Zack Arnold

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Your Time Is Worthless (Here’s How to Invest It Properly) | with Matt Sandrini

About Episode

Author and productivity expert Matt Sandrini believes that time has no intrinsic value and is “essentially worthless.” Given that I have been saying for years that “Your time is your most important asset,” you’d think we wouldn’t have much to talk about in this conversation, right? On the contrary, by the end of this conversation Matt not only convinced me that our time is in fact worthless, but I’ll bet that we’ll convince you of the same!

As the founder of Time Zillionaire and the author of Invest Your Time, Matt has coached business owners, CEO’s, and entrepeneurs around the world to take control of their time and boost performance. Therefore Matt is no stranger to using time as effectively as possible to achieve the most important goals in life. His story is very similar to mine in that he was a Type-A overachiever who hit a giant wall and burned out (more than once). As he emerged from the dark hole he assumed he needed to strive for “work-life balance” only to discover that was the last thing he should be searching for.

In this conversation Matt and I discuss the true value of your time and how to use it most effectively (Note: Being ‘effective is much different than being ‘efficient’). We also discuss why creativity and structure are not enemies, and how to most effectively plan your week no different than you might budget your finances for the week or month. Most importantly, we dispel the myth that we should all be searching for some semblance of ‘balance’ and discuss what to cultivate and strengthen instead.

If you’re interested in learning how to better balance and manage your time, this is the conversation for you. Matt was also kind enough to provide a link to his 7-Day Productivity Challenge which you can participate in for free by visiting timezillionaire.com/challenge.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Matt Sandrini, who is a business coach that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses by focusing on what actually brings them results without constantly being overwhelmed, and you are also the Amazon best-selling author of the book, Invest Your Time. And anybody that knows me well enough knows that this is just going to be two nerds geeking out on productivity in time today, and I love having these conversations, and I’m so excited to have you on the microphone today. So, thank you for being here, Matt.

Matt Sandrini: Thank you for having me, Zack. And I’m excited to be the other night on the other end of this conversation.

Zack Arnold: Excellent. All right. Well, what I can tell you first of all is that you have a really unique view of time, and I’ve done a lot of reading on productivity and time management and time blocking and intention and focus, like this has essentially been my life’s work for the last five to 10 years. It all started with the personal journey of I have no idea how to structure my life as an adult, because I was so used to having the structure as a child with school and college and whatnot, and then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, I need to learn how to manage my time diagnosed with adult onset ADD, and I realized I couldn’t even manage my own laundry and my bills and my dishes at the same time. Went into a deep dive, and what I felt that was was the largest discovery was that time is the most precious asset that I have, and you basically say, well, time has no value and it’s worthless, and as I’m reading that I’m like, wait a second, this is the antithesis of everything that I’ve read, but then as you started to make your argument, I’m like, oh my god, you’re right. So talk to me a little bit about your own personal journey and where it started, and then we’re going to get to this idea that time is essentially worthless, because I love the way that you argue that point, but first I need to understand how you got there in the first place.

Matt Sandrini: Yes, and that’s a great start. And, well, I guess, like, my journey through really understanding, first of all, like, what, what is the value of time to me, but also what I wanted to do with that time was really when I started to, I started my first big job as a corporate job as a business consultant, and I went from my studies, to you know, and being quite structured, and having a structure around that was imposed on me, you know, even though when you’re in school as a kid, everything is structured for you, it’s like, you know, you go to a specific room and you’re there until the bell rings, and then it’s the same thing, and then you know it changes a little bit when you’re, when you’re older and you’re doing good to university, but still you’ve got this structure that is there for you, you don’t really question right, and so when I started with this big job, it was, it was a similar thing, I had like a lot of structure imposed on me, but at the same time I noticed that, you know, I tried to be really, really effective and really excel in in my position, and the reason for that was that I traveled quite a lot for work, and I was away from my girlfriend at the time, I was away from my friend, away from my flat, so I really wanted to make the most of my free time, and I thought, well, if I can be really effective and do an amazing job in my hours at the office, that means that I can, I can finish earlier, or maybe I can do more things, more efficient, and compress more things into my day, while at the same time not compromising on my results, and so I really found a lot of ways to like be really efficient and make sure that I over delivered, and over time I then I started finishing my work a lot in advance, so it started to be 4pm and there was 2pm and then by Thursday would finish most of my work that was due on Tuesday, and I remember this moment where I just, the head of the project I was working on was really, really happy with my work, and just set out to wet manager. My manager took me to the side and said, well, you’re the first one to leave the office, and that’s not okay, and I thought, but you know I’m also the one that you know has just been has just received like a lot of of kudos from like the head of the project and she was like yeah but that doesn’t matter that one leaves at 630 or seven you have to leave at 637 and at that point I remember like at this moment it was kind of like uh maybe a negative or a reverse light bulb moment where I realized that. What it was assuming that was okay. I want to be more efficient, so I can create more results for my team. Didn’t really work that way for that structure that was imposed on me, and actually, you know, that I had to be in the office for a certain amount of time. It didn’t really matter what it was doing, and it’s just at that point that I realized that, well, that actually, my output wasn’t necessarily proportionate to the amount of I was always putting in at the office. I thought, okay, if I stay in, my output can stay the same, doesn’t necessarily have to go up, and it’s really the first time that I thought, oh, okay, actually I can, I can change the game and either make it to my advantage, not. And so later on, when I, then I left a job, and I started my first business, went the other way, meaning that, like, I did the classic sort of entrepreneur thing, working 16 hours a day, or even longer, not really knowing what you’re doing, and you know, I think that at that point it was kind of rejecting that structure that had been imposed on me for so long, but seeing those two ends of that, that spectrum, and one was like, you know, you just have to put in the time, and the other one was that you have to pay a lot of work, and time doesn’t really matter, really made me question things, and I was like, if I keep putting in 1618 hours a day, and I’m not getting the results that I want, and before I was getting the results that I want, but you know, was measured on time, it really made me think in a different way, and so I was like, I’m not, I’m working such long days and not seeing results, and I had to change that, and rethink about things, and go back to being really effective, and think about what are those things that using my time on that actually giving me the results that I want, and can I focus more on that, can I do less of what is actually just a time sink and do more of what it’s giving results in my business, and that attitude literally changed my life, my business, and my results, and my lifestyle. And then over time, I kind of evolved that into a lot of the tools and the ways of thinking that then also explained in, in the book, like, invest your time. Yeah, so that’s how it all started.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I have a very similar journey as well, where I was basically born and raised modeling the workaholic attitude, which is the more hours I put in, the more output it’s going to create, and that was just perpetuated once I got into the Hollywood film industry, and this idea where you’re saying, well, you’re always the first one to leave the office, we’ve just been taught this thing that’s called the theater of work, it really doesn’t matter what we’re doing, as long as we look busy, then we’re earning our paycheck, right? And I realized, well, this is just leading me to repeatedly being burned out. You push, you push, you push, you put in the long hours, but because you have to be there anyway, what’s the point of becoming more effective with your time? Because if you can’t leave earlier, well, then I might as well just continue being inefficient, because it keeps me here and it makes me look busy. But then I asked myself, what if I flip the script? What if instead I’m always the first one to arrive and the last one to leave, which was basically part of my identity. I said, whenever I go to a new job, and I would even say this in interviews, I’m going to be the first one there in the morning and the last one there at night, and everybody says, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic. He’s a hard worker. I said, ‘Well, clearly this isn’t going to work for the next 40 years of my life, especially if I value number one, my health, and number two, I value my relationship with my family, and now my young kids. What if I flip the script? What if I decided that I’m going to be the last one in the office every day, and the first one that leaves? What difference would I have to make in the way that I do my work and the way that I create my relationships with the people that I collaborate with, and it took some time, but I realized that at least in my industry it is all about output. If you’re working for a corporation, yes, they’re going to be staring you down and wondering, well, why is it you’re not working right now, and why are you leaving early, but I found an industry specifically working as a film editor, where as long as I’m meeting my deadlines and the quality of the work is at or above the level of expectation, nobody cares when I show up and nobody cares when I leave, and that’s kind of how my journey started. But the biggest thing that I realized, and it took me a long time to understand this, and I know that this is something you speak to a lot as well, that I want to go deeper into. There’s a huge chasm of difference between the words efficient and effective, so let’s talk about the difference between these two, because I think that mistaking them is one of the fallacies that leads people to becoming burned out.

