>> Get The Book (Buy Back Your Time): https://bit.ly/3pCTG78 >> Subscribe to My Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3W2tjp2Stop wasting your time on discipline and willpower. These 15 productivity principles are how I went from an ADHD mess to a hyperproductive $100M CEO... and how you can get sh*t done even when they don't feel like it.They're the same principles I mapped to each chapter in my book, Buy Back Your Time.Start crushing your goals TODAY without the struggle.
Chapter 1: Who is Dan Martell and what is the Buy Back Your Time methodology?
Stop wasting your time. Successful people don't rely on discipline or willpower to be more productive. These are the 15 principles that they follow to get shit done, even when they don't feel like it. They're the same principles I use to go from an ADHD mess to a hyperproductive $100 million CEO. So without further explaining it, these are the 15 principles to buy back your time.
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.
Chapter 2: What is the pain line and how does it affect entrepreneurs?
Starting with chapter one, how I buy back my life. My friend Stuart had a panic attack at the happiest place on earth at Disneyland. Why? He was working a hundred hour weeks. He wasn't taking care of his health. He asked his family if it was okay to miss dinner and not be there in the morning so that he could work on this massive project. And because of that pressure, his body said, screw you.
Essentially he hit his pain line and most entrepreneurs hit that about 12 employees or a million in revenue. because it's a point where more growth feels painful. So most people do one of the three S's when they hit their pain line. The first S is to sell. It's so painful that they'd rather sell the business, go get a normal job or do something else because the grass is greener on the other side.
What I've learned is sometimes the grass is greener because it's actually fake, but selling is not an option. Second is sabotage, right? They sabotage themselves by taking on new projects, new product lines, hiring bad people only to give themselves permission to fall back so that it's not their fault that they're not succeeding in their business. Well, the third one is to stall.
Chapter 3: What is the Buyback Loop and its three steps to reclaim your time?
Stall means drag their feet on making decisions or stay small because not growing means slowly dying. Now that you understand what the pain line is, what do you do once you hit it? It's called the buyback loop. And there's three simple steps. The first thing is you have to audit your time for things that suck your energy that would cost very little to pay somebody else to do.
second is to transfer those things in that bucket to somebody else that loves to do this. There's actually people that play at the things that you consider work. And once you transfer and give them the playbooks, which I'll talk more about in a sec, then they'll be able to take that off your plate to open up your calendar, which brings you to step three, which is to fill.
This is the thing that brings you the most joy, the most energy, and makes you the most money, which I'll double click on when we get to the drip matrix on how to invest your newfound time. Which brings us to chapter two, the drip matrix. I believe in life, there are two categories of things that you do.
There's things that feel like math class for me, which is boring and I hated it and it felt like every second just went super fricking slow. Or there's art class, Where when I was in art class, what I felt was five minutes was more like an hour. The clock goes off and all of a sudden I'm done. It's like time flew by. And life can be that way. Not all tasks are created the same.
Chapter 4: How does the Drip Matrix help prioritize tasks for productivity?
The way you look at your work will dictate how long it feels. And I'm always looking to invest it, not just to spend it. So that's why I created the Drip Matrix. which is a very simple X and Y axis of things that light you up, that give you energy to things that make you money, that produce the most income in your life.
And you got to move from the bottom left quadrant all the way to the top right. So in the bottom left is D for delegate. What are the things that when you look at your to-do list, you should just delete it? or defer doing it this week, this month, or give it to somebody else that can do it and just learn how to delegate. Then you move up to the R, which is replacement.
That quadrant is all about looking at the key people you need to hire on your team and build that team of people that can replace you from having to do the work. And that's why I teach the replacement ladder, which we'll get into in a second, but understanding the right sequence to do that will equal success. The second quadrant on the bottom is investment.
Once I've got time back, then I got to invest in developing the skills, the relationships, the mindset to become a better person for my team so I could grow. And then the top right is all about production. This is where you want to do the work that gives you energy, that lights you up, that truthfully you would do for free, that makes you the most money.
If you don't know what that is, you'll figure it out over time. But that's why the drip matrix is such an important map. for you to understand where are you spending your time? And if you're not moving your way through it, then you'll always feel stuck. But to start buying back your time, you need to understand how much it's worth. And that's why I created the buyback rate formula.
So for example, if your current income in your business is 200,000 a year, you divide that by 2000, then take that number by four, that equals $25 per hour. Anytime you spend money to buy back your time, you wanna get a four times ROI on that money. So if you can spend $25 an hour paying anybody to take anything off of your plate, that'll give you the best return on your time.
