I stay productive 99% of every day - Here's how

I'm going to share with you how I stay productive 99% of every day and make it feel easy. This is what allowed me to become a millionaire by 27, sell multiple companies, and actually learn to love my life, even though I grew up with crippling ADHD and still deal with it today.
So if you feel lazy sometimes, burnt out, overwhelmed, or stuck in the hamster wheel of work and life, I was there too. But the ideas I'm about to share with you are what got me out of it.
Hopefully can get you out too. So without further explaining it, this is how to actually get more done than 99% of people.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million 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. My bestselling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now.
Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. In my book, I talk about this simple framework that helps people understand where they can be more productive, called the drip matrix.
D-R-I-P, D stands for delegate. You wanna look at everything in your life that you're doing right now that other people can do at a very low cost.
Those are things you wanna ask somebody else to support you on. You can ask an intern, you can have a family member, or you can just decide to delete it or defer it.
Most of you guys are doing stuff you shouldn't do. So just get rid of it or put it off to next year.
So once we get out of that quadrant, we wanna move up. R stands for replace.
Replace is understanding that at the lowest level, there's administrative tasks. Then the level above that is things that are delivering the value that we sold to a customer.
Above that is marketing, then sales, then leadership. So I use this framework called the replacement ladder in the R quadrant so that I can look at my calendar and figure out, am I building the systems to get out of that type of work so I can create more money? Once I've got more money, then I redeploy that into the I, which is I for investment.
And what I wanna do is invest in myself to become more valuable. See, the world doesn't reward who you are.
It rewards you for the value you create in it. And the only way to make more money is to become more valuable to your customers, to the marketplace, to the world.
Once I've done that, then I get to spend most of my time in the top right quadrant, which is P for production. In the production quadrant, this is where you spend most of your time doing things that light you up, that you enjoy, that honestly you would do for free, that make you the most money.
It could be your art, it could be your writing, it could be shooting videos and nothing else. So for example, if you're a YouTuber, you're an influencer, you're a mechanic, you wanna just do the work that you love and everything else around the business gets done and supported by other people.
If you follow this process, you will be not only more productive than everybody else, you'll be richer than everybody else because you'll become more valuable and you will spend your time on things that actually make you the most money. Most people are wasting their time because they don't know what to do next.
I see procrastinators. Some of them think, I'm a perfectionist.
No, you're a procrastinator. You're just putting things off.
And most of the time, it's because they just don't have a clear next action item. My friend Brandon calls it MINS, the most important next strategy.
So he was telling this story about his friend that wanted to be in a relationship. He said, well, what do you got to do to be in a relationship? He's like, well, I need to find a woman.
Well, how do you find a woman? Well, I've got to probably get back on the dating apps. Okay, why don't you get signed up on the dating apps? Well, I need to go get a haircut.
So the next most important strategy is getting the haircut to enable everything else. And most people spend more time trying to figure out what's the big vision, what's the big plan, instead of just doing something that moves their dreams and goals forward.
Time's more important than money for a lot of people because time is constant for all people, yet you can create more money. And unfortunately, a lot of people have never experienced this because they've always traded their time for dollars and they've never traded their creativity, their value, their resourcefulness for payment.
And when you disconnect getting paid to your hour of doing work, then the whole world opens up because then you can use that resource, that money to buy more time and experiences to enjoy life. And I'm not saying you shouldn't go and experience some tough, challenging times because I think most people come from pain and develop from challenges more so than they grow from pleasure.
But money buys time, money buys freedom. Being rich enables you to live a quality of life that you probably didn't growing up.
It's why you have a desire to be more successful. The whole point of being more productive is to create more per unit of time than other people.
And the way we do that is with leverage. So you need the money to pour into the activity of time to create the leverage so you can be more productive.
