 My flow starts around six, so it's basically about an hour-ish if I sleep until six then it's seven, but I try my best to be up by five because I know that those early morning hours, the other reason for me is, and as a leader many of our listeners will agree with this, I get more done when others are asleep. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. We're often using our time, energy and priorities unstrategically so we don't think of time in terms of what Kevin Cruz said, what I've suggested you know that you only have a limited amount of time, you have to use it in particular ways and if you use it where you're leveraging your energy and connection with your time it's going to go better and then we have so much inbound. When I was writing the book and I took me a few years to put together so this isn't just pandemic related like we were stressed long before COVID, we were stressed long before the global pandemic came along but I counted up the number of inboxes I had at the time so this is like circuit 2019. I have 11 inboxes which is silly like your parents and grandparents they had a post office box like a mailbox at their front door or at the end of their driveway and once a day the letter carrier would drop off some mail that was it and maybe you had a neighbor who knocked on your door once. Now everywhere you go on every device you own people are messaging you you go to social media you've got inboxes you go to personal public inboxes multiple email addresses you have inboxes you go to LinkedIn there's an inbox over there everywhere you turn someone is asking you for something and it's it's overwhelming there's a psychologist Rob and Dunbar have you guys ever heard of Dunbar's number it's not particularly well known yeah I don't know so how many friends can one person have number 150 that that's how many people we are wired to know and almost all of us would have well over 150 social media followers in many cases thousands tens of thousands millions we're not wired to know that many people and that leaves us in the stress spiral overwhelmed over committed overwork and what's so fascinating about that is all of those inboxes are constantly notifying you and it dims your ability to listen to your own personal notifications right those own warning signals you have that my energy is low that I'm way too emotional about things that I'm not showing up at my fullest you know unfortunately everywhere we turn there's a little red circle with a number in it on every single application we interact with and if you're like me I don't want to see that so I'm constantly trying to get to inbox zero get this clear this out move this around and I'm expending so much energy on things that ultimately don't matter to my own core values to my own mission to what actually gets me up in the morning and part of what we learned in restructuring our own day is yes we all get the same amount of time but we don't have the same rhythm to our time so I'm much better early in the morning and I didn't really know that I was making tons of excuses that would allow me to sleep in to deal with the burnout and then when I actually started focusing on my mornings getting up earlier working out then getting into my day when I was able to orient my time around when I was at my best and then structure my day around that I was exactly like you said leveraging it to see those exponential results see this stuff makes me so happy AJ because that's exactly what the book's about right so as you started diving into this material and the whole concept there is everybody's got three to five hours in a day where they are at their best and this is now brain research is is proving in the last decade what I figured out anecdotally on my own is I painfully tried to reconstruct my life but like I like to think of myself as a robot right I can just go 18 hours a day and I can't and I'm I have a lot of energy if you follow the enneagram I'm an eight we're the challenger we're big and bold entrepreneur right that kind of thing so it's like if there's a wall I'm going to break through it and what I learned is apparently I'm also human apparently my my energy does not stay the same throughout the day so I encourage everybody and I will play this little game if you guys are willing to identify their green yellow and red zones so think of your day as three types of energy zones green being what you've already hinted at when you're at your best your energy is flowing you're bright you're generally speaking you know assuming you didn't have a crazy night the night before the toddler didn't wake up at 3 a.m screaming but just in normal days this tends to be the time of day where you're at your peak your mood is good your energy is flowing you're in the flow for creatives like us if you're writing something you feel really good Johnny if you're composing a song you know it's flowing the lyrics flowing the music's flowing that kind of stuff so you're just in that flow when would you guys say that is for you AJ you said morning right so yeah do you have particular hours like 6 a.m. 8 a.m. when when does that flow start when I'm up by 5 my flow starts around 6 so it's basically about an hour ish if I sleep until 6 then it's 7 but I try my best to be up by 5 because I know that those early morning hours the other reason for me is and as a leader many of our listeners will agree with this I get more done when others are asleep because