Death By 1,000 Cuts: How You Waste Time

hey what's going on everyone as Sam Evans here and I just wanted to make this quick video for you today called death by a thousand cuts and specifically why productivity is death by a thousand cuts and what I mean by that is that you know when people are trying to be productive and when people are trying to get things done and deliver projects and ship things and you know really build something great or build a great business whatever it is you know the thing that the thing that

really trips people up is that they think it's going to be something big that comes in and steals all of their time or makes them not productive but there isn't really what happens instead what happens is it's a thousand little things and each of them all look like ah when it pops up into your day you're like oh this is just something small it'll only take five minutes or all this will only take one minute or 30 seconds and you know it's these things that really get us when it comes to

productivity and time management and that's why you know I call it death by a thousand cuts because it's not one big like dagger that gets you it's just these little paper cuts that are just getting you over time and the end result is that you know the the thousand little paper cuts it just kills you in a kills your productivity and right now I'm in my new place out here in Venice Beach in California you can kind of see the you know the ocean through there and right

now I'm sitting at my temporary desk and I can show you it it's an Ikea disc with a forty dollar plastic drawer set from Amazon and you know we just made the move out here to California to Venus and I'm gonna be doing another video soon where I you know give you a tour of the place and also explain why I moved here and you know the rationale and logic and reason behind that decision and everything but for now I'm not going to give you a full tour or anything because

you know we really don't even have any furniture and we're waiting on a track to bring our stuff from New York over here to Venice Beach and it's not going to be done until like four or five weeks from now and so it's not really worth giving you a tour in the state it's currently in but you know making this move from New York to Venice it's really shown me an important lesson and that is that you know you your environment and the systems and routines and processes that

you have established they are crucial to your productivity and what I thought you know I've gotten quite productive in New York with with my company and everything and I started to think I'm a really I'm a really productive person and you know it doesn't matter what environment you throw me into I'll be productive I'll get things done and so I I just moved over here to Venice thinking that that's what's gonna happen but then as soon as I arrived here and we moved into this

place you know my productivity just fell off a cliff you know I everything kind of is ground to a halt and I was like shocked I was like oh my god what's going on here and really what it was is you know my environment wasn't set up the right way to to really make me as productive as I was back in New York and what I learned from this experience was that you know it's not so much an individual that's productive it's more you know the individual and their environment and

their routine and you I can't say which one's more important you know the individual the environment or the routine I I think they're all really as important as each other because I was very productive over there you moved me over here into a bed and we're not a bad environment but you know into a different environment and you know I'm not as productive and really what happened there is that there's all these small little things that you take for granted and you don't you don't realize

a dear that you sit up earlier that really builds a foundation for you to be really productive and what I mean is you know just simple things like the internet connection how fast is it and then also having like a charger and not just a charger where you work but you know if there's multiple places where you take your computer during the day or whatever then you should have a charger in both rooms because what happens is you might move room you might be working and then

notice that your battery's going flat now you've got to get up go to the other room to get the charger and bring it back again now that might seem like that's just a small thing that might only take you 1 minute 2 minutes but like I said productivity and time management it's it's death by a thousand cuts so all of these small things just creep up and the end result is that you can't get anything done because you have to make all these small micro decisions

all the time and you know it goes deeper than this it's not just about like having a fast internet connection it's not just about having a charge or in every room one of the biggest things that I see that is just so tragic for most people is you know just food and eating and to you know to think about what am I gonna have for breakfast and then have to go out and get that and then to think oh where am I going to get a coffee to have to look that up and then go and get a coffee and then maybe

wait in line or whatever and then you know to think about what am I going to have for lunch going out and getting lunch probably waiting in line again coming home eating it and then dinner it happens all over again and food is one of the biggest like things that crushes productivity it's because you know we need to eat like constantly throughout the day we need to have like breakfast lunch and then dinner alright and that's three things that happen every single

day and if every single time one of these things you know you need a meal you have to think what am I going to have to eat and then go out and get something and then bring it back and then eat it like before you know it you've got no time left in the day because if you have to you know if you've got a slow internet connection you have to think in the middle of the day I'm gonna go get this charger from this other room and then if you have to go out and get breakfast lunch and

dinner you know just doing all of those things that has probably cut your productivity by I would say 75% you know it's it's not just a small thing here it's a massive like it's a massive performance killer and why it is and this is one of the reasons why people don't understand this when they think about something when they think about doing a task let's say it's going out to get lunch they think oh they will only take me 30 minutes but it's not that it's it's so

