EXTREME

PRODUCTIVITY
BLUEPRINT

with Dan Kennedy

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 2011/Glazer-Kennedy Insiders Circle LLC

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Governed by Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure

Agreement
Reproduction, Re-Sale or Disclosure Prohibited

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Notes

Introduction: Dan Kennedy presents the Extreme Productivity Blueprint, which

focuses on the barriers that prevent most people from being super successful.
He then discusses ways to make sure youre squeezing everything you can out
of every moment.
Dan: Were going to talk about the process of extreme improvement of
productivity and the first thing I would say about it is that we mostly talk about it
as being a time management issue.

But the truth be told, its mostly not a time management problem, its mostly an
insufficient motivation problem. Its mostly not sufficient drive, determination,
and reason. My original mentor said the number one reason there arent more
millionaires in America is because most people havent come up with enough
reasons to do whats necessary to be a millionaire. Same things are true with
being productive.
Most people are just not sufficiently motivated to do everything thats
necessary to be super productive.
This is from Harvey Firestones autobiography from 1926, which was titled Men
in Rubber, which had a much different connotation in 1926 than it would now.
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Heres a couple of things that are significant. The first story is: I was on the
hunt day and night for men to buy our stock. It was no easy matter to sell stock
in a company that had no assets except on a patent on which it was losing
money. For years I never saw a man with money without turning over in my
mind how I could transfer some of his money into our stock.
What hes just described is specific ambition. That was Harvey Firestone every
minute of every day. If extreme productivity is your ambition, thats how you
have to approach that too. Youre on the hunt night and day; youre trying to
control every single minute, every interruption, every person, every everything.
Second then, part of the game plan is self-awareness. Tyson used to have two
people whose job was to follow him around all the time; walk behind him and
say, Youre the man Mike, youre the man. This goes a long way to explaining
Tysons current financial position. What would be more useful is having
someone walk around behind you all the time with a baseball bat and every
time you were acting in a way grossly incongruent with your stated goals, just
haul off and whack you.
Were not going to do that as a practical matter, so weve got to do it to
ourselves mentally. And we have to do it on a real-time basis, not a
retrospective basis. The time to determine whether or not your behavior is
congruent with your stated ambitions is not at the end of the week, not at the
end of the month, not at the end of the calendar quarter, not in Decemberits
real time minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. What you cant measure
you wont be able to manage. We have to have measurement benchmarks of
our productivity and of our congruent behavior.
Again, if you want an extreme result youve got to go to the extreme. Youve
got to be very aware of leverage, value, use of time. Like on the dress thing,
today if you were going to meet with somebody who might be worth a million
dollars to you, would you look like you are? No, no, of course not. You might
run into the guy in the checkout line in Wal-Mart thats going to be worth a
million bucks to you and you cant be looking like youve been working on your
car, that doesnt work.

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The other awareness is what you are permitting to happen around you, with
you, its getting in your way, and kill it. If you arent willing to defend your
productivity violently, if necessary, what exactly are you willing to defend?
Somebody is screwing up your productivity, how tolerant of that are you? First
of all, how aware of it are you? Then, secondly, how tolerant are you of it? I will
suggest to you that there is a direct correlation between high income and low
tolerance for anything that is screwing up ones productivity; something they
are doing to themselves or something other people are doing to them.

Third, very specific decisions over how you are going to control these things.
What you do, where you do it, if you do it, who you do it with, and how you do
it. Most importantly here is the who.
I want to make it very clear the very first thing on your job list is to facilitate my
maximum productivity at my best mental attitude so I can be productive. Thats
your job. Thats who you want around you and there is no neutral, spouse,
staff, friend, there aint no neutral, theyre either helping or theyre hurting.
When you talk about going home and getting to work and making things
happen, theres eight specific types of actions. One is immediate. Thats start.
General Schwarzkopf, who I was on programs with for quite some time in his
leadership talk, he always said its better to get started in the wrong direction
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than it is not to get started. Because we can fix the direction, we cant fix the
not starting. And hes right about that. One of my premises is Ive got four or
five things as a result of my being here that I want to do. I know that the best
odds of them ever getting done is if I start something having to do with them
immediately, immediately. No matter how ill prepared you may be to follow
through, start matters.
So Carville says the best time to plant an oak tree was 25 years ago, the
second best time is now. Thats true of everything. The best time, if you cant
do it last week, which you couldnt because you didnt, so the next best time is
now. There is enormous power to starting.
Second is visible. Puts you on the spot and conveys certain things to others so
visible actions matter from two directions.
Third, renegade millionaire principle simultaneous, not sequential and you
really ought to watch yourself on this. Its hard not to slip back because youve
been conditioned since birth that everything ought to be sequential: step one,
step two, step three. A then B, and walk before you run, first grade, second
grade, third grade, blue badge before you get red badge, etc. Youve been
conditioned since birth to do everything sequentially. Theres two problems with
that. One, thats not how high performers and rich people do anything. If youre
trying to get extreme results thats not what they did; they run around and make
all kinds of messes and start 500 things at the same time, thats what they do.
They live in perpetual controlled purposeful chaos, thats how they live.
Secondly, the problem with sequential behavior is that in many cases nobody
ever completes the sequence. Financially heres what everybody thinks, heres
how all poor people think about money; they think Ive got to get a job, then Ive
got to get my basic stuff taken care of, Ive got to buy a house, Ive got to get
some furniture, Ive got to have some appliances, etc. If Im making enough
money to take care of rent, car payment, movies, beer, stuff Ive got to do, my
iPhone, my cable TV, which all of that adds up to 30 bucks here, 30 bucks
there, before you know it youre a trillion dollars in deficit. Theyve got to get all
that taken care ofthen if Im making enough money, Ill start saving some
money. When Ive saved up enough money to make it worthwhile, Ill start
worrying about investing the money. They never get there doing it that way.
Never, neverin part because nobody ever has any money left over. Nobody
ever has any time left over, either. And if youve got any lying around, time or
money, that you have left over, that youre not doing anything with, somebody
will take it.
So simultaneous, not sequential. Massive, not dinky. You put a lot of stuff in
motion all at the same time with urgency.

