can stay focused on the task at hand.

Speaker 1:

There's a whole bunch of tips in here about tracking curveballs, about what to reflect about and how to reflect on it, and the biggest, biggest, biggest one for me, that is also one of those people kind of like is like knowing your limits, and so here's the question for you out there in the omniverse Do you even know how many commitments, how many things are you committed to in one day? Do you know what that count is? My money says you don't. The second thing is how many things of those commitments do you deliver on a daily basis? If you don't know the first number, you sure as hell don't know the second number. And so, when it comes to like credibility now we're talking about the say do ratio right, how many things that you say you're going to do versus how many things you actually do takes us all the way back to credibility.

Speaker 1:

And so, knowing my limits, I've set a target of seven tasks per day. I used to have 15 tasks per day, but what did that do? That made me a butthead. I was rude, I was short with people, I didn't have time to like give to people because I was like I got to get my 15 done and that wasn't a good experience. And so I've experimented and now I'm down to seven and I violate it regularly. But the thing is, if I have more than seven things on my calendar for that day, I'm not going to schedule a meeting, I'm not going to open space up for other people or other things that aren't the priority, to invade and impact my credibility. And so that's the daily domination piece Overview again, real quick summary. That's the daily domination piece overview Again, real quick summary.

Speaker 1:

The self-first time mastery framework is about building you into your calendar. It's about committing to yourself, it's about improving your performance, improving your delivery and improving your quality of life so you can show up better and be as awesome as you can be more frequently, byron says. At this stage in my life working 10 plus hours a day, including the commute with the wife and two young kids sleep is usually what exactly. Sleep is what gets sacrificed. It's the only time I can focus on content creation, otherwise I wouldn't make any real progress.

Speaker 1:

I feel you my friend and so you bring up a good point, because this is a consistent conversation that we have in the workshop. It's like, yeah, but I have like a real job, jesse, I don't have. I don't. I'm not in Wonderland like you gallivanting around doing goofy stuff all the time and I get, yeah, I get that you can apply this methodology in the space that you have the most control, meaning your nights and your weekends. I know that it can be applied in the workspace, but you can just use this methodology, this self-first framework, in your post-work hours and the weekend hours. If you're interested or you know people that could benefit from some guilt-free future planning, strategically selfish scheduling and daily domination, hit me up. I'll give you the link to get them signed up. We're going to hold it. We've got three classes coming up and there's going to be a maximum of 15 people per cohort, so they're going to be filling up pretty quick. I hope to see you there.