Weekly Planning Mistakes That Kill Your Productivity - Demir Bentley

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Written By Brian Nelson-Palmer
Brian Nelson-Palmer and Demir Bentley with their fingers pointing up

Demir Bentley reveals why 94% of managers know weekly planning is crucial but only 0.8% do it.

What if 94% of managers know the secret to productivity but only 0.8% actually use it? Brian sits down with Demir Bentley, who nearly died from working 100-hour weeks in finance before discovering the "religion of leverage" that transformed him into someone running a multi-seven-figure business in under 30 hours per week. The kicker? The entire transformation hinges on one deceptively simple practice that takes just 30 minutes—and Demir's got the data to prove most people are sabotaging themselves by skipping it.

This conversation gets brutally honest fast: discover why your calendar is a "bald-faced liar" that's setting landmines to blow up your week, learn the "Europe prepack" technique that'll expose your magical thinking before Monday morning chaos hits, and find out why planning faster—not slower—is actually your secret weapon. Demir reveals his 6-step framework that treats weekly planning like water skiing (lose speed and you sink), including the "stupid tax" you're paying every time you miss a conflicting meeting you could've caught five days earlier. Brian counters with his GLOWS framework for life balance, and together they tackle the manager's dilemma: how do you get your team to plan without micromanaging them into resentment?

If you're drowning in meetings, ending every Friday wondering where your priorities went, or carrying "Sunday scaries" through your entire weekend, this episode is your intervention. The show notes include both frameworks, the planning videos that'll change how you see your week, and the exact calendar blocking strategy to join the 0.8% who actually win their weeks.

The Video

The Audio/Podcast

References In This Episode

Brian Nelson-Palmer and Demir Bentley smiling

Demir Bentley and Brian Nelson-Palmer

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Productivity and Planning Mistakes

03:05 The Shift from Hustle Culture to Leverage

05:43 The Importance of Planning Your Week Ahead

08:29 Understanding the Resistance to Weekly Planning

10:25 Creating an Algorithm for Winning Your Week

12:57 The Psychological Benefits of Planning Ahead

16:02 Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Weekly Planning

18:46 Creating a Rewarding Planning Environment

21:23 Choosing Your Hard: The Importance of Planning

24:37 Steps to Effective Weekly Planning

27:55 Demir's Six Steps to Winning the Week

31:20 The Importance of Speed in Productivity

32:29 Planning Your Week in Advance

36:27 Balancing Work and Personal Life

41:14 Empowering Managers to Support Their Teams

46:59 The Role of Enrollment in Team Productivity

52:40 Taking Action: The First Step to Change

Today’s Guest

Demir bentley

Co-Founder & Productivity Expert, Lifehack Method

Demir Bentley is an executive productivity coach, co-founder of Lifehack Method, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning the Week: How to Plan a Successful Week, Every Week.

Demir helps high-performing professionals escape burnout without sacrificing results. His work focuses on practical efficiency and real accountability, built for people who are tired of working harder and are ready to win their week with less stress and more control.

Through Lifehack Method, Demir and his team have supported 100,000+ professionals, including executives from Facebook, Google, Uber, and PepsiCo, as well as teams from Microsoft and Caterpillar, helping them prevent burnout and create more freedom in their lives.

Demir’s approach has been featured in ABC News, Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and Entrepreneur, and his community, the Lifehack Tribe, is designed for professionals who want to stop burning out and start hitting 12-month goals in 3 months.

Connect with Demir:

Lifehack Tribe Community: lifehackmethod.com/tribe

Book & Resources: WinningtheWeek.com

Website: LifehackMethod.com

LinkedIn: Demir Bentley

Instagram: @lifehackmethod_

Facebook: Demir and Carrie

YouTube: Lifehack Bootcamp

Why Subscribe To The Email List: Brian shares separate hacks, tips, and actionable learning exclusively for his email subscribers. Sign up so you don’t miss out!

About The Creator/Host: I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that my life was going to be 10-20 years shorter than everyone else. As a kid I took time for granted, but now as an adult, time is the most precious thing that I have. After spending a career hands-on in the trenches as a leader at all levels, I now train Productivity Gladiators to level up their careers. Graduates wield superpowers in time management, practical leadership, communication, & productivity. If what you’ve seen here intrigues you, reach out, let’s chat!

“Time is the currency of your life, spend it wisely.”

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TRANSCRIPT

Brian Nelson-Palmer (00:06)

I'm Brian Nelson Palmer. On this show, I share personal practical productivity skills that will make you more productive and advance your career. And in this episode, I'm talking about weekly planning mistakes that kill your productivity. Planning your week in advance is a huge thing with productivity. And I want to talk about what you may be doing wrong and what you should be doing right. And with me on the show today is Demir Bentley, who is the co-founder of Lifehack Method.

Demir, thanks so much for like, I've been so excited to talk about this. Thanks for coming on the show with me.

Demir (00:40)

Happy to man. Thank you for having me

Brian Nelson-Palmer (00:42)

Now, say a bit about your background and how it relates to our topic today

Demir (00:48)

Yeah, so my wife, Carrie and I, we co-founded the company together. We're like your classic insecure overachievers, right? The kind of, perfect employee in the world because you never have to get after them. They're already berating themselves. It's already not good enough in their own mind. They're already predisposed to like overworking and hustle culture. Like we were 100 % that duo.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (00:55)

That's it.

Okay.

Demir (01:12)

And I like to say that, you I'm not particularly religious, but I ascribe to the religion of hustle culture. And what are the tenants of hustle culture? It's if you just have blind faith that working harder than anybody else is going to pay off, right? That's the tenants. Like just work your little tookas off and it's gonna pay off in every single way. And both Carrie and I had chronic.

stress-related illnesses. In my case, that almost killed me, and in her case, that completely sidelined her. And so for us, that moment was like a falling out of a religion, like losing faith in a religion. It was like we had put so much faith that if we just worked harder than anybody else, in my case, 80, 100-hour weeks in finance, that it would pay off. It was just a matter of time. So for me to have three emergency surgeries and get told by my doctors, you've got to...

cut your hours from 80 hours a week to 40 hours next week, was sort of, I just had this like bottom, rock bottom moment that was like, not just I'm an idiot and I worked myself into nearly an early grave, not just how am I gonna do this? How am I gonna keep this career going? People depend on me. But something more fundamental, like my whole worldview has been shattered. Like I operated from the base assumption that my most

Positive quality about me was that I could just outwork the competition and that was the thing that became the Achilles heel and somehow I had to find a completely new way of a completely new identity a completely new way of operating it was just Everything my entire world got turned over so I'll keep this short and you could double-click into anything you want But like many people who are really extreme I went to the other extreme

and became the person who within a month was working 40 hours a week. I had gotten promoted. And it's like my life completely turned around. I became an adherent of a new religion and we could talk about what that sort of is, but it was really the religion of leverage. Like I was no longer here to just stay in the stream. I was stepping out of the stream. I just completely, I started doing some things that you'll laugh at almost all of them if I tell you, but I started doing some crazy different things.

and they started really working. And the more they worked, the more I became an adherent to this new religion of leverage where I was like, okay, I might look like an idiot. I might be doing things differently than anybody else, but it's working. And we kept rolling that. It's almost like I kept gambling and winning and gambling and winning. And about five years after that, we turned that into the winning the week method and the life hack method and started teaching that to other people. And then we have a little cult.

of people who lives in this way and it keeps working. Now we work less than 30 hours a week and we've got a multi seven figure business and we spend tons of time with our kids and travel the world. And so we're really just out here in the world to tell people there's a totally different way and you can step out of the stream and just operate in a different way.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (04:16)

And Demir specifically for planning your week, then you mentioned that you wrote a book on this or that that's part of your relevance to this episode. And this topic today is is that.

Demir (04:25)

Yeah,

so what's funny is I was at a party and I met a really distasteful dude. I'll use the word distasteful dude because I don't want to hurt you. I really didn't like this dude, but he asked me something that really stuck with me. He was like, oh, you're a productivity coach, huh? Like, well, tell me something right now that's going to change my life. I thought, first of all, I was like, whatever, dude, go away.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (04:32)

Okay.

Demir (04:51)

But actually that question stuck with me and it stuck with me because I was thinking I have so much that I could teach people from the life hack method, but a lot of it takes time. And if somebody met you just really quick at a party and you could only tell them one thing that would have the biggest impact on their life, what would it be? And I kept thinking about that again and again, like that's actually, even though I didn't like the person it came from.

That's actually an excellent question. And I actually give that to the listener right now. If you could only teach your client or a team member or a person that you met one thing and they would never learn anything else from you ever again, what would that be? Because it sort of gives you the sharp tip of the spear of what you really believe in and where the leverage is. And so for us, the answer was so simple. Plan your week ahead of time.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (05:42)

Yes, so true.

Demir (05:43)

There

really is so much embedded leverage. mean, we could talk about, and I, two productivity coaches, my God, give us five hours. We could talk about AI, we could talk about tools, we could talk about SOPs and systems and all that great stuff. And boy, I would love it. I'd be like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his gold coins. I love that. ⁓

Brian Nelson-Palmer (06:01)

both. Demir, let's do this sometime, but not today.

Demir (06:03)

Not

today. But if you're really talking about the very smallest thing that can give you the biggest result, it is the 30 minutes that you spend planning your week ahead of time. Now, why don't we do it though? Go ahead.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (06:19)

So Demir, he wrote the book on this. so that's why I taught for context. I have been teaching planning your week in advance for years and years and years with productivity gladiator. It's one of the foundational topics. So I was really excited to have this episode with you, Demir, we both are very aligned on this. And so I can't wait to dive in, but before we do that,

I did want to ask my favorite thing to ask is What would you say makes you different from everybody else out there doing this?

Demir (06:48)

Yeah, mean,

the thing about planning your week is it's sort of a forehead slappingly obvious thing. It's like telling a basketball player, you should work on your dribbling. I mean, it's such a fundamental part of the game. In fact, I would argue that we think we know it so much that we're not looking at how we're doing it wrong and we're not looking at how we could be doing it better. It's almost like I'll tell somebody, you should be planning their week and they'll just brush it off. They'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let me give you a stat here. We surveyed 5,000 people who managed between five and 50 people. So let's just say they've got something going on in their lives. They've got responsibility, right? They're managers. And we asked them the simple question, what is the most important thing to plan your week? And we didn't lead the witness. didn't say, we didn't give them options. We just said, what's the most important thing to winning your week? 94 % of them said planning your week ahead of time.

Okay, so what's the problem? Clearly, we already all know this. Then we followed up though with a follow-up and we said, okay, same cohort, we said, have you done it for the last four weeks in a row? What percentage, Brian, would you think said, yes, not only do I think it's the most important thing, but I have a regular planning practice that I've done for the last four weeks in a row. What would your guess be?

Brian Nelson-Palmer (08:11)

⁓ well, because I do this work, I would almost want to say like maybe 10 % or 15 % or something like that, even though you'd think that way more like 90 % would.

Demir (08:21)

Yeah, remember, 5,000

people surveyed, 0.8%.

0.8 % said they had done it in the last four weeks in a row. And by the last four weeks, what I mean is that it is like brushing your teeth. It's a regular practice. You don't think about it. You just do it. It's just regular. We're trying to get to that essence. So that was what inspired the book is why this is something we all think is so obvious that we just brush it away and yet 0.8 % of us actually do it. And the reason why

Brian Nelson-Palmer (08:27)

I totally believe that. I totally believe that.

you

Got it.

Demir (08:56)

is sort of why we read the book. so the book is less, yes, we do have a way that we think is better, faster, more efficient to plan your week. And we teach you that in the book, but more than that, the book really tries to overcome the crippling resistance that we have, because I think planning your week is almost more of a psychological game than anything else.

I think what I see is people trying to hack the hack before they learn the hack, right? So if you learn something from Brian, learn what Brian teaches you and do it for like two or four weeks and try to get it up on his feet because Brian has formulated something that he knows works because you put these puzzle pieces together and it forms a picture.

and then go out and do mine for like two or four weeks. Because what people will try to do is before they even get something up on its feet, they've already remixed it like a thousand times. And they're like, well, this doesn't work. And it's like, you never even tried it the way that Brian suggested it. as it turns out, Brian's been working on this for years and it's got an internal logic that holds it together.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (09:48)

No.

No.

Yep, that's so I'm really glad you mentioned that because yes, that's the biggest thing. It's like it's that whole thing about you just have to start you. so let's dive into the topic. I want to zoom out first just to say we're talking about planning our week in advance. So when we say that at a high level overview, Demir, what are?

What does that mean to you? Before we say how to do it, what is it?

Demir (10:22)

Yes.

I think the word planning, it's so meaningless and overstretched that I wanna almost replace it for a second for you with algorithm for winning. An algorithm for winning. You have a certain amount of fixed time this week and we all hit Friday and we feel that feeling of it didn't get done, I didn't move my priorities forward. And that's because, you know, I talk about something called the massive action model, which is in your mind if you visualize a triangle at the bottom left is your time supply. That's your calendar.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (10:33)

Okay.

Yeah.

Demir (10:51)

168

hours, we don't get any more. A big portion of it is already spoken for and some portion of it you're gonna be tired and you won't be able to do work, right? So there's this very fixed amount of supply of time. On the bottom right hand side, you have your time liabilities. That's your to-do list, right? That's how many people, that's the things you've already committed to doing, right? And then at the top is your priorities. And so if you think about those three things, they don't want to play together. They will pull you apart.

and rip you limb from limb. And so you've got to stand in the center of those three things pulling away from you and you've got to put together an algorithm that says how am I going to allocate my time supply to my time demands and my priorities and find that one out of a thousand pathways where I get to have it the way that I want it or at least a little bit more the way that I want it.

Everybody knows you just let the horses run wild and you ask yourself you're gonna you're all your time is gonna get gobbled up You're not gonna work on the things you needed to and your priorities and kind of move forward So there are 99 out of a hundred ways that you don't win your week Your plan for the week is you putting together that one out of a thousand pathways where you're like I get to be the dad I want I get to get the the things that are blowing up done and also move my priorities for

Brian Nelson-Palmer (12:11)

Yeah. that such a good point about those, the competing forces. like that. And for you listening, also, we're going to talk about planning your week in advance. And

Planning it in advance is the key word here. If you start on Monday morning, it's too late. And so that's what we're really going to zoom into today is about that.

Demir (12:31)

Can we just pause on, we recommend, so when we do our live Friday pre-plannings for our community, we do it on Friday. And I always tell my people Friday night, Saturday morning, that's when you plan your next week. Now, why do I say that? Two reasons. Number one, it's fresh in your mind on Friday, right? You're there, you're sitting in it. You've just come right out of the battle. The best time to do a post-mortem and set a plan is when it's fresh in your mind.

Number two, it's work hours. I don't think that you should spend your personal time planning for work. I think you should do it at work because it's work, right? So it's work hours. And number three, there is so much psychological relief you get when you go into your weekend already having a plan for next week. Because what's happening in studies show this, I think it's Szyminski, the famous psychologist, showed and actually demonstrated that if you don't put a bow on the week and have a plan for next week,

Brian Nelson-Palmer (13:14)

Yeah.

Demir (13:25)

you are carrying that through your weekend. And I hear this from my clients all the time. I just can't be present and it's just hanging over me or that Sunday scary is the dread that we carry over the weekend. If you can just suck it up a little bit and do that plan Friday evening, Saturday morning, or Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, do it and just see how it feels over the weekend. You're just gonna notice you're more rested, you're more relaxed, you're more present because you've already made, you've tied a bow on last week.

and you've got to plan for next week, your brain can disengage, relax, and you can be a real human being. So I'm with you. Monday morning, the bullets are flying. That is not, call it whatever you want. It's responding, not planning.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (14:05)

Yep. Agreed. And you know, I'm going to, I'm going to yes. And you and disagree with you at the same time here. Demir, yes, I agree that you should do it in advance. Friday, Saturday is my fallback. I disagree. Mine is Thursday at 2pm. I have a calendar event for an hour that is blocked for me to plan my week in advance. And I actually plan the 10 days ahead. So Thursday, like

Demir (14:21)

Love it.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (14:32)

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the following week through Sunday. I'm looking at the rolling 10 days. But the reason I started picking up on Thursday instead of Friday is because if you wait to plant, you talked about putting a bow on it and how good that feels. Friday is the lead into your weekend. You're kind of setting the tone for your weekend. And so if you're going in Friday evening or Saturday morning and you haven't already put a bow on it,

you're already into your weekend and you still haven't gotten that good feeling yet. So to me it was like, and maybe this is me being an overachiever. Demir, you wouldn't know anything about this, I'm sure. But for me, it's like, you know what? I'm going to do this on Thursday so that Thursday night and then into Friday, sometimes it's a holiday weekend, sometimes you got stuff going on, but I feel really good about my weekends because I already looked at, okay, I've got this much left today. I'm going to do these things tomorrow. The weekend's already set.

Demir (15:06)

I love it.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (15:26)

I got my plans for next week and so my Fridays are great because I do Thursday afternoon until.

Demir (15:33)

It's funny, we actually do our team meeting Thursday afternoon. I sometimes don't say it because it feels too aggressive for people who are just getting back on to weekly planning. But what's great that you also mentioned is what I find is when a lot of people get called to the mat in our team meeting for not having completed something, they've still got one day left in the week. I can't tell you how many times I or a team member has been like, Crud, I didn't get that done this week, but they've still got one day left in the tank. And a lot of times we're,

they'll use that last day and be like, they'll pull the rabbit out of the hat on the last day. So I know we've got ground to cover, but I'm with you, 100 % love it.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (16:10)

That's the so man to Thursday at 2 p.m. However, all of that said Thursday, Friday, Saturday for you listening, whatever it is, your deadline is Sunday night. You have to plan your week in advance, which means the deadline is Sunday night. So however it works for you, sometimes life gets away from us. We know I have a Thursday 2 p.m. plan. It doesn't always work. Sometimes I end up doing it Friday morning. Sometimes I. But you got to do it before Sunday night.

In your book, Winning the Week is the book that we talked about. And that's one of the reasons I've been so excited to have this conversation with you, Demir. You talk about planning the perfect week in 30 minutes. So let's talk about that. What does that look like?

Demir (16:52)

Yeah, so what I noticed is that the reason people weren't planning a lot was they went through this cycle. They knew that they should plan. They tried to plan before. They didn't have a solid disciplined methodology for walking through the, I call it the baseball analogy. You got to touch every single base in order to score the home run. And so they weren't touching all of the bases or they were getting lost and pulled onto side adventures while they were doing their planning. And somehow,

They look up, it's three hours later. They're completely anxious. They're completely terrified and they have not completed their planning. And you do that enough times and you develop a strong negative association with planning where you come rightly to the conclusion, it's long. The juice is not worth the squeeze. I feel a lot of anxiety and fear while I'm doing it. And then your emotional self takes over because the limbic system is so powerful. If you do something that causes

pain to you repeatedly, your body will figure out a way to get away from it and to avoid it. And so people often have a strong negative associated issue with planning and an avoidance mechanism. So the first step that I say in the winning week is step zero. And I call it step zero because you only have to do it once. And if you do it right the first time, you never have to do it again. And that is removing the strong resistance that you have to planning. And the way that we recommend do that is to first and foremost, create an environment

that is a reward in and of itself. So my wife and I on Saturday morning or Friday evening, we'll go out and sort of call me a geek, call us whatever you want. It's like our date night. We'll go out, go to brunch. We have the babysitter watch the kids and we will start it by planning our week and we plan it for business and personal. We will review our plans together. At the end, we'll get synced up because you know what? The version of my wife that I get when we've synced up,

and we know what we're about and we've high-fived and okay, you're gonna get this and I'm gonna do this and we're gonna do this and here's the plan for the week. Then we'll just sit there for like another hour, hour and a half at the cafe and just like enjoy each other in that relaxed state because we are synced up. So that's our version. We'll go to a really nice cafe and do it together. I've had people go to a wine bar after work on Friday. Great, like I'm gonna get a nice glass of wine. I'm gonna sit there with my laptop for 30 minutes. Gonna plan my week and afterwards.