Matt Sandrini: That is such a great point, and yeah, I think like I didn’t understand the distinction between these two for a long time, and it hurt me, and I know that many people that work really hard and maybe didn’t see the results that they deserve, are you know, are not clear on that on that difference, and so being efficient, it’s focusing on the input, and so being really good at doing more, and yeah, again, we are being quick and being able to do more things, but again, we’re focusing on the input, what you’re doing, whereas being effective is getting the right results, and the results that actually take you forward and take you closer to your goal, and so it’s not really about the input and how busy you are and how many things you’re doing, but it’s mostly about how many things are you. Achieving, are you getting closer to your results, and so when you, when you look at it from an effective point of view, instead of an efficiency point of view, it’s really, really a different game, because it’s like shortcutting your actions and just going for the final result with your objective, instead of saying I have to do these 100 things, you just start with the end in mind, and say, okay, I want to get to this final objective. This done, this thing needs to be done, and I figure it out, going backwards, and be like, okay, what’s the best way, what’s the most effective way to get to that result? And you’ll find that you can drop most of the actions actually you would have taken anyway, most of the tasks, or the way to do is that an efficient person might still work on, but an effective person doesn’t have to work on

Zack Arnold: One of the examples that I use when I’m working in my coaching program, and I’m working with my students. We always inevitably end up at the point where they’re trying to move their career forwards in some form, and we look at email outreach, and they’ll say to me, well, listen, I’ve sent out 50 outreach emails, I’ve responded to 50 job applications, and I said, well, that’s very efficient of you, but is it effective to send 50 really crappy outreach emails as opposed to sending one amazing outreach email to the person that can get you the exact job that you want, and they’re like, oh, that never occurred to me before, right. So they start understanding that you can efficiently do the wrong things all day long and spend on the hamster wheel, and it’s kind of like taking the shotgun approach, or you can start to hunt with a sniper rifle and be very, very focused on what you need to get done. But one of the biggest pet peeves I have about just the productivity industry in general, and a lot of the so-called productivity experts and gurus, it’s all about efficiency. How can I get more done, or how can I get more done in less time? But I feel that not nearly as many people are working on effectiveness and making sure you’re doing the right things, and I feel a big part of productivity is understanding what are the right things, what’s the right order, so I’m being the most effective with my time, and most importantly, what the hell are my goals to begin with?

Matt Sandrini: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Because you know, and I’m sure that you see this all the time, where if somebody will send me a question via email or social media, it starts with, hey, what’s the best to-do list app, and I just kind of shake my head, I’m like, it’s so the wrong first question to be asking, but that’s where people start, because it seems easy, right?

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, absolutely, and you know, it also makes you think that sometimes being effective is a little bit scary, because you might have to do something that you don’t want to do, but it will get you the results that you want, like your examples, that the example that you just gave it all, it just might take the right email, but it might, it could be a bit scary to send that email, and so from an emotional point of view, it’s easier to send 100 emails to people that will not either reply and will not reject you, but again, like, do you want that result or not? And it’s so important, and that’s the thing that right now with technology, we live, we live in a world where we can all be so fast, like speed is a commodity, so if you’re the only person to have emails on your phone, on your smartphone, you have an advantage over everyone else, because you are faster. You can communicate with people in a faster way, and you can just do it from your phone. But when everyone has emails on their phones, it’s no longer an advantage, it’s just a commodity. So, speed is only an advantage if you are faster than someone, if you’re just fast, well, you need to find another advantage. And being effective and focusing on the right thing right now is so underrated, and being able to do that can give you a competitive edge over a lot of other people that would just look for the best to do that.

