Level Up with Productivity Strategies for High Achievers Ep 46

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In this episode of Transform Your Future, Eddie Isin sits down with David Buck, author of The Time Optimized Life, to dive into productivity strategies for high achievers. David shares his PEC (Preparation, Execution, Control) framework, designed to help you reclaim your time, enhance focus, and take proactive control of your day. If you're ready to elevate your productivity and make the most of your workday, this episode is for you!

[00:00] - Introduction and Welcome

• Eddie introduces David Buck and sets the stage for a deep dive into productivity strategies designed for high achievers.

[02:00] - David’s Journey to Writing A Time Optimized Life

• David shares his background in sales and how his struggles with time management led him to create his own approach and eventually write a book on productivity.

[06:00] - The PEC Framework: Preparation, Execution, and Control

• David introduces the PEC framework as a foundational strategy for optimizing time. He explains each component and how it can improve productivity by focusing on planning and proactive management.

[11:00] - The Power of Productivity Zones

• David and Eddie discuss identifying personal “productivity zones” – peak hours for high-energy work – and how to structure your day around them.

[15:30] - Real-World Application of Preparation in Sales and Beyond

• Eddie and David explore how the preparation phase applies in sales settings and other careers, emphasizing the importance of mindset and planning for a successful day.

[22:00] - Building Flexibility into Your Schedule

[30:00] - Execution: Putting Plans into Action

[37:00] - Proactive vs. Reactive Mindset

[43:00] - Control: Holding Yourself Accountable

[49:00] - Tracking Time and Minimizing Distractions

[54:00] - Work-Life Flexibility Over Work-Life Balance

• David advocates for a flexible approach to time management that integrates both personal and professional responsibilities, allowing for shifts as needed without the pressure of “perfect balance.”

[58:00] - Closing Thoughts and Key Takeaway

Links and Resources

• Connect with Eddie Isin on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardisin/
• David’s Book: The Time Optimized Life - https://amzn.to/40szu8q
• David Buck’s Free Time Management Checklist - https://infinitylifestyledesign.com/tma/

