Extreme Productivity Blueprint

© 2011/Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle LLC Page 1

EXTREME PRODUCTIVITY

BLUEPRINT

with Dan Kennedy


© 2011/Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle LLC


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Governed by Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure Agreement Reproduction, Re-Sale or Disclosure Prohibited


Notes

Introduction: Dan Kennedy presents the Extreme Productivity Blueprint, which focuses on the barriers that prevent most people from being super successful. He then discusses ways to make sure you’re squeezing everything you can out of every moment. Dan: We’re going to talk about the process of extreme improvement of productivity and the first thing I would say about it is that we mostly talk about it as being a time management issue.

But the truth be told, it’s mostly not a time management problem, it’s mostly an insufficient motivation problem. It’s mostly not sufficient drive, determination, and reason. My original mentor said the number one reason there aren’t more millionaires in America is because most people haven’t come up with enough reasons to do what’s necessary to be a millionaire. Same things are true with being productive. Most people are just not sufficiently motivated to do everything that’s necessary to be super productive. This is from Harvey Firestone’s autobiography from 1926, which was titled Men in Rubber, which had a much different connotation in 1926 than it would now.


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Here’s a couple of things that are significant. The first story is: I was on the hunt day and night for men to buy our stock. It was no easy matter to sell stock in a company that had no assets except on a patent on which it was losing money. For years I never saw a man with money without turning over in my mind how I could transfer some of his money into our stock. What he’s just described is specific ambition. That was Harvey Firestone every minute of every day. If extreme productivity is your ambition, that’s how you have to approach that too. You’re on the hunt night and day; you’re trying to control every single minute, every interruption, every person, every everything. Second then, part of the game plan is self-awareness. Tyson used to have two people whose job was to follow him around all the time; walk behind him and say, “You’re the man Mike, you’re the man.” This goes a long way to explaining Tyson’s current financial position. What would be more useful is having someone walk around behind you all the time with a baseball bat and every time you were acting in a way grossly incongruent with your stated goals, just haul off and whack you. We’re not going to do that as a practical matter, so we’ve got to do it to ourselves mentally. And we have to do it on a real-time basis, not a retrospective basis. The time to determine whether or not your behavior is congruent with your stated ambitions is not at the end of the week, not at the end of the month, not at the end of the calendar quarter, not in December—it’s real time minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. What you can’t measure you won’t be able to manage. We have to have measurement benchmarks of our productivity and of our congruent behavior. Again, if you want an extreme result you’ve got to go to the extreme. You’ve got to be very aware of leverage, value, use of time. Like on the dress thing, today if you were going to meet with somebody who might be worth a million dollars to you, would you look like you are? No, no, of course not. You might run into the guy in the checkout line in Wal-Mart that’s going to be worth a million bucks to you and you can’t be looking like you’ve been working on your car, that doesn’t work.


Notes

The other awareness is what you are permitting to happen around you, with you, it’s getting in your way, and kill it. If you aren’t willing to defend your productivity violently, if necessary, what exactly are you willing to defend? Somebody is screwing up your productivity, how tolerant of that are you? First of all, how aware of it are you? Then, secondly, how tolerant are you of it? I will suggest to you that there is a direct correlation between high income and low tolerance for anything that is screwing up one’s productivity; something they are doing to themselves or something other people are doing to them. Third, very specific decisions over how you are going to control these things. What you do, where you do it, if you do it, who you do it with, and how you do it. Most importantly here is “the who.” I want to make it very clear the very first thing on your job list is to facilitate my maximum productivity at my best mental attitude so I can be productive. That’s your job. That’s who you want around you and there is no neutral, spouse, staff, friend, there ain’t no neutral, they’re either helping or they’re hurting. When you talk about going home and getting to work and making things happen, there’s eight specific types of actions. One is immediate. That’s start. General Schwarzkopf, who I was on programs with for quite some time in his leadership talk, he always said it’s better to get started in the wrong direction


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than it is not to get started. Because we can fix the direction, we can’t fix the not starting. And he’s right about that. One of my premises is I’ve got four or five things as a result of my being here that I want to do. I know that the best odds of them ever getting done is if I start something having to do with them immediately, immediately. No matter how ill prepared you may be to follow through, start matters. So Carville says the best time to plant an oak tree was 25 years ago, the second best time is now. That’s true of everything. The best time, if you can’t do it last week, which you couldn’t because you didn’t, so the next best time is now. There is enormous power to starting. Second is visible. Puts you on the spot and conveys certain things to others so visible actions matter from two directions. Third, renegade millionaire principle “simultaneous, not sequential” and you really ought to watch yourself on this. It’s hard not to slip back because you’ve been conditioned since birth that everything ought to be sequential: step one, step two, step three. A then B, and walk before you run, first grade, second grade, third grade, blue badge before you get red badge, etc. You’ve been conditioned since birth to do everything sequentially. There’s two problems with that. One, that’s not how high performers and rich people do anything. If you’re trying to get extreme results that’s not what they did; they run around and make all kinds of messes and start 500 things at the same time, that’s what they do. They live in perpetual controlled purposeful chaos, that’s how they live. Secondly, the problem with sequential behavior is that in many cases nobody ever completes the sequence. Financially here’s what everybody thinks, here’s how all poor people think about money; they think I’ve got to get a job, then I’ve got to get my basic stuff taken care of, I’ve got to buy a house, I’ve got to get some furniture, I’ve got to have some appliances, etc. If I’m making enough money to take care of rent, car payment, movies, beer, stuff I’ve got to do, my iPhone, my cable TV, which all of that adds up to 30 bucks here, 30 bucks there, before you know it you’re a trillion dollars in deficit. They’ve got to get all that taken care of—then if I’m making enough money, I’ll start saving some money. When I’ve saved up enough money to make it worthwhile, I’ll start worrying about investing the money. They never get there doing it that way. Never, never—in part because nobody ever has any money left over. Nobody ever has any time left over, either. And if you’ve got any lying around, time or money, that you have left over, that you’re not doing anything with, somebody will take it. So simultaneous, not sequential. Massive, not dinky. You put a lot of stuff in motion all at the same time with urgency.