Zack Arnold: Agreed, and I think that going back to this email example again, like you alluded to, well, everybody’s got access to being able to send email from their phone now, but I think on an even deeper emotional level it’s number one, easier to write a template email and send it to 50 or 100 people, but then you can also give yourself the excuse, well, nobody’s responding, but I did my best, I just sent out 100 emails today, but then the thought of spending the whole day writing one email like that, that’s a lot tougher, and I think that then, like you said, it makes it harder to take on because it’s more difficult and it’s more uncomfortable, right?

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, yeah, that’s so true.

Zack Arnold: So, where I want to transition now is what I had alluded to in the beginning, which is really what I’m so fascinated about with your book and your philosophy of productivity is this idea that time is not our most valuable asset. Time is actually worthless and has no intrinsic value. So, I love how you take this idea of time and connect it to your future self versus your present versus your past, and it’s an investment, almost like your finances. So, go a little bit deeper into this philosophy, because I absolutely love this.

Matt Sandrini: Well, so the idea that time is worthless comes from the observation that if you spend an hour queuing at the post office, or if you spend an hour working on your passion, or you have dinner with a great friend, that one hour is the same measure of time, but the value is very different, um. I don’t enjoy very much Q and at the post office, whereas you know all the other examples are great, and so it really is about what you create with that time and not just time itself, but most people, or at least we are taught to just, just value time, you know, for just taking on face value, but even if you think about it, we all have 24 hours, it’s the only really fair resource. We just get 24 hours a day, and whether you are Bill Gates or just a man on the streets, there’s you have 24 hours. So, it’s how you use that that determines the amount of joy that you experience, the amount of growth you experience, the results that you can get in your business, in your career, in your relationships, and so really, it is about the choices that you make in the present, and what is the impact that those choices will have in your present, but also in your future. In fact, if you think about it, you know, now we’re having this chat, and it’s a present experience, but we created it in the past. I was introduced to you, I guess, a couple of months ago by email, quite a common friend, we had a brief chat via email, and then we set this conversation, and you know it all happened in the past. So this is not something that we arrange right now, we did it then, and this is just a byproduct of that, you know, is the outcome of us doing that and arranging that for the future, so really, you know, you, we don’t really have a lot of, a lot of power over our present choices, but we can change a lot when it comes to our future, when it comes to tomorrow, or a year from now, or 10 years from now, and so your choices really compound, and so every day when you choose what to work on, or the people you want to hang out with, or even the skills you want to study, and you want to learn, all that decides the options that you will have in the future, and also your baseline, and all the resources that you will be able to count on. And when you do that over time, and you do it in a way where the present is enjoyable, but at the same time it has an impact on the future, well, all those choices will compound, and and your present choices will become better and better, because they will grow, they will be able to stuck upon the ones that you had yesterday, and on the other hand, when you just, you know, spend time and you don’t really think about this, you don’t really think about the impact that we’ll have in the future, you just do something that has a very small impact in the present, where you don’t get this compound effect in the future. It’s like always starting from scratch every day, and you know, an example of that is just doing something that is a way to make maybe a bad situation more bearable by escaping it, and I’m not saying that again, it’s not about what kind of what kind of activity you use your time on, but it’s mostly about your, your attitude, because you know even if you, if you watch Netflix, or if you do something else, that it’s just pure enjoyment, but you do it because you want to. That is a great way to use your time. You can even use it, maybe with, with a friend, and it could be a great experience, but if you just do it because, well, again, you want to escape the present, that will have zero impact, both on, you know, your present and your short and long term future. So, really, time has value, you know, it depends on the choice that you make in the, in the present moment, and when you focus your, your, your attention over time on those things that create value to you, and you know it really depends on what you want to accomplish, or what you like in life, whether it’s joy in terms of joy or relationships or growth or growth or your business. It’s really when you focus on those things that you create value with your time, and you can actually have great hours, great days, great years, instead of just spending 24 hours and just taking for granted that has some intrinsic value, because it doesn’t, and it’s also why some people can actually charge a lot of money for their time. It’s because they have mastered this principle so well that they can create value for other people in a really unique way, and they can do that in a, in a very short amount of time, and so again, some people, you know, can be paid minimum wage per hour, and other people can be paid five figures for a one hour call, and it’s just because they have created, they have found a way to create more value by investing their time, and over time, that one hour is worth a different amount to other people, and it’s just that it just shows how again there’s no intrinsic value for that time, we’ll get 24 hours and we choose how to use them and we choose how to create value out of,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I love that whole philosophy, and the the key words here that really stuck out to me, and this is really a question that anybody can ask of themselves at any time, any day, is what I’m doing right now, spending my time or investing my time, and the way that you equate this to money and credit cards and investing, I think, is brilliant. So, it’s a matter of, well, am I going to spend $1,000 on buying junk that has no value as soon as it’s no longer new and it’s mine, or do I put that 1000. Dollars in the bank, where I may not even see it for 25 years, but the compound interest is so profound that when I get it back, it’s like, holy crap, what an investment that was. But short term, I’ve just lost $1,000 that I can’t touch for 25 years, right? And I feel like time is so similar, and the one area that I want to go to next that I think hits this point home even more, and I think you put this brilliantly, and this is kind of one of those things where it’s like mind melding, where I’m like, oh my god, I feel like I could have written this section of your book, and it’s almost like you were copying directly from my brain, and it’s all about this idea of intention, right? Intention is what makes all the difference, it’s not about the time itself, what is the intention of the time, and I guess it’s a matter of am I intending to spend my time or invest it, but let’s go even deeper into this idea of intention. One of the examples that you use is reading books, so let’s talk a little bit about this idea of how do I spend it or invest it, even if an observer stands outside and they see the exact same behavior.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, so one question that I got a few times is, I, how can I stop wasting time, and what I always say is, it’s impossible to waste time, because time moves at the same speed, you know, we move through time, 24 hours, you know, well, 24 hours a day, and time moves one hour per hour, and so you can’t really waste it. The only way to waste time is to do something that you don’t want to do, because if you, if you read, you know, if you read the book, is that wasting time? Not if you want to do it. If you watch Netflix again, is that wasting time? Not if that’s really what you want to do. It could be an amazing way to recharge and really take your mind off things. And so, really, the difference is your intention, is it? Did you want to do that, or are you just doing it because it’s what’s happening to you, and in that case, you’re being very unintentional, and so, in a way, you are wasting time just because you’re not doing what you really want to do, right? If, again, if we go back to the Netflix example, you are watching that, but what you really wanted to do was to go out and go for a run. Well, then you’re not being intentional, and you are wasting time just because you’re going against while your real desires work. And you know, when it comes to reading books, in your example that you’re mentioning again, it really depends on, are you, is this a book that you really want to read because you will enjoy it? It’s something that will help you in your journey, or are you just doing it because you feel like you have to, and if that’s the case, well, what are you going to get out of, you know, reading a book a week? Well, probably nothing, you know, it’s just if you don’t enjoy the moment, or if you’re not learning something that makes you grow, well, you might as well not read them, or if you are being intentional, you know, sometimes reading five books a year that are really intentional, that could be a great way to learn a specific skill or a specific theme that could unlock your business or unlock your growth or unlock your projects, and so again, it’s about am I being intentional or do I just think that time and things will take care of themselves and kind of create value just intrinsically without me having to guide them and have that intentionality,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. I mean, one of the examples that I use in my program, and so a very common reason that people come to me in the first place, is they say, I just cannot get off my phone, like it’s always there, it’s always distracting me, and if we’re talking specifically about intention, I’m not going to go too deep into how to eliminate those distractions or organize them. I’ve talked about that on multiple other podcasts, but for talking specifically about this idea of intention, let’s assume that I’m measuring my time on Instagram versus somebody else’s time on Instagram, and we see that both of us spent 60 minutes per day on Instagram, and you’d say, well, Jesus, I thought you were a productivity expert. You’re spending 60 minutes a day on Instagram, where somebody that comes to me and wants to get off their phone spends the same amount of time, but let’s talk about their intention. That person’s intention is, well, I don’t really have one, because every time I want to get into a deep creative time block and I want to start doing something that’s going to move me forwards, I’m afraid to do it, or I’m not sure it’s the right thing I should be doing, and Instagram for 15 or 20 minutes, right? So it’s not about intention, they’re just getting sucked into it. Whereas for me, Instagram has a very specific intention, it actually has two, one of which is that most of the people that I follow on Instagram are American Ninja Warrior athletes, so because I’m training for American Ninja Warrior. I use that as my inspiration, and I use it as research. I say, oh, wow, that’s a really cool training technique. I’m going to bookmark this, and I’m going to try it the next time I go to the Ninja Gym. The other intention that I have is, especially in the afternoons, after I’ve done 345, straight hours of writing or editing, my brain’s a little fried, so I need to do what I call cleansing my palate, so I spent 15 minutes, and I just stare blankly at Instagram, and just mindlessly scroll, and it’s even on my calendar, but I know that when I’m done with it, after about 15 minutes, I’ve recharged enough that I can get into my deep creative block, so if I’m measuring my time on Instagram quantitatively, well, I’m really spending a. More amount of time as other people, but the quality of that time is so much higher because of the intentionality behind it.

