simple ways to win tomorrow

Summary

today is my everything. T.I.M.E. if I don’t win today, tomorrow doesn’t matter and next year is a fantasy.

the boring system that actually works:

1. plan it. schedule the day the night before. block the focus work. block the family time. block the workout. if it’s not on the calendar it doesn’t exist.

2. prep it. lay out the clothes. fill the water bottle. set the workout. the morning is where most people leak an hour to indecision. eliminate the decisions ahead of time and the morning runs itself.

3. respect the small actions. people roll their eyes at laying out clothes the night before. the eye rollers are the same people who hit snooze three times and skip the workout. the small actions are the system.

4. treat time as an investment. every minute spent on the right inputs compounds. every minute spent on the wrong inputs compounds against you. there is no neutral hour. you are either banking it or burning it.

win the day. then do it again. the future is just the accumulation of those days.

Transcript

introduction to the concept of “today is my everything” and its impact on productivity

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, let’s go over some painfully simple ways to win the day. This is the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I had a mentor a long time ago, and he would say. He would always tell me the time acronym, and I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard this before, but T.I.M.E.

Standing for today is my everything. Today is my everything, T.I.M.E. And I always loved that, also felt like it was a little bit like, OK, we’re trying to live in the moment, I get it. Like, I thought that was the approach the first couple of times I heard it. But once I have really realized that concept that you only get today, right?

the importance of planning and how it shapes effective daily routines

If you think about it, you only get today. I’m not saying you’ll be dead tomorrow, but you can’t go in the past. We can’t live yesterdays and tomorrow will be today. But right now it’s not. It’s only tomorrow. So you only get your present moment. Every second that’s passing right now is all you get.

Today is my everything. You have today to make tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now, mean something and be something that you want it to be. But you only get a series of today’s to do that. And while that seems really obvious, I don’t think our brains fully work that way. We don’t work as in only today.

What can we do today? Because we’re always thinking in the future, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, you have a very future based mentality. What’s next? I’ll be happy when all these kind of things. But you only get today to either have that future that you want or to make the impact that you want.

detailed steps on preparing for a productive day

And once I realized that in, you start to, you start to optimize the day, right? A really good book on this is, uh, Aubrey Marcus wrote own the day, own your life several years ago, pretty good book. And it’s kind of around this concept of if you can just own the day, you actually own your life because if you can have an optimal day as close to optimal day every single day, then your life is going to shape up to be better and better and be what you actually want.

So I want to talk real quick about the couple of things I do to make sure my today is the best possible. And the first thing I do is plan and you, you know, I’ll sound like a broken record on this podcast, talking about planning, but always looking forward to the next day and planning when everything’s going to happen.

So when am I going to work out? When is work going to happen? What’s on the kid’s schedules? What do we need to fit in here? All those things. And normally I do this a little bit further out than a day, at least a week, um, maybe more and, uh, just trying to see when things are happening. So planning is going to be huge.

the role of small tasks in achieving larger goals

And so that’s just putting things on the calendar and then sticking to that calendar, obviously when it comes to today, work out when you say you were going to work out, do the work you said you’re going to do, but then start to be realistic when you start to work through these optimal days or these days that you’ve planned, did you stack too many things in there?

Because if you’re not sticking to the plan, you might be overwhelming yourself. You might find that, Hey, here’s the optimal workload. I can actually only fit in this many hours in, in my planning. So like, I got to be more realistic and just a little side note. That’s what I’ve seen over and over again with entrepreneurs who fail to stick to plans is they are going, they’re putting in too much, they’re being too aggressive.

They’re being too ambitious. They’re doing something. They’re not able to achieve it. And when they can’t achieve it, they don’t really want to look at the plan anymore because the plans are holding them accountable to something they’re not doing or achieving. They don’t want to look at that anymore.

how viewing each day as an investment can change our approach to time management

They want to go chase shiny objects and do all these things that waste their time. Don’t worry. I’m not going to say that you, but if it feels like I’m inside your head right now, it’s because we’re both entrepreneurs and I get it. Now, the second thing I do is preparation. This is probably my biggest one.

