Olympic Lesson: Take Care of Little Steps for Big Results

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Get specific about using your time intentionally. Plan a schedule that lets you address key priorities and which you’ll keep, regardless of inconvenient circumstances.

  • Identify what you need to do.
  • Refine your to-do list so you don’t spread yourself too thin and you can make real progress on your priorities.
  • Plan your time strategically, write it down, and follow it.

Related: Olympic Lesson: Leave Nothing to Chance

Transcript:

We’ve got to move! We’ve got less than five minutes to finish this post.

It’s Olympic time, and during this season, I’m hyper aware of my time management. I trained for 13 years to swim a two-minute backstroke event, and I won my Olympic medal by 4/100 of a second. . .

Time, for me, is hugely critical, and the reason I’m so aware of it, especially around the Olympic Games, is because those 4/100 of a second weren’t just decided on the day of my race. They came from time-blocked days, time-blocked weeks, months, and years—knowing what I had to get done and having a time allocation through each day, specifically dedicated to taking care of the details vital to producing a medal-winning swim.

People often ask me about my regular training day. It was very simple. I was up at 4:30 in the morning. I’d be at the pool by 5:00. I would swim from 5:00 till 7:00. Home, breakfast, bed. I was back up by 9:30. Light snack. To the gym by 10:00. I would lift weights from 10:00 till 12:00. Home, lunch, bed. I’d be back up by 2:00. I’d be at the pool by 2:30. I’d stretch, knock out 1000 sit ups, stretch again, in the water by 3:30. Swim from 3:30 to 5:30, sometimes 6:00. Go home, eat dinner, and go to bed. And that was my day! That’s the day of an Olympic athlete.

Oftentimes when people hear that schedule when I’m speaking, I can see some audience members sigh. When I ask them what strikes them or stands out about that day, they’ll tell me, it sounds hard, it sounds tough, and it was. But, it was also time-blocked. Nothing was done by accident. While I couldn’t guarantee exactly how I was going to finish that race, or even where my goal time of two minutes might place me—I couldn’t control that—but I could control what I did for my time-blocked day.

When I’m talking with advisors, and I ask them what they see as their biggest challenge, they will say things like finishing off a meeting strongly (and I’ve included the link from two weeks ago where I spoke about doing that). They might say it’s about language to use when asking for referrals. However, when I ask them to tell me what they’re practicing, they often admit they’re not really practicing anything.

You’ve got to get specific and then allocate a certain amount of time each day for those particular tasks you want to master. It’s not magically going to happen. And it doesn’t just happen on great days. I didn’t keep that training schedule only when days were going well. It meant keeping that same schedule when the power had gone off in the pool overnight, and I was now going into really cold water. It meant keeping that schedule when there was a party next door that went on till 2:00 in the morning. My alarm clock wasn’t getting changed. I knew I was going to get up tired at 4:30 in the morning. And so, the ideal routine doesn’t just happen on ideal days. That’s where the discipline comes in: to make sure, regardless of the day, regardless of the environment, you take care of the priorities that matter most, and you do that within those pre-set, unaltered time blocks.

To do this most effectively,

  1. You must know what you need to do. Identify what you need to work on.

  2. Refine your to-do list. Don’t spread yourself too thin, trying to take on ten or twelve different things, and think covering every single base out there is going to help.

  3. Execute. Write down a time-blocked week. What does your ideal week look like? If you prospect better in the mornings, that’s where you allocate the prospecting time blocks. If you dial in with people more effectively in the afternoons for meetings, that’s where you have your meetings scheduled. If you need to do video posts to put up on LinkedIn, know when to do those through the week when you’re going to feel freshest. And don’t just do one—do two or three of them.

Some days, I walk out out of my office and comment to my wife, “I got so much done today! It’s amazing! Once I time block my day and focus on it, I can’t believe how much stuff I get done!” And she tells me I should listen to this guy that talks about this quite a bit sometimes. My point is, I’m a work in progress. I can point to winning an Olympic medal, and some people think I’ve got everything dialed in. Not so—it’s still a challenge. I get it—there’s always something or someone screaming for our undivided attention. But you’ve got to have that schedule put down, and you’ve got to look at it and realize, if I take care of these little steps, the big results are bound to follow.

I look forward to bringing you another Distraction-Proof Advisor Idea next week.