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

Papaya, welcome David Buck to the Transform Your Future Podcast. How are you today, sir? I. Am doing outstanding. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Eddie. Fantastic. I'm going to jump right in. We've been having some good convos going back and forth in chats and emails. I wanted to just jump in and let's go right in today and let's talk about a time optimized life, your book. Let's talk about what got you to getting to the idea that, you know what, I need to put this in a book. I need to get this out there in the world. What was going on with you that got you thinking that? So I have been in sales business development, fancy word for sales for just about all of my career until I started my own business, and I found that early on these amazing, outstanding, good looks and huge charisma really wasn't working well for me. So I had to find what am I going to do to be successful in the sales career that I was in. And I found that how I managed my time and how I helped my clients manage their time actually became my way to be successful in career. I was going to be more prepared and help my clients use their time than any other salesperson they were going to run into. Absolutely. I identify with that. I would say the biggest gains that I've had and I continue to have is when I really look at my time and managing my day and the hours, the golden hours as a jet blunt to put it of when I'm actually working and managing that. Yeah, absolutely. Let's jump into it. So you were recognizing this, you were practicing it and you decided to, because you helped other people and they were getting something out of it to put it in a book. How did that start when you started to formulate the book? So when I left corporate world and started my own business, one of the things that I am a big layout, the plan have a strategy. So for me, what am I going to do to differentiate myself from other productivity coaches was I created what's called a time management analysis. It's an assessment that people can take that gives them a benchmark and a foundation of where are the areas I do well when I manage my time and what are those areas I don't do. I quickly found when I was doing that that there was a lot of patterns that I was seeing that people were falling into, particularly those that were having difficulty managing their time, and that then became the outline for the book because I had hundreds of them that people have taken. I had a data set with which I could work to work with. And then ultimately what I found is people really manage their time, and I don't mean that in a negative way, but they're reactive. So things come at them and people are like, I'm going to go ahead and solve this problem, and they may solve it well, but it's reactive. And I'm like, how do we flip that script and let people be proactive? And that's what led me to the concept of optimizing time where I'm proactively trying to anticipate what I'm going to do in order to be able to use my time better when the time comes. Absolutely, and again, this is a great thing that we're talking about here because we have to change our mindset if we want to really be successful and double and triple the outcomes of what we can do, we really need to dial in there and get that right mindset that we're not firefighters, right? We're not here to put out fires. We're here to build relationships and take those relationships to a successful conclusion to serve somebody's needs and not just be reactive all day of, this guy has a problem, this customer has a problem, let me fix this issue. Absolutely. So really the essence, thank you. And the essence behind optimization is for an individual to say, what can I do to plan out my day, week, however long, and what can I do and what can I anticipate that's you're never going to get it perfect. I mean, if you do great for you, I've yet been able to, but it then puts me in a position to negotiate my time when someone demands it of me, whether it's a client, a boss, family member, whatever. If I know what I'm doing, it allows me better to say, you know what? I'm going to change in order to devote time to Eddie or Eddie, sorry, I've got this all laid out. Let's plan it and let's figure out something to do benefits us both. Yes, yes. So give me a couple of ideas of some of the key concepts in the books, and I'm sure there's several, but I'll let you decide which ones to bring out. So the overall arching concept that in the book is on the acronym that's called PEC, preparation, execution and Control. So the idea of optimizing your time is first you have to invest time in preparation. What am I going to do with this particular thing? And that preparation is planning my calendar out, deciding, prioritizing what's important to me that I want to do within this time that's coming up. And so once I've established the preparation, I head into executing what I prepared. And if I get into execution and I find out this isn't going well, maybe I need to stop what I'm doing and go back and prepare some more or prepare, but then once I'm executing, if I'm executing it well ultimately the decision is how am I going to control the outcome? And that control element says, do I need to execute better or do I need to go all the way back and prepare some? And so preparation, execution and control, I envision as a triangle three points of a triangle, and you're constantly moving between those to then ultimately achieve whatever task goal or project you're working on. So give me a good example of how I can apply that preparation part in my sales environment. Sales and influence. 100%, eat it, sleep it, drink it, listen to it, train it, role, play it every day. Shoot 200 times like a professional basketball player. So preparation is about training, it's about mindset, it's about knowing the information, right? Obviously if you're in a sales situation and you're new to this and you don't know what it is, what's the points and how it helps and what pain points it solves, then obviously you need to prepare for that, right? So is this on the right lines about preparation? Absolutely. And within that preparation as you laid out, is some form of structure. And that structure either depending on what type of, let's say sales job you have, it could be very structured in that, Hey, I've got to do so many calls per day, or I've got to do so many X activities, so many leading indicators that I have to do in that particular timeframe, and so I'm going to carve that time out. Or if you're in sales selling sophisticated software solutions, that call is just the first step of many that have to happen to ultimately get what you want. So you have to define What is the structure in which I can be successful in? And I find that many early salespeople in their career want to, they think that they can do it better than the structure. And maybe at some point you can but own the process that's given in front of you. And I would say, do the honor by yourself and your employer of diving in and going into that process, particularly if the company's successful at selling stuff or your bosses, that preparation part there. So the