Learnings and Missteps

Learn How To Plan, Commit, And Execute Without Burning Out

• Jesus Hernandez

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Most leaders don’t have a time problem. They have a decision making problem. We break down a self-first framework that turns chaos into clarity by separating planning, commitment, and execution into clean lanes—each with its own tool and purpose—so you can stop spinning and start finishing the work that matters.

We begin with long-term planning across three human buckets: business and professional growth, personal growth, and meaningful connections. By writing goals down and scoring them on impact and effort, you’ll surface quick wins and park the heavy lifts for later. Then we build momentum with a simple plank: sequence your top items, block time for each, and commit to starting in order. No perfection required, just deliberate starts that compound.

Next, we clear space with the Firebox. Finish what’s urgent and important, invest in the vital non-urgent pillars like sleep, exercise, and learning, reduce by optimizing or delegating tasks others can do, and extinguish the non-essential. We audit real life—calendar items plus unlisted chores—to see how overcommitted we are, then make bold cuts. The guiding question stays front and center: what am I optimizing for?

Finally, we move to daily execution with a pre-built board that helps you focus on one day at a time, track distractions, and protect your best energy windows. We pair a planning canvas for ideas, a kanban board for commitments, and the calendar for execution, ensuring each thinking mode has its own home. Along the way, we share templates, simple tactics, and a path to accountability through a live workshop, support calls, and community.

Ready to manage yourself, not time? Tap play, grab the templates, and start building momentum today. If this helped, subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review with one change you’re making this week.

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

SPEAKER_00:

Here's the deal. I want you to have the tools that will help you take better care of yourself and keep kicking butt on all the important things you've got going on in your life. We're going to walk you through the time management framework that's already helping overcommitted construction leaders plan, commit, and execute their goals into reality. I'm Jesse, your selfish servant, and this time management system, like for real, is why I have been able to launch and maintain a thriving business, and I had no idea what I was doing when I started it. Keep my podcast, the Learnings and Missteps Podcast, going for over five years. Support teams across the country in three different time zones, publish not one, but two books, and it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have a system. And my system, this self-first framework, I know it is at the foundation of the things that I've been able to learn and accomplish. And I also know it can help you go from overwhelmed and frustrated to leaving this world better than you found it. So let's get into it. Now I want to let you know right out of the gate, there's three big rocks. And if you just do these three things, you will have a better experience. One is separate your thinking when we're like planning and understand that there's three different styles or methods or ways of thinking, three buckets. There's plan, commit, and execute. Those are three separate functions. So don't mix them up. That's the biggest problem we have is we try to do all of them at the same time and we get burnt out and we never make any progress. The second rock is make it visible, make it visual. The templates that are down below, you click them, download them, they are designed to take all of those responsibilities, tasks, and duties that are in your head, take them out, put them on paper so that you can objectively see them and do something about it, make better decisions about it. And then the third rock is use three different mediums. I use mural, trello, and my calendar. That's what I mean by mediums. And maybe another way to think about it is three separate tools for each function: the plan function, the commit function, and the execute function. So those are the big rocks. But Miss Stephanie Brown with Intelligent Construction Opportunities dropped me this quote and it it just wrapped every, I mean, it wrapped the whole idea very nicely because we spend too much time worrying about time or managing time when what we really need to do is manage ourselves. So, first, big picture long-term future planning. By long term, that's up to you. Doesn't have to be a year, it could be a quarter, it could be a month. Just make it work for you in terms of what that time horizon is. And so you'll see on the sheet, there's plenty of instructions. So I just want to real quick run through this bad boy. The very first thing you want to do is you want to start at the top here, where you have the three buckets business and professional growth, personal growth, and meaningful connections. Meaningful connections, we'll be talking about family, colleagues, community, all of those things that aren't like necessarily with our job, but relationships that we want to maintain. Personal growth, those are the things that I want to learn as an individual, the skills, the stuff, right? The cool stuff that everybody says, why are you doing that? That's dumb. And then there's your business and professional growth. Do you want to get another certificate? Do you want to get a raise? Do you want to get a promotion? What are those goals, ideas, those things that you have most likely been putting off and they've been on the list forever and you haven't made any progress with them? Get those things out of your head and write them down and put them in the bucket they belong to. And expect it to start off a little slow. Once you start writing it down, then the things are gonna come and just go crazy. Just write them all down. It's not like nobody's gonna judge you. Most likely nobody's gonna see it. After you get it out of your head, which is critical, that's the making things visible part, right? Then we want to give it some weight because when they're in our head, they all have the same intensity. We think they're all gigantic, huge things and impossible things. But when we get them out where we can see them, all of us is like, okay, they're not as big and scary as I thought they were, but they're still, you know, some are more important than others or realistic or practical. And so we want to give them weight and we want to evaluate each of those ideas based on impact and effort. And we have the damn matrix here for us to do that. Anything that has high impact and requires low effort, like it's gonna take a little bit of work, not a lot of bit. We put those in the D box. Then we have the A box, the M as in Machine Box, and then the N as in Niagara box. And all of those, again, each thing that you have, put it in the corresponding box. High impact, low effort, D box, high impact, high effort, a box. And so forth. Once you get those laid out and in the appropriate boxes, you'll have an understanding. Okay, like, man, these things are gonna have be more impactful, they're gonna take less effort. I want to do these first. These are gonna be less impactful, and they're gonna take more effort, so I want to do those last. Why? So that we can build momentum on the things that we have been neglecting for so, so long. And then after you do that, we walk the plank. What does that mean? Down here, phase one, phase two, phase three. You go to the damn matrix and start with the highest impact, lowest effort. That's my recommendation. If you want to do another sequence, that's your deal. And we put them on the plank one at a time. This helps us prioritize for what are we optimizing for? We're optimizing for momentum. We put them one at a time. And I want one tripping hazard that a lot of people get caught up on. This doesn't mean that you have to complete the first thing before you start the second thing. What this means is you're going to commit time to start or work on the first thing first. And then you're gonna get the second thing, and you're gonna go in your calendar and you're gonna commit time to work on the second thing second. And so you could be potentially working on all of these things concurrently, like at the same time. But this is really just about am I gonna start it? Am I gonna commit some time to it? Let me put it on the calendar and make the commitment. That's the work part. What usually happens is you're gonna find out, oh my God, there's no space on my calendar, I got a million things going on, or even worse, and most common, we have so many commitments on our calendar, and then we have double the amount of commitments in our head or on the on the shared calendar on the fridge with the significant other, and we forget those because they're all in different places. And so, what we want to do here is like, okay, we don't have a lot of space in our calendar to do all those big, beautiful, awesome things. How do we do that? You're not gonna get more time, ain't none of us gonna get more time. So it's a matter of what we do, don't do. It's a matter of the decisions that we make to continue and what to stop. And so, step one, get this big white box here. All every pick the next three to five days on your calendar and make sure you you know, put some bookends on it. This is intended to help you understand what's going on. And everything that's on your calendar, write it down. Every little thing that you have in your calendar, I want you to write it down in the white box. After you do that, then I want you to go through your memory banks and everything that's not on your calendar that you have to do, write those down too. Pick up the kids from school, take the kids to the ball game, whatever, go to the grocery store, wash the truck. Like there's a bazillion things that you do that aren't on your calendar, but they're real commitments that you know that you're gonna commit time to go get done and list all of those things there. The number one reason we want to do that is so that we can get actually get a sense of how overcommitted we are, right? Because you probably don't re even realize how many things you're committed to. And