18:38Ross Harkness · Tutorial
How to be so productive it feels illegal
A 5-step system that turns chaos into order — energy, environment, flow, priorities, and a schedule built the night before.
June 7thThe argument in one line.
Most business owners waste their time because they wing the day, so a written plan, a distraction-free space, ruthless standards, systems and long flow blocks can double or triple output.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A business owner at or near seven figures who feels busy all day but can't point to what actually moved the business forward.
- A founder who keeps getting pulled into team questions and small fires and wants to stop being the bottleneck.
- Someone who tried Pomodoro timers or to-do apps and still loses hours to email, phone scrolling and task switching.
SKIP IF…
- You already run a written daily schedule, track your time and have documented systems your team follows.
- You want specific software recommendations; the video is about habits and standards, not tools.
The full version, fast.
Business owners waste most of their day because they don't plan it, work in distracting environments, say yes to everything and keep the business stuck in their own head. Harkness's fix is a written daily plan with clear finish lines for each task, a tidy and phone-free workspace, ruthless standards about protecting your schedule, and systems like checklists and SOPs so the team stops needing you. The skill underneath it all is flow: push through the first 20 uncomfortable minutes and work in 90 to 120 minute blocks. Track your performance and energy to find your own patterns.
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- A task like 'work on content' has no finish line, while 'script the first draft of next week's video' can be scheduled accurately.
- Planning your day removes every excuse to randomly open email, switch tasks or spend ten minutes deciding what to do next.
- Your environment shapes your behavior: a phone on the desk will eventually get picked up, no matter how disciplined you are.
- Willpower is finite, so remove distractions instead of fighting them all day.
- If you feel the urge to check something mid-task, write it down for later instead of leaving the task.
- What gets a business to seven figures is doing a bit of everything; what keeps it stuck there is continuing to do everything.
- Every broken schedule is a broken promise to yourself, and it erodes the self-respect that makes tomorrow's work happen.
- Working four hours a day is fine if those hours are hyper-productive; checking email and scrolling during scheduled work is the real waste.
- Every time you repeat an instruction or fix the same mistake, ask what checklist, video or SOP would remove you from it next time.
- The first 20 or so minutes of deep focus are uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the price of entry to flow.
- A 25-minute Pomodoro timer ends before you reach flow, so you only ever experience the discomfort of work.
- Working in 90 to 120 minute blocks builds a positive relationship with work because the reward arrives after the discomfort.
- Wasting just two hours a day is 728 hours a year, about 18 full work weeks.
- Track what you get done, what you waste and your energy, then protect your best focus hours (often the morning) for important work.
Plan the day, protect focus, remove yourself
WHAT TO LEARN
Wasted time comes from an unplanned day, a distracting space and a business that needs you for everything, and each has a concrete fix.
- Write a plan for the day and give every task a clear finish line so you can schedule it accurately and know when it's done.
- Audit your environment: tidy the desk, get a good chair, and keep your phone and other distractions out of reach.
- When the urge to check something hits mid-task, ask whether you're avoiding hard work, and write it down for later instead of switching.
- Say no to opportunities and fires that aren't yours, and treat a broken schedule as a broken promise to yourself.
- Turn repeated instructions and recurring fixes into checklists, training videos, SOPs or decision rules so the team can run without you.
- Work in 90 to 120 minute blocks and push through the first 20 uncomfortable minutes, since flow is where the real output happens.
- Track your output, wasted time and energy to find your personal patterns, then schedule important work in your best focus hours.
Terms worth knowing.
- Flow
- A hyper-focused, hyper-productive state where you're absorbed in a task and waste almost no time, reached after pushing through roughly 20 minutes of discomfort.
- SOP
- A standard operating procedure: a written set of steps so a team member can do a recurring task without asking the owner.
- Pomodoro timer
- A technique of working in short timed intervals, usually 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks.
- Time audit
- Tracking where your hours actually go so you can see what is wasted and what to fix.
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You do not need more time. You just need to use the time that you do have better. Because if you're anything like most business owners, you're wasting upward of 80 % of your time every single day.
Whilst the best business owners, they can get your full week of work done in a single day, which I know that can sound harsh, but it is true. The level at which you could be operating at will blow your mind. So in this video, I'm going to show you the exact system you can use to stop wasting your time and the most important skill you can build if you want to double or even triple your output each day so you can scale faster without having to work more.
So let me show you the first thing you need to do if you want to stop wasting so much bloody time. I've used one of these, where is it? Right here.
