The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Time Management Secrets of Billionaires, with Kevin Kruse (Productivity, Scheduling, Entrepreneurship, Author)
Tue, 12 Nov 2024
Author, speaker, and serial entrepreneur Kevin Kruse shares advice he extracted from Mark Cuban, the 3-21-0 and 4-D email methods, the importance of making friends with the calendar, the productivity tips supported by Harvard research, taking the "I" out of getting things done, and using time travel to defeat procrastination.
It was the classic mistake of letting myself get driven by the never-ending to-do list. So there's more things to do, so I would sacrifice sleep to try to get more things off of the to-do list. I would skip meals. I was in that emotional yo-yo. We all talk about what we value in life, faith, family, my friends, finances.
And yet if you look at people's calories, you can truly see what they value by how they're investing their time.
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There are writers and then there are great writers. And you are about to hear from one of the great writers of our day, I think, Kevin Cruz. And he's the author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. So, Kevin, thanks for being here. I'm really looking forward to it. This will be fun. Traditionally, you've been more in the workplace culture space and the leadership space.
Why a book on time management and why now? What caused this? I'm getting that question a lot because it is a different subject matter for me or from what people know me for. And this was really a passion project because I saw myself the impact of adopting some of these extreme productivity habits It had a tremendous impact on both my business life, but also my personal life.
And to put it plainly, I'm, I'd say, a reformed serial entrepreneur. And when I was young and dumb in my 20s and starting my first businesses, you know, I, it wasn't really my fault. I mean, I was kind of lied to, I believe that it was all about hustle. So I would just outwork everybody.
And in my very first company, I mean, I literally was living secretly in my one room office, sleeping under the desk and waking up in the morning, showering at the YMCA, coming back to the office to put in another, you know, 18 hour day. And I did that for a year. And, and that business,
You know, it showed that it isn't just about working hard and working, you know, every available hour and the next business did a little better, but didn't do great. And it was the classic mistake of letting myself get distracted.
uh driven by the never-ending to-do list so there's more things to do so i would sacrifice sleep to try to get more things offered at the do list uh i would skip meals to get more things done off the to-do list i was in that you know horrible emotional yo-yo of working late in the office and feeling guilty that i wasn't spending time with the wife and kids feeling
stress that you're not working on the to-do list. I mean, I came from a horrible place of just not understanding how all this stuff works. And I want to talk about the to-do list thing. This is what gets me more, you know, hate mail and trolls because people are so attached to their to-do list. And for the research, this book, I didn't just want it to be my own experiences.
You know, I reached out and I interviewed seven billionaires, Olympic athletes. I even interviewed a whole bunch of straight A students from Ivy League universities, always with the question, do Give me your number one piece of advice for productivity. Tell me your secret to time management. Very open-ended. And nobody said...
hey, you know, write down a to-do list and create A1, A2, you know, B1, B2. You know, to-do list, that's old school technology. You know, the legend is that, you know, Ivy Lee kind of invented the to-do list over 100 years ago, teaching Charles Schwab and the U.S. Steel executives how to run their day.
And, you know, back then, in a slower time, when organizations had tons of executives and middle managers and, you know, secretaries, they were called secretaries back then, That approach probably worked. And for people who, I mean, I'm not saying this in a negative way, but people who have average responsibilities or an average career, it can still work today.
None of these ultra productive people I interviewed talked about a to-do list. What they're using instead of a to-do list is their calendar. And it's a subtle difference, but a powerful difference. they're still writing down, you know, getting it out of their brain, kind of capturing it into a notebook or somewhere else. Oh, I've got to do this thing.
But they're immediately scheduling it on their calendar because the to-do list, as you know, I mean, it doesn't have the duration of items on it. So we tend to do the things that are fast. It doesn't have any weighted properties to it. So we do the things that, you know, unfortunately are the urgent things instead of the important things.
And I think the to-do list really is contributing to our overall success stress levels. You know, we're all running around so overworked and overwhelmed that a psychologist called the Zeigarnik effect. When our brain knows that there's stuff that we need to take care of, but there's no plan attached. We, I think it's both conscious and unconscious. We're stewing on that. We're stressing about it.
That's why we go home and it's late at night. I mean, we're so tired, but we're still wired and we can't fall asleep. So once it's on a calendar, you just move that to-do list, pick all those items and schedule it. When it gets scheduled, it gets done. And this is what the calendar key was one of the first things I just heard it.
I mean, we went through and coded 300 responses from these highly successful people. You get Chris Ducker saying, I simply put everything on my schedule. That's the secret. 30 minutes for social media, 45 minutes for email, 30 Minutes for Quiet Time. You know, Dave Kirpin of Likeable Media. He says, I schedule out every 15 minutes of my day. Shannon Miller, Olympic gymnast, won a bazillion medals.