Matt Sandrini: I love that, and I love the example of Instagram – it’s such a great example for that. And again, most people, I can imagine how most people would react, not expect out of you, right? But that intentionality makes all the difference,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. And the intentionality is going to kind of lead us to where I want to go to next, which is this assumption that we’ll wait, if I’m either spending or investing my time, and I want to invest it more wisely. Well, that means I probably shouldn’t spend all of it working, I should spend some of it with friends, I should spend some of it with family. So, guess what? Then that means I must have to find work-life balance, and, like me, you also say the work-life balance doesn’t really exist, and it’s a myth. So, talk to me a little bit more about your view of what work-life balance is.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, well, I think that the idea of work-life balance, it comes from a place of scarcity in a way, because you’re already looking for a compromise, you’re looking for work and life as two separate things, and also, how do you define life as how can work be be separate, but you know you’re seeing them as like two separate entities, and you have to kind of find that balance in between, where you know neither of them is too hot or in a bad situation, and that starts from a place of compromising. It starts from a place where you think, well, I can work, but work is gonna, if I put a lot of my attention on work is going to tip that balance, so I’m gonna have to adjust on life, not understanding that really it should all be part of the same ecosystem, and it is in fact, if you enjoy your work and have have great results and really affected, like, like we’re saying earlier, you will feel great and really accomplished, and well, guess what, that will have a positive effect on your relationships, and then once you invest your time in your relationships and have great people around you that inspire you, that support you, that motivate you to help you grow. Guess what, you know your work is gonna go better, but also at the same time every other area of life, your fitness, you know, when I at this moment, like at the end of my corporate career, and then the beginning of my first business, I was like I was really thinking about work and life as separate, so I went all in into my work and my business, and the thing is, as everything else eroded in my life, also my business and my attention and my motivation and my clarity, they all eroded, and it’s really when I started to go back to my fitness, go back to, like, okay, I want to have more people around me, more inspiring people around me, I want to meet people that can help me, my personal life, my business, that’s when everything then started growing, and you know, my business started to do better as well, and my lifestyle, and it’s really because there’s no separation, it’s all part of the same sphere, I call it, and so when you grow one part of the sphere, everything else grows, but at the same time, if something shrinks, then everything else shrinks at the same time, and when you know, when we think of it as work-life balance, we always think in terms of, well, you know, my resources are limited, so if I do this, if I focus on my fitness, I won’t be able to make progress on my business, and that’s so not true. You are probably using your resources and your time not in a very effective way, and at the same time, you’re keeping everything separate, not understanding that every single area of your life influences the next one, and so

