8 Productivity Rules of the Top 1%

The truth is, successful people don't rely on discipline or willpower to be more productive. But these are the rules that they follow that allow them to get s*** done even when they don't feel like it.
They're the same rules I use to go from an unproductive ADHD mess to an insanely productive $100 million CEO. So without further explaining it, these are the eight productivity rules of the top 1%.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com.
Rule number one, design versus default. The whole philosophy I live by is design your life over defaulting to it.
See, when I got diagnosed with ADHD at 12 years old, I honestly thought there was something broken with me. And I went my whole life on medication and struggling with taking this pill that made me completely different.
And then at 36 years old, I decided I didn't wanna take it anymore. The problem was is that I became so dependent on it.
If I didn't take it, I couldn't get anything done. Like literally couldn't process email or do anything that looked like financials.
And through a process with a friend, I reduced my dosing. I focused on my habits.
I figured out that there was a lot of stuff that I wasn't doing that if I added to my life, it would allow me to show up as me without the downside. And it wasn't easy, but it took discipline.
It took designing it. And most people just live their life as almost like, that's who I am.
That's how it is. And that's their default.
That's not how it has to be. If you lack discipline, build a life that doesn't require it.
So here's a few things I do that's very different than anybody else that allows me to get more done focusing on discipline. First off, I schedule most of everything I do with other people.
Why? It turns out I will do more for somebody else than I'll do for myself. If I have a commitment to go work out, if I have a commitment to a work session, when I have somebody else involved, I'll 100% show up.
If it's just me, sometimes I'll drag my feet. Sometimes I'll cancel it.
Having other people to make a commitment to is a big game changer. Second part is I plan my perfect week.
It's a framework I teach in my book, Buy Back Your Time. And the whole idea is to start with the big priorities.
Look at the reoccurring items, look at the meeting rhythms, look at your goals and ensure that the week is aligned with the goals. Because if you don't, then you're just going through the motions.
You're not moving anything forward. By doing it that way, you do the work even if you're not motivated or overwhelmed.
And it helps you stay focused on the things when you're motivated and not let yourself get overwhelmed. The other thing I do is batch work.
You know, essentially I look at different days of the week and I theme them to a focus on content or creation or businesses that are all similar because most people think that they can do context switching. They think that they can go from like one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing, and it turns out you suck at it.
If you just look at like counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, all the way to 26, and then doing the same thing, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, all the way till Z, you could do that quite fast. Most people can do it about six seconds.
If you go one, A, two, B, three, C onward, a minute plus. So right off the bat, the math does the math.
And that's why my favorite thing to tell people is batch the work and focus, which stands for follow one course until successful, meaning do similar type of work and focus on it. So you have the same energy and get it all done at your highest level.
Another area is for me is manage your energy. I don't believe you manage time.
You actually manage energy. When I wake up in the morning, my ability to connect to my creator and design and think and problem solve, it's at the highest level.
So when I wake up, I have a morning ritual that I follow to allow me to produce and create my best work. I don't save that till I'm tired in the afternoon.
In the afternoon, I schedule meetings because I love being with people and it energizes me. So I always look at right time, right action.
Throughout my day, there's certain types of work that I'm gonna put and insert so that it gets the right type of energy that I've got for that activity. So that's why I'll even split up my day with workouts so that I can reset my energy so I come into the next meeting focused.
If you ask me to talk about the thing that had the biggest impact around designing my life versus the default reaction, it's understanding my calendar design creates my reality. So if you only use this, you'll be ahead of like 99% of the people.
But if you want my template for the perfect week, I'll tell you where to get at the end. The problem is, is that you're probably struggling with discipline and that isn't enough, which is where rule number two comes in.
Build your habits. When I started in business, I used to think getting into flow state was something that happened randomly.
Some like magical moment throughout my week where I'm like, Oh my God, it was like I was working and I felt connected. It was the best thing I ever did.
And it wouldn't happen for a while. And I'd be like, oh, why am I struggling so hard to get into work? But then I learned you can actually make it happen by design.
And it all comes down to your habits. One of my philosophies around this is your habits determine your future.
So all I got to do is look at what you do every day. And I will tell you what your future will look like.
The crazy part about being in flow state is that when you're in it, it feels like you can do anything. I mean, you don't have a desire to go to the bathroom.
You're not hungry. It gives you energy because you're focused on a task and using parts of your brain, which is familiar and you know how to do it.
But at the same time, it's stretching you and then building the habits that precede it. It's just like shooting content before I shoot content.
