The Daily Routine For Maximum Productivity And Creativity
A five-type map of business work, a four-list operating system, and the one rule that ties them together: pick exactly one thing to produce tomorrow.
Posted
4 days ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
6.5K
97 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Every task in a business is one of five types, but only picking one thing to produce each day, backed by a simple four-list system, turns constant busyness into consistent growth.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A solo founder or small-team operator who feels busy every day but can't point to what actually moved the business forward this week.
Someone running everything off a single messy to-do list who wants a simple system for separating real priorities from everything else.
A creator or consultant juggling production, client delivery, and admin who keeps letting the last two eat their best working hours.
SKIP IF…
You already run a working weekly and daily planning system and just want new tactics, not the underlying framework.
You're looking for time-management tricks rather than a way to decide what's even worth doing in the first place.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Every task in a business falls into one of five buckets: produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, or admin, but only the first two directly grow the business. The system runs on four lists: a project list of what you're moving this week, a later list for everything else, a next-actions list per project, and an open-loop list for anything you're waiting on. A 30-minute weekly routine keeps those lists current and names the single bottleneck limiting growth. A 10-minute nightly routine then picks one thing to produce tomorrow, one leverage task, one thing to learn, and a batch of one-off admin. The rule that matters most: never go to bed with more than one thing to produce next.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Bush frames the video around a planning system he built after two stalled attempts to grow his own business, one with limited time and one with unlimited time.
02:39 – 18:06
02 · The five types of business activity
Every task falls into produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, or admin; only the first two directly grow the business, and leverage is defined as output divided by input.
18:06 – 25:45
03 · Running the business on four lists
Project list, later list, next-actions list, and open-loop list, with rules for how long each should be and when items move between them.
25:45 – 30:46
04 · Six mistakes to avoid
Not planning the day, doing something other than producing first, building unnecessary leverage, learning off-target, producing more than one thing, and skipping prioritization.
30:46 – 35:16
05 · The 5-step weekly planning routine
A 30-minute pass: recap last week, name the one bottleneck, update the project and later lists, write next actions, and sweep open loops.
35:16 – 41:14
06 · The 5-step daily planning routine
A 10-minute nightly pass: game plan, one big thing, build leverage, learn, and one-off tasks, done in that order every evening.
41:14 – 44:57
07 · What this looks like for him
His actual daily blocks (production, learning, delivery, recovery), why he batches calls onto one or two days, and why he plans by hand in a paper notebook.
44:57 – 45:47
08 · Free setup prompt and templates
Points to a free Notion prompt and daily/weekly templates linked in the description, no paywall or email wall.
45:47 – 47:26
09 · Bonus: 10 rapid fire productivity tips
Quick tactics: work on a timer, delay the first phone scroll, leave your phone in another room, and more.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
There are only five types of work in any business: produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, and admin, and only the first two directly grow it.
Production only counts if it creates a new asset and leads directly to new revenue for you; everything else isn't production, even if it feels like it.
Leverage is output divided by input: productivity leverage gets more output for the same input, efficiency leverage gets the same output for less input.
Learning before you've produced or built leverage for the day is usually procrastination wearing a productive disguise.
A complete business can run on four lists: a project list, a later list, a next-actions list, and an open-loop list.
A project list longer than five to seven items is a sign you haven't actually prioritized, not a sign you're ambitious.
Your later list should be longer than your active project list; if it isn't, you're trying to do too many things at once.
Unresolved 'waiting for' items drain mental bandwidth even when you aren't consciously thinking about them, which is why they need their own list.
A business has exactly one bottleneck at any given time, and every new project for the week should point at removing it.
The single highest-leverage rule in this whole system: pick one thing to produce tomorrow, not two, not three, not zero.
Delivery work should be batched into a fixed container, or it will expand to consume the entire day.
Weekly planning takes 30 minutes and daily planning takes 10, and skipping the weekly pass is what makes the daily pass take longer.
Takeaway
Pick One Thing To Produce Each Day
THE FOCUS SYSTEM
A five-category map of business work and a four-list system for organizing it both point at the same rule: protect production, name your bottleneck, and pick exactly one thing to build each day.
02The five types of business activity
Work sorts into five types: produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, and admin, and only the first two directly grow a business.
Something only counts as production if it creates a new asset and leads directly to new revenue for you specifically.
Leverage is output divided by input: productivity leverage means more output for the same effort, efficiency leverage means the same output for less effort.
Learning before you've produced or built leverage for the day is usually procrastination dressed up as work.
03Running the business on four lists
Everything you're doing fits on four lists: a project list, a later list, a next-actions list, and an open-loop list.
A project list longer than five to seven items is a sign you haven't actually prioritized yet.
The later list should be longer than the active project list; if it isn't, you're trying to run too many things at once.
Unresolved 'waiting for' items drain mental bandwidth even when you're not consciously thinking about them, so they need their own list.
04Six mistakes to avoid
Going to bed without a plan for tomorrow hands the day over to clients, admin, and whatever the algorithm serves up.
The moment something other than production becomes the first task of the day, growth quietly starts to stall.
Not every automation or hire is worth building; ask first whether it actually makes production more efficient or more productive.
Naming more than one thing to produce tomorrow splits focus and kills the overnight subconscious problem-solving that comes from picking just one.
05The 5-step weekly planning routine
A weekly reset in five steps (recap the week, name the bottleneck, update the project and later lists, write next actions, sweep open loops) takes under 30 minutes.
A business has exactly one bottleneck at any given time, and every new project for the week should point at removing it.
Anything that doesn't address the bottleneck and doesn't keep the business running gets demoted to the later list.
06The 5-step daily planning routine
The nightly routine has five sections: game plan, one big thing, build leverage, learn, and one-off tasks.
The single rule that matters most: exactly one thing to produce tomorrow, not two, not zero.
Learning is treated as a reward that only gets scheduled after production and leverage work are already planned.
One-off admin and delivery tasks get batched into their own section so they don't creep into the high-value hours.
07What this looks like for him
Blocking a fixed window for client calls (Monday, with a Thursday backup) keeps four full days a week free for uninterrupted production.
Planning the next day is the last task before leaving work, specifically so open loops don't follow you home.
Doing the planning by hand in a paper notebook forces a shorter, more selective list than typing ever would.
09Bonus: 10 rapid fire productivity tips
Working on a visible timer reveals how much less actual focused time you're spending than it feels like.
Delaying the first phone check until after the day's one big thing is done protects the most valuable hours from the first scroll.
Writing down the exact next step at the end of a work block makes it far easier to pick the work back up later.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Leverage
Output divided by input. Building leverage means creating something that produces more output from the same effort (productivity) or the same output from less effort (efficiency).
SOP
Standard operating procedure: documented instructions that let someone other than you run a process the same way every time.