She says, every minute of my day is scheduled. So that's the recurring theme. It's throw away the to-do list and live from your calendar. We all talk about what we value in life. You know, oh, you ask anybody, oh yeah, I value, you know, my faith and my family, my friends, my finances. And yet if you look at people's calendars, you can truly see what they value by how they're investing their time.
And back most people back like I was young and dumb, my calendar, you know, I would have answered all those things are important to me. You look at it and I'm spending 120 hours a week just on my startup, just on my career. And that's not a balanced way. And it's not a way to be successful in your career either.
You want to know what someone really believes and look at their calendar and their checkbook. Oh, I love that. Yep. Those are the two things. So one of the people that I know you got to spend some time with was Mark Cuban. I think everybody wants to know what was Cuban, like what was his thing? Yeah, you're right.
I mean, there's a lot of great people in the book, but Cuban's the most famous these days. Everyone's always asking that question. And the interesting thing is, just to set it up, so there were seven billionaires I interviewed for the book. And three of the seven, again, it's an open-ended question. Tell me anything that's a key to productivity for you.
Three of the seven, their advice had to do with meetings, meeting time. So Mark, in his typical, you know, kind of funny, snarky fashion, he says, never do meetings unless someone is writing you a check. Show me. You know, you can assume that's a little facetious. I'm sure he has one on ones with his colleagues.
But he's basically saying, you know, meetings are death unless there's money transferring. Don't do them. One of the early co-founders of Facebook, he now his new company is Asana, Dustin Moskovitz. He says that meetings, again, are lethal and they've established no meeting Wednesdays. So every Wednesday, that's a creative day. That's a maker day. That's a do it day. That's not a meeting day.
A friend of mine runs Aria Healthcare, which is a hospital chain up here near Philadelphia. She has no meeting Fridays. I mean, it's literally becoming so bad in organizations. That great leaders are saying, listen, we're going to just ban those suckers. First of all, people think it's a one hour meeting. Well, no, if there's 10 people in the room, first of all, it's a 10 hour meeting.
It's not a one hour meeting. And then it's at the very least. the cost of salaries and benefits, but the bigger cost is the value that those people are providing. Taking a salesperson away from prospecting and into a meeting for something that's not as important. Let's talk about email for just a second. Yet meetings and email are the big complaints, the big problems.
And the first thing that people identified or shared when it came to email is that They're not leaving their email window open all day long. They shut off those message notifications so they're not getting buzzed or dinged every time there's an inbound email. And, you know, I've summarized it as a system I call 3-2-1-0. And for me, and everybody can adjust this, but I've seen this work wonders.
Three stands for check your email three times a day or process your email three times a day. There's obviously, again, productivity ninjas that say, look, do it once a day. You know, just check it once a day and that's fine. And, you know, the Tim Ferriss followers will have that auto responder go out all the time. This day and age, I want to be responsive. I move fast.
So for me, it's like morning, noon, and night. I'm going to check it. I'm going to process it three times a day. The 2-1 stands for 21 minutes. So when I am processing my email, it's kind of like a Pomodoro. You know, I'm setting 21 minutes on that clock and it's ticking down. And my goal is to get back to email inbox zero by the time that ticks to zero. And 21 minutes is not a lot of time.
And it sounds almost silly or corny. Like, yeah, what's that going to do? It is amazing when you've got that countdown clock, it's almost like a game and you just pound down that list and you're always going through those, you know, the four D's of like, can I delete it? Boom. Yes. If not, can I delegate it? You know, can I delegate this? Just forward it to somebody. Can I do it? Do it right now.
You know, touch it once within a few minutes. If not, then you want to defer it, which means schedule it. Don't leave it in your inbox to just sit there gathering does. God forbid, don't add it to the bottom of your to-do list. Click that little button in Google Mail and Gmail. It's the more button. And then you can turn your email into an event.
So if you can't delete it, delegate it, do it right now, then schedule time for it right then and there. And I mean, it sounds corny. It's worked for me. And I'm just getting great feedback from people who have adopted this system. And for some, maybe they're going to check it twice a day. Others, maybe it's four times a day. Maybe it should be 25 minutes for you instead of 21 minutes for me.
3-2-1-0 is just an easy way for me to remember the system. So tell me about the Harvard experiment thing. What was that all about?
So as reported in Harvard Business Review, these two researchers went into companies, started watching what executives, middle managers were doing primarily, white-collar workers, and they realized that they had much more control over their tasks than the individual workers thought. So they taught them
every morning to look at their to-do list or their calendar and ask three questions around drop, delegate, or redesign. So for drop, they were trained to ask, how valuable is this task? What would happen if I dropped it? For delegate, you ask, am I the only person who can do this task? Who else might be able to do it? And redesign says,
You know, how can I achieve roughly the same outcome, but in less time? Or, you know, what would I do if I only had half the available time to try to get this thing done? Just by training people to ask those three questions, on average, people were able to save six hours of desk work each week and two hours of meeting time. You know, can you just drop them completely?