I'm gonna hang with a friend or hang with my spouse or just hang by myself and enjoy it. I've had people go to a cafe and get a nice croissant. I've had people, I don't know if you know these Trader Joe's frozen chocolate croissants. I mean, these things are banger. I have a woman who will make herself one at the beginning and a little one at the end. So she gets to have two, one for the beginning, one for the end. But the point here.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (19:31)

Bye.

Demir (19:40)

is to create an environment and a reward that can start to tell your brain, hey, this isn't so bad. Actually, I sort of like this. I like showing up from my planning because planning itself, let's just take the lipstick off the pig and show it for what it is. You are taking a week's worth of fear and anxiety and potential conflict and accelerating it into 30 minutes. That is not gonna feel like a good 30 minutes. We do it because we're the kind of people who choose our heart. We're choosing our heart.

Do you want a slap in the face right now for 30 minutes or a punch in the face and a kick in the back next week? I'll take the slap in the face today, but make no mistake, it is not a pleasant experience. So whatever you can do to bring a little bit of positive anticipation to it, make the experience, know, having it in a place where you feel like you're in your happy place and creating a reward that makes it feel a little bit more enticing goes a long way to making that pill go down smoother.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (20:36)

I love that you and your wife have that plan because for me, I told you, I do Thursday at 2 PM, right? That's my work time. And that's where I take care of Brian. This is my planning, my week in advance. And I have a wife and we plan our week in advance. And our experience is very similar to yours in that.

there's all these funny questions that happen and disappointments that happen when you don't talk about it. like, for example, what nights are we eating dinner together? What nights are you fending for yourself or what nights is somebody going to make something and then the other person will like, it'll just be leftovers that are there when you get home or something like that. it's not like there's expectations around that. It's not like all of a sudden we are going to be reviewing how well there's five nights this week that we don't spend together. Like it's not a,

bad thing, it ends up being a good thing because we reset expectations around that week coming up. So my wife and I, a hundred percent plan our week in advance. And so I love that you guys have your brunch thing for us. We find we fit it in sometimes. Sometimes the week gets crazy, but we never ever miss planning our week in advance because it makes the week go so smooth for our relationship to and for the family and that kind of stuff. So that's, I love that you mentioned.

Demir (21:48)

Yeah. And

I just want to tell people, listen, in all different dimensions of life, you're going to choose your heart, right? Life is hard. Life, adulting is hard. Do you want the hard of going to the gym or do you want the hard of going to the doctor and getting the bad news that you've got a chronic illness, right? mean, take your choice, right? Marriages are hard. Do want the hard of having the hard conversation ahead of time or you want the hard of having the fight? ⁓

There's so many hards in life. And I would just tell you, when you balance it all out, it is one tenth as hard to plan your week. It's hard, but it's one tenth as hard as going into your week without a plan, because you are just gonna get ganged up on. It's like, I think about that analogy of a ⁓ bunch of bullies coming to you on the, it's like, if they're coming at you from every direction, you ain't got a chance.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (22:35)

Yep, true story. Talk about the you mentioned the steps at a high level. What are you said step zero and I feel like that was the teaser. So stop teasing us to mirror. What's the rest of the steps here? What do we got?

Demir (22:44)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for

the rest of the steps, I want you to have that analogy in your mind of water skiing through your week. So what happens when you lose speed when you're water skiing? You just sink. And my overall frame for planning the week is that actually speed is your friend. But your inclination, your intuition is that you're gonna be touching on things, each one of which are like the sirens luring you into the rocks. They'll be like,

You you check your email real quick. Come on, get bogged down in email. You check your task list. Come on. Don't you want to start doing some of these tasks? You check your priorities. Come on. Do you want to replan your month or replan your quarter? Right. So as you're running these bases, I would suggest that each one of these bases almost wants to suck you in and you have to have enough momentum and speed running through them that you just want to water ski over them. And what that means is that there is no such thing as perfect weekly planning.

You're just gonna sort of run across these bases and on any given base you could have given every one of these bases three hours, four hours, five hours. Don't do it. Don't get stuck, right? So, okay, step one. What's the first step? And this is a warmup step. Take a look back at your week and just learn a quick lesson. Not five lessons, not 10 lessons. Don't do an hour of chat GPT lessons. I'm just saying look back on your week and say what went well? Let's do more of that. What didn't go so well?

Let's do less of that. Okay, so what went badly last week? I said yes to something that I really shouldn't have said yes to. Great. Do I see that as a pattern? Yeah, I've been doing that a lot lately. I'm saying yes to too many things. Great, great lesson. Log it, move on. What did I do well? Actually, you know, one thing that I did well is I cut my work off at five and I really turned it off. I had a plan for the next day and I went and I was in my personal life and I was a great friend and father. Fantastic, great, booked. Let's have more days like that. What this does is it creates a learning loop.

a reinforcement cycle where you're not just moving on to the next week, but you're actually processing a little bit of like what's working, what's not working. There's a great book on this that I'm not gonna get bogged down in, but like just this idea that you're not just relentlessly moving ahead in life, but you're taking these small moments to do a quick postmortem. Now, a deep postmortem, just a quick postmortem. What was good? Let's do more of that. What was bad? Let's do less of that. Keep moving. I take two minutes on this, right? So that's step one. Just let's learn a lesson.

Now step two, most people would say immediately, let's set our priority, right? Isn't that the first thing you think when you go into planning your week? Let's start with our priority. And here's why we don't start with that. Because how are you gonna set a priority without knowing A, how much time supply you have? You might be out on the road for three days this week. How are you gonna set a big priority if you don't even have the time to tackle that priority? And B, you might have already promised a bunch of things to other people that you've got to deliver this week. So actually what we do first,

is we do what we call a calendar interrogation. Notice I didn't say calendar review. step two, don't just, a review is so passive. Let's look at the calendar. Looks all right to me, moving on. No, no, no, no. Your calendar is the biggest liar. Just a bald-faced liar. There are things that should be on the calendar that aren't. There are things that should not be on the calendar that are, right? And.

There's all these little hidden land mines just waiting for you to step on them and just blow up in your face. What's a land mine? You had a meeting changed from nine o'clock to noon and now it's conflicting with another one. You just didn't notice. You just did a passive review, you didn't notice. Now you're supposed to be in two places at the same time. You're gonna learn about 15 minutes before that meeting, my God, and you're gonna pay the biggest price in terms of loss of face.

loss of reputation, you're gonna be stressed, you're gonna be anxious, and now the meeting that you do choose, you're not gonna be yourself. You're not gonna go in as your best self to the meeting that you actually do go into. That's a landmine. If you see that ahead of time, three, four, five days ahead of time, there's no problem. That's a landmine, where if you see it ahead of time, it's not even a problem, and if you don't catch it, it's a huge problem. So that's why we go through and interrogate our calendar. I'm talking about Joe Pesci and good fellas take out the baseball bat and just, we're.

Wacking our calendar because it is a bald-faced liar and we're trying to get the truth out of it But also you're a liar. What do I mean by you're a liar? Everybody is subject to this magical thinking we overestimate what we can do and we underestimate how hard things are gonna be So that thing that you gave like 30 minutes. Okay, come on now Come on now. When did you ever do that thing in 30 minutes? I had a woman on a call literally yesterday

and she had an appointment, she had not booked travel time. She left her house for the start of her appointment 15 minutes after the appointment began and she missed the appointment. So think about what that did to her day, right? She literally paid all of the time cost and didn't even get the appointment. This is the second time she's missed that appointment, right? Now she's gotta wait a month and a half. So calendar interrogation.

is not calendar review. It's you getting in there with a strong, aggressive mindset of how am I lying to myself and how is the calendar lying to me so that we can really trust our time supply this week.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (27:54)

So that's, we're on step two. How many steps are there?

Demir (27:55)

That's step two.

Just six. Yeah.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (28:00)

Six, okay.

Give us the highlight. Obviously, if people want more from this, you've got the Lifehack method community and that, but I want to give people kind of an overview of, okay, these are Demir six steps. And then I want to share mine too, so you can get that comparison.

Demir (28:05)

I'll speed through it.

Great, great.

Great, so just quick review. Step zero, choose the right place. Step one, let's learn a lesson. Step two, let's interrogate our calendar. Step three, let's triage our task list. And I just say triage because it's like a battlefield medic. It's not all gonna get done. People go to their task list like, how am I gonna get done? Okay, I can tell you the answer, you aren't. You aren't gonna get it all done. So just like a battlefield medic has to choose who's gonna live and who's gonna die, you gotta choose what's gonna live and what's gonna die. So that's step three, choose.

triage your task list and now you're ready to set a But again, don't just set five priorities, 10 priorities, it's not a priority. It's like if you speak to everybody, you're speaking to no one. If you're setting five priorities, it really means that none of them are their priority. I say choose a leverage priority. What is that one thing? That's the 80-20. What's that thing that takes up the minority of your time that gives you the majority of the benefit here? So find leverage, make that your win for the week.

So you can have one North star, not 10 North stars that you're navigating to. And then step six, calendarize your week. People get this wrong. People think that when I say calendarize your week, they want me, that means that you're gonna choose that at 10 o'clock on Thursday, you're gonna do exactly this thing and you're not gonna deviate from that. I couldn't care less about whether you did that thing exactly on 10 o'clock on Thursday. Here's the analogy. Have you ever packed your bags before you go to Europe?

just to see if everything's gonna fit, right? I call it the prepack, right? And does it always fit? Never, it never always fits. You always realize, ⁓ my goodness, I was way over optimistic about what was gonna fit into my bag. So when I tell you to put it into your calendar, I don't care if you do it in that exact order, it's a prepack. It's like just see if it all fits. The answer is going to be no, it doesn't, and then you're gonna have to step back and make some hard choices about, okay, well, I was a little bit too optimistic.

What do I have to push into the next week, bag off on, delegate, whatever it might be to make sure that I can actually pack my bags and make this trip. And that, my friends, is the six steps of the winning the week. And I'll just go fast. Step zero, set the right intention and the right place and the right reward. Step one, learn a lesson. Step two, interrogate your calendar, not check it. Step three, let's go ahead and triage our task list, not just look at our task list. Step four, let's choose a leverage priority. Step five,

Let's go ahead and get out there. think I got myself off of my step. So choose the leverage priority and then calendarize to make sure that your bags are gonna fit and you're gonna be able to make it to your destination.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (30:44)

That is very structured and I love that. And my my productivity nerd self is like, ooh, yes, I like that. That's really good. Let me just tell you Europe prepack is probably the best metaphor outside of these two videos I'm about to share with you that I've heard. I love that. Demir, yes, that's absolutely true. My wife and I, you pack, you pack your suitcase and then if you weigh it before you go to the airport, you find out that it's over the 50 pound limit of the check bag.

And if you do that in advance, your life is so much easier. I really love, love the prepack. That is awesome.

Demir (31:20)

I'll just add one more

thing before we pass the mic is that I time myself through the steps. To me, it's move, move, move. Speed is your friend. People feel like speed is your enemy. No, if I just went slower, I could get this done right. No, actually speed is your friend. You're a professional. You've been doing this for years. Your first decision is probably your best decision. Move, move, move, move, move.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (31:24)

Okay, that's where the 30 minutes that you talk about comes from.

Yeah, I love that because the 30 minutes is a good reminder. You just listed those steps. And by the way, if you're listening to this, I'm gonna try to put the steps in the comments, at least at a high level. if you haven't already made a note, in the very beginning, Demir said, try it, try it for a couple of weeks. It's gonna sound like, oh my God, that's so many steps. And then this could take so long.

Don't spend more than 30 minutes. If you spend more than 30 minutes, that's too much. You went too far in. That's a really good, good reminder to me. I like that. So a couple things. First, the Plan Your Week in Advance. for me, being in the productivity space, there are two of the most famous or well-known videos on planning your week in advance, and it's the Big Rocks video.

by Stephen Covey. And then there is also one A valuable lesson for a happier life. And it's a teacher who shows his students how with the rocks and then the pebbles and then the sand and then the water. And so if you've seen these before, you already know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't seen these before, it would be good for you to see them. So I'm going to give you the links. This is a good one. And if you're a manager,

This is a really good thing to watch with your staff. Like in a staff meeting, start a meeting, they're only like five, 10 minutes. They're not long videos. It's worth watching it together and then taking a second to digest it. Because the concept that we're talking about here of doing it in advance, it's the best metaphor that I've seen for them. So I'm gonna give you those two videos so that.

You can watch them and share. Please share them. They're not mine. They're not Demir's. These are really well known videos, but they're so, so helpful. So pass that on. And then the other thing, Demir, I'm going to share my way, but the one thing that I want to say that you said too is the idea that you will never finish your task list. I have signature sessions. One of them is on to-do list and one of them is on life balance and planning your week in advance. In my to-do list session, we talk about

you will never finish it because in life it's never done. You don't suddenly get to Friday or Sunday and you're like, that's, I did it all. Like, no, that's not, that's not real. Or you're kidding yourself. Or you did that thing where you took this massive list and then you just gave yourself seven things to do today and you actually got the today list done. That's possible, but the real to do list never ends. So don't.

Let go of that idea that you have to finish it straight A students. Let go of the fact that you have to finish it. It's not going to happen. So let go of that and use that as a lesson. So when I do plan your week in advance, I plan it. One of my things is about, and our topic here is not about burning out, right? So it's about life balance. You're planning it for work and you're planning it for yourself and you are both of those things. So make sure you plan your work.

and you plan your personal, like you're planning your week. It's not your work week or your person. It's your week. That includes both. So plan both. And one of the things that the way that I like to look at it, I love that you said some people plan every minute because if I show you my calendar, you'll see that every minute is not planned. The things, the calendar is the place where you need to be.

