How To TRIPLE Your Productivity with Matt Gallant

Want to find out how to TRIPLE your productivity and live the 20 hour work week?

I recently interviewed my friend Matt Gallant, who's a highly respected online marketer and a successful internet entrepreneur having sold over $10,000,000 worth of products and services online.

Matt is known as the “mad marketing scientist” due to his obsession of testing and optimizing every bit of his online business and his life.

In this interview, you will pick up some gold nuggets from Matt on how to triple your productivity in your business and in your personal life.

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Video transcript

Stefan: Hey, everyone. This is Stefan from Projectlifemastery.com. Today, I'm excited to be interviewing a good friend of mine by the name of Matt Gallant.

Now, Matt is a very successful Internet marketer and Internet entrepreneur. He's sold over $10 million worth of products and services online and has built over 39 profitable websites in various markets and sectors online. Matt is most known amongst his friends as “The Mad Marketing Scientist” because he's always testing and he's always optimizing things in his business.

I'm excited to have this chance to be able to interview Matt. I've got him right now on Skype, and we're going to jump in to the topic of productivity because Matt recently put together a brand new blog called Mattgallant.tv. He's got a free PDF, a free resource on how to “3X your productivity” and how to work the 20-hour workweek.

Matt will really dive deep into productivity, how to optimize yourself, your life, your business, and so we're going to talk a lot about productivity in this interview, but a little bit about how to build an online business and really scale up your online business.

Matt, I'm so excited to have this chance to be able to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time today.

Matt: Thanks, man. It's great to have you. It's been amazing to see you flourish with what you're doing, and I'm excited to talk to your audience because I think you're attracting some really powerful people.

Matt Gallant story

Stefan: Awesome, man. Before we get into some of the tips and strategies that you have for increasing your productivity, do you mind telling people a little bit about yourself and your story about how you got into business and online marketing?

Matt: Sure, so I started … I was going to university studying kinesiology and I saw a poster on the wall that said, “Make $10,000 this summer,” and that was pretty appealing, so I applied, and it was an application for College Pro Painters. College Pro Painters is a franchise system and, actually, that company that owns College Pro Painters has several different franchises.

It's a very successful company. I got the gig, and then they proceeded to train me into so many different aspects from cold calling to phone to selling to how to do a painting estimate when I never painted in my life, how to hire people, on and on and on. It was really a crash course in business.

I hated the painting business, but it was awesome, so I did that for a couple of years, then I became a personal trainer and did that for a while. Along the way, I became … There was a light bulb in my head that went off one night that marketing is … just like that eureka moment that you see in cartoons, and I became obsessed with marketing ever since that point because I just realized, if you're good at marketing, you could generate revenue, you could make sales. In terms of starting a business, it's absolutely, in my opinion, the number one skill that anybody can learn.

That started my journey to copywriting. I hired John Carlton, I hired Gary Halbert to mentor me, Dan Kennedy…on and on and on. Then about 12 years ago, I started becoming successful online. The skin care product and then I created a publishing company in the guitar space, a supplement company and too many other niches and things to go into, but I just keep trying to evolve as an entrepreneur even today.

Things had changed. What I do changed. How I think changed. It changes, but it's fun, man. I just love all aspects of business. To me, it's just a blast.

Optimization as a creative process

Stefan:  That's awesome. It's really impressive what you've built online, the online empire that you've built, but you're most known I guess because you're a master at data optimizing, testing things. Why has that attracted you the most, that side of business?

Matt: People make the mistake of thinking of optimization as an analytical process. To me, it's a creative process. I'm a creative guy. I'm about 50-50, 50 right brained, 50 left brained, and I love the creative side of it. That's what excites me.

In other words, I'm going to create two different ideas, throw them in the octagon, throw them in the arena and see which one prevails. I love experiments more than anything else in my life. That's why it attracted me since day one. I remember John Reese talking about split testing, and that was another light bulb moment. I'm like, “Yeah, it makes sense. I can just keep testing, optimizing and improving the results.” It's been probably the thing I've done the most.

It's probably been my number one habit for being successful online because a lot of project that I did wouldn't have worked had I just stopped early or a lot of projects made me ten times more money because I optimized. That obviously keeps fueling the passion for it.

Stefan: That's awesome. I think the core essence is the mindset of improvement. You're always finding ways to improve things, whether it's an ad, a sales page, a product, something in your life, whether it's a routine, a habit. Is that what you would say it really comes down to?

It's just an obsession just to improve things and make it better and better, whereas, a lot of people, they're just content with just putting up one ad or putting up one product or a version of a website?

Matt:  A 100%. It's a 100% an obsession with constant improvement. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the word “kaizen,” which is a Japanese word for “gradual improvements.” That's what my whole life is about on every level whether it's financial, business, physical, emotional, spiritual. I know there is no ceiling.

I love the fact that I can continue to grow. Growth for me, it is a massive payoff. There's nothing that jacks me up more than growing, more than improving. There's probably some massive dopamine released in my brain and it just fuels the passion for it.

Productivity tips

Stefan: Cool. Let's jump into productivity. What are some of the top tips that you have to increase your productivity?

Matt: First of all, productivity is one of those things that never stops. There's no ceiling on that. You can always be more productive. If I look at how much I've improved and how much I've changed since I started business today, it's several thousand percent. I know that, maybe 10 years from now, I'll improve even more. It's never ending. I'm going to cover some big, broad principles and then we can dive into some deeper stuff if you want.

1. Prioritize. There's a lot of things to prioritize. One is, are you in the right market? Are you in the right industry?