And that's why I think time is more important than money. Just most people waste a lot of time to save money when they should spend more money to buy back time.
There's actually only four ways to create leverage in the world. I learned this from one of my mentors, this guy named Naval Ravikant.
It's the four Cs. So the first one is code.
Code stands for automation, software. If I write some code and then I use it to automate a task, I never have to do that thing again.
Huge amount of leverage, a little bit of time up front, but then it always runs the way I want it. It's a system.
The second C is content. Think about creating a standard operating procedure, a playbook for somebody else to follow.
I sit down and I spend a couple hours creating this checklist, and then I can have that train thousands of people without my presence and get a result for the rest of my life. Huge amount of leverage.
Creating content like this, training videos, education videos, any kind of content where I'm like capturing an idea that other people can consume without my time. Massive amounts of leverage.
The third C is capital. If I have dollars, I can buy time to get leverage to create more value for the world, and I can keep making that trade of dollars for time.
If I can borrow money, then I can fast-track results faster in my life to generate profits to pay back some of the money I borrowed, but then over time end up creating more value in that timeframe. So capital is a huge form of leverage.
And the fourth C is collaboration. It's people, it's understanding how can I work with other people? How can I lead them? What is my communication style? How do I get the most out of somebody? How do I develop them? And most people don't spend enough time trying to learn how to work with a team.
So the four C's, if you look at these four key skills from collaboration, content, code, and capital, you have the opportunity to create as much richness as you want in your life if you decide to master these four skills. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube.
I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube.
Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you.
I got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.
The thing that stops people from getting things done is typically a lack of motivation to just do the work. If anything, what I've gotten good at over the years is just being willing to do the boring work over and over and over and be consistent.
I mean, if you think about what does it take to have a body with muscles, it's doing the same thing every day for weeks, months, years to get results. And I think oftentimes I always say that one of the most valuable things I have is my ignorance, not knowing how long something's gonna take, but being willing to commit to a process and showing up every day and focusing, following one course until successful.
That's what focus stands for. That is what allows a lot of people to get things done.
The first swing of the ax against a tree hardly makes a dent. The second swing, same thing.
What it takes is a thousand swings in the same spot to actually finally knock a tree down. And what most people do is they change their mind every three months.
I got to do this. I got to do that.
I'm going to try this. I'm going to try that.
And what it looks like is a side of a tree that's got ax marks all over it, but it's like 30 feet dispersed. It's not concentrated in one specific spot that would have got them the results.
So most people can't get things done because they don't focus. They also allow their feelings to dictate if they're gonna get work done.
I've disconnected my personal feelings to doing the work a long time ago because if I wake up and I don't feel good, it doesn't mean it's not important. It doesn't mean that when I made the decision to do the work, I didn't decide out of all the things I could be doing, this is what needs to be done.
Most people underestimate the impact of productivity that is lost by not being in momentum. When you are consistent over time, you compound your growth.
So the more consistent you are, it's not linear. It actually is exponential because you start getting compounded results on top of compounding results.
If you allow your feelings to dictate, if you're going to get something done, then you're going to lose the momentum because you might take two or three days off from creating something really magical. And that is lost.
The other thing from productivity point of view is the feeling you put into your work is felt by the customer. And you'd be surprised how that impacts your life.
If you wanna be productive, care about the work. I went to Japan recently, and I watch people that cut fish to made ramen bowls to worked on little wooden trinkets, and the level of intention they put into crafting the bowl of ramen or this wooden trinket was mind-blowing.
It was as if they were doing it for the last time for somebody that they absolutely loved and it would never be done again. And they put that level of care into it.
And in today's world, I walk around, I see people that are literally slapping things around, around clicking things together getting stuff done just to get it off their to-do list with no intention