Open loop
Anything you're waiting on someone or something else to do before you can take the next action, tracked on its own list so it stops occupying mental bandwidth.
Next action
The single next thing that moves a project forward, sized to be completed in one work session rather than broken into the smallest possible micro-step.
Bottleneck
The one factor most limiting a business's growth at a given time; by definition there is only ever one, even when there are many other problems.
One Big Thing
The single item you commit to producing the next day, deliberately kept to exactly one so nothing else competes with it for focus or overnight thinking.
“Chances are you don't have an information problem. You have an action problem.”
short, quotable reframe on learning vs. doing→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
29:31
“The most important part of my productivity routine is having one thing to produce the next day. Not two, not three, not four, not zero. One.”
the video's central rule, rhythmic delivery→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
32:07
“The bottleneck in our business right now is the number of new people on our email list each week. If that number was three times what it is right now, our revenue would 3x.”
concrete real-numbers example of the bottleneck concept→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
27:00
“The endless list of tasks and other people's problems that don't grow your business will dominate your working hours, and your business will slowly die as a result.”
high-stakes framing of a common mistake→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphor
The single most powerful skill you can have as a business owner is to build a plan and execute on that plan. You can have all the marketing skills, sales skills, product skills in the world, but if you wield them at the wrong thing or point them in the wrong direction, you will stay stuck despite feeling constantly busy.
I learned this the hard way two different times in my entrepreneurial journey. First, back in 2020 when I began to ride online as a side hustle while working on Wall Street, and then second, when I quit that job in 2022 to go all in on building my own business. Now, what did both of these times have in common?
They both involved me starting a new initiative with lots of excitement, but no real plan. They involved me having an infinite number of things I could work on for that initiative, but having limited time and energy to invest in them. And they involved me being 100 % responsible for whether or not they would move forward on a daily basis.
The only thing that was different was the scope. While I worked on Wall Street, I only had about six hours per day to build my side hustle. Three hours in the morning from 4 .30 to 7 .30, and then three hours in the evening from 6 .30 to 9.
930. Because of how little time I had, I needed to invest it only in the most important things. When I quit that job, I suddenly had 12 hours per day to build my business, but that made my ability to plan and execute even more important because I lost the natural prioritization constraint that came with having a full -time job.
Having more time, much to my dismay, didn't immediately make me more productive, so I had to adjust my approach. During both of these times, I remember struggling without a clear framework for what to work on and when to work on it. In my W -2 job, people mostly told me what to do and my my calendar was mostly decided for me.
But as a business owner, even if you just run your own side hustle, you decide what to work on and you decide whether or not. what you're working on ends up producing anything. As a result, I spend a ton of time either working on the wrong thing or procrastinating working on the right thing.
But over time, through tons of trial and error, I've developed a simple planning system and daily routine that allows me to concisely see all the things that I'm working on, prioritize those things in order of importance, go to bed with clarity on exactly what I'll do the next day, and then wake up with excitement to work on what I have planned.
And that system is what I want to share with you today. So over the next few minutes, we're going to cover first, the only five types. of activities you can do in your business so you know all the things you could do.
Second, how to operate your entire business with just four lists so you can concisely see everything they're working on on one page. Then we'll talk about six mistakes to avoid when planning out your day based on those lists. Then we're going to walk through two routines.
First, the 30 minute weekly routine that helps you understand you're working on the right things. And then the 10 minute daily routine that allows you to wake up and execute on the most important things. And at the end, I put together a full daily planning and weekly planning template plus a prompt to walk through everything.
we did today. It'll be the first link in the description below if you want to go check it out. Now let's get into it.
Starting with our first framework, there are only five types of activities you can do in your business. When you run your own business, there's no shortage of things to work on. Unfortunately, most of those things are a waste of time.
A few of them are worth a little bit of your time and an extremely select few are worth all of your time. Figuring out where each task you can work on falls on that spectrum is one of the most important jobs you can have as a business owner. Luckily, while the number of things you could do is infinite, the types of work fall neatly into five buckets.
That is to produce, to build leverage, to learn, to deliver, and admin. So this is my nice pyramid here that I like to visualize all the things that you could do. At the bottom, the most important is to produce and build leverage.
These are the two things that grow your business. Then in the middle, you have learn that helps you grow the business and then deliver and admin. These are the things that run the business and keep it going.
Now let's take a closer look at each one. First up is to produce. Now producing is the first and most important type of work.
that you can do to grow your business. Now, I use the word produce, but you could replace it with build or make or create or advertise, write, film, edit, anything that puts something out into the world that helps grow your business. So depending on the type of business you run, any of these activities, writing ads, filming ads, running a newsletter, hosting a live training, creating a lead magnet, scripting a YouTube video, recording a course lesson, making an Instagram carousel, the only criteria for something to be production, it must directly lead to new revenue for you, emphasis on new and emphasis for you.
And then second, it must create an asset that didn't exist before. If it fails either of these criteria, it is not production. It might still be worth doing, but it will not be the most important thing you can do to grow your business.
Over time, your goal in business is to focus as much of your time as possible toward production. But you can only produce so much in a day unless you add leverage. And that takes us to the second type of work, which is building leverage.
The definition of leverage is output divided by input. So something has leverage if you get more out of it than what you put into it. When you build leverage, you're doing one of two things.
There's really two types of leverage. You can create something that will lead to more output with the same input.
This is productivity. Or you can create something that will lead to the same output. with less input, that is efficiency.
So if you look at this nice graphic here, in the top, we have something with no leverage, which is one unit of input, one unit of output, and our lever here is not doing anything for us when we add leverage. So we move this little triangle over to the right, two things happen, we can either make it efficiency leverage, which means we get the same output, which is this box being lifted, but with less input, meaning we have a smaller box lifting it, this is efficiency.
same output, less input, or we can have productivity, which is more output with the same input. So we have the same box on the left, and now we're lifting two of them on the right.
It's worth keeping both of these in mind because they don't do the same things. And a lot of people might spend time on one when really they should spend time on the other. Now within your business, there's really three common types of leverage.
You have SOPs, standard operating procedures, automations, and employees slash agents. So SOPs, documented instructions that let someone that's not you run a process the same way every time. Automation is software that execute a process without anyone doing it.
it and then employees are people or ai you train to produce or execute without you all three of these provide leverage in some way let's look at some combinations here for the different types of leverage both efficiency and productivity across all three. So an example of an efficiency SOP is if you document your podcast publishing checklist, the episode goes out weekly, so the same output, but it takes you five minutes to do it instead of 30 where you have to piece together all the different steps and they're all in the back of your head.
So you get the same output, which is the podcast gets published, but it only takes you five minutes, so you're more efficient. Then an efficiency automation is, let's say when you sell a product, you add an automation that puts new purchasers into the course directly. sends them an onboarding email and starts a weekly delivery sequence.