it's so much more demanding than that because if you have to think about it it's using mental bandwidth and that means that when you come back from lunch you know you've got less mental bandwidth to commit to to your work and so it's draining that and more than that if you've got these small things that pop up during the day it doesn't matter if it just takes one minute to go and get like a charger and then come back it if you're in the middle of some task where you were deep in the zone and

focused and concentrated on something then it doesn't matter if the thing only takes one minute to do it's gonna take you half an hour to get back into that same state of mind and into that same depth of zone that you were in so these small trivial things that look like they only take one minute two minutes or whatever they actually end up costing you thirty minutes an hour or more and so by the time we've got like a breakfast at lunch or dinner finding a charger a slow internet

connection you know pretty much we don't have really any thing of the day left and our mental bandwidth is so drained that even with the small little spots we do have left to applied our energy there isn't much energy to apply and so the way that people would have noticed and the purpose of this video here what I've noticed is that the way people look at time is wrong and what they do is they just look at a task and they think this is going to take a minute but what they

don't take into account is that it's gonna take them half an hour to get back into the same gear they need to be in to keep going on the projects they're working on and it might take you know longer than an hour for example you know when I'm creating content let's say I've got to create some some slides or some videos or some training for my online courses at consulting comm if I'm in the middle of there and then I get distracted from from something and I have to come back it might take me up to

one hour to get back to that same depth of concentration and focus and so you get my point you really need to protect your time and what you really need to watch out for is the small things it's remember the saying like death by a thousand cuts it's a perfect way of illustrating it and I actually got this saying from the financial world we're in a lot of training programs where they teach people how to save money and how to become like financially free they say

the same thing death by a thousand cuts the end why they say that is because it's not big expenses that really people it's the small things you know it's just the it's just the lunch out every day it's the override here and there it's going out on Saturday and having a few drinks there and it's buying you know a new t-shirt or new pair of shoes there and it it each one of these small and individual purchases they don't really look like they're going to do much but

the sum total of all of these things is devastating and it's not just finances that work like this it is your time too and your time works like this you know I think time is better suited to the saying death by a thousand cuts then money is because you know people are shocking with their time they don't protect it and they don't treat it like the rare resource that it really is and you know a lot of people they're out there all the time and they're worried about money but no one seems to really

be worried about time and to me time is more valuable than money you know money I have a lot of and can get a lot of but time I only have a finite amount and so you know really I encourage you to be more mindful of you know where your time goes and one thing that I recommend doing if you are not feeling very productive and if you're kind of getting frustrated and annoyed because you can't deliver on the projects that you want to deliver then one exercise a I highly

recommend is just called a hundred units of time and all you do is for one week you just track where your time goes so every single day you keep you chunk it out into thirty minutes and every time you do something you just write it down and you track from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to bed at night every day for seven days straight and track wheel time goes and then at the end of the week look back over that and then look at these different buckets that it goes

into and then you can create some buckets or some categories and then you can start to to work out as a percentage how much time do you spend doing all of these different things and once you're aware of where your time is going the the real trick to it is not to just try and become more efficient or more productive and the real trick is not to get more apps on your phone and it's not to you know get some to-do list software or anything like that that's the stupid

way to do it you know you don't try to do more you try to do less so the real masterful way of dealing with time once you've once you've been made aware of it and whe your time goes you just want to start eliminating the wasteful practices so just get rid of it there is nothing better than just eliminating something you know creating a system or a process or hiring someone or delegating it these are all things that aren't true fixes you know they're kind of just patches in putting a bandaid on

something but eliminating something this is gone it's eliminating things that's why I encourage you to do all the time you know once a month you should do this hundred units of time exercise just one week out of the month every single month see where your time's going identify the wasteful practices and eliminate them and then there's always going to be some sort of argument which is like oh but I have to do this or I have to post on snapchat or something and the truth is

you don't you know a lot of the things that people are doing that they think they have to do just aren't that important and the way to really determine whether something is important or not is whether you know you just it's a process of elimination let's say you know you're in business and you're helping somebody let's say you're helping plumbing businesses get customers right they say that's what you're doing now if we're eliminating things that you're doing in your

business and we're trying to find the point at which it becomes troublesome for your customer who is the plumber so if we start eliminating you know you're doing social media you doing all this different stuff it's not really going to affect the customer in he or she just is fine can business can continue as usual but the moment you start eliminating like delivering services to your clients or looking after your clients or you know delivering results to your clients or

