De-Clutter
The first thing to increase your focus is De-Clutter. Throw out all the waste in your mind and free your mind of everything useless.
Do Not Waste Time
The second thing is not to waste time. All the activities you have been doing on the phone will not get you anywhere. Stop using WhatsApp and Facebook all the time. You need to mute some groups and leave some of them because you will waste your time if you stay there.
So it’s only when you focus on one thing uninterrupted for 4-6 hours at a time that your brain will reach peak productivity and clarity. It’s not with one hour of work. You have to be totally focused with your phone off, and you have to concentrate on doing only one thing. No browsing around on YouTube and clicking everything that flashes in front of you. It’s only after at least 4 hours of focused time, more like 6 hours, that your brain really starts to kick in gear. They say that the human brain is better than a supercomputer; that’s a load of crap. Your brain is not as good as any computer unless it focuses on one thing. The processing power must be harnessed, and the harnessing happens in 4-6 hours of focused work.
Your phone needs to be on mute, silent or powered off. You don’t need to pick these calls. Keep one handphone or any cell phone for the delivery people etc. That should be your public phone.
Rules and Rituals
In business, I follow a set of rules. In my personal life, I follow what you call a certain set of rituals.
What are the business rules?
I don’t answer phone calls. I don’t do business on the phone, and I don’t do business on WhatsApp. Some of you may have asked me for a WhatsApp number, and I say no. If we are to speak, I work very closely with the people in the launch program. So some of you guys are working at a different pace, and that’s fine. I respect that. But if you ever want to reach out and say Hey Rajat, I really need this help. If you are in the launch program, you will get a call from me. This call is usually on Zoom because I don’t do business on WhatsApp, and I don’t do business on the phone, plain and simple. This Zoom call helps me batch all of the stuff together. So these are my business rules. I do business on Zoom, and I do it via email. So people who ask me for links on Facebook will never get a response from me.
The whole thing is captured on live video. The other link is written on the whiteboard. I read out the link from my mouth like 40 times. Say, if you can’t find the link, don’t expect the link from me. But if you send me an email, you will always get a response from me. So I do business by email. Even if you’re not in the launch program, you’re part of the community. If you ever send me an email, you will 100% get a response from me.
The responses are also batched. I do it once a day, towards the end of the day. And if I cannot get back to you, you will get a response saying, I’ve read your email, but I cannot give you a good response right now. So you wait for two days, I’ll give you a good response.
The third thing is batching. I don’t particularly appreciate putting people into one big lump of community and then trying to help them build their startups. So I have small batches that I interact personally with all of them. And if somebody sends me a mail saying I missed your webinar, I want to get in at whatever price, just let me know. I don’t do that. I don’t do that because I like to work in batches, which helps me save time. Then it’s not one big batch right now because we are at a formative stage. So I really want to get a personal touch and figure out what’s happening in everybody’s business life and really help them out.
But if somebody says I want to get into your program outside of that, I don’t send them a link even at full price. If they can find it on teachable or something, they can absolutely get in. And then I’ll figure out what batch to put them in. But I don’t promote my links outside the webinar actively because I don’t want a bunch of people spread throughout the week that I cannot track, and I don’t know what’s happening with every one of them. So there are different batches at different stages of their development, of their startups. And, I like to put them in batches.
So if somebody misses the webinar, I pretty much have to tell them with all due respect that you just have to wait for the next webinar because I launched a batch pretty much every other webinar. In some of my webinars, there is no batch launch. So this is just information, and you can take the information and enjoy it, and some of these webinars have batch launches built into them. So at the end of the webinar says, there’s a 10-minute window. You can take a decision. I’m launching a batch you can get it.
Now, if you are outside the webinar, you can’t get what’s taught in the webinar. That’s my business rule. I don’t do this stuff because I want to do this right, and I have limited time, and I want to use that time to the best of my abilities. These are my business rules, and I don’t do business on the phone.
What are the rituals every morning?
Similarly, in my personal life, I have rituals. I have to read my goal every morning. I have to read my goals, or the first thing in my wallet that comes out are the two gold cards. I’ve already completed my short-term goal. And the goal of August, which was a six-month goal, has been achieved in May, which is three months from the launch date, and then I have separate goal books. So I have one goal book which has all my long-term goals written down. I write these goals every single day, twice a day. So if you’re in the launch program, this whole thing is given in module 1, in which you have all the goal setting.
I have diaries where I track all the time that I have spent. How much time exactly I spent working on this particular business line, which is the startup Frat business line, is written in my diary. There’s a tracking of how much time I put into this business. I’ve got some notes saying, what the things I was able to achieve are? What are the things I missed out on?
The reason I got my six-month goal in three months is not that I’m smart, and the program will make you superman overnight, and you click this button, and you’ll make a million dollars—nothing like that. I had budgeted 30 hours a week to spend on this business line. Because of the slowdown, my time was certainly much freer. Now, if you look at all these week-to-week time trackers, I have spent anywhere between 56-64 hours. I’ve been able to go to a max of 64 in some weeks. And in some weeks, I’ve gone to a minimum of 56, but at an average of over 60 hours a week building this business line without distraction, which is why I was able to complete my six-month goals in two or three months.
With every launch program, I tell everyone that if you don’t have 30 hours a week to spend on a new startup, you cannot work with me because it takes that kind of time. I’m not going to lie to you saying how you can work like 10 hours a week and get this done because you won’t get this done. If you don’t have 30 hours a week to work on your new startup, then I cannot work with you because I cannot be the reason for your failure. I tell that to everyone upfront. That means fewer batches and fewer students for me and higher quality work with committed people.
And this is just one business line. I have the other business line. My Copper Creek Management, which is the Corporate Consulting business line. All of this stuff is tracked down in my diaries. This is how much time I’m spending in each business line. What I do each day, I write it down in my diary. So they get filled every single day.
Everything is planned on my Google Calendar hour by hour. I have my life goals: family goals, money goals, wealth goals, society goals, etc. What do I want to do for society in my social services outreach, all of that is planned and tried. I’m pretty serious about this stuff. Al these rituals help me stay focused.
Batch processing
Batch processing is all the kinds of mundane tasks that take away your time. I told you about one of the batch processing in which I call all my relatives and everybody on Sunday afternoons. They know that they’re going to get a call from me on Sunday afternoons. If I don’t take the call, I’ll send them a WhatsApp immediately saying I’m in the office. If it’s nothing urgent, I’ll call you on Sunday. And that’s done. If there is something urgent, they’ll let me know by WhatsApp, and then we’ll figure out how to take care of that. Not answering calls has really helped me.
Another batch processing item, I have my whole food stuff outsourced, which means my cook figures out what I want to eat. She has her own expense accounts. She figures out what I want to eat every day. She doesn’t bother me with what is to be cooked and how it is to be purchased. Between my wife and me, we have separate food habits. She likes to cook something for herself every evening when she comes from work, like something fresh and nice. I don’t care about that stuff anymore. What I care about is getting ahead of my goals. During the lockdown, I made a lot of “Khichdi,” so I could eat it 7 days a week without any distraction from cooking anything else. I put my food in the fridge, take it out, microwave it, and eat. I’d eat it even cold because I didn’t want to waste any of my time.
I’m not bothered by it if you judge me for eating stale food. But when I am working on a mission, that will change our lifestyle tomorrow. So I don’t care what I eat for food. I batch this stuff, put it in the fridge and a microwave small portions of it once a day, twice a day, and eat it. And that’s helped me because all of this stuff is out of the way. People complain that their time was spent cleaning the house and cooking food in lockdown, and all of that because the maid wasn’t coming.
My time has maximized because there’s no maid to ring the bell. I did not have to eat at a particular time, which is why, during the week, I have separate food habits from my wife. She’s very nice. She will cook for me. But then, the food is cooked at 1 o’clock. I’m busy doing something that I cannot leave because I’m in the focus zone, and the food is lying. It’s getting cold. And then I have to hear about it later that, I cooked some fresh food for you and now the whole thing is stale. Should I put it in the fridge?
I don’t want to talk about it for six days a week. Now she’s super nice to me. Every day in the morning when I wake up or even if I go to take a nap in the afternoon when I wake up, there’s some nice fresh cold coffee waiting for me on the bedside, which is something I love. But broadly, I don’t want to deal with anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone, and I don’t want to decide whether to eat at this time or not to eat at this time. If I feel hungry, I go straight to the fridge, get that stuff out and microwave it, or I just eat it cold. I don’t care about this stuff.
Focusing on food and calling your relatives 40 times a week is a complete waste of time. It doesn’t add any value to anyone. I want six days of complete peace and quiet, and I don’t want my family to ask me if I’ve eaten my food.
Conserve Your Energy
I’ve reduced myself to two meals a day during the lockdown. Why? Because of energy. Every time you eat a meal, it takes a little bit of time to digest, and you cannot focus during that time. Every time you go for your office lunch, you cannot focus between 2 and 4 PM because your body is digesting food. So your brain is not focused at that time because digesting the food is an energy-intensive process. So I cut down my meal times from 3 to 2 so that I have less time to digest my food. I was able to work for 64 hours a week on my part-time business. That’s how I was able to do all of the stuff that I do for you guys.
The more you eat, the food will actually steal your energy. So what is the thing that will give you energy? The thing that will give you energy is water. You need to be drinking four liters a day. If you’re a lady under 60 kg of body weight, then maybe you can do it in three liters, but that is the bare minimum. Medical standards are 2.2 liters. So you need to drink at least 3 liters ideally and go up to five liters.
There are athletes in the world who drink 15 liters a day. They are drinking 12 to 15 liters of water a day just to have the body perform better. You need to be drinking at least four if not five liters a day, and this is the stuff that’s going to keep you in high energy. Your focus will keep your brain working at full power, and it’s going to help you in your sleep quality and everything.
So, if you start drinking 5 liters of water a day or at a minimum of four liters, your sleep quality will immediately improve. And in five hours a night, you will be able to get the same sleep that you would otherwise get in 8 or 9 hours a night. Plan your day so that you can get your productivity to 2x, 3x of whatever it is today, and drink enough water to stay healthy.