Now, rather than having to do those manually for each customer, it now happens automatically. So same output, significantly less input. Then you could have an employee.
Let's say you hire a VA to handle your support inbox and post your social media content. You used to handle both of these. So now someone else does it.
Same output, your inbox is handled and your social media is posted, but significantly less input from you. So you got more efficient. Getting more productive, it looks a little bit different.
First, the SOP side, let's say you build a repurposing checklist that takes a newsletter and turns it into short form content, a LinkedIn carousel, an X article and an atomic essay and a YouTube script. Now you get five to 10 times the number of impressions for the same amount of work. So you get far more output for the same input.
This is. getting more productive. Or let's say you send cold outreach as a part of your business.
You build an outreach system that pulls each prospect's recent post and background and drafts a personalized first line and then preps a message for you to go and tweak. You used to spend an hour doing outreach and send 10 messages. Now you take that same hour and can send 50.
So this is being more productive. If you took the same 10 messages and did them in 10 minutes, that'd be building efficiency. I find most often that if you can build productive leverage that gets more input for the same time, you end up with a better result.
And then lastly, you have your employee leverage. So let's say you hire a short form editor to pull clips from a long form video like this. Now, every YouTube video or podcast you were already making generates 10 short form clips.
So if I had someone come and cut this up, I get much more leverage out of it because same input, I film the video, but now I get more output from it. Now you might be thinking, what's the difference between production and building leverage? The way I think about it is production creates assets that generate revenue, so they must be directly tied to revenue generation.
Leverage creates assets that multiply production. So when you're running your own business, you need time to do both. But if you spend all your time producing, and no time building leverage, your production ability stays capped.
So your growth will be capped. And if you spend all your time building leverage, but no time producing, you'll not have any assets that produce revenue. So again, you'll stay stuck.
Both of these are extremely important, but I do like to differentiate them because there are a lot of pitfalls if you spend all of your time, quote unquote, building leverage, but you're not doing the thing that actually ends up producing revenue. So I like to break these out. These are the two most important activities you can do.
The third involves just getting better at these two. So our third activity is to learn specifically to do one and two better.
If producing and building leverage are the two most important activities, learning to do them more effectively is the third most important. So examples of this include reading books, consuming courses, reading a curated Twitter list, watching YouTube like this educational YouTube that is paying for one on one or group coaching, reading newsletters, talking to people on a mastermind, anything where you are taking in information that changes your behavior in the future.
Now, I see a lot of people get learning wrong in three specific ways. First, they consume something and then do nothing different as a result. So if you watch this video, and then you exit out and you do nothing as a result of it differently in the future than you would have before you watched it, this was nothing but either entertainment or productive procrastination.
It's okay to be entertained if to watch this for entertainment, but don't get confused with high impact learning where you're actually picking things that move the needle for you. Or don't get confused that you're consuming all this information, nothing is changing because you're not doing anything differently. Second, a lot of people will spend time learning before they produce or build leverage.
So hopefully, if you're watching this right now, this is not the first thing you're doing today. If you immediately opened up YouTube and said, I'm about to start learning, chances are this is nothing but procrastination disguised as productivity.
Before you start learning new information, it's best to spend time acting on the information you already have. Chances are you know the handful of things that you can produce on a given day that will grow your business and a handful of things that you can build leverage on that would help you produce more in the future. This video might help you down the line, but it should only be consumed after you have acted on the information that you already have.
And I just want to take an extra second on that because it's so tempting to go, I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm learning. But chances are you don't have an information problem. You have an action problem.
So as long as you are producing and building leverage with the information you already have, that kind of unlocks the ability to go and learn later in the day. And then lastly, a lot of people will learn something that's not directly helping them get better at producing or building leverage. Again, this might as well be entertainment.
If you're learning something that is not directly helping you do the first two things, it can be valuable. It's just not the highest impact thing that you could go and learn. So hopefully that doesn't mean you go X out this video.
If you've already produced and you've already built leverage, you can earn the ability to consume information that's not immediately actionable. But I've had the biggest leaps in my career when all of my time spent learning was directly correlated to me producing more or building leverage more effectively. So as long as you're not egregiously abusing these mistakes in terms of you're popping open YouTube first thing or you're just consuming, consuming, consuming and not doing anything differently or you're learning.
random things that aren't really relevant. It is still valuable to consume this information but I like to do so with intention. and know, is this the best thing that I could be learning?
Because the more time that you invest figuring out the right thing to learn and then finding the best information on it, the faster you'll end up moving. So again, learning is an important daily activity, but only once you've produced and built leverage. Moving on to the fourth type of activity, which is delivery.
So the first three activities we walk through are the only three things you can do to grow your business. You can produce something that leads to more revenue. You can build leverage to better free up time to produce more or to multiply your production, or you can learn how to do that.
first two better. Everything else we will cover from here simply keeps the business running. And if you only ever spend time doing things that keep the business running, your business will not grow.
And if your business is not growing, it is slowly dying. So the first thing you must do to keep your business running is to deliver on the product or service that you sold. Now, depending on the type of monetization method you're operating, this could look like hosting a live session or fulfilling on a client deliverable, writing client emails, onboarding a new client, holding one -on -one calls, answering questions.
Importantly, not all monetization methods have a delivery block. So this is a feature of some of these different ways that you can monetize and a conscious choice that you're making.
So if you're in a delivery intensive method like agency or one -on -one consulting, hybrid group coaching, core based experiences, paid communities, these all require you to take calls and answer questions from members or from clients. Then you have the delivery light ones like software, paid newsletters, and digital products that have almost no delivery other than kind of engaging with your customer's questions.
So I like to lay these out because depending on what you choose, you might have a lot of delivery or you might have very little delivery. Ideally, you're able to batch these delivery activities on certain days of the week or certain times of the day.
And ideally, after you've produced, build leverage and learn something. Because if you do not block time for delivery, it will expand to take up your entire day. For example, I take almost all my calls on Monday.
I try to batch as much delivery as possible onto just Monday, which frees up the rest of my week. If I absolutely have to take another call, I have a two hour block on. Thursday afternoon.
That lets me have almost every day of the week with my morning completely free to produce, build leverage and learn. Then at the end of the day, when my brain is less excited to work and less creative, I can do things like answer questions that I've answered quite a few times or take client calls or anything that doesn't take so much capacity for me to do.
Delivery, it's required as part of running your business, but do not let it consume every part of your day. So again, if you're a morning person, batch it at the end of the day. If you are an evening person batch it at the beginning of the day, just try to have a set container to do this delivery.
So you can have time to produce but leverage and learn. The final piece on this is if you want your business to grow, you need to build your delivery around your production, not the other way around. So if you spend time going, I have all this client work, how am I going to write or create or do outreach or lead to things that produce, you need to flip it, you need to have your big production and leverage blocks built in first, and then you build client delivery around it.
Otherwise, you're just gonna to stay stuck where you are. Then last but not least, we have admin.
This is the fifth and final bucket. This is anything that doesn't produce new revenue, doesn't make production easier, doesn't teach you anything new, and doesn't deliver on the product or service that you sold. It's everything that kind of sucks to do but needs doing.
So sending invoices, travel plans, any types of forms, emails, DMs, passwords, bookkeeping, financials, scheduling meetings, talking to lawyers, accountants, all that. It's all the things that again are annoying. The best practice for these is to batch it at the end of the day.
So again, when you have the least amount of cognitive ability left, you can do these types of very easy to do, but annoying to do things. And if this is something that someone else can do, it's an opportunity to build leverage where you could either document everything that needs to be done and turn an AI agent into someone that does that specific task, or you could have a VA that does it as well.
I like to think about the less time that I can do admin, the more time I have to rest and recover or produce or build leverage again. So if I find myself repeatedly doing a lot of admin work, I know it's an opportunity to build leverage. Those are the five core types of work that you can do.
Again, it's produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, and admin. There are a couple of bonus ones that I wanted to talk to. First is strategic allocation, which is...
deciding what you should produce, what you should build leverage on and what you should learn. This sets the direction for how you spend your days. We're going to talk about the weekly planning routine when you can do this type of activity.
This is not something that you want to do every day because if you're rethinking your direction on a daily basis, chances are you're giving up the compounding benefits of choosing one direction and working on it consistently. For me, I like to do my strategizing either Friday afternoon or Sunday morning outside of a normal working session.
So not at my desk, not with like other tasks. I like to make it the only. thing that I do and then away from my normal working environment.
So if I do work at this desk, I like to go somewhere else, usually like a new cafe or something like that. This requires a very different type of thinking than the work that I do at my desk. So I like to switch contexts and environments entirely for strategic thinking.
And when we get to the planning section, I'll talk to you about how to do that. Second, the next bonus activity is just rest and recovery. You're only able to produce or build leverage or learn or deliver to the extent you can based on your energetic capacity.
So I don't need to turn this into a full guide. on rest and recovery, but I've had seasons where I completely deprioritized it. That was a mistake.
If you do that for too long, you end up burnt out, unable to operate at your best and running a business that's 100 % dependent on you showing up. Not a good combination. Highly recommend avoiding that.
And so the rest and recovery best practices will differ for everyone, but I have a personal recovery routine. It allows me to recharge my brain, my motivation, and my ability to think. So I'll share that with you.
To start to build it, I started with inversion, which was, okay, what are the things I find very And they all have two things in common. First, I do them with a swirling list of like open loops and a lack of clarity on what I'm actually doing with my life.
And that's kind of hogging on my mental bandwidth. And then second, I have even more information thrown at me while I have that state of lack of clarity already. So for me to rest and recover, I simply make sure all my lists and tasks are up to date.
So I close those loops in my head. And then I remove myself from technology completely. That way, I have clarity on what I will come back to.
And then I don't have new info. thrown at me, I can kind of process and just let my brain relax a little bit. I spend a lot of time either consuming information, talking to people talking to my team or producing information.
So the more I can get away from my phone and technology in general, I find it very restful. So that's a two minute on rest and recovery, highly recommend prioritizing it find a way that you can show up better for your production and leverage sessions in the future by prioritizing that rest right now you understand all the types of work you can do inside your business and you know the types that grow it.
the types that maintain it on any given day, you'll have dozens of possible tasks across all five of these buckets competing for your attention, plus probably 100 more thrown at you on any given time. So now you need somewhere to put them all. And to do that, you only need four lists.
so i've read every type of productivity book out there and i always come back to the simplest version of getting things done which involves making four lists project list later list next actions list and open loop list let's look at each one what goes on it and how they work together So first we have the project list. This is a list of everything you're working on inside your business right now.
There requires more than one action to complete. So looking at each part of that definition, you can define right now, however you like. I think of it as this week.
Anything that I move forward this week is on my project list. And then something that requires more than one action is mostly just to keep short, easily completable tasks off your project list. So in general, if it takes less than two minutes, I just do it right now.
And I think of projects as something that will require multiple work. blocks for me to do. When you make your project list, every project should start with a verb that signals action.
For example, my current project list is write weekly newsletter, film weekly YouTube video, build new CRM workflows, build new SOP, set up new infrastructure. Each of these things are things that start with a verb that take more than one step to complete that I will work on this week. That is my active project list.
These roughly map to the five categories of work that you could do. However, the majority of your projects should be producing and building leverage.
As you can see, all five of these are producing and building leverage for me. If your project list is dominated by delivery or admin, you need to audit your priorities. So just an example from my couple quick rapid fire questions, it's fine to keep recurring things on this list as you're going to repeat and complete them.
I write a newsletter every week, I'm going to film a YouTube video every week, those are always going to be on my project list terms of length, having more than seven is probably a rough measure of being unfocused. And I'll show you where to put those additional things that you're not going to do on the later list.
It's really hard to move forward more than five things. If your project list can be one thing, that'd be great. But we all have usually more than one thing to work on.
And one last reminder, the first list you make will be three times too long. And you need to take things off of that and put it onto a list of things you're not going to work on this week. That's what prioritization is.
Where do you put all those things? That's our second type of list, which is the later list. So the later list is the same types of work as the project list, except you're not working on them right.
now. This is a catch all where I put anything that's either coming up in the next few weeks, or something I might want to pursue in the future. I review my later list as part of the weekly routine during which I can promote something from my later list or I can move something off my project list onto the later list if I'm not going to work on importantly, if you're doing it right, your later list should be significantly longer than your active project list.
If that's not the case, chances are you're trying to do too many things at once. For example, my later list has like 10 things, a couple of them are like end of month, like end of month finance or end of month. on software stuff.
The rest are just ideas that sound great in the moment, but I then run through the lens of, I have all these active projects. I'm not going to work on these shiny objects until I finish what I'm currently working on, or I go, this is a higher leverage thing than what I'm currently doing. There's nothing better than having a shiny object, putting it on your later list, and then going a month later, wow, I'm glad I didn't dig into that because I'm way less excited.
It wouldn't have been the right choice in working on the things I already said I would do. I ended up working out. So this is kind of a filter for, all right, new thing comes in, put it on later.
list, if it still looks good a month, then I'll take it on. But most of the time, it ends up being kind of a buffer from the ADHD jump on to every other thing that comes at me ailment that a lot of us business owners have the end of every week, I go through my later list and make sure there's nothing I need to bump up. And if something's been sitting on there for too long, I just get rid of it.
Now, once you have these lists of projects fully created, we need to figure out how to drive them forward. And that takes us to our next actions list, which is like it sounds the list of the next thing you could do on each project, you could call a to -do list if you want.
