Most of the productivity advice out there tells you to:
Work earlier
Sleep less
Hustle more
But if this advice works so well, then why are more business owners burned out than ever…
The truth is that productivity is a system.
It’s not hustling for 16 hours a day and ruining your health.
Trust me, I would know.
As I was building my first billion-dollar business, my health took a turn for the worse and my wife was pissed.
You see, I have a massive obsessive personality.
Meaning, when I commit to something, I have a “do whatever it takes” mentality.
Now add a newborn to the mix while building a billion-dollar business, and it gets crazy.
Because here’s the thing:
I wasn’t just burning the candle at both ends.
I’d doused the damn thing in gasoline and set the whole wick on fire.
And I was starting to face the consequences…
My health was deteriorating by the second.
I would fall asleep while working at my laptop at 3 AM and wake up at 7 AM for a meeting. And my wife was watching this all play out.
So my doctor instructed me to do some loose self-tracking to figure out what levers I could pull to find balance.
And this is the first part of my Maximum Productivity System that I learned…
1/ Audit
After a few weeks of tracking my sleep, diet, and blood pressure, I went back to the office for a visit that would ultimately change my life.
As my doctor stared at the information I gave him, he looked at me and said:
“This is interesting… Every time you wake up early, your numbers improve across the board.
There are some medications I could give you to help with your problems, but I think the best thing you can do for yourself is to wake up early in the morning.”
His prescription was literally to wake up earlier…
Now I knew that there was no way I would wake up at 5 am without stakes.
So here is what I did:
I reached out to 3 friends and asked them if they would jump on a conference call with me at 5 am for 1 week to give me some accountability.
I came up with a message for 3-4 minutes every day.
The 3 friends invited others, and it became 30, then 300, then 3,000.
Today we have over 10,000 people as part of this, called the 5 am Club.
About 2-3 thousand come live every morning.
We have 2 billionaires on the call, 3 members of Congress, and 1 President of a country (not ours).
I have now been doing this 5 am Club call 7 days a week, 365 days a year for over 14 years… mainly because I have the world’s largest accountability group.
Now I’m not asking you to wake up at 5 am for your audit…
But here’s what you can do today:
Take a screenshot of your screen every hour.
This is proof of what you’re doing at work.
Have an AI check in every 50-60 minutes and ask what you’re actually doing right now.
This keeps you accountable to what you’re doing in those 60 minutes.
At the end of the day, give the screenshots and the check-ins to AI and ask it to pull it all together and tell you the truth, not the version you wanted to hear.
Because here’s the thing:
Most people think their day is deep work.
When in reality the audit shows three hours of email and Slack…
And so by doing the audit, you can see where your time and energy are being invested each day.
But without step 2 of my Maximum Productivity System, that time and energy could still be wasted on the wrong things…
2/ Build
Once the audit shows you where your time and energy are being invested, ask yourself if the task is repeatable and worth doing more than once.
Because if the answer is yes to either of those questions, build a system for it.
Every repeated task is either burning cognitive capacity or building an asset.
The way you convert it from one to the other is by capturing what you know into something reusable.
But this only happens if you actually sit down and build a system, one at a time, rather than staring at the whole list with analysis paralysis.
One system built properly is worth five half-built systems you will never use.
And so you Build by:
Completing one system
Proving it works
And then moving to the next.
Once a system works, I ask one more question: does this task still need me in the room?
And there are two ways I get myself out of it if the answer is no.
This is the 3rd part of my Maximum Productivity System…
3/ Calendar & Triggers
There are two types of systems I use here:
The first type of system is a trigger.
A trigger means the system runs because of an input, not because of a time.
For example:
A lead fills out a form
An automation sends them the follow-up
A reminder goes out automatically.
I never have to touch any part of the task because the event is the trigger.
But the next way I get myself out of the system isn’t triggered by an event… it’s set off by time.
Let me tell you a story.
My son is 14.
His one chore is taking out the trash every Sunday.
I used to remind him every week, and it was becoming its own part-time job.
And so instead of reminding him every week, I built a three-question check-in for him:
Did I remember?
Did I do it well?
Did I have a good attitude?
This took him 20 seconds, and it happened every Sunday.
The time slot being Sunday was the whole system. It didn’t matter if there was a trigger first or not.
That same week, we ran the exact same type of calendar-based system across Acquisition(.)com.
It was a full team survey, with three similar questions reworded for work:
What worked?
What didn’t?
What would you do if you were CEO?
It was scheduled and happening regardless of what else was going on in the company.
So here’s how I decide what type of system a task needs.
If the task only works when an input happens, like a payment, signup, or cancellation, I build it as a trigger.
If the task works no matter what else is going on, like a weekly review or a daily habit, I build it as a calendar.
Using a calendar system for something that should be a trigger means I’m wasting time waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet.
And using a trigger for something that should be a calendar means the task only happens when a specific event happens.
Which could mean it barely happens at all.
So how can you apply my Maximum Productivity System today?
1/ Start by doing an audit using AI.
Take a screenshot of your screen every hour.
Then have an AI check in every 50-60 minutes and ask what you’re actually doing right now.
And ask it to pull it all together and tell you the truth about your day.
2/ At the end of the week, use the audit to see what daily tasks could be built into a system.
And make a task for next week to build just one system.
3/ Ask yourself, “Does this task still need me in the room?”
And from there, you can decide whether it’s a trigger-based system you need or a calendar-based one.
If you enjoyed this post, I talk about how I would build a billion-dollar business from scratch in this next one:
