Latest / Mental Per4mance Daily with Adam Rutz / How To Maximize Your Work
Transcript
- Adam Rutz: You get 168 hours every single week. And if you're a daily listener, you've heard me talk about this before. Are you spending those hours or are you investing those hours? Now, I believe that work-life balance does matter, right? Family matters, recovery matters, sleep matters. If you neglect any of those things, eventually your performance is gonna suffer. But I also believe that you should obsess over your process and become extremely intentional with how you use those 168 hours you get every single week. And one of the best ways to do that is to look at your time in three different categories: investment, maintenance, and waste. Investment time makes your future better. So that would be like training, prospecting, studying, practicing your craft, building relationships, doing work. Today that's going to create a return tomorrow. Maintenance time keeps you functioning at a high level. So that's your sleep, recovery, eating with a clean diet, family responsibilities, taking care of things that allow you to keep performing. And then there's waste time. Time that isn't really helping you recover and isn't helping you improve, like scrolling on your phone or procrastinating, watching things that you don't even care about, doing low-value work just because it makes you feel busy. And one of the biggest advantages you can create is learning how to identify those three categories and intentionally move more of your time toward investment. Let's say you're in sales. Maybe right now You work 45 hours a week and you decide you're gonna invest another eight hours of quality work into your craft every single week. So now you're at 53 hours. Eight hours multiplied by 52 weeks is 416 additional hours over the course of the year. That's more than 10 additional 40-hour work weeks. Think about that. You just created more than 10 extra work weeks compared to somebody who stayed at that same level. And compared to the original 45-hour schedule, that's roughly 18% more time being invested. Now, here's the important part: more hours alone do not guarantee better performance. They have to be productive hours. If those eight hours are spent prospecting, following up, studying your craft, role-playing, improving your communication, building relationships, and getting more reps, now those hours actually have value. And imagine what happens if that extra investment helps improve your sales performance over the course of an entire year. That can become a massive competitive advantage. Athletes, the same principle applies to you guys. If you're playing college sports, everybody on your team is showing up to practice, everybody has scheduled lifts, everybody goes to the team meetings, everyone competes in the games, those are required hours. So the real question becomes: what are you doing with the hours nobody is requiring you to use? That's where your separation's gonna happen. Film study, extra skill work, recovery. Mobility, nutrition, visualization, sleep, studying your opponent, doing the things that increase your ability to perform when the opportunity comes. That's investment time. So here's what I want you to look at today. Take your typical week and ask yourself three questions. Where am I investing my time? Where am I maintaining? And most importantly, where am I wasting it? Because maximizing your work week doesn't always mean adding more. Sometimes it means removing something that's stealing your attention. Sometimes it means taking five wasted hours and turning them into five investment hours. You already have the 168. The question is what kind of return you're getting from them. So protect your family, protect your recovery, then become ruthless about investing the rest into your future. Don't just spend your week, build something with it. Mindset, process, discipline, execution, that's mental performance daily.