of understanding who's going to benefit on the other side and how important it is and that is what's not felt by a product or a piece of work that somebody creates without that energy and that has nothing to do with how efficient you are with your calendar it has to do with the intention you you put into the work. It's going to be felt by that customer, by that user, by that reader, by that viewer.
Here's why I think so many people have ADHD these days. I think it's used as a crutch.
I think anybody that is not able to be disciplined, plan, have a big why, focus, they just default to, I've got ADHD. And then they start taking the pills the amount of people around me i see it because they tell me they're like i'm gonna take some pill name your adhd pill and then just get cranking on your emails cranking on your sales stuff it's become an epidemic why because it's literally a pill i'd rather do that than just acknowledge that i need to create a better system for my life i I need to wake up earlier.
I need to drink more water. I need to have a timer on my desk.
I need to block time in my calendar. I need to pre-negotiate all the things that I need to get the work done so that when I sit down and do the work, I can actually get it done.
And I just think everybody that's not winning in life, they just default to I have ADHD instead of I am not disciplined, I am giving up too early, I require perfection in a scenario to be successful. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 11.
I got put on Ritalin, I was on medication my whole life into my 30s, and then I personally decided I didn't like who I was when I was on that medication, And I had to actually detox. I had to get off the medication.
I had to slowly reduce the amount because I was on like 40 milligrams slow release a day. My body was so dependent on this that it was one of the hardest six months period of my life.
And on the other end of that, I discovered my creativity. I discovered my uniqueness.
I discovered my voice. I discovered my Dan.
I discovered what lights me up. And I would much rather restructure my life to build the skill to not have to take a medication than to default to every time I have a problem, I got to find the person who made the pill for it.
Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week.
Find it at martellmethod.com. The top hacks for dealing with ADHD for me is having a routine for strategic planning, for understanding here's what I want to get done in my life.
Here's the why, because I think the why is more important than the how. So I focus on the why and the destination, and then I work backwards, and I start looking at what do I wanna get done this week that's aligned.
And on Sunday, I sit there and I plan my week. For the most part, I have the same rhythm.
I've created a thing called the perfect week, and I wanna make sure that I have my workouts, I have my family time, I have my team times, and I create a rhythm for my week. Then I take all the projects I'm working on and I plug them into my mornings because that's when I do my best creative work.
When I can sit down with a problem and really work through it or I can sit down with a prompt and really write against it or I can create from this place connected to my creator. So that is the way I think at a high level is I use block time and I put everything into my calendar.
So everything I need to get a project done is in the calendar description. And that's a separate piece of work than actually doing the work.
When I sit down, I always play music. So I put my headphones on and I have like EDM type music that's designed to help with focus and binaural beats and there's no vocals in it.
And then I set a timer. First, I like Pomodoro.
So I do 25 minutes on, five minutes resets. And I do that all morning long.
And I also have a journal next to me. And anytime I have an idea and I don't wanna get distracted, I just write it down.
It's kind of like a parking lot. And that way, when I'm doing the work, I'm not getting distracted so I can stay on task because my mind is still coming up with new ideas, cool things, hey, you could do this, but it's not focused on that specific project.
And then I just honor the outcome. Now, if I wanna take it to another level, like let's say I have to do some stuff I really don't wanna do, like create some financial models, that's when I'll schedule the meeting with somebody else and I'll have them on the call with me with the purpose of the meeting or the call to get the thing done.
So if the 60 minute block or the 90 minute block, they're expecting at the end of this, it's gonna get done. And it turns out most of the time I can get it done a lot faster.
If I have the pressure of somebody being on the receiving end of this getting done, I'm focused, I do the timer and I do the music, then I have the person also I can banter with and say like, hey, does this sound good? Does that sound good? Does this look good? Does this make sense? Boom, boom, boom, boom. Get it done.
Send it. Move.
Next task. So that's how I actually work.
But my mornings are designed to get ready for work, which is I exhaust the body to tame the mind. And I only eat high protein whole foods in the morning.
No sugars, no crazy stuff that's going to mess with my brain. And then I attack the day.
So I get my sweat on and then I get my nutrition in my body and I focus my mind to get something done with a bigger vision for my life. I get asked all the time, how does somebody find something they like doing? First off, I think you need to just try a lot of different things.
It would be so sad to find out that you could have been a world-class race car driver if you've never gotten into a vehicle. It sounds crazy, but I know a lot of people that have the aptitude and the character traits

