 Oh, what's up everybody once again, it's Brandon Shawn and this video is a little bit different because I want to focus on the fact that so many artists and just so many people in general, especially entrepreneurs, they have regular jobs, whether it's a nine to five, a two to 10, you know, 11pm to 7am, whatever that is. And I used to work that shift. Good Lord. I hated that shift. It's hard to work on the dream that you have while you are working one of these other jobs. They're taking so much from you. But here's a couple of thoughts and tips that I'd like to share when it comes to getting out of year nine to five to focus on that specific dream that you have. Number one, I've got to say this, even though so many people are doing it already, you can either stay up later or wake up earlier. But to be more specific, why don't you just add an hour of time in the morning time? One thing that I started to do years ago, just woke up one hour earlier when I was working on writing a book and I would spend that entire hour just writing, writing, writing and consistently over time that one hour added up until I finished writing an entire book. Why that's big is because there were people who were telling me they always wanted to write a book. It took them a lifetime to write a book and the book has still not been written. So of course you can stay up a lot of hours or you can wake up a lot of hours early, but just one small hour and just being very focused within that hour can make legitimate changes over time. And the second thing that I really want to push is batching. Not many of you guys might have heard of batching, but if you haven't, it's essentially this concept. Let's say I have four videos that I want to drop every single month. Instead of dropping four videos every month, well instead of recording a video once a week, I would just at the very beginning of the month record four videos. Why is this so beneficial? Because when you're focused on something, it's very well known that when you're focused on an activity, there's a switching cost. Not only the cost to actually put time and energy into actually making that happen, there's a cost to getting your mind away from the thing that you're currently doing to focus on whatever your next activity is. It's like when some of you all spend so much time addicted on your cell phone and you might get on Instagram in the middle of work or whatever you're supposed to be doing, you think that, hey, okay, once I'm off Instagram, I'm doing my next task, but it really takes a lot longer than the few seconds it takes you to close your phone to look at this piece of paper or to go and get in the booth or whatever you're supposed to be doing. Essentially, you can think about it as mental momentum, right? When you're spending 30 minutes on the thing, there's this momentum of focus that's starting to happen. There's this tunnel vision. You were thinking about a lot of stuff. Now you're just thinking about what you're supposed to be doing. Now you're being productive in what you're doing. And there's an entire process. You have to start back with the filtering out other thoughts process whenever you're doing these switching costs. So if I'm just doing videos at the beginning of the month, now I minimize whatever that time would have been in between every time I had to stop and start a new video and get back in that entire phase. You can apply that to whatever you feel like you need to batch, whether that's getting into the studio for longer periods of times or writing songs for longer periods of times, whatever that is, cut off music, cut off cell phones or any type of distractions and focus seriously for an extended period of time, which leads me to number three, which is similar to batching, but it's a way to strategize around batching. And I call it the rapid planning method. Actually, I don't call it that. Tony Robbins calls it that. And I learned that from him about five years ago. Now the rapid planning method works a little bit like this. Every single day, I have an entire list of tasks that I have to go through and something might involve videos, something might involve marketing or maybe I have this personal development that I need to do or even planning a house. There's various tasks. Everybody has multiple types of things that they need to do. If I know I need to do all these different types of things as opposed to researching for a video and then checking my email and then going to cook some dinner and then checking my email again and then recording the video that I was researching and then working on his marketing strategy, I would literally batch every single task that's similar or related to the same type of thing together. That way, when I'm working and focused in this space, then I'm focused in this space. You don't have to clean the dishes, wipe off the kitchen, counter sweep the kitchen and vacuum. I'm going to do all those things at the exact same time or back to back and then I'm going to go do research for videos. And I'm going to research all three of the videos that I might be doing for that week and come up with titles and thumbnails all within the same period. And then if there was a few people's music I might have wanted to check out, then I'm going to check out all of their music back to back. And then I'm not going to have a whole bunch of meetings spread throughout the day where I'm talking on the phone with people and I'm going to reserve all my meetings for maybe a 2pm to 6pm time block because I know I need the fresh part of my brain when I wake up in the morning to focus on knocking out some of my bigger tasks which is a small, you know, sub tactic that you can use as well. So after I knock out these bigger tasks and the things that are most important at the beginning of the day, I have these meetings later on in the day which kind of frees me up. It also gives me a break, right? I might be able to move around because I'm talking on the phone or it's just good to see somebody else if I'm working from home or something like that. But again, the most important part of that is I'm not just throwing random meetings and time blocks that would be interrupting productivity. Because a 15-minute meeting can easily become an hour somehow and even if it doesn't, there's still a switching cost. So it's really about using your time efficiently. Now that's it for this particular video. I'll definitely get into doing some more types of videos like this here and there if they seem to be valuable this time around. But I would also love to know some of you guys' productivity hacks. What do you do to make yourself more efficient and how do you work on your dream outside of work? If you're not already working your dream, of course. Now, of course, as always, if you like this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.