Zack Arnold: What I love about the sphere example, and to kind of equate this to the people in my industry, we are, we basically are part of the gig economy, right? We do, we go from project to project to project, and what I hear from people over and over and over, and I talk about better health and exercising or eating well, and everybody says, “Oh, I know I need to do all of that, I’m going to do all that when the next hiatus comes, but guess what, hiatus never comes. So people think, well, if I compartmentalize right now, I’m in work mode, but then as soon as this job is over, then I’m going to be in getting healthy mode, but then all of a sudden you, you get to that point, you’re like, well, Jesus, I’m so exhausted from burning myself out that I can’t even get the energy to get into I’m going to be healthy now mode, but then guess what? Somebody calls and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a job for you, and you’re like, ‘Oh crap, my hiatus just disappeared, I didn’t have time to get healthy, now I have to be back in work mode. And again, you’re trying to balance these things, but it’s impossible to balance one over the other if you’re not focusing on all of them simultaneously, and kind of the core foundation of this whole program is people say, well, like you just said, well, I can’t both move my career forwards and move my health forwards, like I have to prioritize my health despite my career, and I say no, it’s the opposite, you can move your career forwards because you prioritize your health and your well-being, so it’s not a matter of balancing I’m doing this at one time and this at one time, but when I take the average time over the course of a month or a year, it all balances out. That just doesn’t work, which is why I love this fear example.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, and it’s also, you know, that attitude of always waiting for that brave to then look after yourself doesn’t take into. Account two important principles. The first one is that you are the most important asset that you have, whether you want to work or create a great lifestyle or live a great life. You can only do it with you, and so if you don’t look after yourself, you don’t sharpen your skills, if you don’t look after your health, don’t look after your energy, it’s going to be a lot more difficult for you to achieve anything in any area of life, and then you know, because we always adapt to what we do in life, you know, like if we train every day or we go for a run every day, we’re going to become semi athlete runners, if not even at an athlete level, but if we spend every day on the couch, then guess what, we’re going to be world class couch potatoes, and that’s just because we adapt to what we do, and we adapt to our environment, and we are great at that. And so, if we just put things up for three months, and then six months, and a year, guess what, you’re not going to stay stable, that’s a myth. You’re just going to adapt to not doing the things that you actually want to do, and it’s just going to become even more difficult than get started, and then keep going, and what usually happens is that people that put up all these things that you know could be reading books or it could be having a better social life or looking after their health and fitness. What usually happens is that you know we then do it for a week and we go all in and it’s too difficult, we give up and it almost hurt, and so it’s then difficult to go back and keep going, and we don’t understand that, you know, wherever we are right now, it didn’t happen overnight, it happens, you know, it’s the choices that we make day after day that get us to the point we are right now, whether it’s a negative or a positive moment, that’s what happened, and so if you want real change, it can only happen over time, over the same, the same compound,

Zack Arnold: Right, and that’s the perfect segue, talking about making these choices over the long term, for hours, for days, and for weeks. I don’t want people to just walk away from this conversation to say, “Oh, these are all really good points, and they’re depressing, and I’m not doing any of them, and “What the hell do I do now? Right? I always like to provide a combination of theory as well as action, and I know you’re the same way, where you provide very simple, specific actions to move people forwards, which is the way that I like to do it as well, which is why your work resonates with me so much. And where I want to go next, which I think is one of your unique areas of specialty, is being able to create structure, even for people that are highly creative, because, as you know, creativity and structure seem to be two opposing things, but they actually work in tandem, seamlessly. And I want to pull a quote from your book, which is a very famous quote that I think is going to transition us, and it’s a quote from Sun Tzu, which is, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought. One of the things that I teach in my program is something called creating your weekly battle plan, and it’s a matter of sitting down for one to two hours a week, looking at your calendar, and, like you said, saying, How can I invest my time wisely instead of just spending it in the moment and being reactionary? And the response that you’re going to get from just about anybody is, Well, I’m too busy for this crap, I don’t have time to plan. I have too many things to do, which obviously just sends you down the vicious cycle of spending your time rather than investing it. So, let’s do a bit of a deep dive into how to take some practical action steps to start planning your hour, planning your day, or planning an entire week, so you have this battle plan ready to go.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, one important thing about investing your time, one great advantage is that usually when you work on something that is has a clear direction, a clear objective that you’re passionate about, you will see results in the future, but most of the time it’s also enjoyable to show up, so it’s really such a, you know, that intentionality we were talking about earlier is so great, because it’s not, it doesn’t need to be drudgery, and that is a really important point, because you know there could be a bit of a rejection otherwise of wanting to like show up and only see results in the future, right. The best thing about it is that you can actually enjoy it, investing your time both in the present and in the future, and like you said, structure is so important, and you know, sometimes we kind of shun structure a little bit because we don’t want things to be too organized for us, and the thing is that what happens when we do that is that someone else will will impose that structure on us, whether it’s a client that actually creates a random deadline, or maybe keeps emailing you, or it’s just that you’re working on reactive things instead of working on things that make a real difference, and so something that is really big mindset shift, which is similar to something that you, you hinted at, is to look at your week in advance, and you know you can first of all, you can look at your events and your commitments, really to understand, okay, do my days look all look the same. Do I have more time on a specific day? Do I have less time on a specific day? Have I got any trouble? And that really helps you understand on which days you can maybe do those things that require a sustained amount of time and focus. You will do that in a day that is not constantly interrupted by a lot of events. Sense, but something that I really like is to use time blocks, and so there may be things that you do on a regular basis, on a weekly basis, and some of those things can even be thinking long term. I work with a client who has a big company, and when we started working together, he said that, like, the company culture was very reactive, and everyone was putting out fires all the time, and not thinking about long-term things that I wanted to do, and you know, everything was so short-sighted, and at the same time, he said that he does the same, and so we wanted really to change the way he operated as a founder and CEO, so that he could, he could change the the culture of the lead team, and then go down to the entire company, and one of the things that we did is we were decided on a time block every week, and for for two hours we’ll just go to a specific room in his office and work on long term things, so it would have to be at least three years from now, and that was such a big mindset shift, because all he was thinking about was like today, yesterday, or next Monday, and going from like, well, three years from now, I want to do this really changed the way he was thinking about the business and changed all the goals, and even the way he worked with that with his team, so that’s one of the examples of how you can use time blocks, but it could even be something you could use it for admin, like emails, if you want to go through your entire inbox once a week, or more often, really depends on your work and how communicative you have to be, and if you have that in your calendar, it also allows you to not look at it outside of, you know, of those blocks, and so you can focus on other things, or well, another great example of a time block that works really well for founders and CEOs is is an admin block where usually people work with their accountants, or maybe go through payments, or do things that they kind of don’t want to do, but they have to do at least on a weekly or a monthly basis, and to have that for a couple of hours, say on a Friday afternoon, is a great way to say, okay, if some admin comes in on a Monday, I know I don’t have to touch it, I know I can focus on what’s important for me this day, because I have that time block on a Friday, and really, you can use time blocks for anything that is important, but at the same time is either fragmented throughout the week, or is not urgent enough for you to actually do it. You know, very often we are so reactive that the things that actually matter come last, and having a time block is so important, but it’s like having a meeting with yourself, a meeting with these really important things in your week, in your month, and in your life and business, and it’s, it’s, it’s in the calendar, and you will do it, and I’m a big fan of having a specific time, and in, and for some of them, even a specific place where you can go and do it, maybe you know, if you’re writing a book, you can have that time block, maybe every morning, or maybe twice, twice a week, and go to a specific place, at a, it could be a bar or a cafe or an office space, and just write from there, and just a great way to know when things are going to happen. You’re not going to have to stress about it, you’re not going to have to stress about when to find that time, and at the same time, you don’t have to think about it when it’s not that time block.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, no, one of the things that I want to pull out of this that I think is so profound that everybody needs to listen to and internalize, and if I were to pull literally one sentence out of your whole book and tell people you need to listen to the sentence, is that it is okay to add yourself to your own calendar.