to be world-class at a skill,

but they just never even tried it

to even know that they could have been awesome at that.

So first off, just like figuring out

which kind of ice cream you like,

you should taste a lot of different flavors

and try a lot of different things.

That's why I think if you're a young person,

go travel the world, go see how the rest of the world lives,

go spend some time by yourself in a hostel, learning to navigate the crazies, the people trying to scam you, the new friends, the different languages, the different cultures, because that's going to just expose you to a lot of different things in a short period of time. What should you do with your life? I like looking at the icky guy.
It's I-K-I-G-A-I. So it goes through these four questions.
First one is, what are you good at? Above average than normal people. Look at that bucket of things.
Then it's, what do you love? Of the things you're good at, what are things that you actually enjoy doing that you could spend hours getting lost on doing more of? The third is, what does the world need? What are the problems out there in the world that you can solve with your skill that you enjoy doing? And then the fourth area is what can you get paid for? Because those things may not result in people wanting to pay you a lot of money to do. If you look at those four questions, at the center of that is your purpose, is your beingness, is your uniqueness to bring unique value to this world and be hyperproductive.
Because Steve Jobs said it a long time ago. He said, the reason why we need to be passionate about our work isn't because it's required to do great work.
It's because if you wanna do something big, you will hit a plateau, you will hit a wall. And because you're passionate about solving that problem, unlike everybody else that isn't, they would have gave up, you keep going.
And passion is required to keep going when most people would have given up because it looked logical. And to many people, the fact that you keep going because all those four things are true is the reason why you're gonna be successful because you're willing to do it for long periods of time.
So this is the number one hack that I've seen every high performer do, and that's building a foundation of habits. And the reason why, if you think about it, if you don't have these habits that are daily, weekly, monthly routines, then as you add new things on top of your life that are supposed to make your life better, if you don't lock in the habits of success, then that new thing will be installed on top of quicksand.
There's no foundation. And I see this all the time.
People, they're like, I want to go do this, but they don't even have basic habits in their life. They don't have a consistent time.
They wake up. They don't have a consistent time.
They go to bed. Most people's productivity problems would just be solved by going to bed on time.
Most people don't have a routine for taking care of their body, their energy, their mindset. And because of those habits not being in their life, then every time they go try to do something new and cool, it just falls apart.
Oftentimes, people ask me, what do you do to be successful? And it's not what I do. It's actually what I don't do.
I don't have an addiction to drinking or vaping or gambling or watching video games or the news or sugar. I've taken things out of my life so it created space for me to move forward.
Habits are my way to protect me against me by being more productive, by having those things in place so that I can keep stacking new productivity habits on top of so I can build a bigger life. One of the biggest ways to grow is to learn to let go.
And that skill, that mindset, that activity is probably the best way to become one of the most productive people in your world by learning how to create a checklist, have somebody else follow it, coach them up, and then you get working on yourself and being more productive in your hour. 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. I think most people have a hard time letting go because there's all these fears, right? There's the fear that the person is going to cost them money.
There's the fear that the person person is gonna embarrass them. And there's the real fear that somebody could do something that could sacrifice their whole business, their whole livelihood, which are all based on real potential situations.
Somebody could say the wrong thing to the customer. Somebody could steal from you.
Somebody could under-deliver and over-promise. But what I've learned is those are all things that you can control.
Because you can control who you hire, you can control how you lead them, you can control the systems you put in place, the reporting you put in place, the checks you put in place, and your desire to control is actually keeping you small. The more you learn to let go by developing those skills to be more productive, to reinvest money, to buy back your time, to become better.
That's where the real magic happens. It's on the other side of learning to let go without going crazy that your future exists.
The longer you hold on, that's the level you're gonna meet, which I call your complexity ceiling, where the level of complexity in your life is all you can tolerate. You'll keep bumping your head against that ceiling of complexity.
So you got to learn to simplify, remove things out of your life, create systems that operate that are owned by other people, and then just keep trying to become better. Most people mess up delegating anything because they just tell the person, hey, go do this thing.
They didn't show them how it worked. They didn't train them.
They didn't have them do it while they watched. They just essentially assumed, hey, I said I wanted you to go do this thing.
You heard my words. Why didn't you do the thing? Transactional leadership is you tell them what to do, you check that it got done, and then you tell them what to do next.
It's the tell, check, next loop. Transformational leadership is completely different.
I spend more time upfront dictating the outcome, the definition of done, the visualization, the feelings of how it's going to feel when it's completed, showing them a picture, giving them the training manual, giving them some coaching on the front end of the outcome so that they've got a clear direction to aim for. If I'm asking somebody to build a house and I don't give them a picture of what I want the house to look like, I can't be upset if I come back in six months and the house looks completely different than what I had in my mind.
