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📚 Hey, good evening!

You know how taking the “shortcut” sometimes ends up being the longest way, because you just do the job so poorly that you have you spend even longer going back and fixing your mistakes than you would have spent just doing it right in the first place?

Yeah…

No judgement here - I’ve been seduced by shortcuts in the past too.

Well today’s book breakdown is about 15,000 words, so reading it all the way through is something of a time commitment, but this book could save you literally years of your life.

In the end, reading the 15,000 words will be a massive shortcut.

The book is called No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by multimillionaire business genius Dan S. Kennedy, and I’ve got some of the best tactics and takeaways from that book here in this email.

I’ve also just updated my online course, Time Mastery, with a new video, which is also available to preview on YouTube. 

The vast majority of course content will always be behind the paywall (otherwise it wouldn’t be fair to paying members), but a few of the trainings can be seen on YouTube, including this one:

The BEST Productivity App That NOBODY Uses

I got a little fancy with the editing on this one - hope you like it!

I’ve also got another course bonus that will available for members of Time Mastery either tomorrow or the next day, with several more videos coming this week and next.

But here in this email, we’ve got some excellent advice from No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, which is the featured breakdown this week at the Stairway to Wisdom.

The breakdown itself is about 15,000 words, covering all the Key Ideas, Book Notes, Action Steps, and more.

It’s also free, by the way.

It’ll “only” take you about 57 minutes to read the whole thing, and in it, we’ll discover a radical approach to time management that will help us maximize profits (if you’re a business owner), and free up dozens of hours every single week (which applies to everyone)!

We’ll learn a formula for peak personal productivity, how to slay the Time Vampires bleeding us dry each day, and how to calculate what our time is really worth.

And we'll learn how to stay relentlessly focused on the main objective, which should always be your main objective.

You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this email so you can decide whether to check out the full one later.

Again, totally free.

I should actually say “free for right NOW,” because it’s going back behind the paywall very shortly.

Then it’s just for members only at the Stairway to Wisdom. 

Alright now, let’s attain some…

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This Book is For:

*Business owners who always seem to have more ideas than time available to implement them, and who are open to hearing about some rather extreme time management practices that might just change everything.

*People who feel completely overwhelmed by how much there is to do, how much the modern world expects of them, and how hard it is to make positive, lasting changes in their lives.

*High-performers and super-achievers who want to gain a competitive edge against a global system designed and optimized for stealing their attention and focus away from what will really make a difference in their lives and businesses.

*Anyone who is relentlessly bombarded by demands on their extremely limited time and attention and who are ready to protect their infinitely valuable time with the kind of bulletproof time management measures that are worthy of that value.

Summary:

This book could add years to your life, and that's not an exaggeration in the slightest. It'll certainly save you thousands of hours worth of the most precious natural resource in this universe: time.

Dan Kennedy is the multimillionaire author of an entire series of books for entrepreneurs, but this one can and probably should be read by just about everyone, if for no other reason than that Dan's one of the very few people I've encountered who truly and honestly - viscerally understands the true value of time.

He understands its supreme importance, its utter irreplaceability, and also, in the case of entrepreneurship, how to turn time into wealth. That's what this book is about. It's about more than "just" money though.

Dan's is a radical, obsessive approach to time management that may be your best defense against the relentless onslaughts of what he calls "Time Vampires" and the relentless demands on your time, focus, and attention that come with living in the modern world.

Simply put, he's a phenomenon. For starters, the guy almost exclusively communicates with his business clients via fax. This is because he found that way more thought tends to go into a fax, as opposed to when you hand over your email address and anyone can bother you at any time with the smallest thing that popped into their head. But he's even more extreme than that.

I mean, fax machine...that's pretty extreme, and there are people who misunderstand the true purpose of forcing people to communicate with him that way. But he also surrounds himself with intense, visual reminders of the relentless passing of time, such as the hangman's noose he has facing him at his desk. Not. Subtle.

For out-of-town clients, he also never travels to them, and to eliminate this risk demands that they pay for a private jet(!) if they want him to come to them. Again, this is easy to denounce as "diva" behavior from a man playing power games because he can. But I stress again that this is not the point.

Faced with a choice of taking a cheaper flight to come and see him, or paying for Kennedy to fly private, they just end up coming to him, saving him who-knows-how-many hours of travel. Time he could more profitably put into his business, his writing, and his life. It's all strategy.