as a leader your team needs stuff from you and you want to be there and you want to be supportive so for me to get up before the slacks going crazy before my inbox is dinging and in all the things that I try to do to wall that off I still am human so I found that that space in the morning my phone's not ringing I'm not getting requests on slack I don't have check-ins with the team that is my moment to really shine to get through all the big heavy-duty tasks that I need to feel like I accomplish something and then structuring my day on the back end meetings and then getting into my inbox when I'm lowest in energy I used to think however based on my college experience and graduate school and my struggles with procrastination that I'm a night owl and you know I could pound out an essay at night I could get my research in and get those results when everyone was out of the lab and that just became what I thought I was so I would hit the snooze bar sleep in orient meetings later in the day we even started our our training program later because we were both night owls and we would make excuses around it and then we started to realize in training for the half marathon and working with our personal trainer that he only really had time to train us in the morning so it kept waking us up earlier and earlier and earlier and what do you know getting some shuttle sprints in at five in the morning coming off that exercise feeling like I'm in my complete flow state I'm like why was I sleeping through these hours what was I thinking gosh you know I'm my final year college I picked all of my courses to not start before 11 a.m. I didn't even care what the subject was it's like don't start now I'm up like you I'm up at 4 30 to 6 a.m. most days how about you johnny night owl morning person what are you these days at least in my at 47 later in my later years I have come to be comfortable with the idea that I am a morning person I get I am I do my best in the morning I don't know what that was like in my early 30s I could say some different things but but the the productivity and my mood and how I my energy all coincides with that and and what I do for to wake up is I'm usually up between 6 and 6 30 I have a 645 alarm set up which is the the you can't sleep any longer than this but if you're that beat up then you can sleep till this time that rarely happens I could count that on one handed in a month but usually up and by and at the gym at at the latest 6 30 and and that and once I'm in the gym I'm slogging it out but I am it I am I feel amazing after the gym a shower and and having that first cup of coffee and and that's when I start I start looking over stuff that I want to do I start arranging my schedule I'm fired up I'm looking at how the rest of my day is going to go what needs to be scheduled if anything else it hasn't made it to my calendar but but the problem with that and knowing and understanding that is I run into the trouble of I slamming too much stuff up front because I'm the most excited at that time and so I'll start powering everything enduring from that 9 to 12 8 to 8 to 12 time period and sometimes I get I fill it up too much and I'm don't get done what I need to get done then I get angry I get frustrated and I need to just chill out of like listen you have tomorrow just put that in but but but in learning that made me very excited to schedule things during that time because I know that I'm going to not only engage with it but I'm going to do it with a lot of energy and excited and and I also don't mind trying new things at that time because I'm my energy and how I treat myself is much better so if I get frustrated I'm learning something new it's okay I'll have a pour myself another cup of coffee I'll relax I'll work through it I know that I'll learn where if I try to do those things later on I just start beating myself up and and my I'm not as resilient as I am at that time so all of that plays a role and so my day is scheduled through that and from the yellow time and and the red time as well we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends I was just going to share what I also found so I used to be a proponent of the typical American breakfast my family raised me that if I didn't finish breakfast in the morning I couldn't leave for school and I was forced to chug that glass of milk I had to finish breakfast and it took a while to break out of that but when I actually started intermittent fasting so not having breakfast at all and waiting until lunch when I'm starting to hit my yellow zone it actually created a green zone for me after lunch whereas when I was doing the heavy morning breakfast I was just feeling lethargic and robbing myself of that green energy cycle oh brilliant well this is a good case study two case studies in real time so people are wondering what we're talking about it sounds like the morning club don't beat yourself up if you're not a morning person so I find for a lot of leaders a lot of people who do what we do mornings are the green zone for most people but the point is simply this and it's transferable if you're a night owl actually according to Daniel Pink most people are afternoon people believe it or not midday people they're not morning they're not evening but the idea is you have three to five peak hours of energy a day Cal Newport says you have about four other brain researchers say you have about three to five hours and for all three of us on