Pocket notebooks every single day for almost five years. And the reason I say almost is about three or four months ago, I tried to replace it with a software tool that I was building for my clients. And obviously I wanted to test it before it...
I gave it to them to see if it was good and all of a sudden I noticed that the amount of time I was wasting started skyrocketing. And now it wasn't because, you know, this notebook is magic, although I could make a very good argument that it is magic. It was because I had planned my day in one of those notebooks for five years.
And this tool that I built wasn't a scheduling tool. It was essentially a to -do list, project management, task management system. And so the amount of time I wasted went...
All the way up. So I've worked with hundreds of seven and eight figure business owners at this point. So I can confidently say that the biggest reason I've seen both me and my clients, and most likely you, waste time is not having a plan for your day.
Because that means you're winging it. You have no reason not to randomly open your emails. You've no reason not to switch tasks.
You've no reason not to take 10 minutes to figure out what to do next, only to be distracted by a message from your team. So figure out everything you need to do. and then decide when you're going to do it and a really important thing here when making a plan is to define what done looks like for each task so for example if i was making a plan and i wrote work on content well that's not a clear outcome like what what does that even mean whereas if i write script the first draft of my next youtube video that is something specific it's a clear outcome so make sure you give yourself a clear finish line so you know what you're working towards and when you're done This will also help you make sure your plan is accurate because with work on content, when am I done?
Is that going to take me five minutes? Is it going to take me five hours? I have no idea because it's not clear enough.
So that makes it hard to accurately schedule that task. Whereas if I script a YouTube video every week and I know it takes me two hours to do that, then if I'm more specific with my task, I can more accurately schedule it. Hence, I'll waste way less time and be less likely to run over.
And that brings us to step two. This is one of the biggest reasons. that you're not getting as much done as you'd like.
So imagine you could work in two different rooms. So in one room, you're working with hyperproductive people who are super focused and in the other room, you're working with lazy, distracted people who are basically pretending to work. In which room would you get more done?
It's obviously the room with hyperproductive focused business owners because your environment has a huge impact on your behavior. Like I'm a pretty fucking disciplined person. I'm great at knowing what I need to do and doing it whether I feel like it or not.
But I am also human. If I sit at my desk with my phone beside me, I'm going to pick it up at some point. And if I pick up my phone, chances are I'm going to scroll.
If my desk is messy, I'm going to feel chaotic or cluttered. If I'm uncomfortable, I'm going to struggle to focus. And this is quite hypocritical of me because I am sitting charging my phone right now as I record.
But I do use it when I'm recording. Otherwise, it's normally out of the room. Anyway.
If it is full of distractions, if you don't enjoy working there, if it's messy, if there's fucking lazy ass people around you, then of course you're not going to get as much done. So you need to optimize and audit your environment. Now, there's a lot of nuance here because it does depend on what your environment currently looks like.
But in short, you know, you want to keep it tidy because a cluttered desk is a cluttered mind. Seriously, you will not believe the impact this will have on your ability to focus and get shit done until you do it. So tidy your bloody desk, tidy your workspace, make sure it's organized.
then make it comfortable invest in a good chair because you're going to sit in it for hours every day essentially remove anything not to do with work and make it somewhere where you enjoy working at now obviously that does include removing distractions because the distractions that make you waste time which is you know which is all them well they're in your environment so if your phone buzzes every two minutes you're going to check it and you're going to waste time on it it's the same with emails it's the same with people so remove anything that could distract you because you only have so much willpower and i don't give a how disciplined you are okay eventually if there are enough distractions fighting for your willpower eventually you'll give in you'll waste time so just remove them that way you can't give into them and you know you don't waste time and pay attention to the to the distractions that you create yourself because sometimes your phone is nowhere near you
nobody is messaging you and you still open another tab or check another email because the work you're meant to do meant to be doing is hard so when you notice that urge to like check something just ask yourself do i actually need to check this or am i just avoiding what i'm supposed to be doing obviously that requires a lot of self -awareness but do it okay and if it's something you actually do need to check don't drop your task and check on it don't go off schedule just write down that you need to check it later then return to the task but that brings us to step three and this is by far The best way to get more done every single day as a business owner.
See, what I find when I'm working with my clients is that what gets a business to seven figures is doing a bit of everything. But as soon as you reach seven figures, doing everything is what keeps you stuck because you're saying yes to every opportunity. You're jumping into every fire the second you hear about it.