You know, can you delegate things? It is so powerful. And people will say, I don't have team members reporting to me. I can't delegate anything. You know, delegating to me is just another form of outsourcing. So whether it's you're a solopreneur and you're hiring a VA, you're a stay-at-home parent and have decided to hire the teenager to mow your lawn, these are powerful tools.
So drop, delegate, redesign ended up on average saving eight hours of time each week. Long before this book, you know, was even an idea, I had a mentor who was one of the ones who started to teach me the right way to think about time and productivity. He went on, he's an entrepreneur. He ended up selling his last company to IBM for $1.3 billion. And this guy, I mean, he was never frazzled.
He walked slowly. You know, he had time for everybody. When he was with you, he was fully present. And one of the pieces of advice he gave me is that when I look at all the things I'm supposed to get done, he said, you know, most people look and say, how can I get this thing done? Or how can I get it done in less time? He says, I take the eye out of it. He says, How can this thing get done?
And he says, as soon as you talk about, it's not about, you know, it's just the result. How can I get this result or how can this result occur? How can this result happen and take yourself even out of it? It opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities. Okay, so we're running out of time. So this last question, procrastination is kind of the enemy of self-discipline.
You talk about your idea for the cure to procrastination is time traveling to defeat your future self. The time travel trick is a tool that we can use when we're finding that we're procrastinating on the significant items, you know, whether that be
eating healthy meals or working out or moving that big rock at work that's going to really be the thing that's going to lead to our revenue breakthrough. So this is a strategy that we can deploy to overcome the negative kinds of procrastination. And it's like this. Psychologists talk about, we have this time dissonance where we're always discounting our future selves.
It's a silly example, but let's say I'm always struggling with health and healthy habits. Every Sunday, I go to the grocery store and I say, this is the week I'm going to get on the wagon. I'm going to eat really healthy. I'm going to drop a couple pounds. I spend all my time in the produce aisle buying lettuce and carrots and tomatoes. I'm going to be eating salads every night for dinner.
That's the plan, but The problem is the future version of Kevin that actually arrives, I mean, he's going to sabotage my best interest. He's going to fight against the Sunday version of Kevin. So when Wednesday night shows up and it's 7 o'clock and I stumble into the kitchen and I'm hungry and tired and, you know, my willpower has been depleted, I'm going to say, what's for dinner?
I'm going to open up that fridge. I'm going to see the now wilting lettuce because I haven't had any salads all week. And I'll remember, oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be eating a salad. But and then you start, you know, rationalizing. Right. It takes so long to make at least five minutes to make it solid. You know, it's cold. I deserve something better.
I know I'll I'll microwave this one minute frozen burrito because it's so salty and fatty and cheesy. It's going to be delicious. That future Kevin, that future self sabotages our best interest. And whether it's, hey, I'm going to work out this afternoon, I'm going to I'm going to put two hours into the gym. Later this afternoon.
And then, of course, later this afternoon, that version of Kevin decides not to. So we have to think about all the ways we're going to sabotage ourselves and then come up with strategies now in the present.
to defeat that and this is an extreme example and kind of funny you know i have a friend she likes to eat healthy and i once we were out of a restaurant and she said hey give me a turkey burger with um no bun and a set of fries give me a salad okay that's fine they bring it over and they forgot to you know put the salad down it was french fries now she could have sent it back for something but instead she opens up the salt shaker takes the lid off and dumps the entire salt shaker on top of the fries like what are you what are you doing
And she said, oh, I know that in three minutes, her future self, in three minutes, I'm going to try to eat just one fry because one fry is not going to hurt me. But then I know in five minutes, I'm going to say, well, I'll eat two more. And then in 10 minutes, I'm going to eat all the fries.
And so I'm going to defeat the three minute from now version of myself by destroying all the fries, by covering them up with all this salt. And a less extreme example is, look, if I say I'm going to work out in the afternoon or at night, I know all the tricks that the future version of Kevin's going to do. So instead, I set my alarm early in the morning.
I put the alarm on the other side of the room so I can't snooze it. I got to get it out of bed. And when I get out of bed, I'm stepping on my workout clothes and sneakers. First thing I do is do my workout. Even if I try to tell myself, Oh, you know, I got a little scratchy throat. I might be getting a cold. I'd better go back to bed. Sleep's important too, you know.
No, I'm going to say, look, even if you're not going to work out today, just get on the treadmill and walk for five minutes. You could always walk for five minutes. And then as you know, I mean, once you're on for five minutes, all right, I'll go another five. I'll crank it up a couple more miles per hour.
So whatever the area is that we're struggling, you know, whether it's writing that book we want to write, you know, getting loose, losing that weight, you know, banging out those 50 cold calls. We just need to think about all the ways we're going to jeopardize ourselves in the future and come up with ways to combat those right now. I love it.
So Kevin Cruz, Kevin, thanks for what you're doing, man. We appreciate you. Appreciate the opportunity to share.
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