I just like the word next action. I think it's cool. For simplicity, I define next action as something that can be completed in one sitting or one work block.
The getting things done or GTD version is the smallest possible next action. I find that annoying because if my project is film, a YouTube video is my next action, like open laptop. I'm going to put that on a list.
Probably not. So I think about like one working block is about a next action. Now, every project has a set of next actions.
Some of them, you know, to the highest extent possible. like the full list of it gets completed when I do these seven things. Some you just know the next thing.
So you don't have to have all of those for every project. You just need at least one thing at any time. And then this is the list you'll pull from when you go to plan your day.
So for example, my next action list look like this, this week, I had right weekly newsletter was the project. And then I have my six tasks that all I have to do to finish that newsletter, then the YouTube video, same thing, I need to tweak the script, record and then document any ideas for what I need to do afterwards. Those are the entire list of what completes that project for me this week.
Compare that to something like build CRM workflows. Just because I don't know every single task that completes a project doesn't mean I can't work on it as long as I have the single next thing to work on. And as I take action on each of these, one of two things can happen.
First, I complete the next action and I move on to the next one. Or completing the action creates an open loop that's blocking me from moving forward. Those open loops get their own list.
And that's our fourth and final one, which is the open loop list. The open loop. list is anything you're waiting for to take the next action.
This is by far the most important thing to get out of your head and onto the page. Otherwise, they hog all of your mental bandwidth kind of sitting in the back of your head. And they do this subconsciously because you just have all these things swirling around.
You're like, why can't I? I'm not as sharp. I'm not as clear.
I'm not executing. It's because a lot of your RAM, the mental bandwidth in the back of your brain is being used subconsciously. So to prevent that, all of these open loops you put on a separate list.
So for example, let's say this morning, you had a next action that was film YouTube video. I'm doing this right now.
Once I've completed this and sent it off to the editor, there's nothing I can do to move it forward. That means I have an open loop. My waiting for, so most things on your open loop list should start with waiting for, I'm waiting for my editor to return with a V1.
If I just let that float around while I go try to work on other things. I'm going to be less effective. So the second I finish this, I then go to my open loop list and go waiting for editor to return B1.
This closes the loop in my brain, which allows me to go focus on other things without this thing hogging bandwidth in the background. I cannot overemphasize enough how important this is when you have a ton of things going on. The second that you find when you do something and you know you can't act on it again for a day, two days, three days until someone else does something and you put it on the open loop list, you will just feel this amount of clarity.
when you go revisit it, it reminds you, oh, I need to follow up on that. For example, my open loop list, one of the actions is waiting for a response from tax lawyer on structuring question. I totally forgot I emailed them.
It was not urgent. It was just something on my list and I needed information. I put it on my open loop list so I could completely forget about it.
And then when I scan that every couple of days, I go, oh yeah, I need to follow up with them. But if I had just left that open, I would have been odd. I'm waiting for them to answer.
Have they answered yet? I'm checking. But this allows me to forget it, but know that it's there for me to come back to when the time is right.
So highly recommend right now, if you have five or six things that other people are coming back to you with, put all of those on an open loop list. Look at them once a day and go, okay, this is done. Okay, follow up with this person.
Okay, still waiting on this one, still waiting on this one, still waiting on this one. Watch how much mental bandwidth that frees up. All right, so far we have covered the types of work you can do in your business and how to organize that work into projects and next actions.
With these frameworks covered, we can now get tactical with how to turn them into a daily plan to execute on a daily basis to drive your business forward. But before we get into the step -by -step processes, let's talk about a few mistakes to avoid that I see clients I work with or students I work with make very often. All right, so the list of six mistakes to follow is a list.
of harder mistakes I've made after six years of running my own business, plus multiple years of helping and consulting my students on running theirs. And those six mistakes are one, not planning your day at all to doing something other than producing first thing, three, building leverage on things that don't need leverage for learning something that isn't directly growing your business, five, having more than one thing to produce the next day, and then six, adding everything to your project list and everything to your next action list without any prioritization.
So let's avoid these mistakes real quick. The first mistake is not planning your day.
So if you're watching this, you're already on the right path to avoiding this mistake. Too many business owners go to bed with no clue what they'll do tomorrow. And as a result, they wake up and lose their day to the whims of clients, admin, and the algorithms telling them what to do.
10 hours go by. I see this so often and they go, I spent the entire time working, but nothing seemingly gets done. If you want your business to grow, this is not a sustainable way to operate.
So take the 10 minutes at the end of your workday to plan the next day using the steps that I'm going to walk you through in a minute. When you define the day and what winning looks like for that day, it will be much easier to wake up and execute.
The momentum of one day will feed into the next, into the next, and into the next. So avoid this mistake. Take the 10 minutes and plan your day.
The second mistake is doing something other than producing first thing. So production is what allows your business to keep growing. As your business grows, more and more things will pop up that will compete with production for your attention.
The second you stop making this the main thing you focus on accomplishing each day, your business will slowly stop growing. It won't stop growing overnight, but a year will go by and you'll fill your most creative and productive time with things that do not move the needle.
So do not make this mistake. Build your entire day around making sure that something is produced. Fight to protect this time.
Otherwise, the endless list of tasks and other people's problems that don't grow your business will dominate your working hours. And again, your business will slowly die as a result. The third mistake is building leverage on things that are unnecessary.
So before you build leverage on something, you should ask, ask if it's worth building leverage in the first place. Too many people waste time automating, organizing, or hiring for things that are not critical functions of the business.
That must mean you're growing. You're building an AI dashboard. That means you're saving time.
You're creating an app that sends you notifications. That means you're being more efficient. Unfortunately, most of this is a waste of time.
Before you spend time building leverage, ask yourself, is this going to directly make my ability to produce more productive or more efficient? answer is no, it's not worth building leverage on. The fourth mistake is learning something that isn't directly growing your business.
Here is a harsh truth. Most of the time you're spending learning, you're actually just being entertained. Once again, these activities feel productive, but they're not driving your business forward.
So make sure what you're learning is something that is directly helping you produce more or build better leverage. Otherwise, you're engaging in productive procrastination. Like I said earlier, make sure you're not learning before you've produced and built leverage on any given day.
Starting the day with a YouTube video might feel productive, but it's better to start with acting on the information you already have on the activities you already know will grow the business. Then once you've completed those for the day, you can start to consume more new information.
The fifth mistake is having more than one thing to produce on any given day. This is the one that's taken me the longest time to get right, but man, does it unlock creative ability. The most important part of my productivity routine is having one thing to produce the next day.
not two, not three, not four, not zero, one. Having one thing allows me to go to bed with one problem for my subconscious to think on overnight. This overnight subconscious thinking, it sounds a little bit woo -woo, but it's where all of my creative breakthroughs come from.