I have a whole process that I use to get into the energy of communicating. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to come consistently to shoot and to share with you.
The way I think about habits is I break them down into two things, rituals and triggers. And those things can help you get into flow.
So for example, in my home, I have this specific chair that I use to trigger me to vision. When I sit in that chair, it's this beautifully positioned place where I'm overlooking the city that I live in and I'm allowing myself to dream.
That chair has become a trigger. Another example is my ritual around working that I need to put headphones on.
And I usually put EDM music with no words. I want the beat there so it keeps my mind focused.
But that ritual of when I do deep work allows me to get into flow a lot faster. You can use location as triggers.
Like when you walk into your office, you can use the doorframe as the trigger to remind yourself the kind of work that you're there to do. And it's just these simple mental frames, these identity resets that allows high performers to perform at a level that most people, again, they just go through their life by default.
There's no design to it. So one of my favorites is when I sit in my car, every time I have these really cool cars, I'll review my goals list.
So I have this list of the 12 goals I wanna get done for the year. And I just review them.
I ask myself, is my calendar reflect this? Do I feel in the energy of receiving it? And I just go all in sitting in that car in that environment for me, where that trigger allows me to get more done. But if you really want to be insanely productive, you got to change your thinking.
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Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to rule number three, systematize everything.
Have you ever forgotten to pack something for a trip and like you get to that place and it drives you nuts because like the one thing you needed maybe is your swim shorts or your sunglasses. I don't know what it is, but everybody's got a thing and it's nothing's more annoying than getting to a place and not having what you expected.
Would you find it weird to know that I have a system for packing my clothes? I call it the CEO packing playbook and I've had it for almost a decade now. The reason why is I don don't wanna forget things.
I want to make sure that if I go on an Ironman race, I don't wanna forget my swim cap, or if I'm going mountain biking, I can't forget my clip-on shoes, or if I go snowboarding, I need my toque. Here's a mental quote I want to offer you, is to consider this.
If you find yourself doing something more than twice, create a system for it. The coolest part is system stands for save yourself time, energy, and money.
Because if you do it once, you don't repeat it. I'm a huge fan of checklists.
Again, if you haven't read my book, I talk about it all the time because there's three specific benefits from doing them. Number one is you eliminate procrastination and confusion.
If I have a checklist and I got something I got to get done, I just follow the checklist. It's like if my brain has to go and think about what I'm about to do, then I'll drag my feet, you know, like pack my clothes, get some financial processes finished.
Checklists help me not procrastinate or be confused and just move forward. Number two is it creates consistency.
Back in the day, I used to have to check all my different social networks and make sure I responded to emails and make sure that I checked this. And I created a checklist so that I was always consistently on top of all the inbound messages in my life.
The coolest part is if you follow a checklist, it also allows you to avoid having to do rework, right? Where you do something and it didn't get done right because you missed the step. And then it's got to come back to you to get done.
That's called the defect. And if you want to waste your time and energy, have defects out in the world with your work that then comes back onto your plate and then you're backed up and it just keeps a cycle of like being overwhelmed.
I remember when Elon launched his first car, the Roadster, he had so many defects that had to come back into a warehouse. Everybody was freaking out because there's like hundreds of cars that they thought they had delivered to customers, but they were missing the checklist to do the delivery to make sure the car was done.
And then it all had to come back for the rework. Number three is it allows you to buy back your time.
See, at first you do it, it's your checklist, then eventually a virtual assistant, so they help you out. And now I have a house manager that takes care of all the things in my life.
They're the CEO of Martell family and they follow checklists that I created first for myself, then for my assistant, and now for my house manager. Here's a pro tip for knocking this out of the park is add checklists and context in your calendar.
In the description, you put the checklist in there so that when the notification pops up, you know exactly what you got to go do. But there's another rule that will make you exponentially more productive, which brings us to number four, don't repeat yourself.
This is one of my favorite philosophies that my nerdy programming background brings out of me all the time. Most people don't realize that if you're gonna do something once, you wanna document it so that you never do it twice.
And the best way to do that is to use a thing called a stencil or a pattern so that it makes it consistent every time. If I was manually painting all the birds on the wall, it would take me like hours, whereas with a stencil, I can get it done in an hour.
And that's the difference between doing manual work that you're dependent on a specialist to do versus having a stencil that allows you to get a lot done. So don't repeat yourself.
Broke people get good at doing tasks. Rich people get good at avoiding them.
In many ways, I'm successful because I don't do things that other people can do,