Notes

Everybody understands that they perform more under urgency. I’ve always been amused in pro football at the two-minute drill. These guys haven’t been able to move the ball for two hours past the fifty and all of a sudden, even with no possibility of winning the game, in the two-minute drill they come down and screw up the spread and I lose a thousand dollars. How come nobody plays the two-minute drill every two minutes? Congruent-- is your behavior congruent with your stated specific ambition? Synergistic, so we’re looking for leverage. How can we make the same piece of work do more than one thing? How can we make the same relationship do more than one thing? How many ways can you get productive benefit out of each act? Out of each conversation? Out of each relationship?

Here’s your most common productivity drain holes. Number one doing the wrong work altogether. A lot of people don’t know where their money comes from so they’re doing low money work. It’s surprising how many people don’t know where the money is in their business. They may have opinions, they have ideas, but they do not have facts. And that means more often than not they are doing the wrong work. I start asking math questions. How many calls? How much is it costing us to


Notes

generate a call? What is each call coming into the office costing you? That’s simple math, ad budget, PR budget, everything you’re spending out there in the marketplace divided by the number of calls you get-- now we know how much each call cost. My next question is conversion percentage. How many of these calls get converted to appointments? Which obviously tells us how much it cost to get an appointment. And then how many appointments turn into clients? Which gets us to cost per sale, which is where we want to get. What’s your call-to-appointment success rate? What are we doing about the people we don’t book appointments with? Now there’s the big opportunity. Second big productivity suck, your environments. For me it’s donuts. Candidly, like anything else, if I made that my life’s work, and dedicated all my mental and emotional resources to creating disinterest in or aversion to donuts I know how to do that. And I know the NLP stuff, I know the pressure points stuff, I know the visualization stuff, but here’s a truth for all of you: no matter how much willpower and self-discipline and motivation you have, there is a cap. You’ve only got so much and what you choose to spread it around on and use it on ought to be important. For me this is too difficult a hill to climb, it will suck up too much of those resources, and take them away from more important things so it’s easier just not to put myself in a Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s easier for me to just try and stay out of the environment. I just try not to go where they are right in front of me. Your environments are full of temptations; everybody has their own problem with this. For you it might be your iPhone, for me it’s donuts. You’ve got to know what it is, you’ve got to be in a place that is conducive to what it is that you want to accomplish. There are now resources for your internet addiction. I’m serious. There is a thing now called Rescue Time, which is an online time management tool which you can pre-engineer to nudge you back to work. When it catches you at YouTube, you can tell it only let me be at YouTube for three minutes and then shock my testicles. That’s actually how it ought to be read in my personal opinion, but it doesn’t to that. It just shuts down YouTube and beeps at you or something. Or you can block the internet altogether for a pre-set period of time so you can manage to actually work on your computer without running around the internet.


Notes

Three, poor undisciplined work habits. Lack of preparation, all sorts of people show up unprepared. They get on the phone unprepared. They go to meetings unprepared. They go to conferences unprepared. Who am I trying to meet? Go to their website or their Facebook site, get their picture so I can find them when I’m in a big crowd. I have more, but these are my three basic schedules. I have an official calendar that we let people see. We don’t let the whole world see it, but we let people I work with see. I have weekly to-do list, monthly and daily and most importantly stuff that’s assigned to a date with start and stop times. Stop time real important. Most people have a start time for a call, but they don’t have an end time for a call. They have a start time for somebody coming in their office to meet with them, but they don’t have a stop time for somebody coming in their office to meet with them. And then the daily script, here’s how the day is going to go hour by hour by hour, minute by minute by minute by minute. If I’m doing copy writing today and I’m doing a sales letter for you and I’ve allocated 9 to 11 for it, it has to be because something else is scheduled to start at 11:01.


Notes

We’ll finish with some cool rules for you.


Notes

Here’s my approach, the three biggest things to extreme productivity. Number one if I’m going to go to work, by God I’m going to work. I want to use every minute, I want to squeeze every drop of juice I can squeeze out of it. I’ve done it at everything I’ve ever done. Speaking engagement? Man, if I’m going to go speak I’m going to scheme. What can I do before that engagement to make it as productive as possible? What am I going to do during it? What am I going to do after it? Can I squeeze in a meeting with somebody else? Scheme, scheme, scheme, scheme, scheme. The script is, everything by appointment with yourself. Lunch break, there’s a timeframe for that on my daily scripts. There’s a start, there’s a stop. And then there’s another thing starting. Tight time allotments. Thank you very much.

End of presentation.


Notes

THE BLUEPRINT

WORKSHEET

(1): (specific) AMBITION: Define the objective

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(2): AWARENESS

(Enemies & Obstacles)

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Notes

(3): DECISION(S)

(at least 1 for each enemy/obstacle)

(PRECISE: WHAT, WHEN)

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(4): ACTION(S)

(DO/DELEGATE/DOING/DONE)

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Documents

Extreme Productivity Blueprint