So yes, for all those reasons and more, Dan's book represents a fanatical, obsessive, positively...extreme approach to time management. It's written expressly for entrepreneurs and business owners who are constantly balancing competing priorities, responsibilities, and dwindling resources, and it's full of ruthlessly effective time management strategies that could change everything for people like you and I.

If you have more ideas than time, you'll find exactly what you're looking for in this book. Still, I would encourage you to look beyond his specific implementation and find what will work for you. He's not suggesting that everyone demand to be flown around in private jets and only use fax machines; he's just trying to get you to realize that your time has to be protected at all costs against its thoughtless and/or malicious waste.

Another important point is that it's easier to see the value of being obsessively time-focused when you know what your time is actually worth. He shows you how to calculate the value of your time and use that number to help you decide what's worth pursuing in your business and your life in general.

The supreme importance of remaining hyper-conscious of the passing of time is also stressed in this book. Too many people seem to be okay with trading their lives for likes on social media, wasting infinitely valuable hours on apps whose very business model depends on getting you addicted. Like a casino! More on that in Key Idea #1.

All told, this is definitely a book you may want to keep close by as you start taking back your calendar, dodging pointless meetings, and driving stakes into the hearts of Time Vampires. I came away with 15 full pages of notes, and Dan's strategies and outlook made a profound difference in how I live my life and how I spend my time - which is pretty much the same thing.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Hyper-Consciousness of Time

The best way to start managing your time is to measure how you're spending it now, but the modern world does not make this easy for any of us.

But what's easy shouldn't determine what we do. These are our lives we're talking about here, and I see too many people who are living as though they're guaranteed more than one of them.

The reality is that most of us have a better idea of where our money's going than where our time is going.

Now, I will never try to claim that money isn't important - of course it is. But you can almost always make more money, whereas you can only sometimes regain your health. And your time? Your time is constantly slipping away from you, never to return, and your attention - your awareness in this present moment - by definition, is always gone the very next moment.

We'll fritter away hours - days, even - on the most inconsequential nonsense, but then carefully look over our receipts to make sure we haven't been overcharged for anything we've spent money on. Our priorities are backwards, and that's why we need to balance our perspectives sometimes with the worldviews of people like Dan Kennedy who just...get it:

You cannot be too eccentric about this. I don't think it's possible to be "too fanatical" about getting the absolute highest value out of your time as you possibly can. These. Are. Our. Lives. Kennedy and I will do whatever it takes to protect ours, and we don't waste too much time wondering what other people might think about our time management philosophies.

You don't have to go to such extreme lengths as only communicating by fax, etc. - indeed, many people are required to remain connected to their workplace in some way at least when they're getting paid. But your time and how profitably it is invested is literally Life and Death, and so what if people think you're nuts for taking this "time management" thing so seriously?

They're wasting their lives and you're not.

They will have nothing to show for it and you will.

Now, obviously, don't stress yourself silly about optimizing every single moment and manage yourself into an early grave, but at the very least you should be aware that that grave is wide open before you and that it's one appointment you will eventually have to keep. Memento mori. Remember you must die. Be conscious of time. And maybe steal a tactic or two from Dan:

#2: The First Step Toward Managing Your Time

This is an expansion of the last Key Idea, and the first thing to do once you've made yourself painfully aware of the constant passing of time is to determine where exactly yours is going.

And I do mean painfully. I've found that one of the best motivators to get myself to never waste time ever again is to get angry that I've wasted so much time thus far. It all goes back to hyper-consciousness of the fact that you are losing. You are losing your life every hour, every moment, and yet how many people are more concerned when they realize they're losing their money than when they reflect on how much time they've wasted?

I know I'm repeating myself a bit here, between this and the last Key Idea, but the idea merits constant, ongoing repetition. It's just too easy to let your time slip away unknowingly.

It's possible to take this stance too far, as I've said. There's a point at which beating yourself up for past waste is counterproductive and you end up sacrificing the quality of this present moment with overactive regrets. But most people don't take this far enough. The vast majority of people can much more easily tell you where their money is going than their time, and this is exactly backward.

What Dan and I suggest is scripting out your day in advance - exactly like a movie - and accepting zero rewrites! Don't let anyone or anything mess with your script! Here's Dan in his own words:

Minimize. Unplanned. Activity! That's beautiful. In just a basic, professional sense, this will put you so much further ahead of your entire competition. Remember: your competition is almost entirely made up of people who have no idea where their time is sinking into and don't really care.

Account for every minute. Script out exactly how long each task is likely to take and work against a series of self-imposed deadlines each and every day. John Wooden used to do the same thing when planning his basketball practices and he was one of the winningest coaches in NCAA basketball history.

This is no coincidence. You can even turn it into a kind of game where you time how long it takes you to complete various tasks and then try to beat it. I do this myself and have found it to be extremely helpful.

Ideally, you should script (or even "choreograph") your day as if you are the star of the show - because you are. This is your Perfect Day, scripted by you, and you are the director. If it's not in the script, it's a distraction!

If you're worried that this will be too stifling and that saving time for unplanned adventure is important, there are two things that you may wish to consider.

The first is that discipline creates freedom. By disciplining yourself to do what needs to be done, when it needs to get done, you give yourself the freedom to enjoy other, even greater experiences. Dieting gives you the freedom to have a fantastic body and excellent health. Working hard on growing a business gives you the freedom to pay for your child's education, etc.

Second, as funny as it sounds, you can "plan" unplanned adventure. Simply carve out portions of your day or week where you don't schedule anything and just see where the day takes you. All it means is that you are choosing to relinquish control over how that portion of your day or week turns out, and there's nothing wrong with that if you're aware of it ahead of time. It's when you have no idea where your time is going that's the problem.

Laying out your schedule ahead of time is also an acknowledgement that none of your greatest priorities are just going to "automagically" make it into your schedule. An intentional life is the only way you get to live a meaningful one.

A useful exercise is to place the "big rocks" into your schedule first - your most important or meaningful tasks - and then schedule the smaller rocks around them, filling in the rest of the time with "sand," or those things that aren't important at all or time where you're actively choosing not to plan.

This exercise will probably scare you and shock you into realizing how little time we actually have for what's most important to us. 168 hours just isn't that much time, and if you lose an hour on Monday, you'll be chasing it all week. Next thing you know, your script keeps getting rewritten, your "movie" goes over budget, and your life is a flop at the box office.

#3: A Formula for Peak Personal Productivity

The last part of the above quote refers to the fact that in the professional world, doing work that only you can do results in getting paid more for your contribution.

Doctors earn more than hospital janitorial staff (though especially in that scenario, both jobs are incredibly important), and even though doctors could scrub down the OR and prep all the equipment, etc., they don't, because that's not their core competency.

Doctors are specialists, and they command higher salaries when they restrict themselves to doing doctor stuff - not answering their own phones, scheduling surgeries, delivering medications, etc.

No matter what your profession, you can take the same approach if you want to earn more. You must do as Kennedy says above, and systematically, aggressively divest yourself of everything else that's not what you do best and that earns you the most money. To the greatest extent possible, work only on those things that get you paid, and this will translate into earning the highest salary possible.

There are many ways to begin doing this, of course, and most of them fit into the categories of elimination, automation, and delegation - in that order.

First, eliminate everything that doesn't need to be done at all. Why are you even doing these things? There's no greater waste of time than doing well what need not be done at all.

Second, automate your processes as much as possible to reduce the amount of time spent working on those things you must do yourself. In my case, I use AI to help edit my YouTube videos, I utilize various integrations to run other aspects of my business, add people to my email lists, etc. It may take some additional work upfront to set up these automations, but the amount of time they will save you in the long run will make it all worth it.

Third, you have to learn to delegate. Entire books have been written on the subject, but suffice it to say that you can get a lot more done when you relinquish at least some control over how it gets done. As one of my unofficial mentors says, "80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome."

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

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#1: You Need Two Lists

Dan operates using four separate lists, and, personally I operate using a whole system of lists (some lists containing lists referring to other lists), but you don't need to develop anything nearly so complex, and you certainly don't need to have four or more lists. You do, however, need more than zero.

I would recommend starting with two: a to-do list, and a "stop doing" list, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a list of time-wasting or energy-draining activities that you pledge to stop doing.

Furthermore, a good practice is prioritizing your to-do list from "most important" to "least important" by marking each item with a letter from "A" to "C." The most important tasks that you need to complete are marked with an "A," the second-most important tasks get marked with a "B," and so on.

Dan Kennedy also uses a schedule (which I just combine with my regular to-do list, but to each their own) and a "to call" list, but those may or may not be relevant to you. A "projects" list can also be helpful, and I swear by mine. While you can't "do" a project, you can make progress on them each day, and so I have my projects list and I break them down into actionable tasks that then make it onto my to-do list.

Regardless of the particular system you adopt, the more you get on paper the less you have to remember and mentally juggle throughout the day, keeping your mind free to focus on the actual doing.

#2: Link Everything to Your Goals

The reason why you're not more productive is because you don't have a sufficient reason to be. As Dan would say, you don't have enough good reasons to be productive, so you're not. Simple as that.

