Stop Wasting Time

It is critical during a slow period that you keep a very tight, disciplined schedule to keep yourself and your company focused and productive. It’s easy to become immobilized by bad news and bad decisions and then find yourself doing little more than being worried, scared, and unproductive. When things tighten up you must be more disciplined, structured, and constructive with the time you have—not less. Any production, output, effort or action done in sufficient quantities on a regular basis is better than no production—and it will get you results.

The word production comes from the word produce, which means to cause to have existence or to happen or bring about. It also means to compose, create or bring out by intellectual or physical effort. If you want to cause something to have existence, you must multiply time by actions to produce the economy you desire. Don’t just think of an economy in terms of money but of all the elements that compose it—goods, services, goodwill, clients, resources, equipment, activity, contact, and any efforts at production. Consider this simple formula:

Time X Actions = Measure of Advance

The degree to which you advance is only limited by the amount of time and action you invest. While much—if not most—of the world vehemently refuses to spend time on activities that won’t immediately pay off, I would personally rather be productive and not be paid than not be productive and not be paid. I would rather do something for free than nothing at all. While many might disagree with that perspective, I can assure you that sooner or later, the productive person will be paid in some way, and the unproductive people won’t.

The person who willingly swings the bat has a better chance at hitting a home run than the person who refuses to swing. 

Any efforts—even poorly executed ones—will aid your progress toward advancing and conquering, especially if you make them regularly and follow them up with subsequent action. It’s especially important during a period of contraction to develop a disciplined commitment to using your time and energy. Most people don’t have enough of the “advance” component in their daily schedules. If you want to move yourself, your dreams or your ideas forward you have to do a lot and you have to do a lot consistently. If you look back over your life, you’ll see that you have wildly underestimated both the actions and reasoning necessary to accomplish any endeavor to the point where it could be labeled successful.

For every project in which I have ever been involved, I underestimated the time, energy, money and effort necessary to bring my project to the point of success. Any client I targeted or new sector of business into which I ventured has always taken 10 times more mail, calls, emails, and contacts than I had originally predicted. Even getting my wife to date me and eventually marry me took 10 times more effort and energy than I had calculated, but it was worth every bit! 

Regardless of how superior your product, service, or proposition is, I assure you that there will be something you don’t anticipate or correctly plan. Economic changes, legal matters, competition, resistance to converting, too new of a product, banks freezing up, market uncertainty, technology changes, people problems… more people problems, elections, war—these are just a few of the potential “unexpected events.” I don’t say this to scare you but instead to prepare you for where the biggest opportunities exist.

10X actions and thinking are vital; they are the only things that will get you through these events. Money alone cannot do it; it can help, but it can’t do the job for you. If you march into any battle without the proper troops, supplies, ammunition, training and staying power, you will be defeated. It’s as simple as that. It’s not enough to invade a territory you have to be able to keep it.

To show you the discipline needed to apply the proper time and actions to live by a 10X schedule I put together the 10X Beastmode 24-Hour Clock.

05:00 – 05:45 – Kids
05:45 – 06:15 – Workout
06:15 – 06:30 – Breakfast
06:30 – 06:45 – Get Dressed
06:45 – 07:00 – Drive to Work
07:00 – 08:00 – Work
08:00 – 08:15 – Executive Meeting
08:15 – 09:00 – Work
09:00 – 09:30 – Sales Meeting
09:30 – 11:30 – Work
11:30 – 12:00 – Lunch
12:00 – 12:45 – Production
12:45 – 16:00 – Work
16:00 – 16:15 – Drive Home
16:15 – 18:00 – Work
18:00 – 18:45 – Kids
18:45 – 21:00 – Work
21:00 – 22:00 – Honey Time
22:00 – 05:00 – Sleep

Make your own 24-Hour clock and start dominating your time.

Live your life by the 10X Rule and tackle your projects like your life depends on it—because it does. Manage every action as though you have a camera on you every step of the way. Pretend you’re being recorded as a model by which your children and grandchildren will learn how to succeed in life. Attack everything with the ferociousness of a champion athlete who is getting his last opportunity to claim his pages in the history books. 

Always remember to follow through completely: That is the great common denominator of all winners.

See every action through to completion. Make no excuses. Adopt a “take-no-prisoners” attitude. Approach every situation with a Whatever It Takes mindset. Sound too aggressive? Sorry, but that is the outlook required to win nowadays.

I know you’ve probably heard this before, but success does not merely “happen.” It is the result of relentless, proper actions taken over time. Only those who operate with the appropriate view and corresponding actions will have success. Luck clearly has something to do with it, but anyone who is “getting lucky” will tell you that their “luck” is directly proportional to what they’ve done. The more actions you take, the better your chances are of getting “lucky.” 

Be great, live by The 10X Rule, 

Grant Cardone