but the only reason I can have them do them for me

is because I've created the blueprints,

the templates, and the stencils

for them to do the work the way I would do it

because I've created that frame.

Here's how to not repeat yourself.

Number one, stencils are exponential improvements.

Having a template, a blueprint, a structure

that other people follow to get the same result

is a game changer.

Number two is having checklists that creates the process.

I think it's a game changer. Number two is having checklists that creates the process.
I mean, I have a system for creating systems, which I always thought was obvious. But when I showed my friends, they were like, Oh my gosh, Dan, that's so smart.
Well, of course, because if I'm going to create systems, I need a template and I need a process to show people how to do it. So I never have to do it again.
And it's done right. It eliminates the steps in the process.
Number three is packing lists are cool. That's a system, but a stencil is a complete copy.
A packing list gives you a checklist so that you don't forget anything like your toothbrush. A stencil says, how about you have a copy of all the stuff in your toiletry bag.
And that's a separate bag so that when you do travel, you just grab the bag that you know has everything and put it in your luggage so you absolutely can't forget anything because it's the same thing you took on your previous trip. Four is an advanced move, but it's using AI to create stencils.
So one of my favorite prompts after I'm playing with some kind of AI chat is to ask it to give me the prompt that would generate that specific output. So then I'm asking AI to give me the stencil that I can copy and paste in the future to get to that place way faster.
But sometimes it doesn't matter how systematized the task, there's something holding you back. And that's where rule number five comes in.
Call your shot. A while ago, I heard a stat that said that 22 million people in the US are millionaires, but only 3 million have visible ads.
It occurred to me I had the first, but I didn't have the second. And if I did, then I'd be kind of a unicorn.
So I made this crazy commitment. So I called it Project Visible Labs.
I gave myself 90 days and I went all in. And I will tell you, I thought it was going to be easy until I hit a plateau.
For three weeks, I didn't lose any weight. And the crazy part is I had stakes, meaning that if I didn't do it, I had to enter in a fitness competition as is on stage in a fricking speedo.
That's kind of bananas. What made it different for me is I believe in these three things.
One, you have to have a clear goal. Second, you have a timeframe.
Three is you have stakes. So for me, it was entering the fitness competition.
Most importantly, as I called my shot, I invited my videographer to my house to follow me around, to look at the scale. And then I told the whole world, everybody on the internet, this is what I'm doing.
This is my timeline. And if I don't do it, then there's public accountability.
See, most people don't want accountability because then if they fail, they're going to do it in public. But Stephen Covey used to say all the time, accountability breeds responsibility.
If you're accountable for your action, you'll be responsible to do the right thing. So I want to teach you a few big ideas.
Number one is verbalize your goals to activate them. A lot of people have a vision, they have dreams, they have things they want to do, projects, they don't tell anybody.
If you don't talk your goals out loud, it doesn't activate them. Think about all the people that you follow on the internet, they call their shots nonstop.
Elon Musk, we're going to colonize Mars. Gary Vee, I'm gonna buy the New York Jets.
These are things that people that hardly know these people know about them because they don't stop talking about it. Number two is they commit to others.
They text a friend, they let the person know this is my timeframe, hold me accountable. So they use their peer group, not as a negative thing, as a positive thing, I call it a positive peer group, where you then have your friends ask you, how are you doing with that? You know, I heard you're trying to do that Project Visible Labs.
Is that happening? Being accountable to other people that see you every day and they see you make decisions. You go out to dinner with them and they go, hey man, doesn't look like you're doing that thing you told us about.
That'll keep you on track. I also learned having other people involved makes it easier for me to stick to.
So if I schedule time to go to the gym with my trainer, I'm not going to quit on them. If it's just me, I'm probably going to bail if I'm not feeling up to it.
Number three is competition makes it fun. So not only did I have a stake, if I didn't hit it, I had to enter in a fitness competition.
If I hit it, I gave myself permission to buy one of my dream cars, a Ferrari Pista, one of the most beautiful in my mind cars. And then it became a thing.
And everybody asked me, did you get your car yet?

What are you doing? Are you on track? And it was just like a fun experience because I remember the day I hit my goal, I showed up and we made it a whole event. Everybody on my team came out to see

it and it came out and it was delivered. And I had that car for weeks prior before ever driving it

because I wanted to honor the process. Number four is make a public commitment on social media.
Decide what goal you want to hit, what timeline, post it on Instagram and tag me, Dan Martell, 2Ls of Martell on Instagram. I want to see you make a public commitment to your future.
Call your shot. But if you've committed, you still might struggle with spending too much time on things.
Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you.
It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode.
Which brings us to rule number six, which is compress the timeline. Anytime I've launched a product, my business coaching, my fitness program, my mindset program, anything, I've announced it before I ever had it built.
It's just been my default. I learned a long time ago to default to action.
If I have a thing that I want to create,

I just have to start selling it

because most people think about all the things

I could do to start it and get ready to start it

and da-da-da.