Yet on a simple level, this is what most people do every day when they ask somebody to do something. So I start with the outcome, then I focus on the measurement.
The measurement is what's the one number that's going to tell you and I that you're making progress, that you're being productive. And it takes some work to try to figure out what that one number is.
But if you're creative enough, you'll find it. So for example, when my brother is selling homes and he had other people doing the weekend open houses, we set up a counter on the door to measure how many people walk through the front door.
We also set up pneumatic sensors in the streets to measure how many cars came in the neighborhood because we were running ads in that neighborhood. He had these baselines for how many cars drove into the neighborhood based on the ads.
Were they working or not working? How many of those people ended up pulling into the driveway and walking through the front door? And that way he had a report every Sunday that he reviewed on Monday of how well the open houses did for his business. Now that takes creativity, but that's measurement.
And then the third is coach. And coach is very unique versus telling people what to do.
See, most people criticize the action that was done. Hey, you didn't do this right.
What I want you to ask yourself, what was the principle, the philosophy around the thing that they violated? Because it's not that they didn't close the door before they left the office, it's that they didn't take care of their environment. So let's talk about that.
What does it mean to be accountable for your environment? It means that when you're the last person to leave, everything gets put back so that when the new person comes in the next day, they see a fresh set up office environment. And if everybody understands that principle, then it's not just about the door, it's not about the dishes.
It's not about the desk. It's all of that.
And I think people need to learn how to coach up that concept so that you're not always trying to fix individual activities. You're literally teaching the principle that takes care of hundreds of activities within that concept.
And that is the massive difference between transactional leadership and transformational leadership. If you don't have the money, then you just got to look at how efficient you're being with your own time.
I know some people that want to be more productive and they don't know how to type 80, 90, 100 words a minute. They've never heard of automation tools for email notifications, automation, Zapier, or many of these other software tools that allow you to connect and create systems and flows that it's almost like writing software code for your life.
They don't consider that instead of spending all this time driving around and picking things up and running errands, they could use the apps, right? To have things brought to them, to purchase things online, to audit their calendar for where they're being inefficient with their time. The same thing could be set for just planning and like sitting down and saying, okay, instead of spending money to hire somebody, how about you plan your week so that every time you sit down to do work, you know it's having impact on your future goals.
You stop saying yes to things that you don't have a clear understanding of how it supports your dreams. You don't allow for bleed time.
If a meeting is 30 minutes, you don't go 47 minutes. You stop at 30 and you drive towards an outcome at the end of 30.
You demand from other people that you're interacting with that they show up prepared, that you tell them before we meet, this is the specific thing we're going to get done today. And you drive towards that thing getting done.
A lot of it is just basic productivity. You might be doing 14 things when you really should be doing two, and that's a decision on how much capacity you have, how much energy you have.
Is the work getting the attention it needs? One of my favorite productivity tools ever, I heard by a guy named Brian Tracy, and he said, take out a blank piece of paper and write down all of your goals on that piece of paper, personal, professional, health, et cetera. Then he says, if you've got a list of 14 things, take out a new piece of paper and take the one item, the one goal from the previous piece of paper that would be the leading domino for everything else being successful and right at the top of that new piece of paper.
And once you have that, then I want you to make a list of all the activities, all the projects, all the actions that you could do to get that one goal completed. And he said, do nothing else but that.
And I just think that's a beautiful way to help people that don't have the money to hire other people to be more productive by focusing on the leading domino that allows them to make all their other dreams and goals a possibility. Here's what I hope you take away from this video is that you stop acting overwhelmed.
You stop acting out of emotion. You stop doing it to yourself.
Because I know there's a lot of really successful, high-performing people that they're like, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it. And what happens is you overwhelm yourself and then you can't work for three or four days and you lose that momentum.
You create so much pressure on your need to perform at a high level that 80% performance over a six month period, you just don't think that's enough. And when you can actually design a life that is a rhythm that you never have to retire from, that you're consistent at, that you every day follow that routine and it compounds over time, that's what I hope you get from this.
Because I'm not impressed with the guy that goes to the gym for three days and lifts massive amounts of weights. I'm impressed with the person who goes to the gym for three years, every day, consistently, and focuses on getting results.
It's not what you do a little bit of the time that's gonna get you some wins. It's what you do consistently over time that's gonna allow you to create a huge life.
That's how I get more done than 99% of people. If you wanna learn learn my 21 principles of success click the link and i'll see you on the other side thanks for listening

to martell method if you like 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