Matt Sandrini: Yes,

Zack Arnold: That’s a game changer, right? So explain to me what that means.

Matt Sandrini: Well, most people use their calendar for other people, so if a colleague says, “Hey, we have a meeting on Tuesday at 10am, you put it in your calendar, and sometimes you won’t even question it, you won’t even look at your calendar first, you just say yes to the invitation and just show up, but if you have to do something for yourself, you usually don’t put yourself in your calendar, or if there is a particular project you have to work on, or something you want to achieve, you don’t really put yourself in your calendar, and that means that you always come last, because people, you know, if they want something from you, or they want your time, they want to jump on a call, they want to jump on a meeting, they have free access to your calendar, and most people will just say yes, but you don’t have any space in your day, and that means that you literally are the last priority on your list, and so whatever you are working on yourself, whether again it’s a new project, it’s a book, it’s managing your business, you will always do it in the leftovers of your week, and that’s very disempowering, but it’s actually okay to put yourself in your calendar, and that means on a specific time block, you don’t want to work on anything else, and I don’t want to be disturbed by anyone else. Great, just put on your calendar, and if you share that with your team, guess what, they’re going to see it, they’re going to respect it, and at the same time, you’re going to lead by example, so most. People will be, you know, more people in your team, and more people around you will be empowered to do the same thing, and guess what, especially if you can share that, then you can have blocks that happen at the same time, so that you can work as a team on a specific day, or at a specific time of a specific day, and then be more and more independent, you know, working on different things, but all at the same time, so that you didn’t distract each other, but at the same time you don’t keep anyone else waiting. That communication is really important, but at the same time, that calendar is there for you. It’s your calendar, it’s okay to put yourself in it.