And I'm like, the only thing to do is to get a customer

and then that'll be a forcing function to move forward.

It actually helps you compress the timeline

because it gives you a real feedback loop

of what's important and what's just noise. Parkinson's law says work expands to fill the time available.
If you ask somebody to get something done, they say, I'll get it done by Friday. Just ask them, can you get it done by Tuesday? I can't do Tuesday.
How about Wednesday? Yeah, I could probably do Wednesday. Ding, ding, ding.
All of a sudden now people are getting things done a lot faster for you, which means you get more done in a calendar year, which means you make more money. I remember one time I was coaching a private client.
They flew all the way to Kelowna for us to sit down for a half day to review their 10-year plan, their big goals. They wanted to build a hundred million a year business over the next decade.
And I was like, cool. But then I asked them a simple question.
How probable do you feel it'd be for you to accomplish the 10-year goal in one year? One out of 10, if you had to make it happen, are you confident you could get it done in a year? And everybody replied, there was a few other people and they all said, ah, probably like a three or four. And I said, interesting.
I said, could you get it done in a year if you knew at the end of the year, if you didn't hit your goal, that you would lose all of your business, your bank accounts would zero out and you'd never be able to start another company for the rest of your life. They said, well, now it's a 10.
I said, interesting, what changed? Motivation. All of a sudden now they made it a must, not a nice to have.
That's Parkinson's law. The work will expand to the time you give it.
Most people are scared to choose aggressive timelines, but what I've learned is doing that actually gives you the creativity to force you to come up with the answers. So I'm always trying to find opportunities to create forcing functions.
If I can put myself in a situation that forces me to get something done faster by making a commitment to somebody else or just deciding this is when it's got to get done by tomorrow morning and not delaying it, that creates a better product. Having shorter timeline forces simplicity.
You can't overcomplicate it, which is usually the thing that stops people from actually being successful. And it turns out simplicity scales.
Most people struggle in business because they do 1400 different things instead of choosing the one to three things that actually makes them money, that they love to do, that the customer wants. And if you do that, simple scales, complexity fails.
The human mind is designed to add complexity, so you gotta fight against this. And over the years I've learned, a goal without a deadline is just a dream.
It's something people want, they aspire to it, but it doesn't have any meat because there's no timeline. The one thing I do all the time with my team is just ask me, give me a date, give me a date, give me a date.
Now all of a sudden I've activated the execution

of that project.

But here's most entrepreneurs kryptonite, their phone.

You have access to the entire world in seconds,

which is why number seven to be insanely productive is,

cut out distractions.

Here's a big idea.

Turn off all your notifications on your phone.

Turn them off.

I dare you.

There was a life before your notifications,

before they even built that feature, and there'll be a life afterwards. And if you want to save your time, your energy, your focus, turn them off.
No more vibrating, no more buzzing, no more screen time. You decide when you go check in.
Don't let any person in the world just automatically disrupt your life. Did you know your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list for strangers on your time? Crazy.
Turn them off. A while ago, I had the privilege to be invited to spend a week with Richard Branson at his home in Switzerland.
And what I saw was a guy that not only refused to have a phone or have any distractions or have anybody bug them, honestly, was his process for taking all the inbound requests on his time, emails, text messages, everything. And it got filtered through his assistant.
Why? Because he only wanted to look and be presented the things that needed his unique perspective. Everything else somebody else could deal with, that changed everything.
I saw him do that and I go, wow, now I understand why I have all the time to go skiing with us or do all these crazy PR stunts or charity events. And that's when I changed my whole life.
So a lot of people brag about inbox zero. How about zero inbox? That's the way I live my life.
It's a whole inbox GPS process. So I break this down into three types of distractions.
Number one, digital distractions. These are your phone notifications, the apps, the notification jewels, even having access to Netflix or YouTube downloaded videos when you're trying to

get work done and you're like, oh man, I just want to go watch some stuff and reset my brain. Those digital distractions on those devices are the killer of getting anything done.
You want to be the most unproductive, have those available to you all the time. You want to have discipline and get rid of the digital distractions.
Number two are physical distractions. It's everything from having the mental distractions of staring at a messy space to not having headphones on that really dial you in and focus to having any person just be able to come in and bug you when you're in your focus time.
I remember having a client once that used to brag. He says, yeah, I do these things called gas meetings and everybody loves them.
And I'm like, what's that? And he goes, got a second meeting. Are you serious? What part of working with me made you think that that was a good idea? No, these times throughout the day, you can walk into my office and we have a conversation, but got a second meetings is a distraction.
And it also tells you that the person doesn't plan well enough and that they're always bugging you to interrupt you when you're focused. Number three is internal distractions.
And these are things from lacking clarity to having too much stress, feeling the overwhelm. And it usually comes from like not having a vision or not dumping your task or not prioritizing anything.
That's why like even something as simple as going to the gym for me is about getting my mind right. That's why I always say exhaust the body to tame the mind.
That internal distraction, that mind clutter sometimes needs a rhythm that you have in your life, meditation, writing things down, productivity apps, so that you can do your best work to keep your mind focused on the task at hand. But here's the real truth.
If you're struggling to get the work done, you might be missing something else. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real

life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls and Martell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time.
I'd love to See you there. Have an amazing day.