Let's use you as an example. I remember, just a few weeks ago, you were here and you were selling e-books you weren't that excited about, and then I look at you now where you're doing something that's aligned with your essence, it's aligned with who you are and we look at the difference in success.

That's a great example of are you prioritizing the right industry. You got to obviously choose things you're excited about or things you're passionate about. That's the first priority.

2. Effectiveness. Second, and this leads into effectiveness, and prioritization also involves “are you prioritizing the right projects, are you prioritizing the right tasks, are you prioritizing the right money moves,” which we can get into. Then there's effectiveness, and I want to differentiate effectiveness and efficiency. It's far more important to be effective than it is to be efficient.

Effective means you're in the right industry, you're working on the right projects, you're working on the right money moves, like you're doing the right things, and then being efficient means you're really good at those things, you're really fast.

3. Efficiency is one of the biggest things you got to always be aware of because it's easy to waste your time. Then efficiency is critical, too, learning to be fast.

It is funny a mutual friends of ours was commenting that he was seeing you work on the computer, and he said the same thing when he sees me work, and he just comments how he can barely follow what I'm doing, right? That's just because I'm very efficient. I know all the shortcuts. That's important, too. That helps us obviously get more out of every minute.

Then you get into some higher level things like team-building. That becomes critical because, at the end of the day, there's only one you, there's only one me. Our ability to replicate ourselves and replicate our money moves, replicate our tasks is really where the ceiling comes into play. Imagine if you had 25 staff that are doing what you're doing today, you'd probably be making 25 times more money. That's where team-building comes in.

4. Focusy ferocity. The the biggest leverage point in productivity is what I call focus ferocity. You have to have a lot of other things in play, but, once you know what your money move is, then you're doing the right thing. That's the most important thing. You're doing the right thing. Then, it becomes about intensity.

I'll give you simple example that's very black and white, which is writing. I started writing a blog, for my blog in January. I was writing about 500 words an hour. I wasn't that efficient. I mean, now, I'm about 1200 words. If I look at that, that's more than double, and I could probably get it up to 1500, 2000 words an hour by continuing to try to push myself, continuing to get more efficient, continuing to build that skill, but where else could I triple my time like that? You know what I mean?

Stefan: Right.

The 20-hour workweek

Matt:  This is where the 20-hour workweek comes in because, if you can be 3 times more effective doing the right things, you're going to be more productive than most people are in 40, 50 hours in doing the wrong things, adding normal intensity.

All the people that I'm friends with that are worth 8 figure, 9 figure, they're all intense people. They're intense with their conversations. They can be polite. They can be pleasant. It doesn't mean they're not pleasant or polite, but they have an intensity about them that you won't find in a lot of other people.

Then last but not least is you have to recover because when you're really pushing your brain and you're practicing focus ferocity, you're going to get tired. I'm not just talking about being tired after an hour. There's a cumulative tiredness, too, just like if you train really hard for a competition, like you have the tiredness after three months of doing that that's very different than just when working out.

For example, I really pushed myself for three months straight, the first three months, and then last week and this week, I'm recovering and relaxing a lot more and getting ready for the next big wave. It's very different than … I'm not taking vacations or, because I don't like what I do, I take vacations and breaks and recover to prepare me for another wave of intensity. Just like we do with training, you've got to balance intensity with recovery. That's the big picture. Obviously, there's a lot of little things that come into all of those.

How do you prioritize your time?

Stefan: Yeah, for sure. Let's talk a little bit about the prioritization. I find that valuable. You're running multiple businesses. You've got a lot of different projects going on. How do you prioritize your time? Do you try to simplify things as much as possible to your primary skillsets, because I mean you're extremely skilled at copywriting, ad copy, creating systems?

One thing I found with myself is that, at a certain point, I just kind of gave up trying to be a master at everything. I'd much rather focus on just being, going really, really deep on a few core skillsets and get really, really skilled at that and try to simplify things, to just prioritize my time doing that and then have other people try to do everything else for me. Is that kind of the same way that you operate your businesses? How do you prioritize your time?

Matt: Let's talk about, and I want to talk about this because I think most people who are listening are probably in this level, and that's, let's say you're a 1- or 2- or 3-person team, because it changes, my answer is going to change quite bit, and we can get into that, but let's go back to the beginning.

Maybe I got a tech guy and a Webmaster or even have a business partner. It really becomes about focusing on one project at a time and getting it done. You got to drive it to completion.

Just like maybe when you film a product, you can get laser beam, right? There's nothing else going on. You're going to block off a couple of days, bang that out. That's key. You have to drive on one project until it's out there because, until it's out there, it's just grabbing rim. It's not making you money. It's costing you money. It's costing you mental energy.

That's a big concept that I want to highlight is you have to protect your mental energy. You only have so much RAM. I'm very, very protective about my RAM. There's so many things that I do in my life to protect my RAM, and we can get into that. Picking the right project is first part of prioritization. Then, absolutely, when I was a 2-, 3-person team, I had 4 things that I did.

4 money moves

Money moves is the things that, if you only did that, your business would continue to make more money. Everything else you shouldn't touch. You should outsource. Hire. Get your customer support. Hire a manager. Hire. Do whatever it takes to get all that stuff off your plate.

That's a great example of protecting my RAM because all that stuff drains me. I don't want to be drained. I want to be fresh. I want to be powerful.

1. Working on Adwords. My money moves back in the day was work on AdWords maybe about an hour a day because we were spending well into the six figures a month on AdWords, so there was a lot of leverage there.