The to-do list is what you need to do. And so I don't have a place I need to be everywhere throughout the week. And so I keep those separate. That's my approach. And when you're looking at this, when you're planning your week in advance at 2 p.m. on Friday, I'm looking at what are the big rocks or the big tasks at work that I need to make time for.

because otherwise you and I both know meetings can take you over and you suddenly get to the end of the week or you look at your week and you're like, God, I have no time to do anything because I'm just going to be in meetings. So you do need to mark your calendar. If you're one of those people who thinks, well, like at work, you might have those people where you're scheduling ⁓ a meeting and you want to schedule one with them and they, all of their time is busy. I've met some people like, I don't want to be that person. So I try to leave openings and

That's true, except they don't pay you to go to meetings. They pay you to get stuff done. So you need to finish the stuff that is important. And that means you're not going to be available for meetings. So don't think of it as a bad thing. If you actually, for the big rocks, the big things that are important that they're counting on you for, you should block your calendar for some time for those. Because if you don't have that time, it's going to get taken up by meetings.

So you're gonna prioritize your work and then I'm gonna give you life balance. You're looking at your week personally and it's glows. My metaphor is glows, G-L-O-W-S. Demir talked about a triangle. I think of it as a star. There are a star and there are five things, five points to the star that make your star glow really bright. So you want it, it glows. The first one, G is growth. L is love and relationships.

Demir (36:49)

Hmm.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (36:55)

O is others, something for others, something bigger than you. W is work and S is for self. So real quick, growth is about, you doing something, are you learning? Are you growing in some way? People get stagnant if they're not growing. So look at your week in advance and see, is there something that's gonna be outside my comfort zone? Am I taking a course? Am I learning something? Because growth is a big piece for humans, especially adults.

Love and relationships is about date night. Like for me, that's, do I have a date night on the calendar? Do I have time with friends? If I haven't seen my friends in forever, like these are some of the things you'll be, you'll be missing. So that's love and relationships. Make sure your relationships, for me, there's three main ones. You got family, friends, and date, love, the spouse thing. So do you have time with those people? And if you don't,

Demir (37:28)

Thank you. ⁓

Brian Nelson-Palmer (37:46)

When could you? Do you need some this week? And when could you? It's like a self assessment. You look at this and you're like, I could use some of that this week. I feel like I've been missing that. So these are the priorities. Next up is, that's others, something bigger than you. This is going to be something that you don't get paid to do that you're doing for other people. Like, what is that? For a lot of people, that's church. Many people are in church groups. They volunteer at their church. That's one thing.

I'm a volunteer with big brother, big sister. I have a little bro. I spend time with him. I'm supporting people. Sometimes it's doing productivity gladiator stuff just to help out a friend. But what are you doing that you are gifting? You're giving to others that something bigger than you, you don't gain. So it doesn't qualify for others if you're getting paid for it. That doesn't check this box. W is work. I don't need to explain that to you. You got a job. You know how this works. That's fine.

You need to prioritize work, figure out what those big rocks are, make time for those. And then the last one is yourself, right? This could be your gym time. The three things, let me leave you with this, because there's a lot more to this and I don't want to take a lot of time. I want to hear from Demir. But the thing I want you to take away from self is there are the three things that are the first to go when people get really busy. These three things fall out. Sleep, food, you eat the wrong stuff, and fitness.

your gym time or whatever that is. So do you have those things in? I put my bedtimes on my calendar when I plan my week in advance so that I know that I'm going to get the seven and a half hours that my goal is, you know, that kind of thing. So there's your glows. You can listen back to that. I'll put that in the notes for you and try that. Try Demir's thing, but actually try it. Like we said, because I think these, this practice, if nothing else comes from this episode, if you put

an hour on your calendar or he's, Demir says 30 minutes. I leave an hour because I don't want to feel like I'm rushed and it is that important. I reserve an hour every week to plan my week in advance for work and for self. If you just do it, I love the numbers that you gave her. Great. To me, 94 % of people know this is important and 0.8 % do it. So please join the 0.8 % cause that's a, that's a huge difference.

Demir (40:03)

It really is, mean, honestly, if you just strip out, Dave Ramsey talks about something called the stupid tax, right? That's where you like had a bill, you knew the bill was coming, you weren't on top of your stuff, and now you've got the bill plus the late fee, and then the late fee gets added to the bill, now you've got interest going on, you're like, you're being stupid about it, and I'm not just saying you, but I've been there, I've been that stupid guy that's paying the stupid tax, and when you have a meeting that conflicts and you don't clear it in advance,

Brian Nelson-Palmer (40:13)

I know.

Demir (40:33)

when you easily could, you're just paying left and right, up, down, and center, you're just paying the stupid tax at getting it. I can't tell you how many people will come to me after just doing this, being like, I've got so much more time, I've got so much more energy, I feel so much more in control. It's like, yeah, that's what just taking the stupid tax out of your life feels like. You just feel like, whoa, this is amazing.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (40:55)

Yeah, so true. It's it's that proactive versus reactive thing. Most of the people who are overwhelmed are also operating in a lot of reactive. let's say to the demure for the supervisors out there, for the manager that's listening. What can managers do to help their people get better at this without micromanaging?

So Demir, what advice do you give to that manager?

Demir (41:17)

This is a quick two-parter. mean, the first thing is, actually your job as a manager is, think about you a lot of times as the scout that's moving ahead of the army. Right, so your job is to, by definition, you do have to be a week, two, three weeks, a month ahead of your team to make sure that you're looking at everybody's pipeline and you're making sure that you're allocated and you've got your resources and you're focused on the right things and you're clearing obstacles and saying, hey, there's an ambush ahead, let's get away from this ambush.

You, by definition of your job, have to be ahead of your team. So I just say for you alone to be doing your weekly planning, we also teach monthly planning. So the last Friday of every month, the weekly planning session is weekly plus monthly, so you're looking ahead to the next month. Do that yourself, and honestly, your team's gonna perform better because you'll be performing better, and you'll be doing your job of saying, hey, Chris, you've got this thing coming at you. Did you remember that this is coming at you in the next two weeks? And so you'll be.

performing at higher level. You'll feel better as a manager, you'll be more available as a manager. So I think I almost don't wanna talk about the next layer of the onion until people just experience what it's like to just deal with you. Just get you dialed in and your team will perform better and you'll be better. When it comes to the teams though, I'll say quickly that I often will just, like the easiest move that I, when a team brings me in, I'm just doing the same move every single time and they just think it's genius. I move the Monday meetings to

Friday, that's it. I just move Monday meetings to Friday, right? Like that Monday meeting that everybody has, I just move them to Friday. And then what we do, just like Jeff Bezos has everybody read something before they start the meeting, so everybody's gotta pre-prepare, everybody sits there in silence and reads. Instead of that, what I do is 30 minutes, we all plan together in silence. And the manager's just, okay, great, now let's look at wins, okay, great, now let's look at calendar, okay, great, now let's look at priority. And they're just walking the team through.

silently, like, okay, great, timer, next, timer, next, timer, next, and then after 30 minutes of running all those bases, now let's have the team meeting. Because so many team meetings are a waste of time because people are speculating. What's the point of asking you, Brian, what's going on next week when I know for a fact you haven't looked at your calendar? This is a complete waste of time. What's the point of being like, Brian, what's your priority? When I know you haven't, this is the very first time you were even.

thinking about your priority. It's basically asking people to fictionalize and guess when they don't even know. How much more productive can your meetings be when you just all run those bases together and then let's talk? Because when you check your calendar, Brian, guess what you're gonna find? One, two, three, four priorities. One, two, three, four landmines. And now we can have an educated discussion because we've all looked at the week ahead. We've all done an initial mapping of the week and how we think we can win the week.