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Everybody understands that they perform more under urgency. Ive always
been amused in pro football at the two-minute drill. These guys havent been
able to move the ball for two hours past the fifty and all of a sudden, even with
no possibility of winning the game, in the two-minute drill they come down and
screw up the spread and I lose a thousand dollars. How come nobody plays
the two-minute drill every two minutes?

Congruent-- is your behavior congruent with your stated specific ambition?

Synergistic, so were looking for leverage. How can we make the same piece of
work do more than one thing? How can we make the same relationship do
more than one thing? How many ways can you get productive benefit out of
each act? Out of each conversation? Out of each relationship?

Heres your most common productivity drain holes. Number one doing the
wrong work altogether. A lot of people dont know where their money comes
from so theyre doing low money work. Its surprising how many people dont
know where the money is in their business. They may have opinions, they have
ideas, but they do not have facts. And that means more often than not they are
doing the wrong work.
I start asking math questions. How many calls? How much is it costing us to
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generate a call? What is each call coming into the office costing you? Thats
simple math, ad budget, PR budget, everything youre spending out there in
the marketplace divided by the number of calls you get-- now we know how
much each call cost. My next question is conversion percentage. How many of
these calls get converted to appointments? Which obviously tells us how much
it cost to get an appointment. And then how many appointments turn into
clients? Which gets us to cost per sale, which is where we want to get. Whats
your call-to-appointment success rate? What are we doing about the people we
dont book appointments with? Now theres the big opportunity.
Second big productivity suck, your environments. For me its donuts. Candidly,
like anything else, if I made that my lifes work, and dedicated all my mental
and emotional resources to creating disinterest in or aversion to donuts I know
how to do that. And I know the NLP stuff, I know the pressure points stuff, I
know the visualization stuff, but heres a truth for all of you: no matter how
much willpower and self-discipline and motivation you have, there is a cap.
Youve only got so much and what you choose to spread it around on and use
it on ought to be important. For me this is too difficult a hill to climb, it will suck
up too much of those resources, and take them away from more important
things so its easier just not to put myself in a Dunkin Donuts. Its easier for me
to just try and stay out of the environment. I just try not to go where they are
right in front of me.
Your environments are full of temptations; everybody has their own problem
with this. For you it might be your iPhone, for me its donuts. Youve got to
know what it is, youve got to be in a place that is conducive to what it is that
you want to accomplish.
There are now resources for your internet addiction. Im serious. There is a
thing now called Rescue Time, which is an online time management tool which
you can pre-engineer to nudge you back to work. When it catches you at
YouTube, you can tell it only let me be at YouTube for three minutes and then
shock my testicles. Thats actually how it ought to be read in my personal
opinion, but it doesnt to that. It just shuts down YouTube and beeps at you or
something. Or you can block the internet altogether for a pre-set period of time
so you can manage to actually work on your computer without running around
the internet.

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Three, poor undisciplined work habits. Lack of preparation, all sorts of people
show up unprepared. They get on the phone unprepared. They go to meetings
unprepared. They go to conferences unprepared. Who am I trying to meet? Go
to their website or their Facebook site, get their picture so I can find them when
Im in a big crowd.
I have more, but these are my three basic schedules. I have an official
calendar that we let people see. We dont let the whole world see it, but we let
people I work with see. I have weekly to-do list, monthly and daily and most
importantly stuff thats assigned to a date with start and stop times. Stop time
real important. Most people have a start time for a call, but they dont have an
end time for a call. They have a start time for somebody coming in their office
to meet with them, but they dont have a stop time for somebody coming in
their office to meet with them. And then the daily script, heres how the day is
going to go hour by hour by hour, minute by minute by minute by minute. If Im
doing copy writing today and Im doing a sales letter for you and Ive allocated
9 to 11 for it, it has to be because something else is scheduled to start at
11:01.

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Well finish with some cool rules for you.

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Heres my approach, the three biggest things to extreme productivity. Number
one if Im going to go to work, by God Im going to work. I want to use every
minute, I want to squeeze every drop of juice I can squeeze out of it. Ive done
it at everything Ive ever done. Speaking engagement? Man, if Im going to go
speak Im going to scheme. What can I do before that engagement to make it
as productive as possible? What am I going to do during it? What am I going to
do after it? Can I squeeze in a meeting with somebody else? Scheme, scheme,
scheme, scheme, scheme.
The script is, everything by appointment with yourself. Lunch break, theres a
timeframe for that on my daily scripts. Theres a start, theres a stop. And then
theres another thing starting. Tight time allotments.
Thank you very much.
End of presentation.

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THE BLUEPRINT
WORKSHEET
(1): (specific) AMBITION: Define the objective
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(2): AWARENESS

(Enemies & Obstacles)

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(3): DECISION(S)

(at least 1 for each enemy/obstacle)

(PRECISE: WHAT, WHEN)
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(4): ACTION(S)

(DO/DELEGATE/DOING/DONE)
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