You're taking over every task and you're wearing every bloody hat, even when you hire people to wear that hat for you, which means you end up jumping everywhere. getting nothing important done and wasting time because you should you're doing stuff that you should not be doing and one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in business is that the top entrepreneurs are all fucking ruthless they take no shit and they accept nothing less than their damn best if you want to stop wasting your time you have to do the same because in business there's always going to be something that is fighting for your attention fighting for your time and you have to be able to say no now this is a bit far but like I I get annoyed at myself I waste my time I'd be fucking pissed off at myself because My standard is better than that.
My standard is that I do not waste the most important finite thing I have. Now, I want to be clear when I'm talking about not wasting time, I'm not saying that you need to work 12 hours a day. No, you can if you want to, but that's not what I'm saying.
I'm not counting going to the gym. I'm not counting reading, learning, chilling with your family at night, doing whatever. None of that is wasting time.
What I mean is the 10 minutes it takes you to answer a question from your team that you shouldn't need to answer. the 20 minutes that you spent procrastinating because you don't know what to work on first or the 30 minutes you spent scrolling your damn phone because you're procrastinating in the under the guise of learning instead of doing the actual work that you're you've scheduled to do all of these things can seem small in the moment but they all add up and not only do they add up and waste the time they add up in damaging your self -respect because when you create a schedule essentially what you're saying is i'm going to spend my time this way so i can spend it in the most effective time possible so that I can move towards my goals in the most efficient way.
As soon as you break that schedule, you've broken the promise that you made to yourself. You're showing yourself that your word is not true, that it does not matter, that it's not valuable because you're actively going against your word. And so you ruin your self -respect, which makes you less likely to do the things you need to do tomorrow.
And that adds up. The cycle repeats. You have to have a ridiculously high standard for yourself.
If you say you're going to work, you have to work. You do not need to be annoyed. about having downtime and relaxing so long as you're actually doing real fucking work you do not need to be annoyed if you only work four hours a day but those four hours are hyper productive and they're all you need to do what you need to be annoyed about is the checking emails when you don't need to check them it's the procrastination it's the scrolling your phone when you have a task scheduled doing stuff all day that does not move the fucking needle that is what you need to be annoyed about that is wasting time because you're running a business people's livelihoods quite literally depend on you and you're sitting there wasting time like what the fuck are you doing you're better than that and this is harsh right but I am speaking from experience I'm not just targeting you I've done this myself so I know what it's like but I also know that you can fix it because I've fixed it with myself I'm with countless other seven and eight figure business owners but you have to be ruthless and this is not something that anybody else can help you do you can
implement systems into your own personal operations you can build habits you can do some mindset and identity work which is all great and also if i help my clients with but at the end of the day it comes down to you which brings us to step four and this is how you make sure your team doesn't need you for everything that way you can trust them that way you you can give them work to do and know they'll do it well and you can focus on what you need to focus on as a business owner because look if your business is reliant on you nobody can do anything without you it's going to be hard not to waste time because you'll be doing things that you should not be doing So you need to build systems to take your business out of your head so your team can do more for you.
This is one of the most important steps you can do to grow faster once you're at seven figures, because this is how you stop being the bottleneck. So every time you repeat instructions or answer the same question or fix the same mistake, ask yourself, what could I put in place so that next time this doesn't need me? Now, that could be a checklist.
It could be a training video. It could be an SOP. It could be clear rules for making a decision.
Whatever you do. If you want to stop wasting so much time, you need to build systems so that your business stops relying entirely on you for every little thing. Now, at the start of the video, I told you that I'm going to show you the most important skill you can build as a business owner if you want to double or even triple your output every single day.
Well, that skill is it's something that you've probably experienced before. So have you ever been working on a task and you get in the in the zone and you look up after a while and two hours have passed and you've just fucking aced through the work like it was nothing and you're impressed at what you've done and you've done really well.
Well, that feeling of being in the zone is the skill of flow. Flow is a hyper productive, hyper focused state, which you can learn to drop into and improve at over time. And because you're hyper focused when in flow, you waste almost no time because you're locked the fuck in.