If you don't fight for the value of your time, nobody else will value your time. So you need to understand what it's worth. If I don't know that my time's worth $100 and I keep saying yes to doing things that are $10 tasks, then I'm never going to be able to grow my business. What most people don't realize, the cheapest way to buy back your time is to stop doing things that suck your time.
Which brings us to chapter three, the five time assassins. Most people waste their time by just delaying decisions. It's like getting an email for an opportunity and instead of just replying to it right away and they just mark it as unread or star it and eventually they'll reply on some Saturday morning when they're feeling good about themselves and say, oh, let's talk about it.
And that opportunity is gone. I see people sabotage their success all the time like this. And that's why I've distilled it into these five time assassins. The first one is the staller, just like I just described. That's somebody that can't make a decision. Any decision is better than no decision because no decision is still a decision to just stall and not feel like you're making progress.
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Chapter 5: What are the five time assassins that waste your productivity?
So they're not always having to work to generate money. That's why I created the time and energy audit. It's very simple, but massively impactful. First thing is we wanna write down every task that we're currently doing. I like to tell people to have an alarm go off every 15 minutes to log it. Cause most people don't realize how much time they've been spending on social media.
or taking these got a second meetings from their team that turns into got an hour. So we always wanna write it down to do a true audit of where we're spending our time. And then what you do is once you've got this detailed list, go through each one and give a dollar sign of value of what it would cost to pay somebody else to do it.
$1 is like an administrative task and $4 is like hiring somebody to do your job. And you write that next to each one. Then you wanna highlight in red anything that sucks your energy, that you hate doing, or green things that give you energy. Once you've done that, you now have a bucket of things that cost very little, that are red in nature, and that is the only next hire you should make.
You shouldn't bring anybody else on your team until you grab all those red, low-cost things and give it to somebody else so you can free up your time. Now that you know what to take off your plate, how do you sequence it? 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. Which brings us to chapter five, the replacement ladder. Most people mess this up. They feel overwhelmed.
They read a book and it tells them you need to hire somebody that can help with operations. You're the visionary and have somebody else come in and run your company for you. The problem with that is that you have no skillset for delegating yet. You've never done it before. You're gonna pay somebody six figures plus to essentially have a non-revenue generating role on your team.
And it's gonna stress you out. And in six months, you're probably gonna fire them or they're gonna quit because they're annoyed working with you because there wasn't enough business for them to stay busy in the first place. So most people don't realize that the sequence that you hire equals success or failure.
That's why I've outlined the first principle of this whole methodology called the buyback principle, which states you don't hire to grow your business, you hire to buy back your time. It's a capacity over calendar problem. If you do the first, then you'll just add a bunch of overhead that you need to manage.
But if you only hire people to buy back your time, then you get your time back to go be more valuable to your team, to generate more revenue and do things that light you up. So here's how the replacement ladder works. It's all about the hire you need to make, the feeling you're probably having right now, and the ownership of outcomes that they need to take off your plate.
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Chapter 6: What are the three trades that matter in managing time and money?
The fourth rung, this is where you start to feel freedom because it's a sales hire. And the moment you have somebody else, they can take all new opportunities, take all the sales calls, and most importantly, do the follow-up, because let's be honest, you're probably not doing them yourself, and hold them accountable to generating revenue, now you have freedom.
Because with four hires, admin, delivery, marketing, and sales, you can now go on vacation and have somebody else generate awareness of your business, have somebody else talk to them and bring them into your world and enroll them into your service, and then onboard them into your product or service in your business without you being there. Four hires, and you start to have freedom.
The fifth rung of the ladder is flow. And the reason why I call it that is because having a leader that partners with you on your business to help you with strategy and outcomes, and that's the key. If you hire them and tell them what to do, then you hired the wrong person. But if they can come in and help own outcomes
to drive the business forward to come up with the strategies and manage the execution and design the playbooks that is when you start to feel the flow of really building a partnership and a business that you don't grow to hate most people have a hard time delegating because they're worried that it's going to lose the magic the thing that you do your fingerprint on the business and that's why i use the 1080 10 rule so the 1080 10 rule is used by all the top people people like gary vee elon musk or even mr beast because they can't be involved in every aspect of the business
but they know how to ensure that their fingerprint and their genius is involved. Which is, I sit down with my team at the beginning and I do the ideation 10%. That upfront, let's talk about how this could work, all the resources we have, what we've done in the past that feels similar and make sure I give the team all I know about the ideation of the specific outcome I want.