this show it happens to be in the morning and what what you do is you're supposed to do what you're best at when you're at your best in your green zone then the other two zones just to get those out of the way so people understand red zone you're tired then you feel like you need some caffeine or a nap or run around the block or someone to punch you so that you can stay awake at the meeting for me that happens around 435 every day where I either need to get on my bike have a nap or do something mindless like empty email I inbox right and then everything in between is yellow you're not at your best you're not at your peak zone but you're functioning okay you're just not going to do your best work so to drill down on the green zone a little bit and this is where the exponential returns happen and you everybody will approach it a little bit differently you now need to okay I know what I'm at my best so figure out those three to five hours and the spike after lunch I get that too I also get that little spike between one and two I can accomplish some really really good creative things if it's a good day you won't get more than five good hours in a day it's just not the way humans are wired it's not in our DNA so you're not going to get that nobody's nobody's that good so three to five hours what you then do is figure out what is the most important thing in your case for the art of charm that you do and it could be interview prep so I got to read this book and ask you know cultivate the the questions or get the interview flow down or it could be you're working on a new course which as you know I've seen your products they take a lot of attention and a lot of focus you're not doing that in between phone calls or zoom calls or that kind of thing like you've got to sit down it's deep work for others it might be strategy or we're not growing with the problem that you started this podcast episode with right oh my gosh it's the pandemic 85 percent of what we do just went down the toilet now what do we do you're not going to solve that in a five minute break between meetings that takes your deep focus so whatever if you're an accounting it's like a better pnl or a really good pivot spreadsheet or some pivot table in your spreadsheet or something like that you can tell him not from accounting but um you know my son writes code I have an adult son who who writes code for a living and he's got three to five hours where he has to write beautiful code there is such a thing and so what you want to do is want to figure out okay that is my most most meaningful contribution for me these days it's content it's editing the book it's prepping I have a podcast as well you know it's prepping for the big interview it's doing background research it's figuring out where my industry is going and how I can take my company there before it gets there so if I do that most days for three to five hours you are so far ahead of the curve and then Johnny to get into what you were saying or sometimes you can beat yourself up because you try to cram too much in it's the repeated discipline it's like going to the gym you know one day is not going to qualify you for the half marathon it's going in there and doing the 45 minutes or the 30 minutes or the hour you know four days a week multiple months that's what gets you ready same with your green zone what happens to a lot of gifted people and we all have a gift somewhere is we end up using our gift but never developing it so I'm a communicator if you were to put me let's say we're at a conference together you're like Carrie the keynote guy he just canceled you know his plane's not going to land on time can you get up there and give a talk on productivity no notice I could probably do it and I would do an okay job because I've done this most of my life but if you do that time after time and what happens when you don't do this right the course is due you've got to ship it out and you guys would never do this but we've all been caught once or twice by shipping a substandard product where we're like you know if I only had one more month if I only had one more week to work on it and that's when you cheat your gift because you use it but you never develop it so in your green zone do what Malcolm Gladwell said as he popularized and outliers start developing your gift don't just work on the project read a book about the field when I was in law you know how do I become a better person at cross-examination how do I read the case law that nobody else is reading so next time I go to court and face the situation I've got an argument the opponent will not have I'm not going to use that right now that's how you become best in the world at something if you're doing let's say three hours of really important significant work that moves the needle most days in your green zone and then you spend that half hour or hour a day reading in your field developing your skill set taking a course going to the eighth draft rather than the third draft of whatever project you're working on that is like putting money in the bank that just produces interest at first you don't really notice it but boy three years from now you're gonna you're gonna crush your former skill set and that's where the real productivity in thinking of your day in green, yellow and red goes because otherwise you don't get it done and you go home and you're stressed and you throw up all over your family because you didn't get it done again