You get more done because your intention is entirely on the work and you do better work because all of your mental faculties are concentrated on the work. So if you want to improve your output, the most important thing you can do is learn how to utilize flow. Now, luckily for you, flow requires a few things.
a task which is at the right level of challenge which almost all of your important business tasks will be a key distinction there is that they're important because the challenge of a lot of business tasks is dictated by the effort that you put in for example making content can be really easy or can be hard depending on the amount of effort you put into your content it can be more challenging by putting more effort in it also requires you to have no distractions and it requires you to have a set outcome that you're aiming toward all of which we've went over so if you follow the steps in this video you will be able to drop into flow but do not expect to feel focused the second you sit down this is a huge mistake i see a ton of business owners make they sit down to work and the work feels hard so they want to check their emails for two seconds and do anything but the work then they claim they can't focus so in the future when they try to focus they remind themselves oh i can't focus that's just the way i am they don't even try so do not make that mistake okay the first 20 or so minutes of dropping into flow and deep focus is hard and it's uncomfortable that is the
price of entry because of how the neurotransmitters in your brain like acetylcholine, norepinephrine and all the rest sort of skyrocket when you're dropping into focus and flow. But that is the price of entry and if you can push through it you'll end up in a flow state where you'll enjoy the work. You'll get a shit ton done which in turn rewards you for pushing through the discomfort which means next time you try to focus you're going to find it easier to push through the discomfort because you know you get a reward on the other side of it.
This is why I hate the Pomodoro timer because with the Pomodoro timer you sit down to work. You try to focus and the first 20 minutes of focusing is difficult, like we just went over. So by the time the Pomodoro timer goes off, which is about 20 minutes, 25 minutes, you've not even broken into flow yet.
Then after five minutes, you have to restart. And the thing about focus and flow is that when you get out of it for five minutes and then you try to focus again, you have to restart the process, okay? You don't just jump in where you were.
So you have to try focus again and the cycle repeats. So you never actually get rewarded for focusing. And the only experience you have with work is negative.
because all your work time that 25 minutes is all spent in a state of discomfort it is builds a bad relationship with work so you're more likely to waste time because you don't want to do it whereas if you push through the discomfort you work in 90 to 120 minute blocks you build a positive relationship with work which makes you more likely to do the work and not waste time So give yourself the opportunity to get absorbed into the task instead of abandoning it at the first sign of discomfort.
Not only will you build a better relationship of work, but you'll build a better relationship with yourself because again, it comes back to self -respect. You're doing the work that you're scheduled to do. And you're also proving to yourself that you can actually push through discomfort, that you can do good work.
Which brings us to the next step if you don't want to waste any time. That step is that everybody is different, okay? Everybody has their own things which make them waste time.
Everybody has their own things, which helps them get more done. Now, the things we went over in this video are foundational principles that will apply to everybody. But one of the best things you can do is track how you perform.
Now, this is something I get all my clients to do. They track how they perform. We then analyze the data to see how that performance is working.
Then we find what's not working, we fix it, and then we double down on what is working. So track your performance, track how much you get done, track how much time you waste, and then analyze your data to find what holds you back, what caused you to waste time. and what works for you then implement any changes and improve make sure also to include tracking your energy so when do you focus best what kind of work are you doing what happened before a good session or a bad session and essentially look for patterns in how you focus and how you perform and your energy that way you can use those patterns to plan your day like if you if your data shows you that you focus best in the morning which i can almost guarantee that it will then protect that time for your important work instead of scheduling meetings instead of checking emails See if you waste only two hours a day.
Two hours, that is it, right? That is 14 hours a week. 14 hours a week, 52 weeks a year is 728 hours every year.
That is 18 fucking work weeks a year that you are wasting. And that two hours I'm talking about is not downtime like we've discussed, right? It's not where you know you're going to the gym.
It's not where you're with your family, reading, watching Netflix. It's actual wasted time. It's the checking the emails.
It's the scrolling the phone when you're meant to be working. It's the fixing things that your team shouldn't know how to do. It is those things where you're wasting your time.
And I can tell you after working with countless entrepreneurs over the past few years that you're wasting way more than two hours a day. Like if you actually did a time audit, which again is something I get all my clients to do so we can see where their time is currently going. Therefore, we know what to improve.
You would see how much time you are wasting. You're wasting way more than two hours a day from pointless meetings. getting distracted, going down rabbit holes, responding to messages, all these things that feel like they need done but really do not need done.
And if you had of just built systems for both how you operate and how your business operates, you would not be wasting that fucking time and you would have an extra 18 weeks of focused work done every year. Imagine how much progress you can make with that much more time. Imagine, just seriously, imagine what you could do with an extra 18 weeks a year.
an extra 18 weeks a year of work turns your year essentially from 52 weeks to 70 weeks okay imagine how much progress you can make with that so stop wasting your time okay and if you want to see exactly how to build systems so you can run your business in four hours a day click the video on screen now i'll show you exactly how to do it
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Ross Harkness opens with a blunt claim: most business owners waste upward of 80% of their day, while the best can do a full week of work in one. The rest of the video is the system he uses with seven and eight figure clients to close that gap.