If it's marketing, if it's creating something, it's a customer result, a new website, I only get involved in that first 10%. The next 80% is your team doing the execution. It's them going through all the resources you might have told them about, doing the interviews, essentially managing the whole project. And they take that over from you. And then the last 10%, that's the integration.
That's where they take the project back into your world and you look at it and you go, ooh, let's tweak this, let's tweak that, let's tweak this. And then you decide to present it back. Think Steve Jobs. He goes into the design studio with Johnny Ives and they come up with the idea for the new iPhone. The team goes and prototypes and builds the thing and sources the materials and puts it together.
And then Steve came back at the very end, the last 10%, which is presenting it on stage when they reveal the iPhone. That is how you take creative processes and integrate it with your team where you still feel involved, but not needed to execute. Now let's start with level one of the replacement ladder. What do you get your admin to do? Which brings us to chapter six, clone yourself.
My mind blew wide open the moment I got to spend a week with Richard Branson in Verbier, Switzerland. I watched a billionaire, every other billionaire wants to be like, live his life, operate 400 companies by just meeting with his assistant for 60 to 90 minutes every morning for breakfast.
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Chapter 7: How to conduct a time and energy audit to identify tasks to delegate?
and decided to just CC her on some emails to get her to do things instead of actually allowing her to process. Your inbox is actually your assistant's to-do list if you give them access. Any other way, and it doesn't work because they don't have the context to actually help support you. The second one is your calendar, 100%. I don't put anything in my calendar. My assistant owns it.
How can I ask her to be responsible for my time and the effectiveness, making sure that every day just feels like I'm producing at the highest level and staying in my production quadrant if I don't give them full access? Most people have a hard time figuring out all the things that you should give your executive assistant to do.
So if you want my personal playbook on everything detailed in regards to templates, structures, best practices, and canned responses, then just find me on Instagram at Dan Martell to Elza Martell and message me the word podcast EA, and I'll send you a direct link to my Google Docs so you can copy and paste that for your own needs.
So now that you have your first hire made, how do you transfer things onto their plate without going crazy? Which brings us to chapter number seven, building playbooks. I don't know if you've ever seen the McDonald way, but it's essentially their standard operating procedure for how they run McDonald's.
Every aspect from how they cook the fries to make all the different burgers essentially is documented and they've created a system that any 14 year old kid with no training or hardly any training can hit buttons and have that burger taste the exact same in New York City or Melbourne, Australia. It is pretty wild. What I want you to consider is how do you create your version of that?
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Chapter 8: What is the Replacement Ladder and how to hire in the right sequence?
James Clear has this great quote that summarizes this philosophy, which is people don't rise to the level of their goals. They fall to the level of their systems. So you might have big visions and goals for your business, but if you don't have the systems in place and your team can't support you in achieving those goals.
And that's why I created the four C's of playbooks that my team uses every day. The first one is camcorder. Essentially recording yourself doing the work. Anytime I'm creating slides or working on an edit or an outline, I record myself talking out loud about what I'm doing because someday, maybe, hopefully soon, I'll be able to hire somebody to take that part over.
So again, I could be an editor, not an author. The second is chorus. What you want is a detailed document of how to perform a task. So for example, I have a financial team. They have a detailed list of all the processes that are used to get the books balanced, to do accounts receivable, to pull the reports for the different team leads.
And essentially it's a course in the document that outlines everything so that it's easy to follow. Number three is cadence. Think about every area of your business has a cadence for doing things every hour, every day, every week, or every month. On a daily basis, it could be posting your stuff on social media.
On a weekly basis, it could be pulling the report to see if any of the stuff is working. On a monthly basis, it's coming up with the ideas for the next month. Number four is checklists. And this is one of my favorites because essentially it's a high level checklist of the things that should have been done if somebody goes to complete something.
Think about the difference between a pilot doing a checklist taken off in the plane versus learning how to fly the plane. How to fly the plane is like the course, and then the checklist is what a pilot uses to make sure that there's air in the tire before they take off. They're not gonna learn how to fill up the tire with air in the checklist.
That's like a final checklist, which is completely different from the playbook and the course. But now that you got your time back, how should you structure your day? 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. Which brings us to chapter eight, your perfect week. One of my friends, every time I call him, he always answers, which makes me wonder how busy is this dude?
I don't know about you, but I like to get a lot of things done, which means that I've allocated my time, which means when I'm doing it, I don't answer my phone because I can't take the disruption. There's this great quote that says, if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Meaning that if you've got a lot of stuff you want to do with your life, you need to design your week.