Zack Arnold: And I run into this all the time with my wife, because we have a shared calendar where she can see my agenda for the week, I can see her agenda. She knows when I have coaching calls, she knows I have a doctor appointment or the chiropractor or whatever it is. But then she’ll say, ‘Hey, I wanted to schedule this thing at, you know, 2pm on a Wednesday. There’s nothing on your calendar. I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, you can’t see my other calendars. My entire calendar is full of blocks this week, but I’m not beholden to other people’s agendas. This is my agenda, so I might be writing something, I might be outlining, I might be editing, whatever it is, but to me that time is unavailable. It’s just that to an outside person looking in, they can’t see my personal calendar, they think, “Oh, you’re not doing that much this week, you’re available for all these outside opportunities. But I will set that up in advance. This goes back to this idea of intention, so I’m asking myself at the beginning of each week or at the end of a week to prepare for the next one. It just depends on when I find time to do like what I call creating my weekly battle plan or doing a weekly review. I say, what is my intention with my time for the next week, and how do I put these individual time blocks that, as they start to stack and add up, they’re moving me forwards, and I’m investing this time rather than spending it, and most of my calendar is filled up with blocks that are just for me and my agenda moving forwards, because I’m sure you’ve heard this quote many times in the past, and I’m paraphrasing, and off the top of my head, I can’t even remember who said it, but so many people have paraphrased it, but it’s basically that if you don’t have your own agenda, you become a part of somebody else’s agenda, right? And creating a calendar for the week, or even for the next day, and doing this planning, even though you say, well, I don’t have time to plan my week, or my day is so busy, I can’t plan tomorrow, I can barely survive. Well, then again, you just continue to spend your time instead of investing it, and the biggest fundamental change for me was realizing, oh, it’s okay for me to give myself time blocks and say no to other people.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, and you have to break that negative cycle if you, you know, if you’re reactive all the time, is that able to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to take time to plan my week in advance, right? Because you are reactive, you don’t have a time, but you have to start somewhere, and one thing that I see some people do is they start and they block out everything in their week, and then a week later they come back and say it doesn’t work, I can’t sustain this, and it’s like, yeah, just start, you know, 123, blocks at a time, and then you know, once you stick to them, then add a few more, because really, again, you know, if you, if you haven’t been in a gym for years, you wouldn’t go in and squat 400 pounds the first day, you would hurt yourself, stop, and never go back. But somehow, when it comes to softer skills and more intellectual things, we think that we can go all in straight away, right? This is a great example, like people, you know, if you’re not used to it and you just block out your entire week it’s not going to work, because you’re not, you’re not used to it, and the people around you are not used to working on that, so it really, you have to do it step by step and educate and lead the people around you, but it’s such a game changer.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I would agree with that completely, and I think that, you know, again, it’s really about setting that intention, knowing what it is that you want to do, and then also, like you’re talking about here, there’s a term that I use, and I don’t – I’m assuming that I got this from somewhere else, but I can’t for the life of me know where I got it, just through osmosis. But it’s the concept of cognitive fitness, so if somebody comes to me and says, “I really want to be a focus ninja, and I want to do six hours a day of deep focus, creative work of editing or writing, or whatever it is, I’ll say, “Well, can you do a time block of 25 minutes? No, I’m really distracted, and I’m always checking my phone. Well, that’s like you said, it’s like, well, I want to be a marathon runner. So, on the first day to check my baseline, I’m going to see if I can run 26.2 miles. That’s not going to work so well. You’re going to be really, really miserable. Just run around the block, see how you feel doing one. All right, well, maybe I’ll do around the block again. Can I do two? Can I do three? How do I feel running a mile? So I say, you need to understand and get a baseline of your cognitive fitness. Am I able to work for just 15 minutes undisturbed, or do I have this insatiable craving to be distracted or find distractions? And then you slowly build from there. And in my program, we do this step by step by step, where it starts with the 10 minute time block, the 15, the 25 Now let’s do a full one. Now let’s see how many can we do in a day, and then how many can we do over the course of a week, and how can I actually create this palette right where I have all of these various individual blocks that are creating this entire week, and one thing that I want to add to this, which I. Think is really, really important is this idea of theming your days. So, let’s talk about this, because this is a big one for me. That once I learned this, my entire level of productivity and effectiveness skyrocketed.

Matt Sandrini: Same for me. So, theming your days, really, the idea of giving a specific theme or a specific outcome to each one of your days. So, an example for me is that I create content on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I know exactly that those two days, that’s my main focus, but it also means that on Thursday, that’s not my main focus. On Thursday, actually, my main focus is is coaching calls, you know, having those themes where you know every single day has a specific focus, and this is on repeat, but also it also works if you have one day where the theme is you can move it and change it every week, but it’s so important because it gives you the bird’s eye view of your week, but also the time and the permission to say, okay, this is the one thing I want to focus on, and I’m doing that specific day, which you know, in a way, it also means that on every other day, you’ll be free to do something else, so you know exactly what to focus on. It’s, and also, if you work with other people, if you work in a team, it’s even easier to sync up, because they will know what to expect from you, and you’ll know what to expect from them, and when, and instead of having these days where we keep switching between things and we do, you know, 10 things at the same time, and in the end we don’t get anywhere, or we don’t have enough enough time to actually make progress, because we keep being distracted by the next appointment, or the next thing that we need, that we need to do, when we have a theme for for the day, we know that that is the main focus that we are going to have for that, for that particular day, and we just want to focus on that, and so everything happens, you know, all your tasks and the way you organize your time happens around that, and it’s so liberating and it’s so effective at the same time. Is that a similar way to how you use it?

Zack Arnold: Oh, yeah, it’s very similar, and what I break this down, and I also, I go in the opposite direction, so yes, I theme my days. So, for example, if I’m not on a show, and when I say on a show, that means that I’m not actively editing or working on a show for somebody else, meaning that I’m on a project. If I don’t have to worry about those constraints, and I can basically budget all 24 hours of my day however I want to, then in general, Tuesday through Thursday is a protected block of time, where after I’m done working with my individual clients and doing productivity and career coaching, basically from 1030 on, my calendar to the outside world looks completely empty, but to me is filled with content creation, so that’s where I’m outlining, writing, shooting, editing, posting, the only thing that I’m doing is creating content that moves my business forwards and helps people learn how to do the things that I want to teach them. Mondays is a combination of me doing my weekly review, so my goal is that by Monday at lunchtime I know what I’m doing every single hour until Friday evening at about 7pm I also catch up with emails, I catch up with social media, I do my what I call life management. I do an omnifocus, so project management. I’m a big fan of Trello. I teach Trello. I have multiple courses for it on LinkedIn Learning and on lynda.com but I feel like for just general life management to do single actions, I do that in Omni Focus. So I’ll just put a block for like 90 minutes on a Monday just to knock off all that crap, so I know that by Monday afternoon everything is cleared off the plate, so to speak, and Tuesday through Thursday I’m only creating content, and then Friday I know that my energy is going to start to wane, the willpower is going to drop a little bit, I’m going to get a little bit more easily distracted, so that’s when I check back in with the world, and I check the emails, and I make sure that everything’s good on social media, and that’s also where I’ll finish up any lagging tasks or whatever it is that I need to take care of. And then Friday afternoon is generally when I schedule recovery, so that’s because I’m doing a lot of physical training during the week as well. That could be massage therapy, physical therapy for my, you know, I have a torn labrum on my shoulder, so I do physical therapy. It’s where I would do a chiropractic appointment, because I know that if I do that at the end of the week, once I’m done with that, it’s kind of my shutdown ritual to say, all right, so now I’m disconnecting from work, and now I can spend the weekend being intentional about my time with my family, but beyond theming the days, I also theme my weeks, so what I will do is I’ll look at, like, the next quarter, and I’ll just go into the monthly view of my calendar and have a one calendar color that’s just for themes, so for example, like you and I are recording Wednesday at 11am which is like, well, wait, that is content creation, but it’s also me connecting with the outside world, but my theme for this entire week is creating and recording podcasts that I can use for the next four months, so when people say, well, how is it that you do podcast episodes and you do online coaching and you have courses and you’re editing TV shows, it’s because I just batch all them into small pieces, so to the outside world they see a podcast come out every week, but guess what, big secret reveal, I’m doing all of my podcasts for. Recordings over the course of two weeks for the whole rest of the year, because I have a theme for this week, a theme for next week, and I have a theme for every single week until September when I start my next job, but then I also break it down into themes for blocks during the day based on my ultradian rhythms, so for example, if somebody’s listening to this that does what I do for a living as an editor, and they’re thinking I don’t have as much control over my time, and I’m not a business owner. Well, then I can theme within my day and say, you know what, in the afternoons I know that I tend to get a little bit more distracted, I’m a little bit more lower energy because of the lunch that I ate, maybe I was super busy in the morning, so I’m going to theme my afternoon, where I’m doing catch-up work, I’m doing notes, I’m, you know, coordinating with my team for the next day, but the mornings for me are protected, where I’m being completely creative, and I’m in the zone, and I have built the habit of deep work, so that’s kind of how I seen both my within my days, my day, my week, and even for the entire next quarter,