This, this preparation for the next day, because I’m talking about planning and preparation. Planning is like putting things on the calendar. Preparation is actually doing activities, not just imagining it on a calendar. Preparation is actually preparing for that next day. So quick example, I know if I have planned to work out tomorrow morning, the preparation I need is I need to get, uh, lay out the clothes for that day.

Like here, here’s everything I’m going to wear for that workout. I need to have the white, the, the workout either written on the whiteboard in my gym or prepared on my phone in the app, whatever, just, I need to know exactly where it’s going to be. So I’m not having to think about it or wasting 15, 20, 30 minutes.

balancing productivity with meaningful personal time

Oh, what am I going to do? Or, oh, I got to go get it and like write it down. So preparation is actually doing the activities. So laying my clothes out the night before, writing the workout on the whiteboard the night before, laying out a water bottle then the night before getting that ready to go.

All these small little things, they sound like tiny little things, right? But they all amount to me getting out of bed and being able to go because I know if I don’t do those things and I’m on the fence of whether or not I want to get out of bed, that makes it a lot harder, right? It’s like, ah, well, I’m not sure what the workout was and I don’t know, like I have to, I don’t want to wake my wife up by like slamming all the drawers around looking for clothes.

You know, maybe I shouldn’t do that. All these excuses can pop up. They’re tiny things, right? But these excuses can keep you from doing things. So putting in the preparation to get the day rolling. And then the third thing is to don’t discount all these small things. Don’t discount the small stuff because you might be like, well, this, this is not groundbreaking.

He’s talking about planning the next day and doing a little prep for the next day. Like that’s not, that’s not groundbreaking information. Of course it’s not, but are you doing it? Don’t discount all these small things. We’ve all seen athletes, actors, entrepreneurs, they fall apart when something in their personal lives unravels, right?

It’s like something happens and then they just, they just shatter. So we know that our performance is not based solely on, you know, doing the work. It’s not like we get to sit down and do the work. We have to have all the other pieces in our life to really perform well. We have to have our personal life operating.

We have that health and fitness operating. We have to have all these things in alignment to be able to really, really get going and to really put ourselves, you know, in, in the best position to have that great day. And it’s when we start to discount all these small things like, oh, I don’t need to have my water bottle out.

That’s such a small thing. I don’t need to have my clothes out. You know, I’m beyond that. I’ve transcended that. And you have it and you never will because you always have to prep and you always have to plan. It’s the second you start discounting the small stuff that you will stop seeing progress because you think that you’re, it’s like an arrogance that creeps up and you don’t think you need to do those anything, those things anymore.

It’s something that’s happened to me for sure. But here’s the deal. If you can actually view every single minute of your day as an investment, like a legitimate investment. You will realize the importance of every activity you’re doing because just like an investment, if I can put $5 in today, it doesn’t mean much, right?

It doesn’t mean much, but if I, if I’m putting in $5 every single day and then that’s compounding over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, then it means something and it’s no different with your time. The only negative with time is with investing in anything matters. If I put in a thousand dollars a day, $10,000 today or a quarter or a penny, it’s all moving in the right direction.

Unfortunately with time, it doesn’t work that way because what you can do with time is you can squander it, which would be the opposite of investing. It would just be spending it every single, every single time you get it. So scrolling on your phone or watching hours of Netflix binge watching all these kinds of things, that’s squandering of time.

Not every minute of your day is something that’s adding to the investment of your future and it doesn’t have to be okay. I don’t want you to think that you have to be a productive a hundred percent of the day to feel accomplished. That’s not it. But when we start to look at our work day and our specific activities of what does this activity compounded over time, get me like, where does that get?

Where does this activity compounded over time, get me start looking at your time spent on things as actual investments in your future. And I view this the same, like spending time with my family, right? With my kids, I’m investing in a good relationship with them in the future by spending time with them today.

It’s an investment. It’s actual investment in them. I’m teaching them something. I’m, I’m investing in their future. I want them to be a good person. And so all of these things really culminate to today is my everything. Today is your everything. Plan, prepare, don’t discount the small stuff and actually look at every minute of your day as an investment when appropriate.

Again, not a hundred percent productivity throughout the day, but what are your activities actually leading to you towards? You can do this. Today is your everything. Try harder.