Which brings us to the last rule.

Know your purpose. So there's this crazy story of a musician named Oliver Anthony.
He wrote this song called Richmond North of Richmond. It was about essentially taking a stance.
A lot of people tried to use it for politics, but I liked the message. I liked the energy.
And I remember reading his story to find out that he used to live in a trailer park, drove a 20 year old car, struggled his whole life with addiction and drinking. And here's this moment that shifted everything.
And he was on a podcast and somebody asked him what changed. And he said two things.
One, I discovered God. And two, I stopped making it about myself and I started making it about people.
And when I heard him say that, it occurred to me that I'd seen this pattern in so many people from Oprah to Elon to everybody that's had success. They stopped making about themselves.
It wasn't to be rich to be rich. It was to be rich to be of service.
They started to get purpose. If you have a why that's bigger than your fear, then you'll do it.
Most people focus on the how when they should be focused on the why. The bigger the why, the easier the how.
I mentor a lot of youth and I get asked this question all time. Like, how do I discover my purpose? How do I discover my why? How do I discover my vision for my life? Well, here's what I know.
Pain is inevitable. Every human being by the fact that you're alive will go through pain.
Suffering is optional. The thing that's missing so that the pain doesn't become suffering is purpose.
It's the antidote. Find that and it makes the zest for life a lot easier to deal with all the challenges.
A way to keep it front of mind is I have a vision board, you know, and I put mine on my phone. I put it on the wallpaper of my laptop so that I have a vision of my purpose,

what I'm trying to do and why it matters to me

and all the different components,

the personal, the fitness, the relationships,

the health, the impact, it's all there.

And I review my goals annually, five years,

25 years out, every week, every month,

and honestly, every day for the year

because I have purpose daily.

It's not something I do once and then I forget about it. I just build the plan and put it in a drawer and never look at it.
It's something I put all around me. I have a guy in my office.
He has it printed out on his desk in a framed envelope. We have our goals on the wall here, you know, and they're all stacked like a ladder so that everybody sees it.
If you visualize it, it makes it easier to hit. Most people are trying to hit a target that they don't even know what the target looks like.
So one of my favorite ways to do that is make your progress visible. And I'm talking dashboards or habit tracking.
You can use apps, you can write it down, keep it old school if you want, but just make sure that you see the progress towards your purpose. Because if you do that, nothing will stop you.
In many ways, the way I think about your ability to create and attract your future into your life, it takes 300% focus. You have 100% clarity of what you wanna create and you have 100% belief you can do it.
And 100% of the time you believe and have that clarity, that's how fast you can bring into your life. Now, is it easy? Nope.
Is it possible? 1000%. And this is the deeper, deeper stuff that sometimes I don't share is that your true purpose in your life sits right next to the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
And if you're willing to explore that, I think you would find a drive that you didn't know was there to support people that have gone through the thing that hurt you the most, the most pain, maybe the most shame you've ever had. Helping other people get through that easier or avoid it could become the most important thing you do with your life.
A lot of people talk about happiness. I like to think about fulfillment.
You know, I don't want life to be easy. I want it to be challenging to shape me.
And my philosophy is two things. I wake up every day to try to be the 10.0 version of myself, the person that is the most connected and graceful and determined and confident.
In many ways, I think about becoming the person I needed most in my darkest days, the person I would have listened to. And if you wake up every day to strive to be that person and do the second part, which is to share yourself with the world, and that could be your kids, because that's probably your world or your community or your CrossFit gym or your church, or honestly, I'd encourage you to consider social media.
As you become your 10.0 version and you share yourself with the world, that is fulfillment. And no matter what happens in the world, you will feel incredible about that pursuit.
So as I mentioned earlier, if you want to get started quickly with your perfect week, just head over to Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls and Martell, and message me the word perfect on my Instagram account and I'll send it directly right over to you. And if you want to learn how to get more done than 99% of people, click here to watch the next video.
Thanks for listening to the Martell Method. If you liked this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck reclaim their freedom and build their empire