As I was writing this newsletter, I went to bed with one thing to produce the next day being that section of the newsletter. And as a result, I woke up with immediate ideas on what to go write. Every single time I wake up with clarity on exactly what to do.
I drop into flow state significantly easier. when I set this up. Social media, other cheap sources of dopamine, they're just not even appealing to me because I'm so excited to go produce the thing I went to bed thinking about.
So please trust me on this one. When we get into the planning section, take the one big thing part very seriously and you'll watch your creativity and your productivity skyrocket as a result. And the last and final mistake is adding everything to your project list and everything to your next action list without any prioritization.
The later list exists for a reason. We only have so much time and attention. invest on a daily basis therefore we should be intentional with the select few things we invest them into putting everything else on a different list for us to tackle later as we get into the planning section be ruthless in protecting the very few slots you have on your project list and on your next action list be liberal with moving things off of them to handle later all right now let's get into the tactics of planning your day for success to do that we need to start with one weekly planning session that gets your lists fully up to date.
This is your strategic allocation or strategy time where you step out of executing and into deciding what to execute. Once we've done that, we can execute the daily planning routine for the rest of the week until we need more strategy time. So this is the five -step weekly planning routine you can execute in under 30 minutes to set yourself up to actually work on things that grow your business each week.
The goal of your weekly planning routine is simply to get your lists up to date. Having these up to date is what allows you to spend just a few minutes per day planning your next day.
When these are stale and you don't know what you're working on, you're constantly spending time each day figuring out what to do and if you're working on the right things. By separating this type of thinking out of your daily routine and into its own container on a weekly basis, you can be much more efficient with your daily planning.
I like to do this on Friday afternoon at the end of my work week. I'm going to go do this after I finish filming. This lets me go into the weekend without any open loops swirling around and then I can hit the ground running on Sunday.
is my favorite workday with a clear list of actions to take this whole routine is just five steps the first time you do it it might take you an hour once you've done it a few times you can do it in 30 minutes or less and the five steps are recap what happened last week clarify your current bottleneck update your project list and your later list update your next action list and update your open loop list let's look at each one so step one is just make a bullet list of everything that happened last week i like a quick little brain dump of everything i completed and moved forward this helps me recognize what got done and what didn't get done based on what I thought I would do from the week before.
It usually generates some new reminders and realizations of things I forgot. So I just start with a quick recap of everything that I did. Then I clarify my current bottleneck and most of the time it's just reminding me of the bottleneck I already know.
To make sure you're aligning your projects on the right things, ask yourself, what is the one thing that is most limiting the growth of my business right now? This is the bottleneck of your business. I've made other videos on this channel talking about bottleneck analysis, but depending on your business and your business stage, it could be, I don't have enough new leads.
I'm not getting enough email subs. I have no backend product to sell my current customers. I'm spending all my time on delivery.
No one on my email list is buying anything. I'm not converting any of my sales calls. Whatever it is, there is one thing at any given time that's the most important thing you could help fix in your business.
Again, importantly, this needs to be one thing. By definition, you cannot have more. than one bottleneck, you can have lots of problems and lots of opportunities.
But at any time, there's only one thing limiting your growth. And you need to remember that on a weekly basis, because it will orient all the other things that you work on. For example, the bottleneck in our business right now is the number of new people on our email list each week.
If that number was three times what it is right now, our revenue would 3x. And so me and my co founder, all we are focused on is generating valuable content that drives traffic to our email list. That's what this video is doing nothing else.
matters to us right now except making that number go up we continue to do all the things we know we need to do to run the business but in terms of our new projects they're pointed at removing that bottleneck with your bottleneck identified you can update your project list and your later list so step three is updating your project list and your later list starting with the project list from last week you're going to remove anything that you completed add anything you've recently started then review your later list and add anything that needs to be worked on this week so for example if it's the end of the month and i have end of month financial reporting on my later list, I bump that up to my project list.
And then lastly, the most important one is demote anything that's either not working on the bottleneck of your business or keeping your business running. So if it's unrelated to your bottleneck and it doesn't keep your business running, it needs to go to the later list because it is not a priority right now. This should take no more than a couple minutes and you should feel a huge sense of clarity looking at the few things that you're responsible for moving forward.
Step four is to write out next actions for every active project. Every project gets at least one next action. If you know all of them, you can make a list of all of them.
If you just know the next one, just put one, but you need something to do to move each project forward that's on your active project list. Lastly, step five is to sweep your open loops. So on your open loop list, run down all of them to clear it out.
So if something's either resolved, the loop is closed, you can delete it. If you're still... waiting on it, keep it, or if it's been there for too long, make a next action to go follow up on that thing.
This should take under two minutes and you should feel extremely calm afterwards going, I see the full picture of all the things that I'm working on in four lists right here. I feel like I can go attack. the week, this small investment on a weekly basis will significantly improve your effectiveness when you get into the daily execution side.
So once you've completed it, you have a clear high impact project list, all the other things you could pursue on the later list, a clear list of actions you can take the next time you work and an organized list of open loops that allow you to focus on the things that you can actually move forward. But where it gets very powerful is connecting it to the daily planning routine.
This is the five step daily planning and execution routine. you can do in 10 minutes per day to make sure you're working on the highest leverage things. Everything we've covered so far comes together in the last 10 minutes of the workday.
Now, all you're gonna do is allocate the tasks that you're gonna work on the next morning. So before you begin, you'll start with five separate headers. Game plan, one big thing, build leverage, learn, and one -off.
So if you're doing this by hand, it looks like this. This is a picture of my journal. You can see game plan, one big thing, build leverage, learn, and one -offs.
I always start by prepping the page. page I have my other Journal right here where I do this every single day this is where I keep track of things it just works really well for me so if you're using a computer you can type them all out as kind of a bold list and add sub bullets.
And if you're paying attention, you'll see these almost perfectly mapped to the types of work you can do that we talked about in the very beginning. The only difference I make one off hold all of my admin and delivery activities because I always batch them together and I don't need multiple headers. And then I have a game plan section, which is just my way of listing out all these scheduled activities I have giving me another thing to check off throughout the day, just some extra dopamine.
So with your page prep, let's build the plan in order, you're going to fill out your game plan, fill in your one. big thing, fill in your built leverage. fill in your learn and fill in your one -off sections.
Starting with filling in your game plan, this is just a bulleted list of everything you have scheduled tomorrow in order. For me, this includes wake time, morning routine, work blocks, scheduled meetings, workouts, meals, family time, anything that you have scheduled. Some people use their calendar for this.
I like to just have it on one list. Works well for me. And again, gives me the ability to check off that I woke up today, check off that I ate lunch today, just momentum throughout the day.
It lets me see the entire day at a glance. Before it starts. And I can see how it's going to unfold.