2. Creating emails.  Create emails because, if our list was, at our peak, 1.5 million leads, so, that, there's a lot of leverage in creating emails, then

3. Writing copy

4. Split testing.

Those were the four things that I did for, to grow and launch the businesses. Those are four great money moves that anybody can focus on. It depends on who you are. In your case, maybe being with the video is your money move is you're building your audience, you're getting more people, you're getting more leads, so your money moves will change, and that's important, too. My money moves change probably every 6 months. This is also where the team comes in. I don't write as much copy as I used to.

Productivity strategy

Now, here's a productivity strategy, so 10/90/10, so, as you build things out, I'll be involved in the first 10%, then whoever is going to execute is going to run with it for 80% of it, and then I'm going to come in at the last 10/80. In the last 10%, I'm going to come in and really rip it apart and optimize and improve it. I'm not the one doing the bulk of it. Sometimes, I still do, and that's an important thing, and I'll give you a great example that's right here right now.

In one of my businesses, we're going to complete redo the funnel. We're doing a completely new strategy. I feel that it's so critical that I'm going to do it myself. It depends which business is … I'm talking about.

I'll give you another specific example in the publishing business. I don't write copy anymore because it's not as critical. Like whether I write the copy or not on a launch, it's going to be maybe a 10%-20% difference in revenue because we have the formula down so much and I've got a guy that

I've trained very well. With this new funnel, it can be a $10 million funnel if I do it correctly, so I'm not going to outsource that. That's an example of prioritizing. I'm prioritizing that on top of my list and I'm going to do it myself.

There's no black-and-white answers on prioritization, but I'm going to take that and I'm going to focus on that, and that's going to be my main thing until it's done, and then I'll do something else after. Yeah, that's the quick and dirty of prioritization.

Mental RAM

Stefan: Yeah, what you said about the mental RAM, I think the same way. I mean, it's not even whether you can do it, because you can be more than capable of doing all these things, but it's more so the mental energy that that task can take up in your head and consume your mental thought process.

I remember Mark Zuckerberg and people like that. They wear the exact same clothes every single day just to prevent decision fatigue because, the more decisions you have to make, the more things you have to occupy your mind with. It drains you.

I found for myself and my business just these little things that I could easily do myself, but I just have accepted that I'm just going to have someone else do them for me because I want to make sure that my mind is as sharp and focused as possible.

Planning and scheduling

That's really cool. I want to ask you about planning and scheduling. Do you typically have a method of planning out your month, your week, your day? How do you go about that?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I try a lot of different things. I'm always kind of experimenting to see what works. What I find works is a combination of rigid and flexible. I try like scheduling my entire week pretty much every hour.

That mentally for me was just constricting and, mentally, for me, it was draining, so, now, it's about 50-50, so 50% of my time is schedule because I have meetings with the teams and I also have some time for my money moves, but then the other 50% is open for meeting with people, talking with people on Skype because I think networking is a great money move and just having some time to just do whatever I feel like in the moment. It's about 50-50.

One of the things that I've done that's evolved is I have … I used to schedule meeting like any day of the week. Now, I have 2 days a week where I have all my meetings. That allows me to just get into that mode, that zone, meet with people.

Then, on the other days, it's more about creating, it's more about writing or filming or whatever it is that I'm working on as far as a project. That was a good, that was a powerful upgrade for me that I just did maybe six months ago.

Stefan: Yeah, and it's tough to restrict yourself when you're doing something in your business that requires creativity and flow because, if I only set an hour for myself to record a video, then that's going to … that's not going to allow me to really take advantage of that flow state because, sometimes, you might be doing something, you might be on fire and you might be in that flow and you just want to prolong that as much as possible because what you're doing is so high leverage and so important.

Do you tend to, each day, maybe like plan the day before or the day in the morning and maybe just, okay, here's the highest priority things I'm going to do? Do you try to focus on the most important thing first thing in the morning? How do you go about that?

Matt:  Yeah, I mean, right now, because blogging is a new thing and writing is a relatively new thing or writing this type of content is a new thing. That's the first thing that I do every day. I write for between an hour or 2 hours. That's a lot of mental energy. I'm getting in the habit of that.

This month, I'm going to give you another example, what I'm going to do this month, now that's become more or less a habit because I've been doing it for about three months, so then the next thing I'm going to do is YouTube. I'm going to launch a YouTube channel, and that's going to be one of the first things that I do every morning and I want to make sure I get into the habit, in the groove of that.

Batching vs daily habit

This is a great conversation. That's batching versus doing it daily. Now, batching is more efficient. Batching means, okay, I'm going to take an entire day and film, but one of the things that I learned from Elliott Hulse, who's one of my partners in some projects, is that when you're just starting, don't batch. Get in the daily habit.

That's what he did to build himself up, and that's what I'm going to do because I think it's like learning a language, one of the key things with learning a new language is you have to practice daily because that neural net that you're building really shrinks even with one day of rest. For that reason, I'm going to be using a habit-building strategy versus a batching strategy.

Now, once it's a habit, I'll probably start batching at that point, but I really want to build the skill of being on camera, so, for that reason, I'm going to be doing it early in the morning and, mostly likely, daily.

Productivity apps/software

Stefan: Awesome. Another thing I want to ask is do you use any apps or software, anything like that, to help to be productive?

Matt: I have BusyCal on the Mac. I use Google Calendar, so nothing fancy. In my teams, this is something funny, but, in my teams, we use different tools like Redbooth, which is a good project management, but I don't go in there. That's an example of protecting my RAM. I don't manage projects. I don't want to manage people.

I have partners and project managers and operation managers, so for me to even go in there and take a look is a massive mental drain, so I don't go in there. I know what I'm responsible for and I take care of it. I don't want to be going in there and wasting my RAM, wasting that mental energy, so we do use tools as a team, and we like Redbooth, but I don't go there.

