What If There Were Only 20 Hours In A Day?

A cool strategy to redistribute your work day into other areas of your life.

On today’s episode Russell talks about receiving advice from his life coach about shaving a couple hours off his work schedule each day.

Here are some fun things you will hear in this episode:

• Why Russell thinks he should be able to get the same amount of work done in a 20 hour day as he would in a 24 hour day.
• Why his life coach recommends cutting two work hours out of his schedule everyday.
• And how Russell thinks these changes will go.

So listen below to hear Russell’s plan of getting the same amount of work done in less hours.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”

Hey everyone. It’s another early morning day for me today. I had my accountability call with me coach, Carl, today, which was kind of exciting. I learned some cool stuff. I’m heading in to the gym, and I wanted to jump on and do a quick podcast because I thought what I learned today was pretty profound. I hope it will help a lot of you guys, too.

All of us, as entrepreneurs, have this horrible, horrible problem of working too much. I’m not sure if you guys are the same way, but I’m guessing you probably are [laughs], and it’s interesting. Carl – one of the reasons why I wanted him to be my accountability coach is he used to work the 9-to-5, five days a week, like all of us, and then he started cutting out Fridays, and then he started cutting out every other week and literally, right now he works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every other week, so he works eight days a month right now. He’s making more money than he ever was working the whole time, right? Today his big challenge to me was, “Hey, Russell, you need to start shifting your work habits and what you’re doing.” It was interesting.

He said that, “Do you think that if God took the day, and instead of making it twenty-four hours, he made it thirty hours, would you get more stuff done?” I was like, “Probably not. Maybe a little bit, but not a ton more.” He said, “Okay, well what if we went the other direction. Instead of having twenty-four hours in a day, he cut it down to twenty hours a day? Do you think you would get less stuff done?” and I was like, “No, I think we’d still be able to get everything done in the same amount of hours. We’d be able to jam it in. A lot of times, when you have less time, you get more stuff done.”

He was like, “Well what if we did that to your work day? Right now, what time do you usually leave the office?” I said, “Oh, about six.” He said, “Let’s shave it off so that every day, you start leaving the office at four? Do you think that you could do that?” I’m like, “I guess I could.” He said, “What do you do from four to six, anyway?” I’m like, “I don’t know – just stuff?” He said, “I bet if you cut those things out, all of the stuff you could get done prior to four. At four o’clock, you have to turn your computer off, and you had to leave the office.” We went through the whole process, and he committed me to doing that, which is kind of fun, so I’m excited to start trying that out today.

The next thing was he was like, “What about Fridays, man? What do you do on Fridays?” I was explaining. I explained what I do, and he said, “Friday’s kind of dead day, then, right?” I’m like, “Well I get stuff done, but, yeah, it’s not as productive usually,” and he’s like, “What if you just jammed all of your Friday stuff in to Friday morning, and then every Friday at noon you left and took that last half of the day off? What do you think would happen?” I said, “Probably not a lot. I don’t think I’d lose out on too much stuff.” So he kind of committed me to that. So I am shaving two hours a day off of my work day, and then I’m going to shave half a day off of my Fridays, and just see what happens, and my guess is that the world’s not going to come to an end. I’m excited to find out [laughs].

I want you guys to think about that as well for your life. All of us don’t have enough time – enough time for your family, enough time for your church, enough time for all of the different pieces you’re having, but we spend so much time at the office working. So I’m going to try to shave off those two hours and put it into use in other things in my life that are out of balance and see what happens. I’m guessing, I’m not sure yet, but I’m guessing that everything else will just fall in to the right spots. So I’m going to try it. I want to encourage you guys to try it as well.

I remember one time I was listening to this old cassette course I bought from Jay Conrad Levinson, Jay Abraham, Chet Holmes – I can’t remember who all. It was called “Guerilla versus Gorilla”, and it was awesome. One of the concepts I learned in there, Jay Conrad Levinson was saying that people have habits – a lot of us will kick our business and work eighty hours a week, and we’re going to work so that eventually we can launch whatever, and then we can cut down to twenty hours a week. He said that what he’s found is that whatever your habits are when you start will be your habits forever. If you want to live a lifestyle where you work twenty hours a week, you have to start working twenty hours a week from day one, otherwise you’ll just never get there. It will become a habit. I thought that was interesting as well.

Anywho, that is my game plan to start shaving off some time and redistribute that in other parts of my life that are a little out of balance right now and see what it’s going to do overall. I’m fired up. I’m excited. I recommend you guys test out the same thing. Right now I’m at the gym. I’m going to go get tough, and it’ll be fun [laughs]. I appreciate you guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.