The 3-Phase Productivity System

Today, I want to help you become a lot more productive in what you do.

The Baseball Analogy

Behind me is a baseball diamond where a lot of kids play.  The reason I want to share this with you and the reason for this baseball diamond back here is that a lot of entrepreneurs approach their businesses and the way they work without much thought.

They kind of just go, go, go, grind and hustle. That seems to be the tagline of the day. Just work until you’re dead, and the sooner the better type of thing.

Listen, I’m all for hard work. I think there’s a time and place to plant the seeds and get to work, but that should not  be the majority of what you do day in and day out for the rest of your life.

A little while ago, I put together a new thinking tool called the 3-Phase Productivity System, which was initially inspired by Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach. They may have a different type of entrepreneurial time system that didn’t necessarily work for me, but I modified it a little bit, put my own spin on it, and this is what I wanted to share with you here.

Before I share that with you, think about it this way. The reason I’m sharing this baseball diamond is because athletes get this, even if they’re not aware of this. If you probably have played sports at some point in your life, high performance or otherwise, you will know that it’s impossible to have high performance as an athlete every single day of the week. You can’t perform, you can’t be on top of your game playing games every single day.

Think about football. There’s one game a week. In soccer, there’s one game a week, maybe a Champions League, so let’s call it two games a week.

Baseball might the exception. It seems like they play all the time, but for the most part, athletes cannot play a game every single day of their life because what would happen if they did? They would burn out.

That’s why there’s not many pro athletes beyond 35 years old because their bodies simply can’t maintain that level of intensity, stress and training and so forth. That’s the first example.

Periodized Training Analogy

The second example is if you have any background in strength and conditioning, you’ll probably be very well-versed in this concept known as periodization.

Periodization essentially means that we have a build-up of weak, so we start here, we build it up, we build it up, and then we bring it back down so our body recovers, and then we super-compensate to a higher level than we were at before, but if we keep going and going and going and going and going and going, that leads to burnout.

We have all these great analogies from the world of athletics and sports, but very often in business, we forget about that. We think that, “I’m going to work 10 hours a day every single day. It’s all going to be good.” It doesn’t happen.

I want you to think about the way you approach your time like an athlete. It’s very similar to, think of it like intermittent fasting for work. You don’t have to be eating all the time. You don’t have to be working all the time. There’s a lot of benefits intermittent fasting on the body. There’s a lot of benefit to not doing anything for your business as well.

In my book, the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet, I talked about this, I had this little rhyme. It said, “Some days high, some days low, some days yes, some days no,” as it pertained to caloric intake. Think of it that way with respect to your work output, your mental capacity on a day-to-day basis. Some days high, some days low, some days yes, some days no.

Let’s talk through this 3-Phase Productivity System.

3-Phase Productivity System

We have three phases. There’s three different components to how we’ll want to look at our time.

Phase 1

Number one is we have produce. Produce is, think of the athlete playing the game. It’s Friday night lights. It’s the big game. That is produce. Then we have prep. Prep is the training that gets you ready for the game. Then finally, we have pause. Pause is, as the name implies, pause. Do nothing. Rest. Recover. We’ve got produce, prep, and pause.

Now, let’s take that to the world of business and our work. When you’re producing, and everyone’s going to be a little different, producing are the activities that are going to employ your unique genius.

Now, for instance, for some people, that might mean speaking on stage, but actually I’m going to make an argument here that, for the most part, all of us, our unique genius, our produce activities are going to be some form of communication.

This video and blog is an example of a produce activity in my life where I’m going to get in front of a camera or a mic, and I’m going to share a message. I’m going to share my ideas with my audience. That’s an example of a produce activity.

Now, the cool thing and the simple way to think about this for you is the vast majority of produce activities in your life require no Internet. If you’re on the Internet, unless you’re selling over the phone or on Skype or DMing someone on Instagram and enrolling a client, the vast, I would say 95% of your produce activities should have nothing to do with the Internet.

We’re talking about sharing ideas. I’m creating a video right now. This is not live on the Internet yet. Once that’s done, then we can move into the prep phase.

Phase 2

There’s a lot of different activities that can fall under the prep phase. I’m not going to go into them here, but with prep, think about taking this video and now getting it online or giving it to the right people to bring into fruition. The prep is kind of the planning, is the filling in the gaps between the produce and the actual execution, live, if you will, of getting it all done.

Phase 3

Then finally, we have pause. Now, pause is, again, it can take a number of different forms. It could take the form of doing nothing, like literally laying in the grass here and looking at the sky or taking a break.

For instance, on Wednesdays, for me, I have a pause, which basically means I stop working at noon.

From Noon until I go to sleep, I don’t do anything work-related, and I know that’s very, very tough to even comprehend let alone execute, but I do my very best.

We want to fill that time with activities or nothingness that really just removes us from the business, removes us from thinking in terms of the real heavy output and grinding and hustling and being on our phone, being on our computer.

These are the times where we want to step away from all that because like with periodization, it’s the recovery phase that helps us bounce back stronger. If we don’t have enough pause in our lives, we are going to burn out.

That’s the produce, prep, and pause, 3-Phase Productivity System.

Setting up Your 3-Phase Productivity System

If that makes sense to you, give this a thumbs up, share with someone who might enjoy this as well, and if you need help really identifying what you should be doing in your business that actually moves the needle the most, then just send me a message. Just be like, “Hey, man. I’m totally lost. I don’t even know what to focus on.”

Let’s have a quick chat. Let’s get on the phone if we need to, and we’ll walk you through how we can perhaps move you from where you are to where you want to be because the reality is there’s probably a lot of things you’re doing in your business that you probably shouldn’t be doing or not doing at the level that you’re doing them at, and there’s other things you’re maybe not even aware of that you should be doing that you’re not doing at all.

We want to get clear on that because a lot of times, breakthroughs in your business and your life can come from a really simple shift, and if we’re not even aware of what that might be, well, we’re not aware of it, and we can’t make that happen.

Anyways, I hope this video finds you well. If you want help with this, just send me a quick message, and let’s have a chat. Talk to you soon.