Stefan: Yeah. I found that that's a key thing is really knowing what the distractions are because the distractions are what can kill you, right? Even for me, like, if I'm in the middle of something and I go on Facebook or I go into email or whatever, I just know that that's going to take me down a dark path and, before you know it, like you think you're going to Facebook or email just to check something for 5 minutes, but it ends up … You end up doing all these different thing and it just totally sidetracks you from what you're focused on at that time.

How to eliminate distractions

Do you do anything like that to help eliminate distractions?

Matt: Yeah, this is a great segue to focus. Focus, people look at focus only from one side of it. Focus is two sides. The first side is eliminating distractions. If you think about it, let's say you had zero distractions, external or internal, it's really easy to focus at that point because focusing is just really about putting your concentration on that one thing or whatever you're doing.

If you're fighting distractions, whether again it's external or internal, they're both real, then it becomes much more of a battle, so the first thing that I like to teach people when it comes to focus is just eliminating distractions.

One of the biggest ones is, obviously, what you just mentioned, social media. Put your phone on airplane mode. There's a great software called RescueTime, which I like using. In RescueTime, they have a feature called Focustime. I hit that, and, basically, it just shuts down all the websites that are distracting. I can't easily hit them.

There's even more hardcore software that just disconnects your Internet for 60-90 minutes. That's what I do at first. If I'm going to write, I just eliminate all the distractions. Let's make it hard for me to go there because, again, I don't want to be fighting human nature. I'm as addicted to social media and Facebook as anyone else is, so I do make sure that I shut down all those easy outs.

The other big thing that I do is headphones, headphones with music, even though it's … as much as, for some reason, having the headphones seem to help me go more internal, especially if I'm writing. Even the choice of music is a big deal. I don't want any music with any lyrics.

Lyrics and words are distracting in my opinion, so I usually listen to soundtracks, movie soundtracks because they're emotional, but they don't distract me. They don't distract my brain. It will give me that emotional feeling. Choosing the right music I think is a big deal if you're going to listen to music. Those are some of the things that I do for focus, just for eliminating distractions.

Zen environment

Stefan: Yeah. What about your environment? I've been to your place there in Panama City, beautiful penthouse. In your office, you've got a big whiteboard. Are there certain things like that, having a whiteboard or anything in your environment, that helps you focus?

Matt: One of the things that I'm always battling with, and my dream is to have a zen environment, which it's not, right? It's totally messy, but I'm trying to get there. Even my whiteboard right now is pretty much clean. It is a proven fact that messiness is a mental disruptor. It steals some of that mental energy, so I'm working on …

I'm buying little things like this thing, which is to put my headphones on. It just helps my environment become more zen. Same thing with papers or whiteboards, so, no, I think the cleaner, the less stuff you could have, the better, but my nature is to be creative and to clutter, so it's a constant battle.

Stefan: Totally, it's the whole mad scientist thing, right?

Matt: Yeah.

Stefan: Sometimes, the scientist gets in the lab, everything is a mess, but that's-

Matt: Totally.

Go beast mode

Stefan: Yeah. What about people? I know a lot of people are watching this. There are people that have a job. They got their 9 to 5 and they want to start an online business so that they can eventually make enough money to quit their job. I work with a lot of these people, and, a lot of them, they have that challenge of just time.

What kind of advice would you have for someone like that where they've got a job that's sucking up most of their time, they only have a few hours in the evening or maybe they can do it in the morning, in the weekend? As both of you and I know, in order to get out of that, you're going to have to make a sacrifice and really work really hard to get out of that, but any advice that you have for someone that's in that situation?

Matt: Sure, and some of my business partners were people in that situation and then, after it took off, they quit. The key thing is you have to go to beast mode. You have to go to a place where it's an obsession to be successful, it's an obsession to make this work, whatever it is that you're working on. If you're working 40 hours a week … and I'll give you an example of how, like, where I was with this.

My early 20's, I was working 40 hours a week for the gym, not for myself, then, I would do 30 to 40 hours of personal training on top of that, so I'd start two hours before my shift and then work another 4-5 hours after my shift, plus Saturdays and, on top of that, I was learning marketing, so, after I would get home at 9:00-10:00, I would be watching Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, and doing those exercises so I could build my copywriting skills. That's what it took.

I had no TV. That was the biggest thing. Now, I have a TV. It is a big distraction. There's a lot of shows I enjoy watching, but, during those 5-6 years, there was … I didn't have that. That mental energy I had I just put it into learning.

If you're not successful yet enough to have it be your full time thing, most likely, you have to spend probably an hour a day of learning, and one of the big things is balancing your learning with action, and I call that the action-learning equation. A lot of people make the mistake of spending 90% or 100% of their time learning. They're reading books, they're watching YouTube videos, they're buying courses.

Stefan: Yeah.

Learning + action = success

Matt: The big thing to realize is that you're learning will be 3X or 5X if you take action every time you learn something. That's really been one of my keys to success is I'll go to an event or I'll watch a YouTube video or I'll buy a book, read the book, I'm going to take whatever, at least 1 or 2 or 3 nuggets and I'm going to apply it right away, and then it becomes my reality.

Now, I own that information. It's not a stuff that's floating around in my head and taking space. It's really important to take a lot of action and to be learning. You can't just be action, action, action if you don't know really what you're doing, but, at the same time, you can't be just learning, learning, learning. You've got to balance that. That's a really big deal.

Stefan: Yeah. I was a dating coach for several years. A lot of guys, they get caught up just learning all the theory, but the theory is useless if you can't go out there and talk to a girl or interact with someone, right? I'd always tell people you're going to learn so much more, probably ten times more, just going out there, trying to talk to someone, socialize than you ever will from reading about it in a book.

Morning ritual

Right? It is that balance of you've got to get out there and get some results or some sort of feedback and then analyze that and improve it and learn how you could do things better.  That's awesome. Now, because I'm the morning ritual guy, and I've got a course on morning rituals. I'm a big fan of them. What kind of morning ritual do you have?

Matt: Yeah, that's always evolving, too. I'll tell you what I'm doing right now. I wake up, hit the bathroom, then I have an ŌURA Ring, this thing. This is a sleep tracker. I've been waiting for this thing for a long time. I didn't want to wear a wrist thing. I didn't want to be hit with Bluetooths. I can shut down the Bluetooth with the ring. Anyway, it's awesome.

I wake up, look at data. I'll usually do a HRV reading. I'll strap the H7 heart strap and then use Nature Beat or a Ben Greenfield's app and look at what my HRV is so I know if I can train hard… Then the latest thing I've been doing is I bought the Wim Hof course, and I'm doing the Wim Hof breathing method, which is like some really intense breathing, re-oxygenate the body big time.

I'm doing that with the Elanra Air Ionizer. It's an Australian air ionizer. You're breathing in super, super negatively charged ions, so that's going to detox your lungs and your body. I'm doing the breathing technique with that. It's powerful.

Then, usually, I'll have a Bulletproof coffee. That's usually my morning ritual and then always a pound of water. I usually have half a liter of water. That's the first thing I do that just wakes me up. I'll have some Kangen Water, which you're a big fan, too. Man, that wakes me up, by the way and just a pound of water and boom my brain is alive.

Health and productivity

Stefan: I know you're a health advocate. You're a founder of BiOptimizers. How much do you feel health plays a role in productivity?

Matt: It really determines your ceiling. It determines your limit. You've seen Tony Robbins on stage, right?

Stefan: Yep.

Matt: Could somebody that's not super healthy and super vital physically be able to do what he does? They'd collapse halfway through day one, right?

Stefan: Yeah.

Matt: I mean, the level of energy he's out putting is just world class. He treats himself like a world-class athlete, the technology he uses, the recovery technology he does. Everything he does is to optimize his health, his performance and his energy and it shows. That's what's possible.

People don't realize it, but thinking is a physical energy. I mean, it requires a lot. If you're really thinking hard, especially if you're doing something new, it requires tremendous mental energy. I mean, whether it's being in front of the camera and you're really turning it on or you're really thinking hard and writing or you're networking, all these things require mental energy. If you don't have the physicality to have that energy, you're going to struggle.

Focus ferocity

The same thing with endurance, and we can talk about the muscle side of focus.

Focus is a muscle. At first, if you've never focused, and most people have the attention span of less than a goldfish. A goldfish is 9 seconds. Humans are down to 8 seconds.

That's the statistic not my opinion. At first, it's tough because our brain, especially with all the notifications in social media, we're just used to literally splitting or changing our attention every two seconds. We're flipping and clicking and liking and going and looking at that and going back. That's how our brains are functioning.

Focusing is the complete opposite. Let's say, okay, I'm going to do one thing for forty five minutes. For 45 minutes, it's probably tough at first, so my suggestion is, just like meditation, I mean, meditation, don't try to do 30 minutes or 20 minutes. Start with 5 minutes. Start with 10 minutes.

It's the same thing with focusing. Have that focus ferocity. Maybe you could only keep it up for 15 minutes at first, so then you need a 5-minute break and then you come back and you do another 15 minutes and then you need another 5 minutes break.

The ability, now, I can focus for 90 minutes to 2 hours. I wasn't able to do that even last year. I see the progress, and I think a lot of that, I mean, I take a lot of different supplements for mental energy, for brain power, and I think they're paying off in that regard because I just see the gains that I'm making within. It's always a combination of continuing to strengthening that muscle. I'll give you an example how important that is for me.

I'd spent recently about 15 grand optimizing my sleep. I bought a custom-made $9,000 mattress. I could go on and on, right? That's how important to me the recovery is because I know it's the key to having more energy, and I know it's going to pay, like, for me, that's a financial investment, I'm going to get that money back in the next 6 months or 9 months or 12 months.

Compound interest

Stefan: Yeah. I remember actually Kobe Bryant, he went to Nike to make a shoe. He wanted like a little millimeter taken off the shoe just to make it a little bit lighter. He was so obsessed. It seems crazy, but it would just improve his explosiveness.

It's just like a tiny amount, but I guess that's how you have to look at optimizing things. You're not necessarily going for this big, big change or big result, but it's just a little, the little changes here and there that add up to be the big things. Right?

Matt: Absolutely. Einstein said that compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. People think of that financially, but compound interest is in every area of our life, and it's working whether you're aware of it or you're not aware of it because there's negative compound interest, too.

If you take a look at your health habit, let's say you eat good, you train, you take time to recover, that is one of those things that compounds. You'll get healthier and healthier. If I look at somebody who's doing a little bit of health habits and I look at their compounding health over 20, 30, 40, 50 years and then you have somebody who's got bad health habits and you see what the compounding effect of that is, I mean it's night and day, right?

You just see that divide. It's almost like a boat that is 2 degrees to the left and another boat is 2 degrees to the right. After a few days, they're going to be quite far apart.

That's how I look at everything. Whether it's our work habits, our health habits, our productivity habits, they're all compounded. One of my favorite books is The Compound Effect because it really hammers this home. Over time, over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, you're getting the rewards of the right things, the rewards of the right habits, and it's the difference between success and failure.

Match the intensity with recovery

Stefan: Yep, so let's talk a little bit about rest. Obviously, it's not sustainable long-term just to be as productive as possible in the sense of like working early in the morning to late at night because, eventually, you need to rest. Have you seen a lot of benefit in just, I don't know, maybe in your evenings?

Like you watch TV or you just do something maybe on the weekends to have fun or go out just to recharge in that way? Like you have certain things you do every day or every week?

Matt: Absolutely. It's as critical. It's another thing that determines the ceiling. Like you have to match the output, the intensity with recovery. You have to balance that. When I was talking about working 80 hours a week each day, I was in my early 20's. I mean, if you have to do that to get out of your job, that's great, but here's some numbers for you.

The maximum level of productivity, like let's just say somebody wanted to be the most productive he possibly can, it's between 53, 56 hours a week. After that, people that work 70, 75 hours, have about the same level as the guys working 53, 54 hours, so there's no gains past that point.

Stefan: Right.

Matt: That's important. In essence that's a critical thing to realize. This is going to answer your question is, to maintain focus ferocity, I need to put the recovery because, otherwise, my energy is going to go like this. It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. I'm going to be a 100%, but my output is going to be dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping because I'm out of mental energy, I'm out of physical energy.

The first thing is micro recovery

See, you have to figure out what the optimal thing is for you. Maybe a lot of people like Pomodoro, which is 25 minutes on and 5 minutes off. That's a good place to start. I did 45, 15 for a long time, so 45 minutes on and 15 minutes walking around, going rebounding, playing the guitar. Just change the channel.

Get out of the office. Just take a quick walk. Play with your dog. Play with your daughter. Just change the channel. Then when you recovered, you're recharged, then you go back at it. 45, 15, 45, 15 and then a 30-minute lunch, a little lunch, snack, break is a great strategy.

What I tend to do these days, and, again, it's just a product of time, is more 90 minutes on, maybe 20, 25 minutes off, so I like just getting … because I get in the flow state like you mentioned, which I think is a big part of productivity, and I don't want to get out. Right?

Stefan: Yeah.

Sensing the drop

Matt: I don't want to get out until I start sensing the drop. The drop usually happens after 90 minutes. That's on in the day-to-day. Like, throughout the day, I need to take … make sure I take those micro breaks. That's critical. Then, absolutely, in the evenings, I'll usually learn a little bit in the evenings for maybe an hour, 90 minutes, and then I'm done, so … and then I spend time with my wife.

That's a big part of my recharge, spending time with her, watching a show, talking, walking, we’re going to see a movie, go to a restaurant. To me, that's critical because I don't want to get lost in work and lose focus of the bigger picture. Work is not my life. It's just a part of it.

Then I don't work Saturdays and Sundays 95% of the time. Sometimes, when there's a critical project and I got to get it done, then I'll work on a Saturday. Sunday is sacred not from a religious standpoint, but from a recovery standpoint. Then there's the bigger recovery, which means, about every 3 months, I feel I need 10 days off.

That means I'll start like on a Friday and then I'll take all the next week and the next weekend off, preferably on a trip, and I don't work, I don't answer the computer, I'm not in meeting. That's a deeper recharge. Eben Pagan called it, he says, “You get altitude.”

You get out of the trenches and you're flying above your business at 30,000 feet and you're able to see things that you just can't see when you're just in a day-to-day grind. I actually come up with my best ideas, my best visions, my best game plans, the next level of upgrades during those 10 days. Even though I'm not trying, they tend to happen.

That's my big recovery program. I'm fanatical about sleep, like I just mentioned. I take sleep not as the length of sleep, the quality of sleep. You got to sleep deep, and this is where the ŌURA Ring comes in. It gets me out of the… and tells me if I'm in deep sleep, how long I'm in deep sleep, if I'm waking up. It gives me a definitive rating on the quality of it, so it's awesome.

Planning projects

Stefan: Do you, guys, in your business, plan out the projects you're working on? For example, you've got one big project you're working on for this month and then you'll also plan, okay, after that project is done, that's when I'm going to take my 10-day trip? You plan out certain things like that several months in advance?

Matt: Yeah, we plan. First, we have the ultimate vision for the business, what's the ultimate, which is different from a goal. That's the ultimate. Then we have a very broad 3-year vision, very broad. Then we have a very concrete 1-year plan, and then we break it down into quarters, 90 days.

We'll meet for a couple of days. There's a great book called Traction, which I recommend for everyone. It's really changed how we operate. Everything I'm telling came from that. We'll meet for a couple of days and then really plan the next 90 days, what's the game plan, what are we going to do, and prioritize, and then everybody gets assigned rocks or projects for that 90 days, and you agree to it and then, boom, that's it.

There's no more projects coming in. There's nothing else that's going to take your attention. For the next 90 days, you know what you're going to do, and that's it. That's your game plan. That's how we do it.

Stefan: Cool. By the way, actually, I found out about the book, Traction, from Wade, who is your business partner. Wade and we’re working out. He shows up at the gym one day and he's like, “Dude, this book is changing our business,” and he's super excited about it. I was actually reading it on the airplane the other day, so a really, really good book.

Running multiple businesses

I want to ask … go a little bit more advanced. For people, you mentioned before you recommend, people that are starting out, focus on one project. Obviously, once you start having more success … and, the position that you're in, you're able to focus on multiple businesses, multiple projects.

What kind of advice do you have to be able to run and operate multiple businesses?

Matt: Yeah. It's a very different way of operating. There's another great book called Rocket Fuel. It's something I discovered before I read it, but then I read it and it was just a good validation. The basic breakdown is there's two types of people, visionaries and integrators. The visionaries are people that have the ideas, come up with the vision, come up with the game plan, and then the integrators get it done.

My reality is… I have more ideas than… To match my level of output in terms of ideas, I would probably need need to match my level of output in terms of ideas I would probably need about 15 solid integrators. Every business that I have had is I've partnered with a good integrator.

They're running the day-to-day because, again, first of all, I hate doing that. I don't want to do it. It's completely misaligned with my nature, so they're running the day-to-day and then I come in and I do what I do best which is to create ideas on how to grow the business, and there's a lot of ways that I do that.

Usually, like one hour to two hours of my output will create dozens and dozens or, sometimes, even a hundred hours of work for the team to implement. That's one of the reasons I'm able to have and be part of multiple businesses is I … It takes a lot of time to execute the visions, the ideas, but the key is you got to get the right people.

That's life or death when it comes to this. I'm blessed that I have good partners. Now, even within a business, one of the things that we're starting to do within our publishing business is Intrapreneurs. It's the same idea, but it's not another business. It's kind of a business within the business.

I found this guy, a young guy, and I just saw myself in him, just level 10 drive, just beast mode. I met him at an event, and I did an interview and it just was a good click, so we're bringing him on, and we're starting kind of another niche, another market, and he's going to run that. Obviously, he gets access to all of our resources, the Webmasters, the traffic team, we help him, we groom him.

We even bring him a copywriter. He's the integrator, so then I get a chance to just be the visionary in that, so does the main president of that business. That's a new way that I'm playing with growing. It's bringing more entrepreneurs into my businesses and kind of giving them an arena that they can run, that they can have fun and do their thing.

Team building

Stefan: You partner with a lot of people, right? That's one way that you're able to leverage yourself in some way. Did you have any maybe additional tips for this team building and maybe attracting the right people to partner with or even to hire the right people?

Matt: Yeah, those are two great things. Let's start with partnering. Partnering with people is a big decision. It essentially is maybe not as heavy as a marriage, but it's close. In the beginning, if you look at how you would choose a girl when you were in high school, your criteria is very different today because you've had a lot of learning experiences.

Every partnership that you try, it will teach you what you want, what you don't want, but what it really comes down to in business is knowing yourself. To they own self be true.

That's where a personality test … Do as many tests as you can, Myers & Briggs, Coldbeat, Disk, Caliper. Do an IQ test. You want to know where you're strong. You want to know where you're weak. You want to know what your nature is and what your nature isn't because it's a guaranteed recipe for disaster if you're going to try to do things that you don't enjoy doing.

It's a guaranteed recipe for disaster if you try to do things that you hate doing. If you know these things, then, in business, which is awesome, you can find people that that's their strengths, and that's the kind of partner you want to find.

Visionary or integrator?

Again, one of the big things is are you a visionary or are you an integrator? If you're a visionary, you have to have an integrator because if you two are visionaries, you're going to struggle. You're going to be like on the whiteboard for weeks and you're going to have a 50-page Google Doc with the biggest vision in the world, but nothing's going to get done. Right?

Stefan: Yeah.

Matt: If you have two integrators in the same room, there's nothing that's going to get done either because they don't know what to do. They're not the guys coming up with the ideas. They're not game planners. They don't have vision. That's one of the biggest things is are you a visionary or are you an integrator, and find your complement.

Obviously, you got to get along with. Personally, I tend not to partner with friends and family. I think it's a mistake, but I always become friends with my partners. It's a big difference. Right? Sometimes, it happens. I mean, Wade like you mentioned, a good friend of mine, we were friends before we became partners and that case worked, but I don't become partners because he's a friend.

Stefan: Right.

Matt: That's never happened. What I call functional capability is the key thing. That means are they capable of doing what it is that they're meant to be doing? If I partner up with someone and they're the ones that are going to handle operations, they're the operations guy, if they're not an operations person, if they don't have the skillset, then it's a mistake.

Again, that goes back to “they own self be true,” and that goes both ways. You need to know what their strengths and their weaknesses are, so it's a good idea to do personality tests both ways. 

How to hire a superstar

That's on the partner side. On the employee side, I keep making the process deeper and deeper because hiring a superstar is such a big thing and it's not easy. You're talking of maybe 2% of the population is what I would call the superstar. 98% of the people out there, you want to try to filter them out. I have a lot of techniques.

Let's use Upwork as an example. For those of you that don't know Upwork.com, there's hundreds of thousands of providers who can go on and hire.

1.  Eliminate anybody that's not 4 stars and up. The first thing that I do is I use their search engine and I eliminate anybody that's not 4 stars and up and they're automatically out. Then I look at their work history and if there's any … I look for red flags. I'm looking for red flags.

2. Look for good communicators. Then I'll do what I call Doofus tests. I do a lot of Doofus tests. What I'm trying to do is I want them to show me that they're either a Doofus or not a Doofus. This is filtering. What I want to do is I'll send them an invitation. I really look at how they respond. I might ask a couple of questions… Doofus test. If they're not a good communicator or if there's anything off in their communication, okay, they're gone. That's step 2. I'm starting to filter.

3. Have them answer the 4 Doofus test questions. I'll set up some Doofus test. I'll give you an example we did recently for copywriting. We wanted to hire a copywriter. We had 4 simple questions. It was great. This was a new evolution in our hiring process, so we created a Google form, and there was 4 Doofus test questions they had to answer. It eliminated 95% of the applicants.

It didn't mean that we had to talk to them. That's the third step.

4. Give them “the torque.” Then comes the interview. The best book out there on interviewing is called Topgrading by Brad Smart. That's the book to use. If you do nothing else, just get Topgrading and follow the Topgrading process. It's gold.

There's one question, and we call it “the torque,” where you ask them if … for a reference, and then you ask them, “Well, if I call your reference or when I call your reference, what do you think they're going to say about you?”