actually marketing and selling to get new clients you know these things are mandatory these things must be done in order for the business to stay alive but all of the other things that aren't essential to that plumber being your customer they're not necessary and what you should do is just eliminate all of those things you know I didn't do I didn't do content up until really this year like January 2018 I've only just started doing YouTube videos once a week

and Instagram right it's been around for a long time I only started doing it in January 2018 and if you don't believe me just go to my Instagram profile to scroll back to the to the first ever post I did and it is January this year 2018 and so you know my point with this is that I was able to grow a successful business to the point that was making about 18 million a year that was at the stage last year like end of the year and this was done without having an

Instagram account I didn't even have the app on my phone I didn't have a snapchat account I don't have the app at all and I didn't use Facebook either and I only really logged into Facebook to just answer people's questions and my customer community and stuff but I didn't use it as a consumer I only used it as a producer and so I was able to grow my business by not doing those things and where this really gets people is there like a button I have to do this

you know I have to do this this is what I this is what has to be done and the truth is is that really one of the reasons that I was able to be you know make such massive jumps and grow to the size that my company is is because I ignored all of the stuff that everybody else is obsessed about I obsessed over getting results for my clients attracting clients and you know really looking after my clients and get as many of them as I could that was really where all of my time wind a

hundred percent and then when it came to you know things that were just perception like you know posting on social media and all this stuff I just didn't ignore it completely I eliminated it and that was actually one of the reasons why I was able to make such rapid progress by not doing that and so I encourage you when you're doing you know there's hundred units of time exercise and you're finding where all of your time goes when you spot these areas that is social media and things like

that or maybe it's creating content posting videos on YouTube or whatever I'm telling you it isn't mandatory but you might think well Sam why are you doing it now if it isn't if it isn't useful at all and I'm not saying it's not useful at all I'm saying it's not mandatory you know you don't have to do it to be successful I did it without doing that and there is a lot of other people who do it without doing that too now why did I start doing it this year there's a good question and the reason I

started doing it this year is because it helps you know if you are spending a lot of money on ads and if you've got a bunch of customers and if there's word-of-mouth and stuff out there buzzing around then it actually helps to have a little bit of a social presence and it helps to produce a little bit of content right now the key word here is it helps it isn't necessary but if you can you should do it and I wasn't in a position to be able to do it responsibly until January this

year and the reason why is because if I was creating content or doing social media then it would have been taking my time away from helping my customers and creating good training for them and also getting more customers now I'm not willing to make that trade-off I'm not willing to do less of what's most important to do more of something that isn't important it's mindless that's stupid moronic activity and so I only started doing the stuff that is helpful but not mandatory which is social media

content all that when I had hired and trained enough people in my team to cover all of those bases so that when I started doing this I wasn't taking away from that and that's the that's what I encourage you to do to ignore social media and all of this noise and all of this crap and focus on the main thing keep the main thing the main thing which is you know helping your customers with whatever it is that you're promised in in delivering amazing results amazing support you know nothing is more

important than adding value to your customers that is the main thing and if you're the best at that it doesn't matter what everything else is like you'll win you know at the end of the day when all is said and done the company and the business that delivers the most value to their clients wins regardless of whether they've got snapchat Instagram Facebook or whatever that is not relevant and so that's my point is you know don't get don'ts don't die from a thousand little cuts and look

at everything you know properly do that hundred units of time you exercise and eliminate all of those sources that are sucking your time dry and then try to have uninterrupted focus on the main things because when you put uninterrupted focus and when you channel it into those main areas that's when you really start moving the needle of your business you know there's putting putting focus and energy into these things is so explosive to your business but most people focus just gets bleed out into

all of these trivial things that isn't that important at all and I can't tell you the difference it makes in your business and in your life and in your finances and everything when you make this change it's hard to do because you know you've probably been trained to be all a DD in but when and it's going to be hard to try and channel that focus into the main things and you just have to put up with that resistance and you have to keep going against it and keep going against it until it breaks

and then the resistance will break and then you'll flow with this and it will be your new it'll be your new mode of operation it'll be your new norm and you have to keep working at it until it becomes the new norm and another really useful tip that I've got for you when it comes to you know eliminating time-sucking activities is decision-making and whenever you come to a decision in during your day or during your you know your life or any stage you want to ask yourself what is the