structure, but I also say you need to build in flexibility because the day never goes exactly the way you plan. You're into your third call on your call list and you get a really good client who then or potential client that you're spending all this time with developing stuff. Well, that may have totally messed up the rest of your call schedule. And so if you didn't build in flexibility to this, say, what happens if I have this client that's really interested and wants to talk to me? How do I then address that later? So it's the structure that you have with periods of built-in flexibility to handle the challenges that are going to come your way. Yeah, so I get that. How I handle that in my mind as we're talking is that I like to kind of segment my day. I like chunk it. I find that I can do a lot of high energy, high activity in a period of time so that maybe the first two hours of my day is for lead generation, it's for new people, it's taking a couple of hours to reach out to find new people that I haven't talked to yet and always include that in my day. But I could see how, because it's like a two hour window in there, I have that two hour space to get it done and move things forward. So that's my flexibility portion. Does that make sense? It does. And you bring up a good point about what I call is the productivity zone. We all have it. There are morning people, there are afternoon people, there are evening people, depending on what you do. Now for those of us or people who work in a customer facing role who have to go out and either directly contact customers, new prospects, sometimes your productivity zone may not be in the zone that you need to reach out to your client. And that to me is a personal care element. That's where you need to take care of your body in such a way that you can adjust your productivity zone to be there. But let's just say for the sake of it, we all have a zone. And if you have then flexibility of either when you reach out to your clients or you do your work, then that's the best opportunity to put either the most difficult tasks you have for that day or the most intensive. Because if you're going to do it in that timeframe, in that time zone, you're getting done with the most important things the day. And I'm not scratching your head in the evening going, oh man, I didn't get done with three things I needed to do today. Where am I going to put those? Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I hear what you're saying that just because my desire is to do lead generation for the first two hours of the day. If I'm in a situation where that's not a good time to actually reach people and get things done that's in my sect of business, then yeah, I would have to obviously be alter that and do it at a different time of the day. But I basically take the eight hour work environment and break it down into four, two hour segments that I handle things. For example, I like to handle all the fires, problems, customer issues, administrative crap and all that. Read the email at the end of the day in the last two hours just so that I could be very productive in the first six. I love your two hour block concept, whether it's structured or not. There's a technique called time blocking, and it can be relative to I work for 55 minutes, take a five minute break, I work for two hours, take a 15 minute break, whatever that is. But the idea that what you do, I would encourage all the listeners to do is you have to build in structured time where you will take a break in between to be able to recharge for that new set and level of activity that you're going to do. And even if all day you're starting out intel sales, do that, break in there, stop after a certain period of time, get up, stretch, go do something different, step away from the work area, come back again because you'll do yourself a service and the potential clients you're reaching out to because you've re-engaged and you're fresh. So the second thing, so we were in prepare, and then I forgot the e. Execution. Would be the second execution. Execution, okay. So let's talk a little bit more about some real examples of execution and how we use that idea in our day. So someone let's say in sales says that I am preparing for a sales meeting onsite, so I've done all the preparation I've done beforehand. Now I'm going to execute. I'm in front of the client. For example, I'm working this now at that point, that could be in and out of your productivity zone. It doesn't matter at that point. I just know for me, man, I put myself in the zone. If I was in front of the customer at eight o'clock at night, I'm in the zone because I have to be. I love. It. But at that particular point, you begin to execute against the preparation that you did and you begin to notice I have, I've been in sales presentations to clients that have gone exactly the way I planned it and you walk out of there going, but that actually is the minority, the majority I've been in with customer presentations, it has changed. Something has happened, somebody says, wait a minute, you're showing me something I haven't seen before and maybe you weren't prepared to give that level of information. So as you execute, you execute with a mindset that says, I have already through my preparation have two or three alternatives. I can go with that particular client. Even if you're selling something. And I know that car salesmen have a very set process that they do as they sell the automobile, but I also know the good ones are ready when someone asks 'em a question, what type of rubber is made on the tire of the car? They know that, okay, no one asked me that question. But they're prepared with either some type of answer or something that keeps the customer engaged. You have to be as well. So as you execute and when you're on a sales call in front of the customer, there's no going back to preparation in essence to say, stop. Let me go prepare for that, but you're ready to adapt and because in your preparation phase, you're ready to go in two or three different directions if you need to. Yeah. And I want to say just for a minute that although many people are not in a sales position where they are the person who's responsible for bringing in the new business to the company, all of us in a company have some responsibility to sales and influence in our process. So whether you're the CEO that has got the right talking products or an accountant who happens to talk to other CFOs and have the right kind of messaging about the company, although you're not the one responsible for closing the deal, maybe you're responsible for opening it in some way by the right messaging and talking about what we do and how we do it and how we solve people's pain points and problems. Yeah, sure. You could take that example of what I use, going to see a customer and you can say, I have to present a presentation to my team at work. So I could be in marketing, I could be in operations, and I have to go present a message to the same principle applies. So it doesn't have to be sales. We both are familiar with that, but it can be any professional you do. We love it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I just wanted to be