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Chapter 9: How to use the 1080 10 Rule to delegate while maintaining control?
If you can just start with that question when you delegate and you're very descriptive to the person that's doing the work for you, usually you give them all the nuance and the context for them to be incredibly successful on the criteria that you're looking for to have that thing done. The fourth is the one, three, one rule. And this one will change your life.
Essentially people at the front line have the most context to solve a problem. So if you're a leader and you're allowing people to come to you with their problems and you're always giving them the answer, you're actually doing a disservice because you don't have as much information as they do.
And what I like to do is say to the person, hey, I need you to bring me the one challenge that we're talking about. Second is three viable options. And the last one is one recommendation. And guess what? 99.9% of the time, it's what we go with.
Most entrepreneurs don't feel comfortable having their team members make decisions for them because they don't feel like they evaluated all the different things that you would. So having them state it and do the research and come back to you makes you feel comfortable with their recommendations. You teach people to just solve the problem and moving the business forward.
That's how you avoid a bottleneck. See, bottlenecks are called that because they're always at the top and you're the person that's causing them. Now that you understand how to lead people, how do you get the right ones in the door? Which brings us to chapter 10, the test first hiring method. I got this strategy talking to Seth Godin. We're looking over my new startup, Clarity.
He was giving me advice. We're talking about team members. And he says to me, when it comes to team members, I can't work with them until I work with them. And it occurred to me that most people hire folks that they've never worked with. They've never worked on a project or evaluated their chemistry.
And they just go from interview to the person being in their life full time, which is a wild concept. It's like not even dating a girl and going straight to marriage. So here's how to hire A players. The first step is you have to be clear.
That's going back to the time audit and figuring out who can buy you the most time out of your calendar for the least amount of money that then drives revenue or efficiency. The second step is to cast your net. And this is all about ensuring that you have your team support the job promotion. You pay to run ads against the job post, call for referrals.
But essentially, you want to make sure you get as many people as possible to apply for that role. The third is you have to filter fast. And for me, it's a one minute video answering two questions.
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Chapter 10: What tasks should you delegate to your administrative assistant?
So before I work with somebody, I have them do a test project that is the exact type of work They would do on my team. That's what everybody should do. You should simulate the actual work and have all the candidates do the exact same project so you can evaluate them against each other. Number six is sell the future. And my whole thing there is talk about their vision for their five years.
What do they wanna accomplish? Who do they wanna become? What do they wanna get paid? I sell the possibility of that coming true. And then I try to scare them away because I don't want them to take a job because they need a job. I want them to take the job because they want the job. Now that you know how to get them in, how do you get the most out of them?
Which brings us to chapter 11, transformational leadership. I had one person on my finance team come to me and ask me about expenses and costs of putting a budget together. And they're like, do you know what it costs? And I said, Now, do I know? Probably, maybe. But if I tell them, then guess what? Every time they have a question about budgets, they're gonna come to me.
I'm not teaching them to go fish. And too often people hire folks and then do their job for them. So there's two types of leaders. There's transactional and transformational. A transactional leader, tells somebody what to do, checks that it got done, and then tells them what to do next.
It's called the tell, check, next doom loop because if you keep doing that, you'll always be the person that has to do it, which means at about 12 employees, you'll wake up in the morning and you spend your whole day just keeping everybody busy and you don't get anything done on your project list versus transformational leadership is completely different. I start with the outcome.
The outcome is get a budget put together so that the leadership team can make decisions about the financial state of the business. When you have that done, it is done. Two is measure. Measure how they're making progress.
Tell me where you're at from a percent complete on creating the budget and send me a text message every hour, every day, depending on how long the project will take so that we know that you're on pace to get it done within a reasonable amount of time. Three is to coach. Coaches, if you feel like somebody is delaying themselves, write it down.
And next time you do a one-on-one meeting with them, coach them up. The more you do this, it might feel slow at first, but it is so much faster down the road because then people aren't staring at you to get their work done. They understand the vision you have and the outcomes that they own, and they're gonna drive towards them. So that's why I teach the coach framework.
So I break it into three core parts. The first one of the coach is CO, which stands for core A. When I'm working with somebody, I'm gonna pull up one specific issue that I feel if I can help them overcome will have a force multiplier effect in their life and their ability to execute and be effective on the team.
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Chapter 11: How to build effective playbooks for delegating work?