That question is just gold because they know you're going to call them, they believe you're going to call them and so they're a lot less apt to lie. That's why it's a torque because you're really torquing them on that. It's very powerful. That's step 4.

Then either with that I'll have my operations manager do the first phase because maybe there's 10 people left, she’ll interview all 10, so, now, we're left with three. I'll do an interview with the last three and then we'll do them … We'll give them another Doofus test like something real, okay, like build this web page, write this letter.

With the copywriting example, we had two guys at the end and one guy was a complete disaster. Even after he passed all the other tests, what he gave us was just awful. We were left with one guy, one winner.

That's the process. It is involved. At this point, I have people in my businesses that do the first 90% and then I'll come in at the end because it's too time-consuming. It's about 20 hours of work to just do that. Hiring superstars is going to make or break you when you start scaling. You have to go that deep. You can't cut corners. Every time we've hired out of convenience, it's bitten us in the ass hard.

Managing team meetings

Stefan: Yeah, and how about managing your team? Do you, guys, do weekly meetings? Or what do you, guys, do in that front?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. We follow the Traction process. We always did weekly meetings. Traction has made the meetings better. We meet weekly, and then the business will be divided into teams.There'll be a big group meeting where everybody in marketing will meet and everybody in operations will meet and the includes the business leaders the includes the business leaders but then if we have a Facebook team or a cold traffic team we'll meet on top of that as well especially like going back to my money move. That's my main thing, then I'm going to be involved, I'm going to be driving on that.

Yeah, there's big meetings where everybody's involved and then there's smaller meetings, if you have, again, depending on the size of your business, but if you have different little divisions, smaller teams, then, yeah, meeting. One of the books I just read, I just finished reading it a couple of days ago is Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.

I'm thinking of implementing that process, which is just a 5-to-15-minute daily Scrum meeting where … “What did you do? What are you going to do, and what was done” basically is the meetings, very quick, because I find that, especially if it's a new mission like I was talking about creating a new marketing funnel, I got to be on it daily. I want to be coordinating with all the key people daily.

Otherwise, things get off track and it takes you months to figure out they're off track. That's happened recently, and I feel that we need to upgrade that process. I think Scrum is going to solve that.

The most important habits to build

Stefan: Awesome. All right, now, this has been amazing. We've been talking for a while. We've gone into so many different topics, and I could probably go on with you for several more hours. I guess just to wrap up, do you any final tips or advice or wisdom? You've been in business for over a decade now. Any top, most important lessons that you've learned that you could share with our audience?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

1. Optimization in business. I think optimization in business is one of the most important habits to build. If it's something we are feeling mental resistance, which a lot of people do for some reason, fight back because it's a lot of fun. It doesn't take some massive leverage point. Literally, in about 30 minutes a week max, you can be constantly growing your business.

What we do is maybe 30 minutes, we come up with some different ideas and the Webmaster sets it up and we're done, and then you just look at the data. It might take a month to get enough data to end the tests. Maybe you're coming up with one new idea a week for different parts of your marketing funnel, and that's it.

That habit will probably double or triple your revenue over time with the same amount of traffic. I'm not talking about getting more traffic. It's the same amount of traffic, but double or triple your net profit. It's probably one of the biggest habits.

2. Put your standards as high as possible.  When it comes to the people you accept in your life as partners and as team mates because, I'm telling you, man, the difference between B grade and A grade is it's far. It's like when Michael Jordan was making $100 million a year in his prime and the average player was making a million.

That's the kind of difference I'm talking about in terms of the results. Over time, the gap between a superstar and a B grade … and a B grader will make you feel good, will sound good in the meetings, but, when it comes down to performing, when it comes down to pressure, when it comes down to surprising you, that's one of the main things that I look for.

A superstar will always surprise you. If you're not being surprised, like, wow, that's amazing, wow, you went the extra mile, those are the hallmarks of a superstar. If you're not experiencing that with your people, they're probably not superstars.

I think if you do nothing, but raise your standards, you're going to attract great people. Again, keep in mind, always be trying to become more productive. It's a never-ending journey. You'll look at a guy like Mark Cuban. He's managing or he's invested in over a hundred companies or whatever number it is.

His output, like, if you look at … If he spends 15 minutes on each business every 2 weeks, the value of that time is amazing. Right? That's part of our journey as business growers and as investors is continuing to make our time more and more valuable.

“Triple your productivity” book

It's not a PDF, man. It's an 84-page book that is a PDF that I'm giving away for free. It's called Triple Your Productivity, 3X Your Productivity. Yeah, Stefan will give you the link. Make sure you click that. It goes into everything that we talked about in far much greater detail, including how to really master your schedule and so many other things. We would have to talk for another 5-6 hours to cover half of what’s in there.

Stefan: Yeah. I've been through a part of it. It's really amazing. Again, I'll put a link below this video for you, guys, to head on over and check it out. I also want to encourage you guys to head on over to Matt's blog, Mattgallant.tv. If you're going over there, make sure to read his story, because I read your story maybe two weeks ago and it was really fascinating. I learned a lot about you. You're just a really good writer. You're very skilled. That's one of your top skillsets that you have.

Man, I want to thank you again so much for taking the time today. I think this will really help and benefit a lot of people, so thank you.

Matt: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks to you, and thanks to everybody who listened through. Yeah, then just come over to the blog. It's all kinds of fun stuff, all kinds of things to improve the quality of your life. Come on over and enjoy the show.

Stefan: Awesome. Thank you.

Items Mentioned In This Interview

• Matt Gallant's website
• FREE BOOK on How To 3X Your Productivity
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
• Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business
• Rescue Time