clear about that because these ideas that you have, they apply to everything. We happen to just be speaking a little bit personally about sales because we love it and this is what we do. We eat, sleep and drink and breathe it, right? So I'm thinking about this and I want to talk a little bit more about the kind of execution. How effectively, how does that go back to the time and optimizing? How do we fit that in there? So the element of execution to me is all about you having in the preparation phase, defining the times that you're going to spend on this. For example, I do, I will say with a client, we have booked an hour to work with a particular client. I'm going to hold to that schedule for myself and the client. And I challenge myself even though I've had situations where the client, I always do a buffer, the client wants to spend more time, I'll do that, but I'm also very mindful to say, I know I need to say what I need to say in this particular time, or I need to do, if I'm going to schedule an hour on my calendar to work on a project, I need to make sure that I am going to do everything I can to get it done in that timeframe. Now, it never usually happens in that timeframe. So I usually tell people if it's important enough, add 50% to your time. So if you're going to do you, it's going to take me an hour block off an hour and a half, and if you get done in an hour, wonderful, you have a half an hour of found time of which if you want to throw in your administrative work or other lower level tasks, you can do that and be more efficient. But the idea is the more important the task, you must block it off. And then you have to say to yourself, do I need to give myself some fudge factor or flex time to get it done? It's interesting, I'm thinking about this, seeing that, for example, for five years I was involved in these sales situations and relationships where I actually couldn't control the execution part. So I know that I set it up and we set an appointment and during this appointment this is what we're going to do and I've prepared everything so that could run smoothly. But when we get there and we actually start that process, sometimes some people it requires an hour, an hour and a half, and there are other administrative task or business tasks and business development tasks within there that have to be part of this whole thing and part of this journey, like let's say financing. So now we're going to talk about the financing and do financial contracts and all that. And so sometimes yes, with some people it took an hour, some people it took two hours, some people took three or four hours depending on the day and the time and the traffic and everything. And so I found it very important that I figured out how to utilize a lot of that time to continue to do the other things that needed to be done so that I wouldn't be a feast or famine kind of process. I need that pipeline to always keep putting people up appointments and setting things going. And then I would end up in this situation where now I have to spend three or four hours with somebody and I need to figure out how, while I'm spending three or four hours with you, I still could be preparing and getting things organized for an appointment later or the next day or whatever. So it's interesting, this execution part is actually quite vital. I see why you bring it up a lot to it. Yeah. Thank you. And you also mentioned a good example of when you anticipate working with someone in a period of time and it extends a lot farther. That to me is part of the preparation phases. Obviously if it's a new client, if we're talking sales, you're going to have to learn that. And so it might be the first time you meet with them, it's like, oh, wow, they go much longer than I anticipated. They're harder to stay focused. But we know in our corporate structure work structure, we know if a boss is one who's kind of flighty and it's not focused, then you plan to say, I'm not going to plan one hour. Or if I'm in my one hour one-on-one or we're in his staff meeting, we know as staff meetings always run an hour late, then you purposely block the hour after that so that you aren't anticipating going, golly, we're 15 minutes late, I plan to work on this. Great. You understand? And that's where the anticipation part comes in so that when you're sitting there and it's 20 minutes after the designated meeting time and your boss is still pontificating about stuff you don't care about, you're not freaking out because you've already anticipated that particular time may or may not be able to be used. And the third portion, let's talk about some real examples for the third portion. So the control element is something that says, and again, in some of the specific elements we're working with when either it's client facing, the control element for you is to ensure that your information or your needs are translated to, in this case, the prospect or the client. So however you need to make that happen and you determine that in the preparation phase on it, the control aspect is, was I able to accomplish it in regular tasks or activities in a corporate or job environment? The control element says you hold yourself accountable to achieve the results that you initially did. And if you can't, then you move to say, am I executing it correctly or do I have to go all the way back to preparation and prepare a little bit better and dive back in? So really ultimately the control is are you holding yourself accountable to the goals that you've established for that task or project or appointment? Interesting. So why do you think individuals have difficulty either accepting or planning or organizing or even working towards the idea of actually managing their time and efficiency? So one of the first things that I do with clients is I say, let me see your calendar, open up your calendar for me, and they'll open their calendar up and I'll see a series of meetings populated in there. Typically, most of them are not meetings they've originated, it's been meetings other people have asked them to participate in. And then I'll see a bunch of open time. So at eight o'clock there's a meeting, then two hour break at 11, there's another meeting or three hour break. And so I'll say, what's going on in the empty time there? Well, I'm just trying to work on stuff that I need to get done for the day or things like that. And so that's where I say, okay, right now are letting your calendar run. You are not running your calendar. That's where I say you've got to fill in those open spaces with formal activities that you plan to get done. And we all have through our email servers and the email platforms we use, we have the ability, particularly if people want to schedule your time, that if it's important enough to you, you block it as busy and when you block it as busy, nobody else can come in and meeting bully that time so to speak. And so to me, you plan it. Now if it's like, I need to plan this time, but I've got to keep it open in case a client calls, then you leave that not busy, you leave it open on the calendar so you see it, it's a priority, but you do allow the opportunity for clients, your boss or whatever to say, I need this time