Before we get back to the episode, if you actually wanna 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, 2LZMartell 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 chapter 12, the F word that will save your business. Sometimes I can be an idiot. One time I was on a Zoom call and there's this guy, Jacob, on the team that ran all of our automation. And I was a little frustrated with him for not getting things done on time. And somebody else on the call brought up his name about them having to wait for him to get back to them.
And I'm talking crap about him. And then all of a sudden somebody else on the call says, hey, I just want you to know Jacob's on the call. So yeah, I had to apologize. And I use this specific principle to help have that conversation. It's called the clear principle. It's essentially a conversation format that I use to remove any frustration you might have with your team members and them with you.
Because if there's emotional venom that's piling up and then all of a sudden you don't trust somebody, you're micromanaging them and they're always talking back to you in meetings, it creates a very hostile environment that you could literally clear all that emotional angst by just having this conversation. So C stands for create a warm environment.
I want you to get one-on-one with the person, appreciate them for coming into the meeting and having the conversation with you and just making sure you set the environment to be warm and approachable and lead with empathy. The L stands for lead them to offering feedback. This is where I share with somebody that I wanna be a better leader for them. And I can't do that if I don't get feedback.
And the only way is if they're honest with me and asking for them to share feedback with me is the key to starting this conversation. E stands for emphasize. Emphasize means to restate to them when they give you that feedback, what you heard. And then A stands for ask if there's more. Most people will say there's nothing big or they'll bring something small up.
And when you say, is there anything else? Usually they know, and they're wondering if you were actually willing to listen. R stands for reject or accept. I'm not saying because somebody gave me feedback, I have to accept it every time. They might say, you're an a**hole. And I go, I don't know if I agree.
So essentially it's your opportunity to say, I just wanna give you some perspective on why I made that decision. That might be a rejection. Or you might say, I accept that feedback and based on that going forward, I'm gonna make a commitment to change these things in the future. To me, feedback becomes the ability to inoculate resentment.
Without it, everybody's thinking it, but they've never said it. And if you specifically as a leader don't create the space for people to give you honest feedback, how are you going to get better? You may not realize that there's something you're doing that's frustrating everybody, but because you've never asked, they don't want to tell you. And it means that your team's underperforming.
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Chapter 12: How to structure your perfect week for maximum productivity?
If you had a jar and you were trying to load a bunch of big rocks and pebbles and sand and water into the jar, but you started with the water and the sand, by the time you got to the pebbles and the rock, there wouldn't be enough room for everything.
But if you start with the big rocks and you place two or three big rocks in that jar and then the pebbles all around and you shake the jar a little bit and it kind of settles in, then you pour the sand in slowly and it kind of fills in all the rest of the space. And then you have a whole glass of water and you pour that in the jar and the whole thing fits easily.
That's the idea of planning your year. The second thing is to add maintenance. This is looking at things in your life that you know are best practices so that you stay on top of them so they don't become an issue. I mean, it's like if you're feeling dehydrated.
By the time you feel like you gotta drink something, you're about 20 minutes too late, so you're better off just scheduling the time that you stay hydrated so that you don't get behind. I think about my weekly meetings with my wife as like a family meeting, my quarterly retreats with her so that we disconnect to reconnect.
My board meetings with my kids, that's what I call them, but these very dedicated ritualistic experiences where I know that I have this time in my calendar and it's a priority. So I'm not trying to repair things because I allowed relationships to strain because I was so busy on work. The third is the work to plan, to go all in and say, this is my plan for the year. Here's what I've committed to.
These are my priorities and I'm gonna execute even if I don't feel like it. Number four is to review and adjust. My wife and I have been doing this for almost a decade. And at the end of the year, we always take time to review everything we did the previous year and ask yourself a simple question. Would we do it again? Or should we just take it out of the calendar?
I mean, it's either an F yeah, this lit us up, wanna do more of that, or it was meh. and meh is good and good isn't great. So we decided to cancel that and create space for us to evaluate new opportunities. So every year we adjust, we review, and I'm telling you, our years are getting pretty special, but it only happens if you plan and it requires the preloaded year as a strategy.
But what is this all really for? Which brings us to the conclusion, the buyback lifestyle. This is one of the most important chapters in the whole book because it shows what's possible. Entrepreneurs lose most of their productivity at home, not their office. Most people clean their home before the cleaning person comes over. Allow people to support you in your life.
And just because your mom always did this or your dad always did that doesn't mean that you have to do it. This world we live in where you can literally out-task so many things in your home, from meal prep to groceries to running errands so that you can get all that time back, why wouldn't you take advantage of it? So these are the four levels of the buyback life.
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