And then our meeting for the 30 minutes or hour after that is us cross-referencing it. I can tell you the reason it's my go-to trick is because it both, Friday's a better time to do meetings, everybody's happier because they're ending having put a ⁓ bow on the week and having a plan for next week, but also because the quality of the discussion in the meetings goes so far, it just goes up.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (44:27)

Yeah, I totally agree. you don't want to be the person that calls a meeting on a Friday afternoon because everybody's sort of getting ready for the weekend. So maybe it's a Friday morning, maybe it's a Thursday afternoon, but

Moving it to the end instead of the beginning is a really good point because it can be reflective and proactive at the same time. We're already pretty much done. That's a really I like that, Demir. And you know, the one thing that I want to emphasize is for you listening. There are a lot of really type A really go getter managers who this is going to be a new skill for. I'm going to tell you the biggest challenge for anybody who goes all the way through productivity gladiator training.

You know what the biggest challenge is? you can't change other people. That's the hardest part. I can give you all these hacks. Demir can give you all these hacks. His thing is called the life hack method. It's about how we can give you all of the answers. And then if you actually absorb them and take them, then, ⁓ my gosh, it makes such a difference. And for the people in your life who, my wife,

isn't certified in productivity gladiator and I've never forced her to. And that's okay because you can't change other people. So don't take it on for other people. So I almost asked a trick question when I asked what can managers do to help their people get better at this. The reality is if you do it and it is successful for you and you talk about it, you, all of that, then

you're going to start avoiding some of those pitfalls. Like Demir said, that you got double booked in a meeting and you didn't flag it until 15 minutes before you get, you're going to stop doing those things and you're going to talk about it and you mention it and you show these videos that I'm going to share. And then it's going to be up to the person whether they're going to do it or not. And you don't micromanage this. You don't sit with them and do this because they're going to, if they're going to be a really good member of your team,

You shouldn't have to sit them down and force them. This should be contagious almost in a way. So I would emphasize that more than you can. Now, what you could do is also allow time for that. Maybe you could allow, hey, listen, there's no meetings after three thirty on Thursdays because I want you to have time to plan your week in advance. You can facilitate. Look at your job as a facilitator.

but not as a dictator or an enforcer to make sure that they plan their week in advance. Because you can lead a horse to water, but you can't take a drink.

Demir (46:59)

I love this word,

I love this word enroll. When you enroll somebody, you're taking a perspective of letting go of the expectation that they're gonna do something, but you're inviting them into it without expectation. It's this open invitation of like, this is my ethos, this is this team's ethos, but also manage yourself the way you want. I trust you, you're an adult, you're a professional, manage yourself the way you want.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (47:03)

Hmm

Demir (47:24)

But I am offering this, I'm enrolling you in it with no expectation. And I found that the managers who really embody it, the number one thing I see is the opposite. Where managers are complaining about their team without embodying the principles that they even claim to hold dear at themselves. And I can tell you, 100 % of the time when I see a manager who really embodies the life hack method, they will get a decent proportion. There's no 100%, but they will get a decent proportion of their team coming up and being like,

hey, can I pull you aside? seems like you know how to manage this whole work-life balance thing. Like, what are you up to, right? You and that's where you want it to come from. You want it to come from like, I look to you as a mentor. I look to you as somebody who's got it together, who knows how to handle it. Like, what are you doing? And I always tell people, like my clients, you're the billboard of success. If you don't have people in your life coming up to you and saying, what's your secret? Then I have failed you. Like, that's how I want you to show up in the world, is people are coming to you.

Yeah, I think we're totally in agreement, Brian. It's like embody, embody, embody and enroll with no expectation. know, some people come, some people won't. one of the things that's interesting is it was something like, you only need to get like, it something super small, like 23 % of the right people in your team to adopt to create this tipping point where the rest of the team adopts. So stop thinking about like, how do I get 100 % of my team to adopt? And start thinking.

How do I get the 23 % of the right people to get enrolled and adopt? Because there is tipping points on teams where you get these certain people on board, you create this sort of like domino fall where the rest of the team will sort of fall into line even begrudgingly because like, I guess this is how we're working now, fine.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (49:10)

So true. Yes. There is actually, and I'm going to see if I can find it. If I can, I'll put the link in the notes for you. But there is the, it's called the, it's like the change adoption curve or something. And I just vividly remember it because you have the tip of the spear, the first people to start something when nobody else has done it. Then you have the early adopter. So I can use the iPhone as a good metaphor. Before the first person to ever use an iPhone,

That's the really innovative people that are willing to try something nobody else has done. Then there's the early adopters where they just look around and go, well, wait a minute, he did it, so I'll do it. And then, so they might've gotten the iPhone relatively early. Then you've got the early majority who actually, once they see the early adopters, they're like, and I think this is where that 23 % kind of goes in. It's the like the top half of the bell curve.

where they're like, the early majority is the front half of that bell curve. And they're like, well, the early adopters did it. And there's, I've seen multiple people who are successful at it. So I'm going to try this thing too. This looks good. Then you've got the late majority and the people who will just never change. And the late majority will only do it after the early majority. So it's almost like it's a contagious effect. So the 23 % really resonates with me just because you've got to get, you've got to do it.

some early adopters have to do it. And then that tipping point you're talking about is where the early majority start picking up.

Demir (50:32)

You're building your coalition, right? You're

building that coalition, you're getting that going. I call the last ones the curmudgeons. You know, your grandpa who didn't buy the iPhone until like five years ago or something like that, but even he bought the iPhone. Why did he do it? And he was complaining bitterly the whole time. But why did he do it? Because he could see that this boat had already set sail. That if he didn't get on board,

Brian Nelson-Palmer (50:40)

Hahaha!