from you. So to me, plan out the calendar and I say plan it two weeks out, so knowing it's going to change, but then that way you're out there saying, my time's value. I've planned every minute of my time that I possibly can. And I could see how for different individuals, they would apply this idea a little bit differently. But essentially what we're talking about is a real mind shift change and a real attitude or change that we're going to go on to understand that we need to make the idea of my schedule work for me to achieve my goals, not for me to be a slave to the calendar. Right? Absolutely. And I get that. I think that's a big nugget right there. For example, right now I'm dealing with this new CRM that I feel like it's managing me and I'm not managing it. I need the CRM to work for me so that I can reach my goals, not for it to work against me, to stop me from doing the things that I need to do. And sometimes you have to figure that out, I guess is what my experience is. But I find I just want to say that you, and I'm sure that you'll agree and your clients that you work with agree, but it is a real game changer. People oftentimes they think, I can't get things done. I'm doing everything I can and I've reached this limit and I wanted to go from here to there. I wanted to be, let's just say I just use round numbers just to use a number as an idea. I wanted to do $200,000 in sales, but I only did a hundred and I feel like I'm doing everything I can to get to that a hundred. So I don't know how I can get to the 200. How is that possible? And this is the thing that actually changes all that. It's kind of like my coach says there's a difference between baby seals and navy seals, and it's like if you want to be a Navy seal, you need to master this. If you want to be a warrior, you need to master this. If you want to be in the top five, 10% of people who are really at the top of the board there or the top of your game in your business, in your industry, in your profession, you need to master this to get there. Absolutely. With that a hundred percent, it's a game changer. And the flip side is people don't realize you have to invest time to make time. And that sounds counterintuitive, that sounds against the grain, but really you have to say, what time am I going to allocate to be able to manage my time better to be able to plan it going forward? A lot of people will say, yeah, I got home and I worked a couple of hours, or I worked till 11 at night trying to catch up on stuff that I'm doing. And there is an economics term called the declining marginal utility, which means basically as you consume more, your satisfaction goes down. Well, that's the same for your time if you are not investing it well. So you may say, I'm going to go home, I'm going to work three hours to try to get ahead. Whereas if you said, maybe if I was able to plan my day better, I wouldn't have to work those three hours. Maybe I need to only work that one hour afterwards and that one hour is so productive. I got done in one hour. What it took me three hours to do because I was better focused. I knew what I needed to get done. I wasn't reacting. I was proactive to what I needed to do. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think also I wanted to talk to you about something else here and see what you have to say about it is that I have had the experience where when I attempt to do this and to manage my time and plan out a day, I'll go too far in the other direction where I try to obsess about what I'm going to do for these five minutes, these 10 minutes, these 15 minutes, and I ended up putting so much stuff in there, no human being could actually ever really be able to do it in a day the way that I set it up, and it just was completely unrealistic. How do we help people through your process to not go in that direction? And that's easy to do because it looks real pretty when you're like, wow, I'm going to get all this stuff done. And that's where the prioritization comes in. So then as you lay out all the things that you're going to want to do, I challenge people to say, you got to lay out the most important ones for the day, and those are the critical ones. So I get a lot of people, for example, say they'll put 10 tasks down during the day. They'll get eight of them done and go, yay, eight out of 10, and then they'll say, those other two were the most important. So then they have to flip that over to the next day and try to figure out how am I going to cram that into all the other stuff? It should be reversed. You should say, these are the two I have to get done today of the 10, and if I get these two done and the other eight aren't done, doesn't matter. I got done with these because those other eight I can cram in to a certain point later on in the calendar to make it work. So prioritization, then that goes back to the preparation part that says, I'm going to say only the most important stuff is the stuff I am going to hold myself accountable to. I get to the other stuff, great. If not, I'll find another time later on. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And my favorite things in life is to being able to break it all down to its real essential core of what it is that I'm doing. In other words, I have goals and my goals are driven by a need that I have to do something. Let's just say it could be simple as putting your kid through college. You want to pay for your daughter to go to private university, and so there's a number that's attached to that because I need that. I need to make sure I have that to take care of that. And then you back that down into your day to make sure that you hit that number on a daily basis. It's not that complicated. Right? I read that book, and I don't remember the title exactly, but it was about the one thing I think it was called where you figure out what's the one thing that if I could do this one thing and get through this one thing successfully in a day, then I've had a really good day and I've moved everything closer to where I want to go. And so for me, for example, there's a amount of money I need to make a year to do the things that I need to take care of my responsibilities and to make the impact that I want in my life. And then I break that down by the month, break that down by the week, break that down by the day, and then I backed that down to, okay, so knowing let's just say hypothetically you need to get two sales a day. Let's just say it was something like that, and the average amount was fit to reach what you want. Let's just say the two. Your thing was just do 2000 a day, let's say. So if you have two sales and the average tickets a thousand, that's 2000 a day. So now the question is what activities do I have to do on a daily basis to do two sales a day? Is that 200 phone calls? I got to make 200 dials to reach so many people, to get so many people in the pipeline and going through the process to be able to close two a day or whatever. I kind of back it all down that way to make it all work. And again, I'm trying to bring out all these points that we're talking about, and obviously if I'm not prepared for these things, then I probably should just cancel the meeting because