half-life of the stuff this decision what is the half-life of this decision and what I mean by that is you know if I make this decision how long is it gonna last for before I have to make this decision again so for example they say it's 12:30 on a Monday and I'm hungry and I need food and I have to make a decision where am I gonna get food from today and so I google it and I find a place then I go out I walk I go there and I get food I bring it back and I start eating and then I'm done

right that's how poor people think and the same decision keeps popping up the next day the next day the next day it pops up three times in one day and yet the person doesn't realize that they keep wasting all of this time thinking what I should get to eat when it's going to keep happening forever for the rest of their life and it's going to keep it's going to happen three times a day and yet this person never really thinks like oh maybe I should maybe I should make a better decision about this

maybe I should make a decision that's gonna last longer than four hours and so the half-life of that decision is really only four hours until you're hungry again right but what smart people do is and they make a decision once that fixes that problem and solves it for forever or if not for forever for a long time and let me give you an example when I noticed that you know food was taking a lot of time I decided to hire a chef and so I hired a chef and we got her trained

and everything and then you should order the groceries and all that and then after I'd eaten should even do the dishes just aims to end full stack covered everything from planning the meals buying the groceries putting them in the fridge putting them in the pantry cooking the meals cleaning everything up and doing the dishes and I made that one decision and at one decision took probably the same amount of time as it took to buy one meal right so with the same mental bandwidth and energy that it

takes to make one decision to get some food I found a chef who would make food for years and that's what she did she continued to you know make me lunch and dinner for you know for more than a year and it was honestly one of the best investments and productivity things I ever did in my entire life that one decision was worth millions of dollars even though it just seems so small like just hiring ship is worth a lot of money because it saved me so much time cumulatively and though these are the

things you want to think about is you know make sure that the decisions you make have a long half-life you know instead of thinking how can I just solve this in the short term start thinking how can I solve this so this decision never has to be made by me ever again and another way to do this is with your schedule and your routine and I see people all the time like they go to be it at different times in they wake up at different times and whenever you do that

you you can't really hold a schedule and you can't really plan out in advance because you don't really know like whether you can schedule something in for 9:00 a.m. on a Friday because you're not sure if you're going to be awake at 9:00 a.m. on a Friday and so you can't really plan and you can't schedule and the the real trick to this is to set standards and principles in routines and rules and what I mean by this is instead of having everything open and flexible

start bolting things down a bit and what this really does is when you create constraints it actually releases more productivity you know a lot of the time we have freedom from constraints and it's quite the opposite of what most people believe a lot of people believe are if I have just true freedom no schedule no calendar no routine then I'll be really productive but there's not just try and just try and operate but when you're doing that you're all over the place you're a miss and instead you

need to set some standards and have some discipline and so when I started doing this it changed my productivity immensely you know I started going to be able to live in a clock every night and then I started waking up at 6:50 in the morning every night and going to the gym at 7 o'clock in the morning pretty much every day five days a week over seven and when I really stuck to that it meant that I was able to schedule my days better I was able to schedule things well out in advance

because I knew when I was gonna be working and when I wasn't going to be working and it totally unlocked a lot of efficiency for me and so if you're an entrepreneur then I beat you you suffer from you know too much freedom and this is what happens because when you've got no constraints on you and when you're your own boss and you can kind of sit whatever limits you want for yourself sometimes you can have too much freedom and you just end up kind of in a tangle

in an amiss and what I recommend for you is to you know set some standards and some rules and then stick to them and stay on the rails you know really what we're doing here is we're kind of building like rails that we can stay on and when you stay on those rails you're able to just execute and get things done so much more efficiently than you would have without them and I didn't really experience this until I came here to Venice when my rails were were removed

you know my personal trainer it wasn't here our chef wasn't here and you know my desk and workspace is all different the internet was different you know everything was different and I didn't really have this realization until all of that was taken away and then I realized how helpful these rails really are and that's what I'm in the process of now is putting these rails back in place so I can get back to that optimum efficiency that I was at before so that's it for this video today I just

wanted to tell you watch out for you know those thousand little cuts it's those little things that get you it's those little things that are going to take you out and really consume all of your life without you either really being aware of it so if you liked this video just click that like button and also leave me something in the comment section below I'm gonna be reading these comments and replying to them so let me know what you think down there also if you if you

liked this video subscribe to my You Tube channel I release a blog video like this once every week and I also do customer interviews and Q&A calls and other things that might help you along your journey so thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next one soon