Rory Vaden

Rory Vaden is a co-founder of Southwestern Consulting™. He’s also the New York Times bestselling author of Take the Stairs and Procrastinate On Purpose, international speaker, and the world’s leading expert on self-discipline and overcoming procrastination.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Rory’s success

Focus Funnel

Result if you follow the steps in Rory’s session

Create more time and more results

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

When people hear multiply time, of course my TED Talk is actually called how to multiply time and it’s, people think that it’s a superlative or that I’m exaggerating somehow. And we’re not exaggerating, we mean this literally.

And the key is a change in perspective. See, while there is nothing you can do to create more time inside of one day, we all have the same 24 hours, 1400 and 40 minutes or 86,400 seconds, and none of us can add more time to one day.

And that’s exactly the problem because we live in a world of urgency. We live in a world where the average person wakes up and and we say to ourselves, what is the most important thing I can do today?

But that’s not how multipliers think. Multipliers don’t think that way because they realize that after you take out all the time that you’re in meetings, you know, getting ready, eating, traveling, taking care of your kids, you know, doing conference calls and things that are already pre scheduled, you might only have two or three hours on any given day to actually get a work done. And yet your to do list is going to be 1000 items long.

And so what happens is multipliers realize, okay, there’s no way I can get all thousand of these things done in the two hours that I have. And what most people do, most people default to then saying, okay, what is the most number of these tasks that I can get done in the two hour window that I have?

Which seems very smart, right? It seems very intelligent. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it necessarily. The difference though, is that multipliers know that today, success is no longer related to the volume of tasks that you complete, but rather just the significance of them.

And why most people live in an urgency paradigm which is one day it’s a scarcity mentality. It’s how much time do I have right now.
Inside of this day, multipliers break through that and they make what we call the significance calculation. And they are not thinking about today. They’re thinking about tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day.

So while most people wake up and say, what’s the most important thing I can do today, what multipliers ask is they say, how can I use my time in a way today that creates more time tomorrow or more results tomorrow.

And so in one sentence, the way that you multiply time, just to sort of wrap it up for you, Liam, is you multiply time by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on the few things today that create more time tomorrow, by spending time on things today that gives you more time tomorrow.