Demir (50:56)

he would lose status, he would lose contact with people, he would be outside of the system, And so you can get your curmudgeons, but they need to be dead, let them stay on the sidelines until dead last, because there is a point where the ship has sailed and they sort of know, I need to get on the ship or I'm gonna be left behind.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (51:14)

Yep. And you know, as a manager, let me flag for you that the challenge becomes, well, we can't have anybody that's a laggard who just refuses to change. Brian, what do we do about those people? So let me answer it for you, which is if you're going to introduce change, it's a good idea to get the, the innovators and then the early adopters and then the early majority doing it. So you've got at least 50 % of the people who have proven this is good. This is the way we should do it. And at that point, that's when there's a policy that says you have.

to. But if you introduce it too early, then you get a lot of that pushback. But if you've already got more than half your team who's doing this and showing that it's successful and you want the other half to do it, wait until you get into the late majority, when they've started to do it, that's when you implement a you must do it.

And that's how change can be really successful as opposed to just forcing everybody on day one before anybody's done it. Now, last thing I want to share is, so Demir, let's sort of bottom line this in a way. We've shared a lot of stuff. I know that when I listen to podcasts, when you listen to podcasts, you probably listen to this, you appreciate the conversation. Wow, Demir is right. Wow, Brian's right. What are you actually going to do with this? So Demir, what's the first thing that the

person listening should do from all the things that we said, if there was one thing, what's the first step that before they stop listening to this, please do this. What's the first step?

Demir (52:40)

The first step, I mean, you just have to ask yourself like, where are you going? Where's your leverage point? There's gonna be a lot of people listening to this. This is not your leverage point right now. This is not your focus right now. God bless it. Tuck it away, stuff it somewhere for later. I would rather you do one thing extremely well rather than do five things really badly and not get the result. If this is not one of your things, I salute you. Stay focused on the thing you're focused on. Do not do this.

But if you've listened to this and you think, boy, this has got 80-20 written all over it, like this feels like a very small change that would make a big difference, I would say make a commitment for a month and just say, I wonder what it would feel like to spend 30 minutes every week for one month and take the Pepsi challenge and just see, does this make the kind of difference that Brian and Demir are saying it will? And honestly, use whatever.

Use Brian's method, use my method, Brian Tracy's method. I mean, go to town. But, you know, it's like working out. Will Pilates work? Yes. Will weightlifting work? Yes. It's all gonna work. Just choose something, don't bastardize it, follow it for a full month, and I will live or die by the Pepsi Challenge because I think when people are planning ahead of time, this is not a subtle difference, my friends. This is not like, I wonder if it did improve my week or not. No, you will feel it.

it will be unmistakably different. This is not like when you go to the gym in the first like month or two, you can't even see the difference. This is like you see it right away. So I would just say if this feels like it's in your leverage zone and you want to commit, don't just do a week, you know, commit to a month, set aside the time, make it a recurring calendar appointment, defend that time, show up.

I can tell you week one, you're gonna feel it. And by the time you get to week four, you're just gonna, the results are gonna be manifest. You're gonna say, I'm gonna keep doing this because I don't want to go back to the old way that I used to feel.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (54:40)

God, yes. Yes, yes, yes. And I want to double down on what you said, which is add it to your calendar. If I could say one thing before, right now, pull out your calendar and mark the time. When are you going to do it? Your work calendar. If you work, put it on your work calendar. When are you going to plan your week in advance? whatever your circumstances, it needs to be on your calendar when you're going to do this. Set aside that time.

right now and start trying this thing because I absolutely agree with Demir. you're going to feel the difference in the way that you show up in the world. I don't want you to think that you're going to do this and suddenly life is going to be Suddenly there's less on your to do list. That's not you might notice that effect because you're actually getting stuff done so that that you very well could see this. But the biggest difference is the difference in the feeling.

and the overwhelm and the anxiety, the way that you show up in the world is going to change from the first time that you start doing this. And I think you'll find out why. I mean, I've been doing this for 13 years straight, consecutively, never missed a week. And Demir, how long has it been for you?

Demir (55:45)

It's funny, it's really, it's like 12, 13 years, something like that. It's really close actually.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (55:52)

Yeah, so you're once you start, you're like, wow, this is like the best addiction you could possibly have. I love this good feeling, and I'm addicted to this good feeling of having planned my week. So mark your calendar, please, and then try it. By the way, you don't have to be a pro. The first time you go to the gym, you don't look good doing all that stuff. You don't have six pack abs and you're not ripped. So same thing with the calendar. Just show up and do it. It's like a workout. Show up. You do this every week. You get better and better at it. And then pretty soon you'll be on.

talking to other people about this because only 0.8 % of people do this and that you need to be that friend who's like, you know, listen, this is good.

Demir (56:27)

Brian, I

love that you said that because one of our core ethos at Lifehack is we want to play games that we can't lose, right? There's certain games you can't lose and planning a week is one of these. You can try to message, just do it and be like, I'm going to do the, I'm going to try to follow these steps and I'll do it the worst way possible. You cannot screw this up because anytime you ask, you take a look at the calendar, you're benefiting. Anytime you take a look at your task list, you're benefiting. Anytime you set priorities and think about priorities, you benefit. You cannot not

benefit from doing this. So instead of thinking, ⁓ will I get this right? Or will I get it wrong? You little apple polishing a plus people out there. I know you right now. Like this is so like, wow, this is a game I can't lose. I can I can sleepwalk through this and get a benefit.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (57:14)

Yeah, for sure. Well, Demir, here's what I love. I'm sad that it took an epic life experience to get you doing this, but I love that you wrote this book and you're out here doing this and you've got your community and you're putting this word out there because God, there needs to be more people who are helping people with this. This is this. This is step one for a lot of people. got to do.

this. So I love, love, love that you've you've dedicated your life to this and that you're doing this. So thanks for doing that. And thanks for being on the show and sharing some of that with us.

Demir (57:45)

Thanks, man.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (57:45)

Now for those people who might want to get in touch with you or find out more about you, where should they go?

Demir (57:51)

Yeah, it really just depends on how you like to absorb more of this content. So the book is in written form and the book goes and dives deeper into the methodology. So you can get that on Amazon. There's an audio book of it that I read myself. So if you don't like my voice, then don't listen to the audio book version. And there's also a free masterclass on our site, lifehackmethod.com, where you could go get sort of a video training on this for free. you know, pick your pleasure.

Brian Nelson-Palmer (58:16)

There you go. And I'll have the link to those in the notes for you. So check that out below. You can click and go right through. And for you tuning in, think about someone in your life who struggles with this topic. Maybe it's a coworker or a colleague or a friend who you've had this conversation about overwhelm or that kind of thing. And maybe it's somebody you haven't talked to in a while. Would you share this episode specifically with them? Because

I know that Demir and I would love to know that our conversation helped someone who needed to hear this. And we would love to be your excuse to reconnect with that person too. also if you want more of the productivity insights beyond just this podcast, my email subscribers get access to everything that I create. So come join the email list if you haven't already, but more than anything, I love sharing productivity gladiator with you because

Together, these productivity skills are gonna change your life. That's a wrap.

Brian Nelson-Palmer
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