I can know where I can slot things in. It just gives me a really good sense. If something happens at a certain time, I put the time in front of it.
So if I have a 2pm meeting, I put 2pm meeting with John. But if something is a bit less structured, I just put the name of the block. So as the day goes on, I check them off.
And I put quite literally everything on this from when I wake up to when I go to bed. Am I able to fully plan the next day to an extreme level of granularity? For the most part, no.
But if I have six or seven bullets on there. I know these are the chunks of time that I have allocated and I can just go about my day checking off them off. Once you have all those listed out, now you're gonna slot in the types of work you can do in the different sections.
So first is your one big thing. We talked about this already. This is the single thing you'll produce first thing the next day and the last thing you will go to bed thinking about tonight.
Importantly, we talked about this. One thing and one thing only, it gets its entire own section to make sure there's nothing else competing with it. If you look at this screenshot, it has one bullet under one big thing I can.
only put one thing in there and it guarantees that i don't go to bed with split attention this is also a natural prioritization forcing function you must choose every day the single most important thing you can do to move your business forward today for me that was write my newsletter my next newsletter not the one that i'm talking through here i spent three hours working that was my one big thing this morning i built leverage was filming this youtube video technically kind of production, but I don't know.
I had some extra juice in me today, but I didn't go to bed thinking that I had to produce two things. I went to bed thinking the only thing I need to produce is my one big thing on my newsletter. And I put this on my build leverage list.
Don't underestimate this part. Just please put one thing on your one big thing section. I swear your creativity will go up.
Then we fill in your build leverage section. So after your one big thing, you want to do something that builds leverage. Again, it will fall into one of these three buckets, documenting an SOP, building an automation.
or training an employee. Some days this could be three things. Some days it could be one.
It's fine to list all of them. Some days you might not have anything to build leverage on and you can instead, like I'm doing today, spend more time producing. But don't put two things on there.
If you can wake up and spend your morning producing something valuable and then building leverage, it is very hard to not see a stack of assets to start to compound. So wake up, produce, build leverage. Step four is filling in your learn section.
This is the one thing that you will intentionally consume tomorrow. This comes as a reward. reward after you have produced and built leverage.
So if you want a little reward here, make watching these other YouTube videos the learn block, but you only get to watch them after you've produced and after you've built leverage. This could be specific like two chapters of a book or vague like 30 minutes on educational YouTube. The point is you choose your inputs the night before rather than let the algorithm just dictate them to you.
I find that when I see a podcast that I want to listen to and then I put it on my list the next day and I go search for it and find it, rather than opening up YouTube, getting inundated with all the potential videos I could watch, I end up learning much more effectively as a result. So I am choosing rather than letting the algorithm choose for me.
And then step five, fill in your one -off. This is anything that needs doing across your delivery or admin or follow -ups that aren't scheduled in the game plan section. So for example, I don't put scheduled calls in my one -off.
I keep it on my game plan. But if I have something like... email to my accountant to track down an invoice that goes in the one -off sections.
I also always have in my one -off sweep open loops as a task to make sure that there's nothing time sensitive that I need to deal with. So every day when I start doing my admin, I sweep the open loop list to make sure there's nothing that I need to check in on. And this keeps it separate from all the important work and it gets its own little section.
where I can put anything that I need to go and do. And I only start doing these one -offs when I've done these other things. And just like that, you have a complete game plan for your next day.
Again, this will take a few reps to nail down and you'll find the best way to adapt it for yourself. But stick with this routine long enough to feel the euphoric benefit of waking up with one thing. Then after days of knocking it out first thing, you'll quickly find this type of planning very addicting.
I know that one of the most exciting parts of my evening is finding the one thing I'm going to work on and being very intense. intentional about prioritizing it. When you stack together days, weeks, and months of producing and building leverage, you will ask yourself how you ever went this long without this system, I promise.
Right now, because a lot of people will ask, I'm going to run through what this routine looks like for me on a daily basis. The only reason I filmed this video is because I love this system and it works great for me. I use it every day and every week to organize my entire life.
And so I want to briefly take you behind the scenes of how I implement all of it. Feel free to take what's useful, discard the rest, adapt the system. for what works best for you.
I'm currently living in Amsterdam. I'm actually in Montenegro right now on a little beach vacation, but YouTube still is a priority. And I'm operating a business with a co -founder on the West Coast of the US and primarily US clients.
That means my daily schedule will look different than someone who operates completely in one time zone. So take this with a grain of salt. Because of my time zone, I start my workday around 9 a .m.
and I end around eight. I split my day into roughly four blocks. So this is what my game plan section looks like.
Nine to two is for production and building leverage. This is five hours of clock time, about four hours of actual deep work. I have an office and a social coworking spot here.
It allows me to work in different environments depending on what I'm doing. Two to five is for eating lunch, learning and training. I break my fast around this time, throw on a podcast, walk to the gym, hit a workout, hit some cardio, hit a sauna, whatever it is.
And I like to have information going during that time. I come back around five from five to eight is when I batch my delivery admin calls and talking to my team. Not every day do I have calls, but the days that I do, I do them during this time.
And then I also will have space to do admin or just check -ins with anyone that needs to get talked to. From eight to 11, rest and recovery. The last thing I do before heading home.
is planning my day. And then I go fully recharge and be present with my girlfriend. With the fully closed loop that comes with planning my day, there's a huge benefit to doing this type of end of day planning before you go spend time with your family.
I'm able to show up so much more present when I know what I'm going to do the next day before I come home. If I come home with all these open loops circle around, I'm just not there and she can feel it. I just know that I'm not being the best partner or future husband that I could be.
So I make sure that I plan my day. before i get home it's the very last thing that i do over the course of the week i've talked about this a little bit i take calls just two days ideally one i have several recurring calls on monday anything i can't fit on monday i put to thursday but this gives me almost always four days per week sunday tuesday wednesday friday where i know i can spend the entire day producing if i wanted to i try not to work on saturday but i love working on sunday that's my best day of production i try to do my weekly planning on friday before the work week ends talked a little bit about this but allows me to be fully present on saturday which is the day i spend mostly off the grid.
And then it lets me hit the ground running on Sunday. I do all of my planning in this pen and paper notebook, my Muji A5 notebook and my 0 .5 clicker pen. I've done it this way for as long as I can remember.
It works for me because it forces me to slow down and deliberately write and rewrite my project list over time. This prevents me from making a list that's too long. It's way easier to type 10 things than it is to actually force yourself to go, I'm only writing these five by hand.
You'll just get tired of writing long lists. So it's a natural. forcing function to focus.
And then it allows me to still work and plan without any technology. So because I can bring this to a cafe without any other technology with me, except my watch to pay for my coffee, I can still work with just a pen and paper because I have all my actions that I need to take right here. And I find that if I can go a couple times a week to do three or four hours in the morning without my phone, I can move forward a ton of stuff.