what's the point of meeting somebody if I'm not prepared for that? So you just went through a wonderful exercise to prevent people from being procrastinated or for them stopping their procrastination. So let's take your example. Let's say you were going to do two sales a day for the purposes of keeping it easy, you have to do 600 sales in a year. Well, if your boss handed you a sheet of paper and said, here you go, Eddie, you got to do 600 sales in the next year, you might just stop with fright because you're going, how what, six? How am I going to do that? And then so take that example and apply that to, let's say example. I'm going to paint my room. I'm going to say I want to put color on the walls. Well, if I just make that as a declarative statement, it's very easy for me to push that off to say either I can't do that. I'm not going to get 600 sales. Whereas when you take the time and you break it down to the elements that says, okay, I have to then ultimately, if I can make, if you said like 200 calls a day or whatever the metric is that says that will, then I've got it in a manageable chunk that's realistic to me that says, yes, I can do this. Or maybe a little bit of tension. There's always good tension if it drives you and motivates you, but it's something that says this is doable and you get to reward yourself. So even if at the end of the day you got two sales, you got 598 more to go, at the end of the day you get to say, I made progress and it gets you motivated to the next day to make the phone calls. Maybe I want to get ahead of the curve and maybe I can try to get three. But it gets you off of this big, huge, maybe nebulous or seemingly unattainable goal and puts it in the context that says, I can get it in chunks, and then you find I'm not procrastinating because I'm making progress. Yeah, I'm just thinking about all this, David, and I think it's fantastic, and I encourage everybody to really look at their schedule and look at what they're doing. Because what I find in the actual working world that we're in, the teams that I've been involved in, the teams that I've built, the structures that we created, it just seems like most people naturally don't do a lot in their day. They waste a lot of time in their day. There's a lot of waste. And I'm not saying that maybe for example, that in talking to other people on the team or in your workplace, this socialization, that's a process. I'm not saying you can't socialize. I'm just saying we need to manage some of those things. We don't want to spend three hours of our golden hours of our work time socializing with people. We need to focus on the things we have to do. So in the sales environment, oftentimes it is reactive sales. It's not proactive sales. So in other words, you're sitting there and you're just waiting for somebody to call you. You're waiting for somebody to walk in the door instead of being proactive and making those conversations happen and doing everything you can to have those multiple conversations in a day by cold outreach or warm outreach or I had a habit in the past. The way I've done a of things is I've just do check-ins. Like you have a customer, you did work with the customer. And then every couple of months I make sure to check in, how are you doing? How's things going? How's that project you're working on? Is there anything I could do to help you at this point? Just let you know who I am. I'm back here again, here, I'm in your face. Is there anything that we can do and get more business out of that repeat business and structure, referrals, whatever. But having those kinds of systems so that you're proactively bringing people into your pipeline and not reactively just waiting. Because when you ask a lot of people, I say, so Joe, you told me that you needed to make X, Y, z and that you had these goals and things that you wanted to do, how's that going? And they're like, oh, man, it's not going. It's really bad. It's been really struggling. Really? Why is that? He goes, well, there's just not enough leads. There's just not enough people. These are the things they say. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Let's break that down. So I mean, obviously if you sit here and you're waiting for somebody you're waiting for somebody to call you. Yeah, that's true. If you're waiting. So the problem is not that there's not enough people coming in the door, the problem is is you're waiting. I'm saying. So I love it. I love it. And I'm sure that this applies to every area and everybody's schedule, that the more proactive you are, the more successful you're going to be. The more reactive you are, the less successful you're going to be. It's not that complicated. Right? Yeah. And the couple of things off of your discussion is that first I am not a fan of companies tracking people's time. I don't like that idea of track, but I am a fan and I encourage people to track your own time. Go ahead. There's a lot of, there's clock iffy. I forget the other one, but there's two or three free software versions out there, and I encourage you honestly, track your time for a month and then come back. You will be shocked at how much time you quote waste. The average person, and this is my second point, the average person is on social media almost three hours a day. And. So you have to say to yourself, if I'm on social media for three hours a day, what am I sacrificing in my regular part of my day to be able to see if my post went viral today or to see who commented? And social media companies, they are designed, they work to pull you away from what you're doing. That's why distractions are the single, that's my single most time management challenge that I have. God, you're speaking my language. Well, and for those of us in sales, we're designed to be distracted. So you mentioned your CRM. My CRM notifies me when someone opens an email and it's so easy if I get excited, particularly if there's someone I've been trying to get ahold of that I see they open my emails, I'm like, oh, I'm going to jump on then because maybe they're in the office. I'm going to give 'em a call and say, Hey, how's it going? Well, I was just reading your email. And so you have just that alone. And so the idea that we are what's around us is programming to make us distracted. If you can control that, just imagine if you could say, I could cut my social media consumption in half. It's an hour and a half. You're giving yourself a day. What if you filled that with other productive stuff? Whatever you do, whether it's working on the marketing plan, whether it's doing more calls, whether it's figuring out operationally, how to improve a process at the plant you work on, just imagine what benefit that brings to you, not only personally, but professionally. And I'm not one to judge. I don't judge. The thing is that in my life, I mean all these things we're talking about, yes, I use them in a work environment. I use them to reach goals and to build the life of my dreams and what I want. But I mean, I use it all day, every day in all areas of my life. So that typically when you say to somebody, here's just one thing, if you learn more, you earn more. This is a simple thing. And you don't have to