This is why you should consider linking everything on your to-do list to your goals, your larger purpose for getting those things done. Why are you actually doing this? Why does this need to get done now? What foundational, meaningful goal is the completion of this task getting you to closer to?

It's hard to get motivated about something you don't care about, and I'll be the first to admit that most modern office jobs don't exactly lend themselves to high levels of excitement about the work itself. But if you can link what you're doing to more important goals like gaining financial freedom for the people you love and care about, you'll end up becoming far more productive and investing your time more intelligently.

The reason I get a tremendous amount of work done is that I care about the goals that my work is linked to! Every single thing I cross off my list (well, most things) is bringing me closer to achieving my ultimate vision.

A good benchmark to shoot for here is being able to answer "Yes" to the question, "Is this bringing me closer to my goal?" at least 50% of the time. Absolute, total, 100% productivity wouldn't be attainable or desirable (when would you simply wander along the beach, or explore your favorite local park, with no end in mind but simply enjoying yourself?), but 50% seems like a good goal to shoot for.

#3: Practice Time Blocking

Carving out specific times for completing your most important work can almost be seen as making - and keeping - inviolate appointments with yourself. This can be equally as important as respecting everyone else's time and keeping appointments with other people.

Time blocking is where you block out specific periods of time and commit to spending it on one specific task, usually something that's more cognitively or creatively demanding.

For example, if you have a YouTube channel where you publish videos 3x per week, those videos aren't going to script, record, and edit themselves. You have to block out time for it! If it's important to you, you can't just "find time" for it somewhere, you have to make the time; you have to put it in your schedule first, and then schedule everything else around it.

If you've calculated how much your time is actually worth, you can compare that to how many hours the task or project is likely to take and how much you expect to earn from its successful completion.

This may not apply to more creative pursuits (or to things like growing a YouTube channel, with slow growth in the beginning that compounds over time), but if you know these numbers, you can see that, for example, the project will generate you approximately $1,000 in income, and your time is worth $25/hour. This means that you can spend up to 40 hours working on it and still come out ahead.

Block out 40 total hours for that project, and realize that if you go over, you're going to wind up being underpaid for your work. Then, you can take steps to make sure you finish under the allotted time, such as instituting the next Action Step.

Above all, though, the most important reason to block off your time is that it helps you account for more of the hours you actually have available to work. The less free-floating space you have in your calendar, the more discriminating you have to be about what is and is not a productive use of your time.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Dan S. Kennedy is the provocative, truth-telling author of seven popular No B.S. books, thirteen business books total; a serial, successful, multi-millionaire entrepreneur; trusted marketing advisor, consultant and coach to hundreds of private entrepreneurial clients running businesses from $1-million to $1-billion in size; and he influences well over 1-million independent business owners annually through his newsletters, tele-coaching programs, local Chapters and Kennedy Study Groups meeting in over 100 cities, and a network of top niched consultants in nearly 150 different business and industry categories and professions.

As a speaker Dan, has repeatedly appeared with four former U.S. Presidents; business celebrities like Donald Trump and Gene Simmons (KISS, Family Jewels on A&E); legendary entrepreneurs including Jim McCann (1-800-Flowers), Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields Cookies), and Nido Qubein (Great Harvest Bread Co.); famous business speakers including Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Tom Hopkins, and Tony Robbins and countless sports and Hollywood celebrities. Dan has addressed audiences as large as 35,000....for more than ten consecutive years, he averaged speaking to more than 250,000 people per year.

Dan lives in Ohio and in northern Virginia, with his wife, Carla, and their Million Dollar Dog. He owns, races and drives professionally in about 100 harness races a year at Northfield Park near Cleveland, Ohio.

Additional Resources:

Dan Kennedy | Magnetic Marketing

Dan Kennedy | The Magnetic Marketing Podcast

Time Mastery | Online Course from Matt Karamazov

This Book on Amazon:

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

If You Liked This Book:

No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Wealth Attraction in the New Economy, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, by Dan S. Kennedy

Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

Buy Back Your Time, by Dan Martell

Die with Zero, by Bill Perkins

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OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free (for now!), and you can find it right here.

What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out most of the Book Notes, all the Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc.

So there’s a lot more for you left to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are six more ways I can help you:

1. Work with me personally to take control of your schedule, grow your business, and enhance your learning, performance, and productivity

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4. These are 50 of the greatest books I’ve ever read (out of more than 1,200+), along with complete breakdowns of all the key ideas

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