In terms of recovery, Saturday is when I just don't have any structure. I get rid of my routines. I go in nature.
I'm with my family. I'm spending time doing fun stuff. Because of these routines, I'm able to fully show up on those days because I don't have all the things swirling around.
Then all the other recovery basics, eating well, sleeping well, sunlight, exercising, staying off my phone, I'm pretty consistent with all of these. This is the way I execute this plan on a daily basis. It's been different during different seasons, but it's what I'm doing now.
All right, if you've made it this far, you might be thinking, Dickie, this all sounds great, but it sounds like a lot of work. And that would be true unless you have a quick start guide. So I put together a full interview prompt that will build this entire planning system with you based on your business, get everything currently on your plate, everything's rolling around your head onto your lists.
Then based on your answers, it will fully organize all of them into the four lists we talked about. It'll give you your current bottleneck and will also show you how to take those actions and turn it into a daily routine. I also have the full daily planning.
template and weekly playing template if you want to print them out or just do them yourself they're the first link below in the description you can go find it there's no paywall there's no email wall just go check it out and if you liked it all i ask is you subscribe to this channel and come back for future videos if you have any questions about everything we just covered leave a comment i read and respond to every single one of them that's all we got thanks for watching peace If I had to rattle off some of the most tactical productivity tips that help me get things done each day, here's what I would share.
First, work on a timer. This will show you exactly how much time you're actually spending working, which is usually way less than you think. Second, delay the first scroll as much as you can.
Fight to make the first thing you do each day be the one big thing that you set out to do the night before, before you check your phone, before you get sucked into YouTube, Instagram, social media. Third, leave your phone in another room. Whenever you're working, put it over so it's out of reach.
This will prevent you from picking it up the second things get challenging. Fourth, Make your days as similar as possible.
Find the flow you can repeat without thinking about it. You can then redirect all that extra decision -making energy into your work. Fifth, reward yourself for small accomplishments.
When I finish filming this video, I'm gonna go get a big snack because I've been waiting to eat all day until I could finish filming this video. Use that little small reinforcement to get through the big blocks. Six, take a walk after each working block.
I find rather than scroll my phone, if I go circle the building I'm working in for five, 10 minutes, I immediately come back with more clarity. Seven, if it takes under two minutes, do it now. Don't make a long list of all the things that you could have just knocked out and don't let them accumulate.
If something pops up, just take care of it. Eight, make it easy to pick things back up. Whenever you reach the end of a work block, write down the exact next thing you'll do either that day or the next day so you can close the loop of what to work on next.
Nine, download a social media blocker. I like News Feed Eradicator because it doesn't block them, but it just takes out the full scrollability unless it's on my own timeline. And then 10, don't let your open loops linger.
be mindful of letting open loops pile up. If you're going to check something that's going to generate them like Slack or email or your phone, get in the habit of closing them as quickly as possible.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Dickie Bush opens with a confession: two different pushes to build a business, one with six hours a day and one with twelve, both stalled because he had no real plan. What follows is the system he built to fix it: five types of work, four lists, and a ten-minute nightly routine built around doing exactly one important thing.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:20list
The Five Types of Business Activity
Produce
Build Leverage
Learn
Deliver
Admin
Every possible business task sorts into one of five buckets. Produce and build leverage grow the business; deliver and admin keep it running; learn improves the first two.
Steal forauditing where your own hours actually go each week
04:29concept
Leverage = Output / Input
Productivity leverage: more output, same input
Efficiency leverage: same output, less input
Built via SOPs, automations, or people/agents
Leverage has two flavors that don't do the same thing: productivity multiplies what you get out, efficiency shrinks what you have to put in.
Steal fordeciding whether to automate a task or hand it off before doing either
18:10list
The Four Lists
Project List
Later List
Next Actions List
Open Loop List
A complete GTD-style system reduced to four lists: what you're moving forward this week, what's parked for later, the next step per project, and everything you're waiting on.
Steal forreplacing a single sprawling to-do list with something you can actually clear daily
25:48list
Six Mistakes to Avoid
Not planning your day at all
Doing something other than producing first thing
Building leverage on things that don't need it
Learning something that isn't growing your business
Having more than one thing to produce in a day
Adding everything to your lists with no prioritization
The recurring failure modes Bush sees in himself and in the founders he coaches, all variations of avoiding the one hard decision: what to actually work on.
Steal fora weekly self-check on why a plan isn't sticking
30:50list
The 5-Step Weekly Planning Routine
Recap last week
Clarify your bottleneck
Update project and later lists
Update next actions list
Sweep open loops
A once-a-week, under-30-minute reset that keeps the four lists current so daily planning stays fast.
Steal fora Friday-afternoon or Sunday-morning planning block
35:18list
The 5-Step Daily Planning Routine
Game plan
One big thing
Build leverage
Learn
One-off
A 10-minute end-of-day routine that allocates exactly one production task, one leverage task, one learning input, and a batch of one-off admin for tomorrow.
Steal foran end-of-workday shutdown ritual before switching off
45:50list
10 Rapid Fire Productivity Tips
Work on a timer
Delay the first scroll
Leave your phone in another room
Make your days as similar as possible
Reward small accomplishments
Take a walk after each work block
If it takes under 2 minutes, do it now
Make it easy to pick things back up
Download a social media blocker
Don't let open loops linger
Tactical add-ons that support the core system rather than replace it.
Steal fora quick-reference checklist to pin near your desk
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
44:50link
“They're the first link below in the description. You can go find it. There's no paywall, there's no email wall.”
Soft, single-ask CTA pointing to a free Notion template and prompt, delivered once near the end rather than repeated throughout.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Sam Ovens hands over the four documents he personally uses to plan a year: a vision/mission/principles worksheet, a color-coded War Map calendar, a RICE project-scoring sheet, and a daily health tracker, all free to copy.
One creator ran two frontier AI agents through the same 15 real work tasks and tracked the winner, the time, and the exact dollar cost for every single one.
01:00
01:20
02:00
02:29
03:30
03:59
05:02
05:23
06:01
06:32
07:37
07:44
08:31
09:13
09:29
10:17
11:06
11:31
12:09
12:50
13:15
13:38
14:18
15:07
15:39
16:18
16:53
17:39
17:50
18:40
19:16
19:36
20:52
21:38
22:14
22:55
23:25
24:00
24:36
25:22
26:23
26:58
27:17
28:09
28:36
29:35
29:38
30:16
31:07
31:49
32:54
33:12
34:05
34:41
35:52
36:27
36:57
37:33
37:58
38:40
39:25
40:01
40:36
41:12
41:33
42:59
43:39
44:07
45:21
46:32
47:08
46:30
19:39
26:26
5:50:39
38:35
5:02:20