go to college and spend hours. You're not like an empty cup that somebody needs to fill. No. It's just a matter of learning new skill very quickly that can help you to achieve all the things that you want to achieve. And oftentimes, sometimes it's just about understanding certain things. So every day we want to incorporate learning new things. I told you earlier that I practice every day. I feel like if I was in the NBA, I would be one of those players that would go out and shoot 300 baskets a day and be active just like if I was in a championship game every day, I would be in that right emotional state at that peak performance to perform, perform at the highest level every day so that when I'm actually in the game, I've already done it 400 times. It is part of me. I don't need to think about it. And so all these things, they need to be included in your day. And so sometimes you'll say, well, I don't have time because I'm so busy doing this. I'm so busy doing that, and then I've got to sleep and how am I going to fit that in my day? Well, if you go back and you start doing what David's talking about, it actually start even if it's as simple as you just have a piece of paper and a pen, and from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed a couple of days, you write down everything that you're doing, you'll be able to look and see what this, and then you take a yellow highlighter and just highlight all those things that were just a waste of time. All these things, if I eliminated these things, it wouldn't change anything. If I just didn't do these things in a day, it wouldn't make anything good or bad. It would be non-consequential, right? And then my favorite thing that I like to do that I'm working on again right now is removing anything I don't like doing. Because then I go through the list and I'm like, you know what? I had to spend an hour doing this and I don't like that. I really don't want to spend an hour doing that. I need to find somebody else to take that hour away from me so I could do what I'm really good at. Because all of us have talents and skills. And so my sweet spot is spending most of my time working in where my talent and skill is rather than spending a lot of my time doing things that are not my talent and skill. It's very funny. I'm working with some people right now and they want to be involved in the process of designing something and creating something. And it's a very difficult kind of thing because when you're working with somebody and you want 'em to do business with you, you don't want to just tell 'em, Hey, this is not your forte. Why are you even involved in this? Stick to what you know. But really essentially that's the idea is that they're getting sidetracked and hijacked by this fancy object over here. Maybe it's fomo, maybe it's fear of not getting what they want, and they still got to get all involved and manage that and control it instead of just focusing on what they do. So I try not to let that happen to me. I see people do that every day. For me, I don't want that to happen to me. I'm very happy for you to take care of the things that are not my forte, that are not my specialty. So I liked where you talked about integrating in and personal elements of things, and particularly this idea of continuous learning. And I challenge people because a lot of people really separate career versus personal, meaning they plan, if they plan, they try to plan in career, and then when they step out at the day is done and they move off, then all organization stops. And I'm like, you need to merge professional and personal together. And I'm not saying that means you have to work 14 hours a day. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is your time is consumed at the same rate whether you're at work or you're at play. So why not plan both of them out? And I loved your idea of continuous learning, and I had a boss really stuck with me and pushed it because I would say, listen, I give the company enough. I don't need to do any other professional learning or whatever. If the company wants me to do that, they can tell me and teach me. He able to flip my mind script because then I'm like, okay, if I do well, if I'm doing what the company expects of me and I'm giving it and I'm meeting all my goals, I might still only be looked at as, Hey, Dave's a good employee meets what it is. But if I come back and I spend a little bit of time on my personal time developing my skills, learning new things and coming back in and saying, Hey, I tried this new thing that I learned or this course that I took or book I read, then it shows you're trying to do over and above what is expected of you and that's what gets you promoted because they're like, well, and it might require an investment of time outside of work, but when you integrate professional and personal together, what are you doing? You're proactively preparing to invest that. Time. But you're also investing time in self, your personal self with your family, your spouse, your partner, whatever. You're dedicating time to them instead of just saying Outside of work, I'll try to figure out what I'm going to do. Yeah. If you take your three key principles that we discussed and you apply that to all areas of your life, you would have a much more successful life. You would feel more engaged in your own life. You feel like you're a winner. You feel like you're really winning every day. And that's an important thing we were talking about earlier. I never mentioned it, but we were talking about you were saying in the zone, and that's my thing, bro. That is my life. I want to be in the zone every day and I do a lot of the preparation that I do every day. I mean from my morning routine and how I handle that morning routine to the closing routine at the end of the day to how I incorporate that one day a week, I turn everything off and I don't listen to anything and I just relax and enjoy life and just forget about everything. The world is gone and I don't have any responsibilities for one day a week because that retreat for one day and freedom that I have, that's part of why I can operate at a peak performance. I need that, but being in the zone is critical. So how do you get in the zone in your life? What do you have to do so that you feel that way every day? And that's why you got to hack your life just like you have to hack your job and your schedule. You got to do the same thing with your life. And I think when you look at the, it's interesting you brought up that thing. I was listening to you and you brought up about, I'm not saying you were clear that I'm not saying you need to work 14 hours a day. That's what you said. And the reason you're saying that is because many people like to make the excuse of why they're not moving ahead, why they're not really critically reaching their goals, why they're not living the life of their dreams. They like to use the excuse that they don't want to work 14 hours a day or 16 hours a day. And I find that really that the mindset is the problem there because really I don't consider what I do work. I mean, okay, I understand I have these hours of the day that I'm productive, but I don't really consider it work. I