then when you get invited to do something or somebody asks for a favor, doesn't seem like a big thing in the moment. But when you're overcommitted already, it's a huge thing. And then you have to juggle things around and you add stress to your life. After you do that, you take all of those things one at a time and run them through the firebox. And so the firebox is our way of really figuring out how to clear things off of our calendar, off of our plate, so that we can have time to invest in the important things. And here is the ultimate question that you need to continue thinking about always and forever. The question is this what am I optimizing for? What will I do? What do I want to do with the extra time I'm going to free up? If you don't know that answer, we said it earlier, you're you're running a fool's errand. If you do know the answer, and actually, once you've gone through and planned out all your future planning, you know exactly what you're optimizing for, right? And so when we look at the firebox, there's the F, which means finish first. I invest focus here, always. That's what we're trying to do. Invest in the important, not urgent things. The R box, we want to reduce those things, and the E box, we want to extinguish those things. So, right here in the I box, these are the things that are important to you. And it's important that you do them. What are some examples? Exercise, sleep, nutrition. We neglect those. And what happens when we neglect those? They become emergencies. And when those things become emergencies, they they will stop you in your damn tracks. And so we want to focus more time on the most important things to us because they keep us alive longer, duh. Now, anything in the F box, urgent and important. Uh what do we mean by urgent? Is it time sensitive, right? Is it due by tomorrow? Is it due by the end of the week, right? If it's urgent and important, and I'm gonna add this is it important that you do it, right? Period. Can somebody else do it? That's a different question. And that takes us to the R and the E box. This is where we start removing things. If it's urgent, like if anything that can be done by somebody else that you're currently doing, and and there's a lot of reasons why you're doing it, but like for real, I want you to really, really think about do I have to do these things? Here's an example. Do I need to go to the groceries to buy my groceries? Hell no, I don't. Do I need to wash my car? Do I need to mow the lawn? No, I don't need to do those things. Somebody, they need to be done, but it ain't gotta be by me. And so if it's not important, we want to figure out okay, how do we reduce it? If it's not important that I do the thing, we want to figure out how do we reduce it and make it smaller? Optimize it, automate it, or delegate it. Now we move over to the final, the e-box, to extinguish things, anything that is not time-bound, it's not time sensitive, and it ain't important that you need to do it. Conventional language is stop doing it, but it ain't that easy. So, in some cases, you got to have a conversation with people. You gotta have like come to terms and say, hey, you got me on this meeting, I'm not getting any value, I'm not providing any value. Why am I on the meeting? Can I come off the meeting? Right? That's a simple conversation, might free up 30 minutes a week. And if you get 30 minutes a week and there's 52 weeks in a year, we're talking 26 hours that you just got back, or outsource it, like I said earlier, like the groceries. I pay, I have a service that picks up my groceries and brings it to the house. And I freaking love it. Does it cost a little bit of money? Yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it gives me time to do the things that are important to me that it only I can do, or really that I don't want anybody else to do yet. So that is the strategically self-rescheduling. I want you to look at this from the perspective of like if you didn't have to worry about anybody judging you, anybody talking smack, any negative consequence, like for real, for real, for real, which box would you put it in? So we get into daily domination. So we started with like big picture, future, long-term planning, then we got down into the strategically selfish scheduling, which is about clearing space on our calendar and clearing things like minimizing our commitments. And so now we get into daily execution, which is really all about really understanding how much am I doing per day, what do I have on my plate, and identifying the things that get me off track. Because why? Because life keeps on lifing. I want you to notice there this template, this Trello template, is pre-populated. So all the cards are set up to help you get started with the pointers. When you click on the cards, it'll give you instructions, right? Here's an example set yourself up for success. Boom, there's a link to a YouTube video with some instructions on how to do that particular thing. Focus on one day at a time, blah, blah, blah. It gives you the instructions, get it, you move it, and the video shows you, right? Each of the little cards in there has instructions, has a video. And like I said, it's designed to help you start really start measuring your performance and come up with strategies to deal with the squirrels, the distractions that you chase, or deal with the curveballs, the things that come from outside of you, the where people come and attack you, the time bandits and so forth, give you some good strategy so that you have your energy and you feel good when you get stuff done. If all that instruction was like too, too fast, I completely understand. And I 100% recommend that you sign up for the workshop for like the full experience. It's 250 bucks a person, and it consists of the workshop kickoff, which is a four-hour workshop where we're gonna be building and going through these things live in a group where you can ask questions, you can steal steal cheat codes from all the other people on there. And I'm there to answer questions and guide us through the things to make sure everybody's kind of understanding it. There's plenty of time. Like you're gonna be working on the thing, like it ain't like you're just gonna be listening. After the workshop kickoff, then there's gonna be four support and accountability calls. Uh, the very first one is focused on distractions, like and tips and tricks on how to manage your distractions. The second call is focused on measuring performance, like how are we performing day to day, week to week, so that we can, you know, get better. You ain't gonna improve and you ain't measuring it. The third call, we dive into schedule management, like calendar schedule management. And then the fourth call is a status check on the long-term goals. Why? Because that's what we started with in the workshop. But you know, there's some good habits that we need to build that will actually help us make progress on those long-term goals. So those are four separate calls, they happen every other week. And we have the Make It Happeners online community. It's kind of like Facebook, where you upload pictures, we support each other, ask each other questions, you know, celebrate, complain, all of the above, so that we can maintain the momentum on this effort that we have in terms of improving ourselves and making things better. And so, what's the point? The whole point of this Sell First Time Mastery framework is to give you the tools, the mental models, the frameworks so that you can start focusing on your gifts and talents so you can leave this world better than you found it. That is the whole point. I want to remind you you can sign up for the webinar, the link's down there below. If you're ready to like just buy a seat for the upcoming workshops, hit the QR code. It'll take you to the page where we've got all the dates and the times. Sign yourself up, bring your friend. And yes, if you're wondering, do I do this for companies? Yes, I do. I'm headed to Dallas and Phoenix here in the next couple weeks to do an in person training for these businesses, for all the folks in these businesses. Um, and that's a super, super fun thing. So if that's something that you're interested in, hit me up, we'll we'll work it out, and I'll gladly come to your town and have some fun with you guys.