Matt Sandrini: I do a similar thing. I look in my quarter in advance, and then every month I look at what main objective I want to accomplish with each week, which is a similar thing. And, but I love the way you do it, and I always like when, when people batch their content creation, especially if you do with other people, like in this case, and it’s, it’s crazy, how, like, until you see it, you wouldn’t think of it, and most people don’t, don’t think about it, just see it, that is released on a, on a regular basis, that just don’t realize that it’s all batch, but that’s a big secret to batch things, is, I mean, we all know that we can do that, but when I started bashing things a few years ago, it made such a big difference on my lifestyle and my workload and the results that I started to achieve, and just focusing on one thing and do that many times, then have it ready, and then you can release it on a regular basis, and I love the example of the podcast show.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it’s funny, one of the things that I talk about is the one of the core fundamentals of the program for being more productive and being more effective is that I essentially treat everything in my life like loads of laundry. You don’t go around washing one sock at a time, one shirt at a time, just to try and keep up with the laundry. You wait until the end of the week, or whenever you do your laundry, you have an entire load and you do it at once. Why? Because it would be dumb to do 40 loads of laundry, but guess what, that’s kind of how we live our lives. That’s how we answer our emails, and that’s how we deal with social media, that’s how we deal with all the notifications on our phones, all the demands of people on the outside world. I just batch everything, so my entire life is just a bunch of random loads of laundry that I process at the same time, based on the theme, which is what we’re already talking about.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, yeah, such a powerful analogy. I never heard of that before. That’s cool.

Zack Arnold: So, speaking of analogies, I just.. I want to point one out really, really quickly, essentially, because I want to ask your permission to steal it, because it’s so good, and it’s so applicable to my program. But talking about this idea of theming your days, to doing time blocks, allowing yourself to get into the zone, if you’re the kind of person that feels like, well, I’m a multitasker, or you know, I just kind of jump around all day long, and I do specific things here and there, but they’re all kind of, you know, different themes, not really batching. This is quite possibly the best analogy I’ve ever heard to describe multitasking and distraction, which is you’re essentially trying to deep dive, but with a snorkel.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, it really came through while I was writing the book, because what I was thinking is, whenever you do something that requires a lot of creative attention, or even just sustained focus, so you get into that zone of deep work and deep focus, and that’s when you like have that flow and can just work in a really deep way without having to think about things too much, because it just happened through. You’ve already, you know, maybe you’ve already done all the planning up front, and you’re just doing great work. And you can never get to the point if you have to keep going back to the surface and just breathe, and then come back and breathe. And it’s same thing if you want to go to kind of deep dive and really have that deep focus and work on things, you have to be able to leave the surface and stay away, and not have to keep going back, and going back means going back and checking your emails, or going back to the surface and being distracted by someone else that walks through that walks up to your desk, or maybe by social media, or by another task that comes to your mind, so really you can never get to the point of deep focus unless you let go of all those things and you don’t have to go back to the surface, you can just stay in your zone of deep focus.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I absolutely love that, and it’s funny because the fundamental framework of my program is the Go Far framework, which stands for goals, obstacles, focus, act, and review, and that’s the framework I take people through. The reason I love your analogy is because the originator of that framework, I didn’t create it myself, it was the subject of a documentary film that I directed about the first quadriplegic to become a scuba diver.

Matt Sandrini: Wow,

Zack Arnold: So as soon as I saw the. Idea of deep diving versus snorkeling, like, oh my god, this is the perfect analogy to use for this program based on its original edition. So, so I’m like, oh my god, it’s amazing. So I’m going to use it, but I will make sure to credit you, so don’t worry about that. So, speaking of two productivity experts that are all about investing their time and not spending it, we are now three minutes over budget, and I want to make sure to be very conscious of your time, so I want to thank you very much for being here today, but I also want to ensure that anybody that wants to do a deeper dive into your work and possibly work with you knows how to find you and also find the seven day productivity challenge that you’d like to offer to my audience.

Matt Sandrini: Yeah, absolutely, so you can find my book on Amazon and Audible is called Invest Your Time. You can find me on social media at Matt Sandrini, and also find me at times.com And you can get my free seven day productivity challenge at busytoproductive.com And through seven days, you just go through a few of the fundamentals, and take action, and do that, it will change the way you work, and I look forward to seeing that change in you. If you listen to this,

Zack Arnold: Well, I love it. I really appreciate you prioritizing your time today, and investing it with me, and not spending it doing other things. This has been really, really helpful for me. I’m glad that we got hooked up by our fellow productivity expert, as well. I will make sure that I direct everybody to your work and have links in the show notes, but I cannot thank you enough for being here today.

Matt Sandrini: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, and thanks for tuning in. And we’ll keep in touch.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Your Time Is Worthless (Here’s How to Invest It Properly) | with Matt Sandrini

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