mean, this is what I do. It's my talent and skill that I have. I enjoy people. I enjoy doing what I do, and if you don't enjoy what you're doing, that's something that you need to critically look at. If you're living a life that you're saying, oh, I don't want to be doing this for 14 hours, why is that? Maybe you're in the wrong career or maybe you're a level 10 player. I have found myself many times. I'm a level 10 player, but I was in a level five company and team and I needed to switch. I find there's a compass inside of me and you got to listen to these things and help that guide you to find that sweet spot in your life. But I would challenge anybody that it's impossible for you to actually do the research and see what are the top five or 10 common traits that all very successful people have. And one of them is they absolutely manage their time in their day and they focus all their attention and utility to make sure that they're reaching the goals that they want to reach regardless of how that fills their day. I mean, I always say I would challenge people, people, I work with teams all the time and I'm helping train people in sales. I'm a certified sales trainer. And they'll be like, man, you know what my real challenge is? I don't have a good life work balance. And I'm like, let's unpack that a little bit. What does that really mean? And when you start talking about it, I'm like, well, I think you just have unrealistic expectations because personally, I would rather spend one really good hour where I'm absolutely a hundred percent engaged with my wife than spending four hours with her watching tv. So true. Let's really break this down because I don't understand. People have this idea, well, if I spend four or five hours at home with my loved ones, then that's my goal. Why? If you're all just watching TV or somebody's in their room playing the video game and you're in the other, what's the point of that? I would rather spend 30 minutes of a tight, really, I'm engaged. You're engaged. We're communicating effectively. We're talking about our lives and our goals and how we help each other and love each other and concern for each other. I would rather do that than spend four hours while we're just watching TV or playing around the house or just sitting around the table eating and bullshitting. So that's just me. I love the idea. You brought up work-life balance. I am actually not a fan of that phrase, and the reason why is it is hard for an individual to maintain balance. If you look at a gymnast, the balance beam, that takes some skill to stay on that thing many times, I mean if any one of us got on it, we would fall off. And so I'm more of a proponent of work-life flexibility. The idea is I work on the professional and personal side of my life, so on the professional side, I build up relationship capital with my boss, whereas if I have a project that's due, I've got to do something I say to the family, Hey, sorry for the next week, everybody, I'm involved in this project at work, I'm going to be having to put in extra hours. And so at work, you build up the relationship capital so that when the family stuff comes up, you have the flexibility to say to the boss, Hey, can I leave a couple hours early for the next couple of days? My kids at a recital. I really want to be there. It's an important life event. I want to be a supportive parent. And so you work in the both realms of your life in order to be able to establish the relationship capital to then be flexible to say, this week's more on the family side. It needs to be, and it's okay with the boss and this week it's more on the work side of things and it's okay with the family. Exactly, and this is the thing is we all have 24 hours in a day, and so how we use that 24 hours is going to be how successful we are. That's the real simplicity of all this and why it's so important to have that time optimized life that we talk about, not necessarily a time optimized work. Right? That's why you title it that way. So we've talked about a lot of things. I've had a really great time with you, David. I want to keep talking to you and keep chatting and see where this goes with us. But right now, is there anything that I haven't asked you or we talked about that you want to talk about before we wrap the show up? No, you covered really well. I'll just reiterate this idea of if there's one key takeaway today, don't manage your time because manage can be reactive. It can be something that you're trying to address that comes in a last in first out mentality. Flip it around and say to yourself, I want to be proactive with the use of my time, and I'm going to do that because I'm going to prepare how I use my time. I'm going to execute against that preparation and I'm going to control the outcome because it's important to me as an individual. Interesting thing you brought up. You don't like time life, I'm sorry, work life balance. You didn't like that idea and I agree I don't like it either, and I'm going to tell you why is that for some reason the average person believes that they have to find some perfect balance of their time in life, and this is a lie. There is no such thing as that. It is not even possible. The truth is that, for example, I like to just tell people, let's just say hypothetically, your kid breaks his arm right now at school. What are you going to do? I'm going to go take care of it. Exactly. And so it's like a time is much more like a pendulum than it is something that you balance on a seesaw because now it shifts over here. We have to put all of our attention over here. My kid just fell down and broke his arm on the playground and I got to go run and pick him up and take him to the hospital, and that's more how life really works. So if you understand that, then this fantasy that I'm going to balance my life you could let go of all that and just realize that I have to build all of this in my day and understand that. Then if I have to switch to go take care of this for a few hours, that means I need to make up some other time for other things in some other way to make things work. That's much more, it's a juggling act, not a balancing act. Right? And you're investing time upfront on both sides of your life. Again, that's why I like to combine them. One, it's just your life and how do you manage the time in that life to the best of your ability and so that you are able to have a life is what I call you. Move time from finite to infinite. Because the more you try to optimize your time, the more time you feel like you have. Even though, like you said, we only have 24 hours in a day, but the more you're working and focusing on the consumption of time that's important to you, the more you feel like you have because you're able to do more and more the things that you want to do instead of reacting to all the things that other people want you to do. Yes, sir. We can call our shots. That's right. David, I appreciate you. I'm so grateful we spent our time together. What a great time. I'll be in touch with you, my friend, and I'll drop your links in the show notes. Awesome. Eddie, thank you. This has been a lot of fun. It's been an honor and a pleasure to be here with you today.